Battle Scars Analytical Essay

Battle Scars, edited by Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber is their second book written and edited about gender in the Civil War. Battle Scars is made up of ten historical essays that focus on women and race. These essays mainly focus on the South, but do provide a couple chapters on the North. Silber simplistically lines the flow of the book out in the first chapter as well as the importance of gender in the Civil War and how it changed the world moving forward afterwards. Each essay is followed by the primary and secondary sources that the historian used to compose it, making it easier on the reader to check the accuracy and find more information about that specific topic. After Silber’s introduction the essays begin with Stephen Krantrowitz “Fighting Like Men” . Krantrowits opens readers up to abolitionist and Massachusetts and the fight to allow slaves to be apart of the militia and later the war. He even notes that women were apart of the fight and were allowed to participate in some groups in secret. This showed …show more content…
Once the war began brothels began popping up everywhere and many women worked in them to be able to afford to live. Many officers did not like soldiers sleeping with prostitutes or public women because it often lead to venereal disease and kept them in hospitals for days and in an attempt to prevent this from happening they tried to send women off, which resulted in failure. The publicity that women were getting was becoming worse during this time period and at one point women tried to rally together to take goods to be able to get food for themselves and their families, which resulted in threats that if they were to persist that they would be labeled in the news papers as public women. Many women stopped speaking out and went back to their