Elizabeth D. Leonard. All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies. New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 1999. 368 pp. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-14-029858-1.
Reviewed by Jennifer Rebecca Harbour (Department of History, University of Iowa)
Published on H-Minerva (October, 2001)
It’s Our War, Too: Women as Soldiers and Spies
field. Leonard’s main motivation for writing this work,
however, seems not to simply celebrate the lives of her
subjects, but to question their motivations for “joining
the ranks” in the first place. Primary and secondary
sources alike indicate that women “joined” the war effort
for several reasons, such as patriotism, the desire to follow a male loved one, and longing for adventure. Even
though Leonard’s research provides evidence for these
reasons, she instead asserts that many women took up
the military cause because they needed the money. Although some tasks such as spying did not offer a typical
wage, women who occupied the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder needed shelter and food at the very
least. Leonard urges other scholars to think about these
factors when considering women and the Civil War.
It’s Our War, Too: Women as Soldiers and Spies
In her study of the Civil War women soldiers and
spies, Elizabeth D. Leonard relates the story of a group
of extraordinary women. Leonard posits that the women
in her study have for too long been cast as mere literary
figures or infamous symbols from songs and legendary
tales. Instead, Leonard argues, women like Margaret
Corbin (a.k.a. “Molly Pitcher”) of Revolutionary War
fame actually existed. What’s more, Leonard suggests,
women such as Sarah Emma Edmonds (who dressed as a
male soldier) “made the decision to put their lives on the
line and engage in the traditionally manly profession of
war” in a deliberate act, something which has continually
confounded scholars (p. 19). Leonard offers a chapter on
each of the following four topics: women spies, “female”
espionage and resistance, army women and their predecessors, and real and fictional army women. She then
presents two chapters on women soldiers (with special
attention given to Deborah Sampson), and a final chapter on the motivations of her subjects.
This is an important book, especially for those scholars who continue to insist (despite all evidence to the contrary) that war is the domain of men. To that end, though,
Leonard’s book would have been even more welcome for
scholars of women if it had included an analysis of gender, to say nothing of race. Leonard does mention some
Leonard culls these stories from a variety of sources,
African-American women, but she does not interrogate
making good use of the Official Records of the Union and reasons why their experiences might have been differConfederate Armies, newspapers, contemporaneous writ- ent from Anglos, despite the fact that her thesis turns on
ings, personal and family papers, and secondary sources. notions of class. At any rate, this work is an excellent
In chapter after chapter, Leonard recounts the stories of building block for historians of women who wish to reCivil War women who left their homes and risked their
claim the arena of war as legitimate area of study.
lives to serve their country in battle, both on and off the
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H-Net Reviews
Citation: Jennifer Rebecca Harbour. Review of Leonard, Elizabeth D., All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the
Civil War Armies. H-Minerva, H-Net Reviews. October, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5568
Copyright © 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for
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