How Did The Roles Of Women Change During The Civil War?

Written by: Catherine Clinton, University of Texas, San Antonio

By the terminate of this department, you will:

• Explain the effects of government policy during Reconstruction on social club from 1865 to 1877

Suggested Sequencing

Use this Narrative alongside the Mary Chesnut'south War Narrative to let students to clarify and compare women's experiences during the Civil State of war.

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Whether black or white, Northern or Southern, rich or poor, women confronted daunting obstacles during the Ceremonious State of war era. The impulse to overthrow societal constraints and the struggle for equal opportunity were critical concerns for many women in the 1860s.

The abolitionist movement flourished alongside female activism, and during the decades leading up to the Civil State of war, women increasingly advocated for women's rights, peculiarly suffrage. The vote was then a right granted at the state level; New Jersey had briefly allowed some women to vote (who satisfied the same property-buying qualifications equally men), but generally, momentum for suffrage had been lost after the American Revolution. It revived during the 1850s, when many reformers, such equally Susan B. Anthony, began their suffrage work after condign engaged in the temperance, abolitionist, and moral reform movements of the 1830s and 1840s. In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton initiated a national women'southward rights movement in Seneca Falls, New York, after witnessing male resistance to women'due south participation in abolitionism at the World Antislavery Convention in London in 1840. Notwithstanding women'due south rights campaigns were intertwined with abolition. Antislavery activist Angelina Grimke argued that slaves might be emancipated while women were denied equal status, but women could never truly be free until slavery was abolished, suggesting a domino effect.

Pictured are two of the leading suffragists of the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (left) and Susan B. Anthony (correct).

When war was declared in spring 1861, women were prepared to launch into action to contribute to the war effort. In the Southward, they stitched sashes and prepared cockades for their soldiers marching off to defend the newly established Confederacy. In the North, medical pioneers and sisters Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell called a meeting of women in Manhattan to coordinate efforts for soldiers' aid. On April 29, 1861, betwixt 2,000 and iii,000 responded to the phone call. They trained nurses for work in the field and established a network of soldiers' assist societies. The Women's Cardinal Relief Clan'due south board of 12 overseers included six women, which was unconventionally egalitarian for the era.

Nurses not only cared for soldiers in wards but some undertook tours of duty on the battlefield. Mary Anne Bickerdyke, or "Female parent" Bickerdyke, as she was affectionately known to the troops, attended to the Union wounded on 19 different boxing sites. She spent near of her time at the Marriage's armed services hospital in Cairo, Illinois. Even more than innovative, female nurses and matrons staffed the war department's mobile "floating hospitals," prepare near battle sites to rescue the wounded. Mary Edwards Walker was an abolitionist and surgeon who fought for an army engagement and eventually served. She was given the Medal of Honour by President Andrew Johnson and remains the merely female recipient of the award to this day. Clara Barton was maybe the all-time-known nurse of the Civil War generation and subsequently founded the American Red Cross in 1881.

Before the war, Dorothea Dix travelled the world to investigate treatment of the mentally ill, and she campaigned from Maine to Louisiana to try to build humane facilities to care for those diagnosed with insanity. Dix helped establish the Harrisburg State Infirmary in Pennsylvania, 1 of America's first asylums, in 1851. During the state of war, she worked independently of the federal army, organizing wartime care of soldiers in the country of Massachusetts. Through her personal appeals, thousands of dollars were donated to supply Massachusetts soldiers with nutrient and medicine. Dix was eventually appointed Superintendent of Army Nurses and provided "care, succor [assistance] and relief" to hundreds of Matrimony soldiers.

More than three,000 women served as military nurses, the bulk in the North. Louisa May Alcott's Infirmary Sketches depicted a nurse's life, describing times when "legless, armless occupants entering my ward admonished me that I was there to piece of work, not to wonder or weep." Confederate women organized private facilities; Sally Tompkins founded a hospital in Richmond and was given the rank of captain by Amalgamated President Jefferson Davis. Phoebe Pember, a former Charleston socialite working in a Confederate hospital, wrote of rats that "ate all the poultices applied during the night to the sick, and dragged away the pads stuffed with bran from nether the arms and legs of the wounded."

A new generation of women leaders began to sally. With the aid of the U.S. Christian Commission, Annie Wittenmyer developed a "dietary kitchen system" in which patients were each given a diet tailored to their medical condition. This system is however in use in hospitals today. Because iii of every five soldiers who died in uniform succumbed to disease unrelated to combat or wounds, superior care was important to keeping the ranks full. None other than Ulysses S. Grant said of Wittenmyer that "no soldier on the firing line gave more heroic service than she did."

An intrepid core of women embarked on even more dangerous merely heroic journeys. A small group served as spies, including the infamous Washington, DC, society widow Rose Greenhow, who drowned while trying to evade the occludent off the coast of North Carolina, smuggling gilded and documents back into the Confederacy from her mission in Europe. Immature women often worked as saboteurs and scouts during war machine operations in occupied territories.

Rose Greenhow, pictured here with her daughter in a Washington, DC, prison in 1862, was part of a small group of female Confederate spies.

Scores of women disguised themselves equally male soldiers to serve in combat. Two such women were Irish gaelic immigrants Jennie Hodges and Rosetta Wakeman. Both fought in the 1864 Ruddy River Campaign in Louisiana. Hodges was built-in female but lived as a male near of her adult life, enlisting as Albert Cashier. Wakeman enlisted in the 153rd New York volunteers as Private Edwin Wakeman. Wakeman wrote home to her family unit about her feel on the battleground: "I was not in the first day's fight merely the next day I had to face up the enemy bullets with my regiment. I was under burn almost four hours and laid on the field of boxing all night. There was three wounded in my Co. and i killed."

In 1863, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony organized the Women'southward Loyal National League, the showtime national women'southward political organization, which advocated an amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery that was more expansive than Lincoln'southward Emancipation Proclamation (the League shifted its focus to women's suffrage later the war). The abolition of slavery became a top priority for northern women activists, who poured their talent and energy into political organizing. Almost wanted to secure freedom for blacks before women'south suffrage, but black women were fifty-fifty more than outspoken. At their showtime national convention, African American activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper said, "Yous white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs." Harper and other free black women in the North advocated on behalf of enslaved southern women, noting that more than than one-half the black population of four one thousand thousand was withal in bondage. Black women joined white women in the fight to terminate slavery and pushed for autonomy for all women, non just white women. Many explicitly raised sensation about the connexion between discrimination on the ground of race and of sexual activity.

Harriet Tubman continued her dangerous career behind enemy lines. She had served as a conductor on the Hugger-mugger Railroad, helping runaway slaves escape to freedom, and then began to work with the Union army as a nurse, watch, and spy in occupied S Carolina. Self-liberated ex-slave Susie King Taylor moved into Spousal relationship-occupied territory along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts, where she served as a nurse and as well as a teacher for illiterate blackness Union soldiers serving nigh her Sea Island encampment.

Harriet Tubman, photographed here soon after the end of the Civil War, helped the Wedlock army during the Civil State of war and was a conductor on the Underground Railroad.

Women of color had a special pale in the struggle, rightly perceiving the Civil War every bit a boxing for black liberation. With the passage of the Thirteenth Subpoena in 1865, women within the Loyal League, which pledged to win equal rights within the scope of the U.S. Constitution, could claim victory. With the Fourteenth Subpoena, however, the situation became disquisitional: this amendment specified "due process" and "equal protection," essential foundations upon which rights might exist constructed. But Section 2 of the amendment specified rights were to exist accorded to "the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of historic period, and citizens of the United states of america." The question of who should exist granted these rights produced a split within the move, and Susan B. Anthony, for one, challenged the notion that only men could vote.

In the wake of Southern surrender and the enormous task of bounden the nation's wounds and rebuilding the land, women put their shoulders to the wheel. Yet those who had taken over men'due south positions during wartime in the U.S. Treasury Department, for instance, and in the munitions factories in Amalgamated Richmond were encouraged to retire and, in some cases, were fifty-fifty expelled. Women suffered the consequences of state of war because they lost their fathers, sons, and husbands and thus their principal means of financial support. The provision for female pensioners and protective labor legislation helped to shape late nineteenth-century reform and federal reform. The legacy of the Civil War put an indelible stamp on the women's rights movements, as women connected the long struggle for women's suffrage. They were successful in winning the right to vote in several westerns states while working for a ramble amendment.

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Review Questions

one. During the Ceremonious War, women who took role in a variety of reform movements before the war made which of the following their principal goal?

1. Women'south suffrage
2. The right of women to serve as doctors
3. The abolition of slavery
4. The correct of one-time slaves to serve in the Spousal relationship Army

2. Women such as "Mother" Bickerdyke served in the war mainly as

1. volunteers on the dwelling forepart, writing letters of encouragement to wounded soldiers
2. workers in factories, replacing men every bit they were drafted into the army
3. nurses on the frontlines
4. women bearded every bit men fighting on the frontlines

3. Primarily known for her work in reforming the treatment of the mentally ill, Dorothea Dix served during the Civil State of war as

1. founder of the U.S. Christian Commission
2. superintendent of Regular army Nurses
3. founder of the Woman's Loyal National League
4. a spy for the Union Army

four. When Spousal relationship Full general Ulysses S. Grant stated that "no soldier on the firing line gave more heroic service than she did," he was speaking of

1. Sarah Grimké
2. Louisa May Alcott
3. Clara Barton
4. Annie Wittenmyer

5. During the Civil War, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony campaigned for an subpoena to the Constitution that would

1. cancel slavery
2. grant women the correct to vote
3. grant equal rights to all persons regardless of their sex
4. grant freed slaves the right to vote

6. During the war, Harriet Tubman and Rose Greenhow both worked as

1. nurses
2. spies
3. doctors
4. teachers

seven. Nigh southern women who had the time to volunteer for the Confederate cause served every bit

1. nurses and seamstresses
2. scouts and saboteurs
3. blockade runners
4. spies

Free Response Questions

1. Describe the reasons for formation of the Women's Loyal National League.
2. Explain the function African American women played in the Civil War.

AP Practice Questions

"TO THE WOMEN OF THE REPUBLIC: Nosotros enquire you to sign and circulate this petition for the ENTIRE Abolition OF SLAVERY. We have now One HUNDRED K signatures, but we want a One thousand thousand before Congress adjourns. Remember the President's Proclamation reaches merely the Slaves of Rebels. The jails of LOYAL Kentucky are to-day crammed' with Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama slaves, advertised to be sold for their jail fees Co-ordinate to Police force,' precisely every bit earlier the war!!! While slavery exists ANYWHERE there can be freedom NOWHERE. THERE MUST BE A Police force ABOLISHING SLAVERY. Nosotros have undertaken to canvass the Nation for freedom. Women, y'all cannot vote or fight for your country. Your only way to be a power in the Authorities is through the exercise of this one, sacred, Constitutional Right OF PETITION;' and we ask yous to use it now to the utmost. Go to the rich, the poor, the high, the low, the soldier, the noncombatant, the white, the black get together up the names of all who hate slavery all who dear LIBERTY, and would take it the Law of the land and lay them at the feet of Congress, your silent just stiff vote for homo freedom guarded past the law. . . . E. CADY STANTON President. SUSAN B. ANTHONY, Secretary W.L.Due north. League"

Women's Loyal National League, "To the Women of the Republic," January 25, 1864

Refer to the excerpt provided.

1. The phrase, "remember the President'southward Declaration reaches only the Slaves of Rebels," refers to

1. the Proclamation of Rights and Grievances
2. the Olive Branch Petition
3. the Emancipation Annunciation
4. Field Order No. 15

2. The ideas expressed in the excerpt were a continuation of which philosophy?

1. The ethics in the U.South. Constitution
2. The "perfectionist" ethics of the Second Smashing Enkindling
3. The philosophy expressed past the Stamp Act Congress
4. The philosophy of compromise expressed by Henry Dirt

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Master Sources

Brumgardt, John, ed. Ceremonious State of war Nurse: The Diary and Letters of Hannah Ropes. Knoxville, TN: The Academy of Tennessee Press, 1980.

Cady Stanton, Elizabeth, and Susan B. Anthony. "To the Women of the Commonwealth." January 25, 1864. https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/slavery/experience/gender/docs2.html

"Declaration of Sentiments, Seneca Falls, 1848." https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/modernistic/senecafalls.asp

"Fifteenth Amendment. Black Suffrage." http://world wide web.ushistory.org/documents/amendments.htm#amend15

"Fourteenth Amendment. Ceremonious Rights." http://www.ushistory.org/documents/amendments.htm#amend14

"Thirteenth Amendment. Abolition of Slavery." http://www.ushistory.org/documents/amendments.htm#amend13

Suggested Resources

Campbell, Edward, and Kym Rice. A Adult female's State of war: Southern Women, Ceremonious War, and the Amalgamated Legacy. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1997.

Chesnut, Mary Boykin. Mary Chesnut'due south Diary, edited past Catherine Clinton. New York: Penguin, 2011.

Clinton, Catherine. The Other Civil War. New York: Hill and Wang, 1999.

Giesberg, Judith. Civil War Sisterhood. Boston: Northeastern Academy Printing, 2006.

King Taylor, Susie. Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, edited past Catherine Clinton. Athens, GA: Academy of Georgia Press, 2006.

Massey, Mary Elizabeth. Women in the Civil War. Lincoln, NE: Academy of Nebraska Printing, 1994.

How Did The Roles Of Women Change During The Civil War?,

Source: https://www.billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/women-during-the-civil-war

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