Army Wives and Women’s Military Memoir Collection

Special Collections Receives The Marion Floyd Leach ’43 Army Wives and Women’s Military Memoir Collection
This past fall, Special Collections was the recipient of a bequest, first made several decades ago, of a collection of books written by American women whose husbands were military officers. Collected over several decades by Marion Floyd Leach ’43, a self-described “army wife” and alumna who was married to a Brigadier General, Leach and her husband retired from a long and well-traveled Army career to Beaufort, South Carolina. After Leach’s death early in 2017, the collection came to Furman, where it is currently being cataloged. Highlights include several nineteenth-century memoirs and campaign histories by Elizabeth Custer, a rare first edition (1906) of Mary Boykin Chesnut’s A Diary From Dixie, a number of mid-twentieth century etiquette books for army wives, and several nineteenth-century books about women who were combatants and spies. This collection adds excellent depth to our growing women’s history collections.

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