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6 - Women at war

from Part 2 - Genre, tradition, and innovation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Dale M. Bauer
Affiliation:
University of Kentucky
Philip Gould
Affiliation:
Brown University, Rhode Island
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Summary

Recent attention to women's roles in the Civil War has uncovered several stories of women who dressed as men in order to fight in battle, such as Sarah Wakefield on the Union side. The Confederacy had female warriors as well. One Union soldier remembered how “Another She-Devil shot her way to our breastworks with two large revolvers dealing death to all in her path. She was shot several times with no apparent effect. When she ran out of ammunition, she pulled out the largest pig-sticker I ever seen . . . she stabbed three boys and was about to decapitate a fourth when the Lieutenant killed her.” The terrifying specter of such heroism may have affected the difficulty warrior women who survived faced in receiving antebellum pensions. However many cases may eventually be documented, the murderous intentions behind such a rampage were hardly confined to participation in battle. The northerner Gail Hamilton's “A Call to My Country-Women,” for example, complains that “stitching does not . . . hew traitors in pieces before the Lord” (Atlantic Monthly, March 1863, p. 346). And in a response to Hamilton's piece, an anonymous writer for the Loyal Publication Society declared that “many a Southern woman, during this war, has written to husband, brother or lover, to bring home with him 'a dead Yankee, pickled,' or 'a hand, or an ear, or a thumb, at least'” (New York: May 1863). While such extreme manifestations serve as commentary, they also situate the unease of fictional examples. Marion Harland's Sunnybank (1867) has southern women writing to their soldier boyfriends to ask for “rings, and charms, and watch-chains made of the bones of Federal soldiers slain in battle” which might then be “displayed exultingly by Southern ladies as trophies of their lovers' valor” (165).

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2001

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  • Women at war
  • Edited by Dale M. Bauer, University of Kentucky, Philip Gould, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing
  • Online publication: 28 May 2006
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521660033.007
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  • Women at war
  • Edited by Dale M. Bauer, University of Kentucky, Philip Gould, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing
  • Online publication: 28 May 2006
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521660033.007
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Women at war
  • Edited by Dale M. Bauer, University of Kentucky, Philip Gould, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing
  • Online publication: 28 May 2006
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521660033.007
Available formats
×