TV commentator celebrates women of the Civil War

Journalist, political commentator and author Cokie Roberts will be in Naperville this month with her new book, "Capital Dames," her collection of stories honoring women of the Civil War.

The book is an expansion on her reports about the key contributions made by women in the early years of the United States that she began with stories of the Revolutionary War period in "Founding Mothers and Ladies of Liberty."

Roberts will meet readers and fans at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 29, at Community Christian Church, 1635 Emerson Lane, Naperville.

Tickets are available with the purchase of Roberts' new book, "Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington 1848-1868," from Anderson's Bookshop, 123 W. Jefferson Ave. in downtown Naperville, or online at www.andersonsbookshop.com.

The author will sign her book for attendees at the event. For details, call Anderson's at (630) 355-2665.

With the culmination of the Civil War's sesquicentennial in April 2015, Roberts' book provides a revelatory look at the lives of women during a tumultuous and perennially fascinating era of American history.

Concentrating on Washington, D.C., then a small Southern town that sat as a bull's-eye between battling armies, Roberts explores newspaper articles, government records, and private letters and diaries - many never before published - to reconstruct a remarkable period of conflict and change for its self-described belles, for whom life would never be the same.

Through the eyes of Washington's fierce, sometimes funny, and almost always formidable female residents, such as Adele Cutts Douglas and Elizabeth Blair Lee, Roberts describes the capital's transformation from a sleepy, social city to a contested place of political power.

The secession forced many of the southern women to depart, and the union loyalists and friends they left behind were soon grappling with questions of safety and sanitation as the capital was transformed first into a huge army camp and then a massive hospital.

With the men gone to fight, women stepped up to the plate as nurses, supply organizers, relief workers, propagandists and journalists. Just like World War II's Rosie the Riveter, women made munitions at arsenals, many losing their lives in awful accidents, and worked at the Treasury Department to print greenbacks to pay for the war. The Navy Yard broke with tradition as well and hired women to sew canvas bags for gunpowder.

Roberts chronicles the increasing political empowerment these women experienced through their newfound independence and importance. After emancipation was declared in the capital in 1862, friends previously divided resettled and united to promote a common cause - changes in public policy, through lobbying and activism, which were desperately needed to heal a country torn apart.

Roberts, a political commentator for ABC News and National Public Radio, has won many awards and was named a "Living Legend" by the Library of Congress in 2008. She is the author of the number one New York Times best-seller "We Are Our Mothers' Daughters."

Her other books, "Founding Mothers, Ladies of Liberty," and "From This Day Forward" (written with her husband, journalist Steven V. Roberts), also spent weeks on the best-seller list. She and her husband have also collaborated on "Our Haggadah."