Forgotten "Brothers" in Arms: Bringing Female Soldiers Out of the Discourse of Myth

Abstract

In 2016, the Pentagon officially sanctioned women being on the front lines of combat for the United States. Although this was certainly a progressive moment to celebrate, it was by no means a phenomenon, as women had already been on the front lines of combat at the beginning of U.S. history, but this was especially the case for women soldiers of the U.S. Civil War. One large contributing factor for forgetting (and excluding) the military service of Civil War women was in the popular use of the rhetorical device mythos, or myth, in mid nineteenth-century America all the way to the present, which served as a means to foster a narrative of women only existing, and being capable, as warriors within myth. My dissertation focuses on how the myth of the woman warrior (such as the Amazons, Mulan, the Valkyrie, the goddess Sekhmet, etc.) has had an impact on the discourse pertaining to actual women who were in combat, particularly concerning what is archived. My main argument is that while this myth, perpetuated by men’s influence on the conventions of culture, makes godlike women suitable for the battlefield, it serves to keep the living, breathing women of reality outside of combat and in the domestic sphere. I combine the methodological approaches of Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch with Susan Jarratt’s concept of examining content from a Sophistic perspective through the dualistic relationship of mythos and logos, and what occurs between that relationship, nomos. To see the different ways the myth of the woman warrior took shape and how certain women interacted with, and were affected by, its discourse, I dedicate individual chapters to analyzing the memoirs, or archival artifacts, of three different women, Confederate soldier Loreta Janeta Velazquez, Union soldier Sarah Emma Edmonds, and Buffalo soldier Cathay Williams, in the form of case studies. My findings show that myth of the woman warrior served to reinforce the institutions of power that reified the space of the military as strictly masculine, but it coalesced for each woman differently and had varied and particular layers according to the intersections of her identity.