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A comprehensive new history of women's roles and lives in the Civil War, Thavolia Glymph’s recent book, The Women’s Fight, shows how women--North and South, white and black, enslaved and free—were fully engaged in the wartime struggles on the home front, the military fight, and the political and moral battle to preserve the Union and end slavery. Glymph focuses on the ideas and ideologies that drove women's actions, allegiances, and politics. Join Professor Glymph for this virtual presentation and conversation as she discusses the ways women’s fight in the Civil War was a fight among and between women and with the men who sought to control how they could fight. Glymph shows how the Civil War exposed as never before the nation's fault lines, not just along race and class lines but also along the ragged boundaries of gender. Glymph makes clear that women's experiences were not new to the mid-nineteenth century; rather, many of them drew on memories of previous conflicts, like the American Revolution and the War of 1812, to make sense of the Civil War's disorder and death.
Thavolia Glymph is the Peabody Family Distinguished Professor of History and Professor of Law at Duke University. She is the author of The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation, Littlefield History of the Civil War Era Series (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), which won the Albert J. Beveridge Award, American Historical Association; the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, American Historical Association, the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, Southern Association for Women Historians; Tom Watson Brown Book Award awarded by the Society of Civil War Historians and the Watson-Brown Foundation; the 2021 John Nau Prize awarded by the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History, University of Virginia; the 2021 Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award awarded by the Organization of American Historians; among other honors. Her first book, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge University Press, 2008) was a co-winner of the 2009 Philip Taft Book Prize and a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize.