Protecting Women

Recovering the rarely heard voices of immigrant soldiers, Indigenous women, and Mexican women alongside officers’ narratives, this book richly portrays the US Army at war in Florida and Mexico. Its unique focus on interactions between the army and local women uncovers army culture’s gendered foundations. Countering an almost exclusively officer-focused historiography, it amasses enlisted men’s accounts to describe what life was like for ordinary soldiers, show how enlisted men participated in and shaped army culture, and demonstrate how officers wrote their reports to achieve specific ends. By piecing together scattered mentions of women from personal writings, military and civilian newspapers, court-martial proceedings, and official records, it also shows the wide spectrum of Indigenous and Mexican women’s wartime activities. Army authors erased or reframed evidence of women’s combatancy to bolster their status as women’s protectors, but undoing this process reveals that even in the most understudied conflicts, evidence exists to tell women’s stories.

Author Biography

Justine Meberg received her PhD from Columbia University, where she won the Bancroft Dissertation Award.