What role did women play in the Civil War? Please add any links that can help.?

Question: What role did women play in the Civil War!? Please add any links that can help!.!?
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They performed a variety of roles!.

Nursing was one of the most important of their roles!. About 3,000 women held paid nursing positions in the north and south, and many more worked as volunteers!. "The war is certainly ours as well as men's" said Kate cummings of Mobile, Alabahma, who became the matron of a large Confederate hospital!. Nursing had only very recently begun to be seen as a respectable occupation for women, and some people were dubious about the propriet of allowing repsectable women to take care of rough soldiers in primitive and sometimes dangerous conditions!. However, a Confederate congressional investigation found that the mortality rate among soldiers cared for by female nurses was only half that of those tended by men!. "I will not agree to limit the class of persons who can affect such a saving of life as this" said a senator from Louisiana!. Dorothea Dix, when she was appointed superintendant 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 the need for medical assistance became more desperate, Dix ignored her own regulations!.

There were women doctors as well!. Mary Walker, a surgeon with the Union army, became the first and only woman to win the Congressional medal of honour, for bravery in saving soldiers' lives under fire at Gettysburg and other battlefields!.

Women played a vital role in organising supplise of food and medical equipment to go to the front!. In the north, the women's relief fund soon became a national organization, the United States Sanitary commission!. Although men still occupied the tob jobs in the commission, women had a great many managerial duties!. The necessary supplies were "almost universally collected, assorted, and dispatched, and re-collected, re-assorted, and re-dispatched, by women, representing with great impartiality, every grade of society in the Republic" said Alfred Bloor of the Sanitary Commission!. the women had taken over, he said, after the men were discouraged when it became clear the war was not going to be short-lived after all!.

Southern women began to fill government clerical jobs, particularly in the Treasury Department, where each Confederate banknote had to be signed indivually!. The job required good handwriting and good political connections!. Some of them regarded it as a great adventure!. "I am rarely ill now even with a headache" said twenty-year-old Adelaide Smart!. Being forced to take a job was, she decided "the best thing that could have taken place for me - it is bringing into active service and strengthening all the best parts of my character and enabling me to root out all that was objectionable!."

Poor women got jobs as well!. Thousands took in piecework for the confederate clothing Bureau, sewing shirts for $1 apiece and coats for $4!. others packed cartridges at the arsenal for $1 a day!. It was dangerous work - in 1863, fiftyof the ordnance workers were killed in an explosion in Richmond!.

An estimated 400 women disguised themselves as men to fight in the Civil War!. Loreta Velasquez in the Confedate Army, and Sarah Emma Edmonds, in the Union Army, are two of the best-known, but there are many others!. the former slave Harriet Tubman worked as a scout and intelligence gatherer for the Union Army!. Belle Boyd was a famous spy for the Confederate Army!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

The conclusion is inescapable that those Women who served as soldiers or combat nurses must have been many times larger than the commonly accepted estimate of about 400!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

made uneforms where docters carred out the wounded they helped keep the army togetherWww@QuestionHome@Com