National Women’s History Month: Women at War

If you are familiar with the UNC Press Blog, you probably know that we know a thing or two about celebrating. If it has a national celebration day, week, or month, we probably have it marked on our calendars well in advance. Why else would we have a 1000-word post on the merits of National Chili Day, like we did a little over a week ago?

For March, we’re celebrating National Women’s History Month at the Press, and I’ll be highlighting some fantastic new books we’re publishing that focus on women in America. We have titles spanning this history of women in the United States, from before the Revolution through a book profiling women of the past decade.

Women at War

Today’s post centers on two new books from UNC Press that focus on women at war in America. Published in September, Judith Giesberg’s Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front explores how both black and white women assumed increased social and political roles in the Union while their husbands and fathers fought the Confederacy. Giesberg includes striking details about how even with the return of the soldiers, these new gender roles remained.

150 years after the stories found in Giesberg’s Army at Home, Laura Browder and Sascha Pflaeging have put together this arresting new collecting of images and oral histories of women returning from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, titled When Janey Comes Marching Home: Portraits of Women Combat Veterans. Along with 48 of Pflaeging’s portraits, Browder presents the oral histories that run across the emotional spectrum, providing the reader with a sense of just what it means to be a woman on the front lines of both a physical war and culture war.

Check back here for more posts in March about the great coverage of women’s history we have at UNC Press. Next week, I’ll provide a post on two new titles about the role of books in the lives of American women.

–matt