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

In this meticulously researched study, Thavolia Glymph unearths the voices and experiences of women during the American Civil War to show the different dimensions of war and the conflicts that entangled their lives with the battle to preserve the Union and end slavery. While the historiography is not short of titles that include accounts of women on the home front, Glymph’s work is distinctive in that it is inclusive of women across race, region and class without losing sight of the specificity of such factors in shaping the wartime experiences of women. This was a war in which southern white women were fugitives, enslaved women set their anti-slavery politics in motion, and northern white women expressed desires for the comfort that came with employing the labour of freedpeople in the South.

The book complicates the assumptions we bring to the study of women in the American Civil War, and Glymph specifically addresses what she means when she uses the term ‘women’. The book is organised into three parts: ‘Southern Women’, ‘Northern Women’ and ‘The Hard Hand of War’, this latter on the inhumanity and atrocities that come with total war. In nineteenth-century American historiography, any of these sections might stand alone as monographs, and depending on the book, the titles might signal the experiences of plantation mistresses, abolitionist women, free black women, the wives of yeoman farmers or enslaved women. Glymph manages the arduous task of connecting all of these varied experiences and does so with a level of sophistication and analysis that comes with decades of expertise in the field.

In the South, devastation on the battlefields, personal loss and financial ruin led to the displacement of plantation mistresses and poor white women, leaving them in search of sanctuary and resources for mere survival. The protection of southern homes and white women framed the basis of the Confederate cause, but as Glymph reveals, the experiences of Southern women called into question the integrity of this claim. The collective experiences of white women in the South threatened the legitimacy of the Confederacy as the government failed to address the needs of women. Slaveholding women were displaced and exiled from their homes and forced to search for assistance in ways that strikingly resembled the plight of poor white and black women. Glymph observes that ‘As refugees, a generation of slaveholding women experienced dislocations of the kind their ancestors had known during previous wars but that were reserved largely for poor and enslaved women’ (p. 28). Poor and yeoman women mounted a resistance against the Confederate government and its officials to make claims to their granaries and food supplies, and protested the inflationary prices of goods that left them in a state of scarcity. These struggles called into question the degree to which Confederate ideology remained realised or even relevant in the lives of Southern white women.

The displacement of white Southern women created possibilities for enslaved women and when slaveholders remained on their homesteads, plantations became militarised zones. Conflict unfolded as enslaved women confronted violence perpetrated by slaveholders who used guns to compel enslaved people to work, and by soldiers who committed acts of rape as enslaved women attempted the trek to Union lines. Enslaved women took tremendous risks and suffered in their pursuit of freedom, often having to make careful calculations about which soldiers, officials and volunteers to trust. But as much as the war became a nightmare for many, in rare instances the war presented an opportunity that enslaved women could only fantasise about just a decade prior to the firing at Fort Sumter. As Glymph argues, ‘enslaved women transformed personalized, individual, and plantation-and neighborhood-based struggles against slavery into a mass movement to destroy it’ (p. 122). This was a moment of possibilities, retribution even, and enslaved women deployed centuries of knowledge about how to undermine the stronghold of the American South. Overlooking this fact, Northern white and black women patronisingly articulated their ideas about the best approaches for assisting freedpeople in their transition to freedom. These prescriptions for freedom were often rooted in various degrees of class prejudice, patriarchal gender configurations, and demands for rigorous moral conduct. These varied experiences disrupt our oversimplified interpretations of sectional politics and social norms.

Glymph offers a nuanced portrayal of Northern white women, such as Laura Towne, who ventured South to assist freedpeople as volunteers. Historians have typically read such efforts as an extension of the work of abolition and moral uplift into the war. Glymph, however, reveals how race and class offer a specific lens into such political work, citing the manner in which white and black women travelling South took advantage of the privileges afforded them through food and clothing rations, supplies and even the labour of freedpeople. Northern women embodied the aspirations of plantation mistresses, expressing their preferences for black servants, domestics and labourers, while denying them fair wages and access to supplies. While Northern volunteers gained access to necessary supplies, freedpeople were forced to pay for such supplies as evidence of their work ethic and frugality. Both white and black volunteers from the North enjoyed provisions while enslaved people were looked upon with suspicion. Volunteers such as Harriet Tubman, however, read and understood the power dynamics of the South Carolina Sea Islands and its Northern benefactors. Glymph offers the view that ‘Tubman did not become a hero to black people in the Sea Islands because she was a woman and an African American but because she incorporated their politics into hers’ (p. 181). For enslaved women, the American Civil War was a conflict about slavery, and they understood what they wanted freedom to look like and fought arduously to realise it.

As this book reminds us, the battlefield included plantations, militarised zones, and labour camps run by the Federal government. These battlegrounds were the places in which enslaved women tested the reach of Union policies. As they pleaded with officials to allow them to seek refuge behind Union lines and offered their labour and demanded provisions and wages in exchange, they began to give policies shape and relevance, crafting a wartime agenda that Glymph frames as ‘actual freedom’ (p. 222). Enslaved women brought their children with them and employed the strategies they had relied on in the past when they were subject to an unpredictable and relentless domestic slave trade. ‘As they made their way across the landscape of war—pushed forward by wartime exigencies and their own analysis of the war’s meaning—and settled in cities and refugee and labor camps, black women used this history of reparative work as ballast and drew strength from networks of kin and community formed during slavery’ (p. 229). Enslaved women drew upon their own epistemic traditions as they manoeuvred through the obstacles and opportunities of war.

This book accounts for the varied and gendered dimensions of women’s lives, and of the war itself. It reveals how their actions were political in ways that make their treatment in the historiography arbitrarily absent or segregated. Glymph fills these silences with powerful stories that remind us that we have yet to fully comprehend the impact of the American Civil War and its most compelling actors.