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Of the 2.27 million soldiers who fought in the American Civil War, an estimated 400 were women

They bound their breasts and cut their hair, claiming their right to fight and die alongside their male counterparts. “The notion of a woman in pants was not only illegal, but just so foreign that all women had to do was put on pants and they would register as male to other men,” says singer-songwriter Jenn Grinels, who is the composer of The Rosetta Project, a folk-rock musical about a Union soldier named Sarah Rosetta Wakeman. A period photograph of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman in her Union army uniform. Wakeman enlisted when she was 19 and was killed in 1864, but her experiences were immortalized in the book An Uncommon Soldier, a collection of the letters she wrote during the war....

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