There is also Belle Boyd, a boisterous woman at first more interested in notoriety than in helping any cause but whose loyalty to the South became ever more strong.

On the side of the South there’s Rose O’Neale Greenhow, a socialite in DC who used her affairs with Northern politicians to spy. There’s also Elizabeth Van Lew and her freed slave Mary Bowser in Richmond who worked together to spy on the Confederate president. Emma enlisted as a Union soldier and soon wound up spying for them - pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman to cross the lines. So who are the four women highlighted in this book? On the side of the North, there’s Emma Edmonds, who had already been living as a man to escape a marriage being forced upon her by her family. This lends a clearer perspective on the Civil War than I had before. Abbott beautifully switches among the four different women, following the timeline of the Civil War and telling their stories simultaneously. I knew from that second forward I was going to enjoy this work of nonfiction, because too often authors stray either too far toward hearsay and imagining how people felt or too far toward distancing themselves from anything other than the driest facts. A look at the Civil War through a women’s history perspective and told in an easy to follow style with lots of respect for the historical source material.Ībbott notes at the beginning of the book that she only uses quotation marks around information she is directly quoting from source material. By following their lives through the Civil War, Abbott demonstrates the critical role women played in the Civil War that is too often silenced.ĭoing Dewey’s review of this book landed it on my wishlist, and I was really pleased to receive it for Christmas. Abbott looks at the little discussed role of women in the Civil War by highlighting the lives of four different women spies, two with loyalties to the South and two to the North.

Liar temptress soldier spy book review