CONFEDERATE WOMEN are far better represented than their Union counterparts in published diaries, memoirs, and sets of letters. Accounts by Mary Boykin Chesnut, Phoebe Yates Pember, and Sarah Morgan, among others who wrote across the South, are widely known and cited. No Northern testimony has achieved comparable familiarity, or impact on historical writing, though Louisa May Alcott’s slim Hospital Sketches attracts attention because of its author’s fame as the creator of . Yet many fine titles illuminate the war from northern women’s perspectives, including two by a young African American who taught in South Carolina and the wife of a Democratic judge in New York City.
