Women in the Civil War

1
Women in the Civil War

• Enduring Hardships and Gaining Social Independence

2
The Home Front

• Women faced many hardships
• Worry or grief for husbands, sons, brothers,
  fathers
• Shortages of supplies (e.g. food, clothing)
• Battles close to home

3
Challenges Faced by Southern Women

• Southern women came into more direct contact
  with the horrors of war than did most Northern
  women (Hillstrom, K. and L. C. Hillstrom, 2000)
• Shortages of food and supplies
• Substitutions for medicine, coffee, kerosene,
  shoes
• Most major battles took place in the South
• Women became nurses involuntarily, as homes were
  used as hospitals

4
Northern Women Coped by

• Getting jobs.
• Many factory jobs needed to be filled, since the
  men who worked them went to war.
• Many women also needed the income from such jobs
• Forming Aid Societies.
• 7,000 aid societies were formed in the North.
• U. S. Sanitary Commission raised money for
  medical supplies, trained nurses, and
  standardized health care
• Prior to the Commission, an estimated 4 soldiers
  died of disease for every 1 in battle (Women in
  the Civil War, 1999).

5
Nurses

• Women in both the North and South were motivated
  to become nurses to
• Be near loved ones
• Compassion
• A sense of duty
• For the money
• For a sense of adventure

6
Challenges for Nurses

• Becoming a Nurse
• In both the North and South, laws were enacted to
  allow women to become nurses
• Circular Order No. 8 (July 1862)
• Battlefield Conditions
• Nurses in the South often had to continually
  move patients and hospitals in order to remain
  behind battle lines (Hillstrom, K, and L. C.
  Hillstrom, 2000)

7
Notable Nurses

• Dorothea Dix
• Unions Superintendent of Nurses, 1861-1866
• Recruited competent nurses
• Mary Ann Bickerdyke
• Union nurse
• was the only woman (nurse) at the battles of
  Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, caring for
  1,700 wounded in a field hospital
• Sally Louisa Tompkins
• Ran a Confederate hospital in Richmond, where it
  is believed that she lost only 73 of her 1,333
  patients (Women in the Civil War, 1999)

8
Spies

• Men didnt believe women were capable of deceit,
  and would not be spies
• Women spies relied on their status as women for
  greater leniency if caught
• Women who were suspected of espionage were run
  out of town.even if there was no proof.
• These women were often innocent of the
  accusations
• (Hillstrom, K. and L. C. Hillstrom, 2000)

9
Famous Spies

• Elizabeth Van Lew--Crazy Bet
• Pretended to be eccentric so that Confederate
  officials would think of her as harmless
• Helped Federal prisoners escape from Richmond,
  and provided the Union with information that
  helped Grant capture Richmond
• Rose ONeal Greenhow
• A Washington, D. C. socialite who used her social
  status to gain information from Union officials
  she sent secrets to friends in the South
• Helped turn the First Battle of Bull Run into a
  Confederate Victory in 1861
• (Hillstrom, K. and L. C. Hillstrom, 2000)

10
References

• Dix, D. L. (1999). Circular Order No. 8. In The
  Civil War. Woodbridge, CT Primary Source Media.
• Hillstorm, K., and L. C. Hillstrom. (2000). Women
  in the Civil War. In American Civil War reference
  library (Vol. 3, pp. 165-172). Detroit UXL.
• Women in the Civil War. (1999). In Women in
  America. Woodbridge, CT Primary Source Media.