Confederate and Union women played an important role in the Civil War. They took up tasks previously performed by men, nurtured and nursed the wounded, campaigned for reform, and even spied and scouted for the armies. Standing in for the men who'd gone to war, women on both sides toiled in factories, ran farms, and supervised plantations.
NURSES, NORTH AND SOUTH Thousands of women left their homes to care for sick and dying soldiers. At first, Union women sought only to assist the few overworked medical doctors, but the human carnage they found so angered them that they helped to organized and staff the United States Sanitary Commission, an organization that distributed medical supplies, ran special kitchens, and inspected army camps to assure standards of cleanliness. Some 3,200 Union women became unpaid nurses during the war. Dorothea Dix, the tireless campaigner on behalf of reforming the way society treated its insane, was appointed head of the Union's nursing corps. Southern nurses were less organized but equally vital. They set up hospitals in their homes, cared for their mangled soldiers with few medical supplies, and eased the pain felt by those dying far from their loved ones. SOLDIERS AND SPIES Some women disguised themselves as men and actually served as soldiers and scouts. And women on both sides volunteered to operate as spies. Rose O'Neal Greenhow, a Washington DC socialite, was an expert at obtaining information from top government officials and Yankee officers. In the Confederate capital of Richmond, Elizabeth Van Lew, managed to plant a spy inside the Confederate White House. ABOLITION AND EQUALITY Civil War feminists worked hard to abolish slavery and promote the equality of women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony organzied the National Woman's Loyalty League, gathering 400,000 signatures calling for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. They thought it intolerable, moreover, that women in manufacturing earned less than the men they worked with, that medical doctors opposed having female nurses in the operating rooms, and that no woman in America was allowed to vote. For most soldiers, the letters written to them by their mothers and sweethearts provided indispensable emotional support. Some 45,000 letters were sent daily via Washington to soldiers of the eastern armies and another 90,000 were sent each day via Lexington, KY to western soldiers. Clearly, the role women played in the Civil War was an important factor in the way it was fought. Unfortunately, the Civil War resulted in little economic or political equality for the women who suffered through it. When the fighting stopped, men resumed their dominant roles at home, in politics, at work, and even in one field that women had professionalized: medical care. Indeed, nurses were classified as little more than domestic help until well into the next century. |