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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Psychologist and amateur historian Lowry has certainly done his homework. After poring over some 75,000 federal court documents pertaining to Civil War-era military trials, he extrapolates fascinating profiles of 120 women who were convicted of crimes against the U.S. army or government. Labeling all these women "heroines" is a bit of a stretch; a few were prostitutes convicted of spreading venereal diseases among the Union troops; nevertheless, these brief accounts detailing smuggling, spying, and sabotage provide an alternative to the more familiar representation of passive Southern womanhood. Although lacking in analytical historical perspective, this study will provide Civil War scholars and feminists with plenty of previously uncharted information, and casual readers will enjoy some of the more remarkable exploits. --Margaret Flanagan Copyright 2006 Booklist