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Book Review
| They Fought like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War. By DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. xvi, 277 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8071-2806-6.)
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In my survey class about women during the Civil War, students are
always skeptical when I mention women who disguised themselves as
soldiers to fight in battle. In the past, to convince them, I showed
them first a photograph of Lauren M. Cook dressed as an administrator
in a North Carolina state university (courtesy of a Smithsonian
Magazine article on Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, Cook's first foray
into the history of Civil War women soldiers). Then I put up a photo
of her dressed very convincingly as a Civil War soldier. The students
are usually floored, but they always have more questions about women
warriors than I can answer. Until now. DeAnne Blanton and Lauren
Cook's book is the first quantitative study of women in the war
that provides answers to most of the questions students of the war
raise about women on the battlefield. No scholar of the war can
afford to ignore it.
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