From the Archives: Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy

 

In every book I write I reach the point where I am so deep in the work that I have to stop writing blog posts and newsletters. I always hope to avoid it. That somehow I’ll be smarter, or faster, or more organized, or just more. This time I’ve managed to avoid hitting the wall for several months by cutting back to one post a month. But the time has come. For the next little while, I’m going to share blog posts from the past. (This one is from 2015.) I hope you enjoy an old favorite, or read a post that you missed when it first came out.

There will be new posts in March no matter what: we celebrate Women’s History Month hard here on the Margins. (I have some fascinating people lined up.)

 

Liar temptress Soldier Spy

Nursing wasn't the only role that women played in the American Civil War. Women on both sides of the conflict organized soldier's aid societies, effectively transforming homes, schools and churches into small-scale factories and shipping warehouses in which they made and collected food, clothing and medical supplies. Eighty years before Rosie the Riveter, they worked in munitions factories, loading paper cartridges by hand. In the north, hundreds of women took over desk jobs in the growing Federal government, freeing up men to fight.*

Other women stepped even further outside of social norms. Several hundred women cut off their hair, disguised themselves as men, and enlisted to fight. Others used society's assumptions about what women can/should/don't/shouldn't do as an effective cover for spying

In Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy, Karen Abbott tells the stories of four very different women who went undercover during the Civil War. Seventeen-year-old Belle Boyd, described by a contemporary as "the fastest girl in Virginia or anywhere else for that matter", was a courier and spy for the confederate army, using her feminine wiles and her lack of maidenly modesty to manipulate men in both armies. Rose O'Neal Greenhow was a "merry widow" who formed a Confederate spy ring in Washington.** Her Union counterpart was Elizabeth Van Lew, a wealthy maiden lady in Richmond who was a known abolitionist and Union sympathizer. Disguising her actions under the guise of proper ladylike behavior, she ran an extensive and daring information network under the nose of her Confederate in-laws, with whom she shared a home. Emma Edmondson had disguised herself as a man for personal reasons two years before the war and traveled as a Bible salesman. When the war broke out, she enlisted in a Michigan regiment as Frank Thompson.

Taken together, their stories explore the boundaries of nineteenth century assumption about the roles of women. Which sounds ponderous. Trust me, in Abbott's hands it's anything but dull. Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War is a rollicking good read.

 

*Unlike Rosie the Riveter, many women kept their new jobs after the war was over. One of the things that we tend to forget about war is the holes left by the men who don't come back, not only in families but in society as a whole.

**I've always found it difficult to understand why a man in possession of critical military information doesn't have warning lights flash in his head when the woman he's having an illicit affair with wants to talk troop movements.

***Which is a big assumption, because I realize that people discover this blog and individual posts long after the fact. If you're new here, welcome!

From the Archives: Fatherland

In every book I write I reach the point where I am so deep in the work that I have to stop writing blog posts and newsletters. I always hope to avoid it. That somehow I’ll be smarter, or faster, or more organized, or just more. This time I’ve managed to avoid hitting the wall for several months by cutting back to one post a month. But the time has come. For the next little while, I’m going to share blog posts from the past. (This one is from 2015.) I hope you enjoy an old favorite, or read a post that you missed when it first came out.

There will be new posts in March no matter what: we celebrate Women’s History Month hard here on the Margins. (I have some fascinating people lined up.)

*

If you dismiss history told in comic book graphic form* as the non-fiction equivalent of Classic Comics, you're missing out. At its best, graphic non-fiction uses visual elements to tell stories in new and powerful ways.**

In her graphic memoir, Fatherland: A Family History, Serbian-Canadian artist Nina Bunjevac tells the blood-soaked history of the former state of Yugoslavia through the lens of one family's story.

Fatherland centers on Bunjevac's father, whose involvement in a Canadian-based Serbian terrorist organization led her mother to flee with her daughters to Yugoslavia in 1975 and ended with his death in a bomb explosion. Moving back and forth in time and place, from modern Toronto to Yugoslavia during both the Nazi occupation and the Cold War, Bunjevac explores the steps that led to her father's extreme nationalism and its tragic consequences. Using a combination of strong lines, pointillism and cross-hatching that evokes the feeling of an old newspaper, she tells a story in which there are no heroes and every choice, personal or political, has traumatic consequences. (Bunjevac's mother is forced to make a classic "Sophie's choice": the only way she can take her daughters to Yugoslavia is to leave her son behind.) Both the country and Bunjevac's family are torn apart by the bitter divisions between Serbs and Croats, partisans and collaborators, royalists and communists.

Bunjevac makes no moral judgments about her family's choices. Instead she approaches their history from several viewpoints, introducing increasing complexity and moral ambiguity with each new layer. The only thing that is black and white in Fatherland is Bunjevac's exquisite and often grim illustrations.

*As opposed to what we call "comic book history" here at the Margins--stories that are culturally entrenched and often emotionally satisfying but untrue.

**At its worst, graphic non-fiction is garish and heavy-handed. But if we abandon entire genres of literature based only on the worst examples we'll have nothing left to read.

 

From the Archives: Word with a Past–Two Bits

In every book I write I reach the point where I am so deep in the work that I have to stop writing blog posts and newsletters. I always hope to avoid it. That somehow I’ll be smarter, or faster, or more organized, or just more. This time I’ve managed to avoid hitting the wall for several months by cutting back to one post a month. But the time has come. For the next little while, I’m going to share blog posts from the past. (This one is from 2013. Time flies.) I hope you enjoy an old favorite, or read a post that you missed when it first came out.

There will be new posts in March no matter what: we celebrate Women’s History Month hard here on the Margins. (I have some fascinating people lined up.)

One of the favorite cheers for my junior high school's football team went "Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar, all for our team stand up and holler." It made no sense to me, but neither did football. When the rest of the Trojan fans stood up and hollered, I stood up and hollered. When they said glumly in the stands, I sat. By high school, my best friends were all in marching band, I was therefore freed of my weekend football obligation, and I knew that "two bits" meant a quarter--I just didn't know why.

Turns out the phrase has its roots in the Spanish conquest of the Americas and the river of silver that flowed from the mines of Potosí to the royal coffers in Madrid. (1)

In 1497, their Most Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella introduced a new coin into the global economy as part of a general currency reform. The peso (literally "weight") was a heavy silver coin that was worth eight reales.(2) In Spanish it became known as a peso de ocho(3); in English it was a "piece of eight".

The peso quickly became a global currency. It was relatively pure silver, it was uniform in size and weight, and it had one special characteristic: it could be divided like a pie into eight reales. In English, those reales became known as "bits". Two bits were a quarter of a peso. After the new American Congress based the weight of the American dollar on the peso in 1792(4), "two bits" also referred to a quarter of a dollar.

Now I need to figure out what "Two in ten, let's do it again" means.

(1)And flowed right back out again to pay for spices, textiles and other luxury goods in the India trade.

(2) The important word here is EIGHT, not reales. The story would be the same if it were eight goats, eight marbles, or eight football fans.

(3) For those of you who never had to count to ten in Spanish, ocho means EIGHT.

(4) Choosing to base American currency on the peso rather than the pound was a not-so-subtle way to spit in Great Britain's eye. The peso remained legal tender in the US until the 1850s.