Occupied Women

Occupied Women, a collection of essays edited by LeeAnn Whites and Alecia P. Long, demands that women be integrated into the military history of the Civil War in a new way that obliterates the distinction between home front and battlefront. The title is a double entendre and reflects the book's focus on female actions in Union-occupied territory, as well as its central premise that women did more than simply respond to wartime disruption. According to Whites, they acted “not as the hapless victims of collateral damage of Union occupation or as the occasional and atypical politicized woman but as the critical bottom rail of the war of occupation” (p. 6). The occupied women in these essays come in many different forms, including elite Confederates in Natchez, Mississippi, and New Orleans, Louisiana; Confederate sympathizers in Union border states; and African American and white Union sympathizers in Confederate states. While women's occupation and their resistance took many forms, the authors in this volume all make convincing arguments that the particular women under consideration were not civilians trying to cope with war, but were combatants themselves. Long sets the tone in her fine essay on Benjamin Butler's General Order No. 28 when she asks: “What if the women in occupied areas ... were the equivalent terrorists of their day—elusive, mercurial, hiding among the population but somehow slippery and uncontrollable” (p. 31

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• Mingled in One Common Destruction

  Elizabeth Conant-Lambert•2017

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