by March is Women’s History Month, and our latest installment of “Students in the Stacks” features a Civil War book – another from Rare Books student assistant Claire Peterson – that shines a spotlight on women’s roles in warfare.
L.P. Brockett and Mary C. Vaughan’s Woman’s Work in the Civil War: A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience portrays a number of the “Loyal Women of America” to whom the work is dedicated, each in great detail. Each woman’s portrait consists of a description of her character and accomplishments, and sixteen include engravings.
The book profiles women who worked in hospitals, gathered supplies, organized societies, aided former slaves, and volunteered in various ways to promote the war effort. It makes visible hundreds of the heroines often excluded from the history of the Civil War, for, as the authors argue in the introduction, “if ‘The world knows nothing of its greatest men,’ it is still more true of its noblest women” [i].
