The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation by Thavolia Glymph

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation by Thavolia Glymph Melissa Develvis (bio) The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation. By Thavolia Glymph. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 392. $34.95 cloth; $26.99 ebook) In the beautifully written The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation, Thavolia Glymph challenges historians of the Civil War era to re-evaluate their definitions of home, freedom, and womanhood. Even the notion of fighting the war, or, in the instance of Black women, "making freedom," changes based on the gender, race, and class of the historical actors (p. 223). Splitting her work into three sections, Glymph posits that writing the Civil War along the "lines of the regional divide imposed" by slavery's legality "disfavors class analysis" (p. 8). Living in a northern state did not an abolitionist make, and even abolitionist elites gained their fortune from family histories fraught with black exploitation. The women described in The Women's Fight transcend their assigned thematic chapters and interact with each other throughout, exposing the fault lines of power and race relations between northern and southern women alike. Glymph challenges temporal conceptions surrounding the Civil War. For the women in her study, there is little to no differentiation between home front and battlefield. Glyph employs a framework that, rather than viewing the Civil War as an entirely novel experience, considers women's history in "the context of previous wars, gender and class struggles, and slave resistance" (p. 11). South Carolinians remembered British occupation in Charleston, and the confiscation of property and slaves at wars' end. Enslaved women brought antebellum strategies of resistance to the Civil War and employed kinship and community networks to survive in refugee camps. The Women's Fight particularly shines in its examination of legal, military, and social definitions of refugees, womanhood, home, and politics. Poor white women of the South soon realized, for instance, that their idea of home and womanhood was not one the [End Page 649] Confederacy found worth protecting, and thus began to resist. Expanding historians' definitions of political activity, Glymph highlights Black women's resistance to slavery as their "antislavery politics," but shows how their gender and race prevented them from gaining recognition as abolitionists, refugees, and Unionists (p. 96). "To white Northerners," Glymph writes, "Southern 'Unionist women' were by definition white, which made them eligible for human consideration and, concretely, or support systems and privileges denied Black women Unionists" (p. 9). In the face of apathetic and even violent Union soldiers, racist white missionaries, and Confiscation Acts that only applied to male-coded labor, free and enslaved women of color persistently fought for their rights and forced Americans to reckon with their ideas of freedom and nation. To be sure, Glymph's study is not a comprehensive analysis of every woman during the Civil War. In a collaborative measure, she frequently cites other historians of Civil War women, such as Nina Silber, Stephanie McCurry, Drew Gilpin Faust, George Rable, and Steve Hahn. Yet while challenging historians to move beyond their northern- or southern-exclusive studies, she herself omits women west of Arkansas, including Indigenous women. Some regions appear as case studies: Glymph's section on elite white women narrows in on the destabilizing effects of planter refugees of the South Carolina Lowcountry, for instance. Yet the following chapter on poor white women often utilizes the same Lowcountry elites as a source base, giving the first section of the book a slight Carolinian skew. Any mention of poor whites, especially German and Irish workers in the North, begs expansion. Glymph is entirely convincing in her assertion that women, especially women of color, are often overlooked in historiography due to the gendered nature of their labor and politics. To "fight," she proves, is not simply to wield a gun, but to redefine freedom in one's own image, to produce goods for the war effort, to change or defend the meaning of home. Taking great care to name every woman mentioned, [End Page 650] Glymph weaves a captivating tale in parts...