One of the questions that lingered after our Reading the Civil War project was, "What were the women doing?" Well, if I were to make a short list of books to answer that question, this would be at the top of it. There are other books to tell the stories of individual women, but this book continues the work of Out of the House of Bondage by extending the depiction of women beyond the plantation.

This book is broken into three sections. Southern Women contains chapters on slaveholding white women who've had to flee their homes; on poor white women (often encroached upon by those refugees); and enslaved women. Northern women discusses both those who spent the war in the north, and also those who went south -- supposedly to help the enslaved and recently freed, but depicting the traps of white supremacy they continued to fall into. Finally, in the Hard Hand of War, we see the refugees who fell under the protection of the Union Army -- both the slaveholding women insisting on retaining whatever scraps of their former status they could, and Black women trying to expand freedom for themselves, their families, and their people.

This answered so many questions that I had, and opened my eyes to so much that had never occurred to me. I am so grateful to have access to Glymph's scholarship. ( )