On the whole, what readers can glean about Civil War women soldiers from the few twentieth-century historians who addressed them is that they were crazy, whores, or homosexuals.  (Blanton and Cook 198)

uthors DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook have collaborated to fight the battles of history faced by a very small but historically and socially significant group of former soldiers: women who, for a variety of reasons, participated in the American Civil War not as nurses, laundresses, and cooks, but as combatants, couriers, and spies. More specifically, these are the women whom Blanton and Cook deeply admire for achieving a seemingly impossible goal: trading their skirts for a uniform, cutting their hair or hiding it under a union or confederate cap, and adapting their manner to become in both visible and covert ways the soldiers they wished to be. This text is meant to tell the real stories of patriotic citizens in order to repair the distortions of past histories, offering instead the image of the generally successful woman soldier, a person admired and trusted by her comrades, even if the truth became known. While the true stories were quite familiar to nineteenth-century readers of literature and the popular press, they have disappeared from or been distorted in the histories written in the century that followed.

The authors' greatest success in this work—an impressive body of carefully researched and fascinating detail—grows out of their experiences as a professional archivist and an amateur historian. Blanton works at the National Archives, especially with military records from the nineteenth century. Cook took part in Civil War reenactments, at least until she was discovered to be a woman, the experience that inspired her interest in the similar fate of so many of the real distaff soldiers of the American Civil War. The very nature of the topic here, women forced by their culture's norms to hide their real identities to become soldiers, makes the research extremely challenging. The text's extensive notes and bibliography are culled from private, historical society, and manuscript collections; from government records, National Parks, state libraries, and newspapers; and from full-length published accounts, other histories, and periodical articles.

To make sense of their large body of material—of the evidence that is sadly often recovered from mere fragments of stories and lives—Cook and Blanton take a sensible and largely thematically descriptive approach to their topic, organizing chapters around kinds of experiences: the transition into the male military persona, "Life in the Ranks," and being a prisoner of war, for example. They carry their overview into life after the war, and they add two final analytical chapters, one on the handling of the soldiers' histories since the War, and another on the overall conclusions to be drawn from their research. An appendix outlining the Victorian Female Warrior literary motif supports their frequent references throughout the book to the influence of popular culture on both the women's views of themselves and the popular "reading" of their lives.

An additional stated goal of They Fought Like Demons is to contribute to an accurate history of women's experience in combat as part of the current debate on the place of women in the military. While they do not enter fully into this argument, their position seems clear in their recurring admiration for and belief in the successful performance of duty by the female Civil War soldier. For them, the significant rates of disease, casualties, and wounds offer "the real measure of any soldier's contribution to his or her nation's war effort." Additionally, "any argument that the higher casualty rates for women is evidence of their relative incapacity for the rough business of soldering also wanes in light of the promotion rate of fourteen percent for female soldiers over the course of the war." When able to sustain the fiction of their positions, in opposition to the assumed separate spheres ideology of their time, these women soldiers proved their abilities and dedication.

The historical method used in They Fought Like Demons inspires and satisfies, but it also frustrates. Civil War buffs and students of military, American, and gender history will be grateful for access to the wealth of detail and the convincing composite portraits of the varied experiences of these women warriors. The thematic approach, however, requires that too few extended stories, even when available, get told whole and that individual fragments of stories are too often repeated as the relevant bits are applied to flesh out the claims of the various chapters.

It is the distorted overgeneralizations of history that these authors hope to counter, and their most effective moments come when they immerse their readers in the joys and sorrows, successes and losses of an individual woman's life. One story in particular illustrates the point. Soldier and postwar cross-dresser Albert D. J. Cashier (born Jennie Hodgers) served three years in the War, gaining a number of loyal advocates among his fellow soldiers. After living successfully as a man after the war, as well as through it, Cashier was forced by need and senility into a state residence, where he was required to wear the skirts he had spent his life evading. Ironically, he fell in those skirts, broke a hip, and spent most of the remainder of his life an invalid. Knowing Cashier's history, readers celebrate when it is their fellow soldier Albert, not the woman Jennie, whom the local GAR (Grand Army of the Republic) buries, in uniform, with full military honors.

The absence of any sustained critical perspective will leave some students of military, gender, and sexuality history and theory wanting more. Cook and Blanton do include the Cashier story, for example, and they refer to the work of Lillian Faderman and other gender and sexuality scholars. But there is an underlying discomfort with the questions of sexuality and identity that is revealed, among other places, in the quotation at the start of this review. They go on to characterize the three united terms "crazy," "whores," and "homosexuals" as "sweeping and negative misgeneralizations." They cut short the difficult but necessary discussion of the complex relationship between gender, identity, and sexuality, and even go so far as to say that because women in the army lived among men, it would be "counterintuitive" to infer that they were lesbians. Finally, they claim, "Any focus on the sexuality of women soldiers is nothing more than a smokescreen that obscures consideration of their military record." Books such as Miriam Cook and Angela Wollacott's Gendering War Talk, however, challenge us to look at all culturally constructed identity categories as integral elements in the social conception and historical realities of war.

In their important and thoughtful homage to these fascinating and diverse women, hoping in part to use them as evidence in favor of women's active military service, these authors seem to have lapsed into an unfortunate version of "Don't ask, don't tell."

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