The Women’s Fight: The Civil War Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation

Glymph’s breathtaking history focuses on the home in order to highlight the centrality of women to the physical and ideological battles of the American Civil War. Although both northerners and southerners defined the home as separate from politics and war, Glymph shows how households became enveloped in war regardless of location. The Confederacy rallied to the defense of white homes, but both white and black women had to take to the road as refugees, heading away from or toward Union lines. Northern women repurposed their homes to support the war effort and sustain their families; some of them also moved south to contribute directly to the war and emancipation. At a moment when many historians prioritize narrative, Glymph’s book is a sustained argument, confronting previous scholarship that divided women into abolitionists, Unionists, and southerners, and separated enslaved and freedwomen into their own category. Her book offers an inclusive history of...