You've Come A Long Way. ..

represents a solid contribution to the social history of the Civil War and, more specifically, to the role of women in that war. That is, her book is representative of a growing literature that not only provides a more accurate understanding of the significant place women had in the conflict, but also demonstrates gender as a useful category of analysis in Civil War studies.1 In other words, Schultz's book embodies a growing sophistication and maturity in the history of women in the Civil War, a field that has come a long way since such early groundbreaking studies as Mary Elizabeth Massey's Bonnet Brigades (1966). While Schultz clearly empathizes with the women she studies in Women at the Front, her study captures the complexities of Civil War hospital work, nuances that do not always reflect well on these women, but shows them to be complicated human beings attempting to cope with their place in such a large and horrific struggle. Her book also is sensitive to the differences between the experience of northern and southern hospital workers, and she takes pains to differentiate between elite women and their more humble counterparts who usually made up the bulk of the workforce. After a brief introduction, Schultz confidently dives into the wartime experiences of female hospital workers. She begins by examining what sort of women went into hospital work during the Civil War and the nature of the medical system they encountered, North and South. Not surprisingly taking into account the intense mobilization of human resources in both sections, Schultz finds, "Female hospital workers were as diverse as the population of the United States in 1860" (p. 12). Given the competing philosophies of federal versus states' rights, it is also not surprising Schultz finds there was a more centralized hospital system in the North and a more decentralized and informal hospital system in the South. In both sections, elite volunteers led