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Letters home from a stateside WAC, 1944-1945.

Article Excerpt
Aileen Kilgore Henderson. Stateside Soldier: Life in the Women's Army Corps, 1944-1945. Women's Diaries and Letters of the South Series. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. 252 pp. Illustrations and index. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 1-57003-396-X.

Aileen Kilgore Henderson's Stateside Soldier is an edited collection of letters and diary entries written during her two years as a WAC (Women's Army Corps) at the conclusion of the Second World War. It is the first twentieth-century contribution to the book series formerly entitled "Women's Diaries and Letters of the Nineteenth-Century South" edited by Carol Bleser. Though there are probably other books more suited to classroom use than this one, it does succeed in providing historians conducting research in related subjects a glimpse into the day-to-day life of a good soldier and a likeable young Southern woman.

In a sense there are really two authors of this book, each of which is relevant in her own way: Aileen Kilgore Henderson circa 2001, and Aileen Kilgore circa 1944. As the author herself notes in the prologue, "the young woman writing those diary entries and those letters seemed to be someone I had never known" (p.1), The person who wrote the introductory material, and who presumably chose which excerpts to include, has a lifetime of work behind her as an...