The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (Littlefield History of the Civil War Era) - Softcover

Thavolia Glymph (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1469672502 ISBN 13: 9781469672502

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2022

Synopsis

Historians of the Civil War often speak of "wars within a war"―the military fight, wartime struggles on the home front, and the political and moral battle to preserve the Union and end slavery. In this broadly conceived book, Thavolia Glymph provides a comprehensive new history of women's roles and lives in the Civil War―North and South, white and black, slave and free―showing how women were essentially and fully engaged in all three arenas. Glymph focuses on the ideas and ideologies that drove women's actions, allegiances, and politics. We encounter women as they stood their ground, moved into each other's territory, sought and found common ground, and fought for vastly different principles. Some women used all the tools and powers they could muster to prevent the radical transformations the war increasingly imposed, some fought with equal might for the same transformations, and other women fought simply to keep the war at bay as they waited for their husbands and sons to return home.

Glymph shows how the Civil War exposed as never before the nation's fault lines, not just along race and class lines but also along the ragged boundaries of gender. However, Glymph makes clear that women's experiences were not new to the mid-nineteenth century; rather, many of them drew on memories of previous conflicts, like the American Revolution and the War of 1812, to make sense of the Civil War's disorder and death.

About this title

About the Author

Thavolia Glymph is Peabody Family Distinguished Professor of History and Professor of Law at Duke University and author of Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1469672502
• ISBN 13: 9781469672502
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 392