A new addition to the growing canon of works on women soldiers in the American Civil War, Shelby Harriel's Behind the Rifle: Women Soldiers in Civil War Mississippi overcomes considerable archival challenges in identifying previously undiscovered women soldiers (over twenty such examples, by Harriel's count) and reconstructing details of their military service. Harriel's study is distinguished from earlier texts on women soldiers – notably Deanne Blanton and Lauren Cook's important and detailed work They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War (2002) – by its regional focus: homing in on Mississippi, the site of multiple intense and important military campaigns, she considers the military service not only of women soldiers hailing from the Magnolia state, but also of women serving in units fighting within Mississippi.

Throughout the book, Harriel demonstrates a dogged and scrupulous approach to her sources, tracing and retracing the names and careers of her subjects. In addition to identifying new examples, she succeeds in shedding fresh light on old stories or, indeed, debunking and clarifying previous misunderstandings. Her work raises interesting and pertinent questions about how we define who is, and who is remembered as, a soldier. Orderlies, for instance, were not formally enlisted, nor were they subjected to medical inspections, but they nevertheless found themselves frequently exposed to danger or drawn into combat (68). Attaching themselves to the armies in these less formal or scrutinized capacities may have provided additional scope for women to serve while escaping detection. Behind the Rifle, too, provides ample evidence of the ways in which women soldiers were discovered and identified – often by their gait and appearance, by unguarded behaviour (sometimes while inebriated), or more often by health crises or injuries that precipitated the exposure of their “secret.”

It is clear from Harriel's work that the labour of locating women soldiers (and isolating their stories) is frequently complicated or confused by misidentifications, misspellings, people with the same or similar surnames, or women operating alternately under their (re)married and single names. The Internet has opened up new possibilities for researchers of women soldiers (and, indeed, other historical actors hitherto rendered silent by archives), and Harriel makes excellent use of Ancestry.com's extensive collection of family-history records to piece together the stories of hard-to-find soldiers. Nevertheless, readers still often see these women through the eyes of the men who encountered them (fellow soldiers, commanding officers, surgeons, jailers, and so on) rather than through the women's own words. When the women's words are included, these are largely in the form of published works such as postbellum memoirs, and are hence shaped by the soldier's need, for instance, to stake a claim to a pension, or to reassert their respectability and the worthiness of their motives.

While Harriel does not always overcome the limitations and obstacles that her sources present, she does evoke compellingly the situations which her subjects are likely to have encountered. The first three chapters are thematic, focussing on motivations, the experiences of women prisoners of war, and the deaths and injuries sustained by women soldiers. The remaining nine chapters provide a roughly chronological account of the war in Mississippi. As Harriel traces the various campaigns and skirmishes that took place in the state, she knits individual women soldiers’ service into the experiences of the units and regiments to which they were attached. In these passages, Harriel demonstrates an impressive eye for military detail, and a keen sense of the sensory tapestry, weaving together olefactory, auditory, and visual elements.

However, laudable and impressive though the archival work of identifying new women soldiers is, it is unclear how these new examples enrich or complicate our understanding of a multitude of issues: Mississippi's place in the Civil War, the role of women soldiers in the conflict, and, in particular, how recovering histories of women soldiers interacts with gender norms and expectations in the mid-nineteenth century. While Harriel does discuss in passing the constraints and expectations placed upon (especially white, middle-class) women in Civil War America, she also misses crucial opportunities to consider what women soldiers, and the ways in which they were commemorated after the war, can reveal about the (in)stability of gender boundaries during and after the conflict.

In this way, Behind the Rifle conforms to what Marjorie Garber described in her 1992 book Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety as the “progress narrative” – the urge to explain away transvestism or other forms of experimentation with gender expression as women dressing as men to get ahead in society. Harriel embraces this narrative enthusiastically, interpreting her subjects’ actions as, variously, quests for financial security or adventure, acts of patriotic duty, or attempts to follow loved ones into battle. Yet as Peter Boag has suggested, the “progress narrative” reinforces a strict gender binary, and precludes the possibility that some individuals chose to don masculine-coded attire “because they did not consider themselves women.”Footnote ¹ Harriel rejects this possibility outright. In considering the well-known and widely discussed example of Albert Cashier (born Jennie Hodgers), Harriel dismisses “scholars and journalists” (whom she declines to name) (155) who have argued that Cashier was a trans man.Footnote ² In so doing she misrepresents and oversimplifies the work of transgender historians. Scholars including Genny Beemyn and Rachel Hope Cleves have stressed that transgender history does not constitute the presentist imposition of contemporary categories of identity onto individuals for whom concepts such as “transgender” were meaningless.Footnote ³ Rather, transgender history embraces what Cleves terms the “contingency and mutability of gender,” exploring the infinite ways in which binary understandings of gender were challenged and destabilized in the past.Footnote ⁴

That is to say, while Harriel's work is replete with fascinating and well-drawn anecdotes, a failure to engage sufficiently with developments in gender history means that Behind the Rifle struggles to reshape our understanding of women soldiers in the Civil War, beyond proving that they were, indeed, present.