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All the Daring of a Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies. By Elizabeth D. Leonard. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Pp. 386. $27.95.)
In a sector of Civil War literature where many others have sensationalized the already lurid, Elizabeth D. Leonard has instead written a carefully researched and calmly reasoned analysis of the military roles of women, From a wide and skeptical reading in primary materials, especially military records in the National Archives, Leonard has reconstructed the lives of women released from normal gender constraints by the maelstrom of war.
Leonard studies what the noted social commentator Mel Brooks once termed the great and the near-great. In addition, to sensible discussions of Belle Boy, Rose Greenhow, Antonia Ford, Elizabeth Van Lew and Pauline Cushman, infamous spies all, Leonard uncovered enough additional women spies to suggest that their numbers and usefulness were far wider than historians had thought. And in addition to exploring the experiences of the five hundred to a thousand young women who passed as male soldiers during the conflict, she...