It is a sad reality that a book about three prominent women of the 19th century must feature their husbands prominently. If those three disparate women had not married the men who courted them, historian Carol Berkin quite likely would never have chosen them as subjects for her newest remarkable book about American females of the past.

Berkin, a history professor at Baruch College in New York City, is the author of "Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for American Independence" and "First Generations: Women in Colonial America." She is masterful at making history relevant, and "Civil War Wives: The Lives and Times of Angelina Grimke Weld, Varina Howell Davis and Julia Dent Grant" continues that tradition.

The married names taken by two of the women -- Davis and Grant -- almost surely will bring recognition in the context of a Civil War-era book. Varina Howell married Jefferson Davis, who became president of the Confederacy. Julia Dent married Ulysses Grant, who led the Union military effort and later became president of the (sort of re-) United States. Berkin's other protagonist, Angelina Grimke, took a name that might puzzle at first -- she married Theodore Dwight Weld, who advocated an end to slavery. During the marriage, Grimke changed from the daughter of South Carolina slaveholders to fiery abolitionist.

The three lives share the obvious commonality of gender and relative prominence. Otherwise, Berkin wisely makes few claims to a unified narrative. She began with the desire to understand women from the 19th century who stood "between the powerful and the anonymous, the famous and the ordinary. Their lives were in many ways privileged, but in others they were anomalous, for through their marriages to leading figures they had access to the seats of power but no power themselves."

Berkin shortened the list of possibilities based on whether the women under consideration left behind adequate records of their lives in their own words.

By 19th-century standards and even the standards of 2009, Weld and Davis could be called uppity by misogynists. They were determined to make the world a better place on their own, with or without their husbands' approval. Grant would qualify as more placid, as traditionally domestic; she expressed herself publicly only in the final years of her life, as a memoirist while fading from the unwelcome spotlight.

Berkin has mined the resources available to her wisely. The book does not succeed as a group biography, nor did Berkin establish that as a primary goal. It succeeds beautifully as a chronicle, from three perspectives, of how relatively privileged women lived, advanced various causes and died six to 10 generations ago. Grimke Weld, Howell Davis and Dent Grant should never have been forgotten. Because of Berkin's research and writing skills, those three women will now be difficult to forget.

Steve Weinberg's most recent book, "Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller," has just been published in paperback.