A review by buttonsbeadslace
They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War by DeAnne Blanton, Lauren M. Cook

3.0

As a collection of primary sources, this book is invaluable. Unfortunately, the authors chose to structure it as an argument to prove a thesis, which makes it a lot dryer and harder to read. (Most of the first chapter is literally just a list of every battle female soldiers participated in, in chronological order, to make the point that there were a lot of them and they served throughout the war. I was taking notes and I still didn't appreciate having so many names and dates just dumped on me all at once.) And then the points the authors argue for range from obvious and unremarkable to offensive and ridiculous. Read it for the primary sources and some of the statistics the authors collected, and draw your own conclusions.