How did the civil war affect women?

Question:How did the civil war affect woman?

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It had a big effect on women on both sides. women on both sides organised relief efforts, in the north the women's efforts soon became a national organisation, the United States Sanitary Commission, which performed a critical role in providing food and medical services for the soldiers. The necessary supplies "were almost universally collected, assorted, and dispatched and re-collected and re-dispatched, by women, representing with great impartiality every grade of society in the Republic' sadi Alfred Bloor of the Sanitary commission.

In the south, a lot of women were left to run plantations while their husbands were away at the war. Many of them were very unhappy about this, and petitioned the Confederate government to let their husbands come home. many were afraid that, with their husbands gone, their slaves would rise up and kill them. Or just run away. "I dread our house servants going and having to do their work" wrote mary Lee, a Virginia woman whose male slaves ran away in 1862, with the females threatening to follow. Some did run away. Southern women who had to do household chores that had previously been done by slaves were not happy about it. In America's Women' Gail collins writes:

'many well-to-do women had no idea how to do household chores, and when they learned, they didn't much like it. Kate Foster of Mississipli was forced to do the laundry when the house servants ran off, and she reported she "came near ruining myself for life as I was too delicately raised for such hard work." There were reports of women who "fainted dead away" while washing windows or who took to their beds after a bout of floor scrubbing.

The Confedrate Army began to draft soldiers in the spring of 1862, during planting time, and the sight of women behind plows became common. As the war dragged on, the towns became virtually all-female worlds, stripped of able-bodied men who could help with the local defense, run local businesss, or even lift heavy furniture. A solider's pay was $11 a month, and at wartime prices in some areas that was not enough to feed a family of four on grain alone.

Women got increasingly surly and started food riots, attacking merchants and army agents, raiding grain warehoueses, mills ,and stores. In areas where the farms were small and people had never owned many slaves to begin with, enthusaism for the war burned out rather quickly, and wives pestered their husbands to come home and help feed their families. When the men complied, they camped out in the woods while the women supplied them with food and blankets. Some women physically attacekd Confederate officers who were trying to reclaim their male relatives. "The women are as bad as the men down here" complained a milita officer in North Carolina. Militias sometimes tortured women in order to locate their sons and husbands.

Although many Southern women came to regard the war as a betrayal by the men who were supposed to look after them, some saw it as an opportunity. In a gesture of liberation, they let down their hair and took off their hooped skirts. Young women also began to cut their hair short, much to their mothers' dismay, and even the more conservative gave up elaborate hairstyles once they had no slaves to arrange them.'

Southern women began to fill government clerical jobs, espeically working in the treasury, as each Confederate bill had to be signed by hand. The job required good handwriting and good political connections, so it was done by upper-class women. Women from less influential backgrounds also got jobs, thousands took in piecework for the Confederate Clothing Bureau, and others worked packing cartridges at the arsenal for $1 a day. It was dangerous work - in 1863, fifty of the ordnance workers were killed in an explosion in richmond.

In the North, many women took over clerical jobs that had been vacated by men. Eventually, 447 women worked in the Treasury Department.

Nursing was a popular occupation for many women during the Civil War. At least 3,000 women held apid nursing postions in the North and South, and thousands of others worked as volunteers. "The war is certainly ours as well as men's" said Kate Cummings, of Mobile, Alabama, who became the matron of a large Confederate hospital. Authorities were wary of putting young girls in intimate contact with bedridden soldiers. Dorothea Dix, when she became superintendent of Union nurses, set a minimum age of thirty for her volunteers and demanded that they be "plain looking women" As the war went on and theneed for medical assistance became more desperate, Dix ignored her own regulations.

Clara Barton organised supplies to be sent to the men at the front. She collected donations and supplies and transported them to the front on wagons. It took months of beuracracti wrangling before the government would let her pass through the lines. In 'America's women' Gail Collins writes:

'After the war, Barton became famous as the organizer of the American Red Cross, but her finest hours came in those hectic, disorganized truaman centers of the war's early years. her face turned blue from the gunpowder, and her skirts were so heavy with blood that she had to wring them out before she could walk under their weight. Her courage under fire was legendary. Walking across a rickety bridge under heavy battery, she barely missed being killed by a shell that tore away a portion of her skirt.'

There were women doctors working in the army as well. Mary Walker, who was a surgeon with the Union Army, became the first and only woman to win the Congressional Medal of Honour for bravery under fire at Gettysburg and other battles.

About 400 women disguised themselves as men to fight in the Civil War. One of the most famous, Sarah emma Edmonds, fought under the name 'Frank Thompson' for the Union Army until her sex was discovered after she caught malaria in 1863. In 1884 she was awarded a military pension. Loreta Velsasquez fought under the name of H.T. burford until she was wounded by mortal shrapnel while fighting with Genera hardee near shiloh church, and her sex was disocvered. She spent the rest of the war as an intelligence gatherer for the south.

A great black woman warrior of the Civil War era, Harriet Tubman, fought in several raids in Confederate territory as a soldier with the Union army. On June 2, 1863, Harriet, in command of three gunboats on a dangerous mission along the Tennessee River, destroyed a bridge and resuced over seven hundred slaves.

women also acted as spies. The most famous Southern spy was Belle Boyd. Taking advantage of the Union soldiers' gallantry toward a beautiful teenage girl, she served as a courier for the Confederate intelligence service and delivered information on troop size and placement she had picked up from her admirers. On her final mission, Belle sailed to England carrying confederate dispatches and was captured by a Union blockade. She later married the Union officer who had takne command of her captured steamer.

Which Civil War? What country?