Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War - Hardcover

McCurry, Stephanie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674987977 ISBN 13: 9780674987975

Verlag: The Belknap Press, 2019

Über diesen Titel

Críticas

With uncommon comparative sizzle and a deep grounding in gender, legal, and racial history, McCurry has written a stunning portrayal of a tragedy endured and survived by women. Horror and hardship in this case have inspirited beautiful writing. Women's War gives the legions of Civil War era readers a unique, unsettling, and enriching understanding of the conflict. Women were not mere witnesses to war; McCurry is our witness to how they died and lived through this cataclysm.--David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom As Stephanie McCurry points out in this gem of a book, many historians who view the American Civil War as a 'people's war' nevertheless neglect the actions of half the people. Her account of Southern white women's participation in rebel resistance, black women's roles in their own emancipation, and the prostrated condition of the women as well as men of the planter class after the war paves the way to a better integration of women into the story of this era.--James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom Stephanie McCurry challenges us once again to look at the Civil War through a different lens. She demonstrates how women's participation changed not only their lives but the very understanding of war itself--its laws, its mechanisms of violence, its legacies and aftermath. In this brilliant exposition of the politics of the seemingly personal, McCurry illuminates previously unrecognized dimensions of the war's elemental impact.--Drew Gilpin Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering

Reseña del editor

The award-winning author of Confederate Reckoning challenges the idea that women are outside of war, through a trio of dramatic stories revealing women's transformative role in the American Civil War. We think of war as a man's world, but women have always played active roles in times of violence and been left to pick up the pieces in societies decimated by war. In this groundbreaking reconsideration of the Civil War, the award-winning author of Confederate Reckoning invites us to see America's bloodiest conflict not just as pitting brother against brother but as a woman's war. When the war broke out, Union soldiers assumed Confederate women would be innocent noncombatants. Experience soon challenged this simplistic belief. Through a trio of dramatic stories, Stephanie McCurry reveals the vital and sometimes confounding roles women played on and off the battlefield. We meet Clara Judd, a Confederate spy whose imprisonment for treason sparked heated controversy, defying the principle of civilian immunity and leading to lasting changes in the laws of war. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved women escaped across Union lines, upending emancipation policies that extended only to enslaved men. The Union's response was to classify fugitive black women as "soldiers' wives," regardless of whether they were married-offering them some protection but placing new obstacles on their path to freedom. In the war's aftermath, the Confederate grande dame Gertrude Thomas wrestled with her loss of status and of her former slaves. War, emancipation, and economic devastation affected her family intimately, and through her life McCurry helps us see how fundamental the changes of Reconstruction were. Women's War dismantles the long-standing fiction that women are outside of war and shows that they were indispensable actors in the Civil War, as they have been-and continue to be-in all wars.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: The Belknap Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0674987977
• ISBN 13: 9780674987975
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320