One of the most talked about moments of Ken Burns's television documentary The Civil War (1990) was the dramatic reading of Sullivan Ballou's letter to his wife, Sarah, in which the Union officer anticipates his own death in the First Battle of Bull Run. This moving conclusion to the series' first episode and the sensation it caused underscore the persistence of a gendered model of wartime literacy: the ideal war-text is an eyewitness account written by a man, and read by a woman at home. Women, the Ballou letter sequence suggests, are consumers, not producers of war-texts. As innovative as Burns's documentary was, however, the dramatization of a personal letter from the front has a long history. The first chapter of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), for example, climaxes with Marmee's recitation of a letter from Mr. March, absent at the war. “Very few letters,” the narrator tells us, “were written in those hard times that were not touching, especially those which fathers sent home.” Both Burns's original script for the Ballou segment and Alcott's earlier writing about the war reveal the artificiality of the normative model of literacy presented by The Civil War and Little Women; in order to maintain exclusively male control over the production of wartime texts, documentary and novel must repress or radically circumscribe female voices. Burns originally planned to have an actress, reading as Sarah Ballou, finish the letter, but decided against it; the effect of a woman reading would have been “so emotional [ctdot ] just too much” – as if even a female audience for the male wartime text can only be hinted at, not represented.