Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War by Stephanie McCurry

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War by Stephanie McCurry Jennifer Lynn Gross Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War. By Stephanie McCurry. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 297. $26.95, ISBN 978-0-674-98797-5.) In Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War, Stephanie McCurry works from the premise that “Women are not just witnesses to war”; they are actors in it and impact “all the major dynamics, processes, and outcomes of the war” (p. 203). In each of the book’s three chapters, she extensively illustrates instances when women played a transformative role in conventionally male realms like the military and politics. In sum, McCurry’s latest work reveals, “There is no Civil War history without women in it” (p. 204). In the first chapter, McCurry analyzes the change during the Civil War from the assumption of Confederate women as innocents to their consideration by Francis Lieber as potential “‘war rebel[s]’” (p. 41). The shift was not an easy one, but eventually President Abraham Lincoln’s administration was forced by Confederate women’s actions to dispense with the notion that women were “the quintessential noncombatants” and focus instead on their loyalty or disloyalty. McCurry concludes that the alteration in policy was radical: “There is a great deal at stake in the idea of women’s innocence and of noncombatant protection in war. It represents an investment in the gender order itself ” (p. 61). In chapter 2, McCurry explores how African American women were impacted by the Emancipation Proclamation’s call for African American soldiers. As she astutely puts it, “enslaved men were to take the martial path to freedom and enslaved women the marital one,” though there was no such legal person as the “‘slave wife’” (pp. 7, 63). Just as it was the enemy women who forced the change in the rules of war discussed in chapter 1, it was African American women who forced the federal government to recognize them. Importantly, McCurry observes, the hierarchical gender order of marriage was replicated “to govern the relations of the millions of new American citizens whose freedom was confirmed by the Thirteenth Amendment” (p. 122). Acknowledging that one life experience can only take historians so far toward a new history of Reconstruction, in chapter 3 McCurry uses Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas’s perspective to illuminate “how the huge structural changes in land, capital, and racial ideology that form the usual subjects of Reconstruction history were inextricably wound up with highly intimate matters of marriage and family, sexuality and love” (p. 10). In light of recent challenges to the idea that Reconstruction marked a significant break in American history (because of the legacy of racism in American society), McCurry makes a solid case for continuing to see Reconstruction as revolutionary, especially in how it impacted “the most personal realms of life, touching on matters of love and belonging, marriage and motherhood” (p. 201). Using three underconsidered stories of war, McCurry makes a solid argument that women participants were written off after the war as exceptions, and women’s role in the war became solely a story of sacrifice and service to men, [End Page 175] even though their participation had been widely acknowledged during the war. In the epilogue, McCurry considers why, concluding that this postbellum narrative emerged from assumptions about women’s “normative identity as wives willingly subject to the authority of their husbands. “Those principles are hard to live without,” she writes; “when war is over they have to be restored” (p. 205). Although men were certainly major actors in this willful forgetting, many women accepted these same ideas, even couching their postwar justification for women’s rights in terms of their sacrificial service to men during the war, not their own active heroism. Akin to the postwar whitewashing of the war as a so-called brother’s conflict instead of a war caused by slavery, McCurry illustrates “the larger historical problem of women and war: about how much of that past is disowned—or rendered exceptional—when it is in fact foundational” (p. 62). Jennifer Lynn Gross Jacksonville State...