Lowry (Don't Shoot That Boy: Lincoln and Military Justice
) recounts the exploits of women who broke the law to serve the South. These feisty Scarlett O'Haras spied, smuggled medicine and cut telegraph wires. Even women who didn't intentionally help the Confederacy are included: prostitutes spread venereal disease that made Union soldiers "that much less of a threat to the men in butternut and gray." As the title suggests, there is more than a little lost cause Confederate patriotism in this book; Lowry praises the women as "heroic," but never grapples with the fact that their daring deeds were acts of treason against the U.S. government. A retired psychiatrist, Lowry doesn't bring the questions of a trained historian to bear, nor does his prose transcend the workaday. Nonetheless, this book is remarkable for the amount of research it represents—the author and his wife, Beverly Ann Lowry, slogged through transcripts of over 80,000 Union military trials, and they have done Civil War buffs a great service by digging up so many accounts of Confederate women's wartime activities. 4 b&w photos, 1 line drawing. (Oct.)
