Book review: Women’s war: fighting and surviving the American Civil War by Stephanie McCurry

In Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War, Stephanie McCurry challenges the tendency to position women outside of histories of conflict, examining the roles played by different groups of women during the US Civil War and its aftermath. The study collapses the gendered separation of war and women by positioning women as an integral part of military history, writes Ben Margulies, and it expands the scope of the political in ways that inform our understanding of today as much as they do our knowledge of the US Civil War.