Booknotes: Hard Women, Hard War

New Arrival:

• Hard Women, Hard War: How Southern Women Shaped U.S. Policy During the Civil War by Laura Mammina (UGA Press, 2026).

From the description: Laura Mammina's Hard Women, Hard War: How Southern Women Shaped U.S. Policy During the Civil War "establishes a new interpretation of Southern women’s wartime behavior by examining their interactions with the Federal army. From the very beginning of the war to the bitter end of the conflict, women negotiated military policy toward civilians, motivated by their political loyalties, which were grounded in their ideas of home."

Mammina's study "demonstrates that Southern women forced Federal soldiers to adjust and sometimes change their civilian policies." Black women, both free and enslaved, "encouraged Federals to make hard war on unrepentant rebels" while Unionist white women from slaveholding households "advocated protection of their human property." At the same time, "elite Confederate ladies' defiance spurred the army to bring the war to Southern women's homes" (pp. 2-3).

As also mentioned in the introduction, the book "contributes to the growing scholarship on the decisive impact of guerrillas." The most recent scholarship on this topic argues that "Confederate women played instrumental roles in the origination and continuation of guerrilla warfare." First along the western edges of the conflict and then spreading elsewhere, federal forces were determined to "act against these women in order to curtail the threat they posed" to the Union war effort (pp. 4-5).

Chapter 1 "argues that conciliation was less of a policy than a mentality enjoining the army to treat civilians not as potential enemies but fellow members of the United States." Chapter 2 "argues that wartime social interactions" between soldiers and civilians "created a crisis for the Federal army." After the decisive turn toward hard war, the third chapter "argues that while confiscation, foraging, and emancipation were in theory separate policies, Federals often implemented them and civilians experienced them at the same time." Chapter four considers rape accusations made against federal soldiers in a variety of contexts. The final chapter examines raiding policies and practices "that sought to destroy Confederate resources and plantations while striking fear into the hearts of rebels" (pp. 10-12).