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.

‘In the antebellum wars against the Seminoles and Mexico, women were more than bystanders or victims. In this groundbreaking and original study, Justine Meberg reveals how both imagined and real women were central to the emergence of America’s continental empire.’

Andrew Lipman - Barnard College

‘A rich and original analysis of the culture of the US army in a formative antebellum moment with respect to both the laws and practice of war. Meberg makes a powerful argument: that the army embraced a code of protecting enemy women as non-combatants during war, and that code did not protect women but rather exposed them to violence in war, while relieving the army of the obligation to report non-combatant casualties or deaths in military operations.’

Stephanie McCurry - Columbia University

‘This book represents a major breakthrough in the fields of women, gender, and military history. It analyzes the discursive practices at work in army records, which are in turn passed on to military histories. The argument—that erasing woman from the military record produces male cultures of dominance—is crucial for all scholars working in the field of women and war.’

Mary Louise Roberts - Distinguished Lucie Aubrac and Plaenert-Bascom Professor of History, Emerita, University of Wisconsin Madison

‘Justine Meberg’s work is pathbreaking in perspective and focus. Her discussion of officer-enlisted soldier relations suggests a less adversarial and more cohesive dynamic than most scholars, grounded in the racialized distinctions soldiers made in their gendered expectations of male and female combatants and noncombatants in occupied territories. Protecting Women is the most valuable book on the nineteenth century army and gender.’

Samuel J. Watson - author of Peacekeepers and Conquerors: The Army Officer Corps on the American Frontier, 1821-1846