The literature on women in the Civil War is large but not comprehensive. There are excellent monographs on Black women in the war and Northern and Southern white women, on nurses, on sanitary commission workers, and now on government workers, but scholars have generally not attempted an overarching interpretation of the many different groups of women in the war. Certainly, given the breadth of the historiography, the time is right for such an attempt, even as the task is all the harder because the literature is so vast. Thavolia Glymph constructs a narrative of women's war experiences that is not a mere synthesis of the existing scholarship but is deeply researched in the primary sources.
Generations of women's historians learned the ideology of separate spheres—that men and women were seen as inherently fitted for their respective domains of public life or domesticity—along with the critique that separate spheres was a...