America's Women

by Gail Collins

  Women from less influential backgrounds 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, fifty of the ordnance workers were killed in an explosion in Richmond. Their supporters bitterly asked why poor women working at such hazardous jobs got paid so little “when so many of the departments are filled with young ladies (not dependent on their pay) with nothing to do, at salaries equal to and in some cases better than the best male clerks?” The split consciousness that worshiped the image of a lady with soft hands and no occupation, while expecting most of Southern womanhood to spend their lives in hard labor, was still at work. In 1864, when the note signers were ordered to move from Richmond to Columbia if they wanted to keep their jobs, the women were treated like martyrs. But there was a limit to public sympathy. Late in the war, one Confederate congressman proposed that government vehicles be used to take the women to their offices when “their lives and health are jeopardized by the weather.” The ensuing hilarity indicated that the women’s pedestal had been trimmed to a more manageable height.

  In the North, Francis Spinner, Abraham Lincoln’s U.S. treasurer, was a fan of female clerical workers. He liked their efficiency and, not incidentally, the fact that they were much cheaper than men. Eventually, 447 women worked in the Treasury Department. They made $720 a year—a generous salary for female workers but barely a living wage in a time of high inflation. In 1865, women Treasury workers petitioned for a raise and got $900 a year. It was half the salary paid to men, and it was the last raise they’d get for twenty years.

  If the female workers in the South were treated like fragile flowers, the Northern Patent Office women were viewed as a potential source of sin in the workplace. In 1864, Congressman James Brooks of New York, who was at odds with a Treasury official named Spencer Clark, claimed that Clark and the Treasury women were participating in “orgies and bacchanals.” Brooks’s target might have been Clark, but his victims were the girls accused of having relations with him. When one, Laura Duvall, died, Baker claimed she had succumbed from the aftereffects of an abortion. But an autopsy on her body—removed from the hearse on the way to the cemetery—found she was a virgin who had died of pneumonia. In the end, the investigations committee declared that Brooks had unjustly “compromised the reputation of three hundred females…wives or sisters of soldiers fallen in the field.” But the Patent Office women had gotten a reputation that stuck long after Brooks and Clark had vanished from the scene.

  “ALMOST WILD ON THE SUBJECT

  OF HOSPITAL NURSING”

  Until midcentury, nursing had been a job for men and lower-class women. Florence Nightingale made it respectable for ladies. She was a well-born Englishwoman who became an international heroine in 1855 when she reorganized the nursing care in the Crimean War, reducing the death rate in British field hospitals from 45 to 2 percent. When the Civil War began, one observer noted, there was “a perfect mania to act Florence Nightingale.” At least 3,000 women held paid nursing positions 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.

  The Nightingale mania struck particularly hard in the North. “Our women appear to have become almost wild on the subject of hospital nursing,” said a wartime correspondent for the American Medical Times. When Elizabeth Blackwell called an emergency meeting at her infirmary to organize nursing aid for the war effort, 4,000 volunteers showed up. Not everyone was pleased. A wartime correspondent for the American Medical Times was disturbed by the image of “a delicate refined woman assisting a rough soldier to the close-stool or supplying him with a bedpan.” He urged that women restrict themselves to “delicate soothing attentions, which are always so grateful to the sick.” But public opinion once again chose necessity over proper standards of ladylike behavior. A Confederate congressional investigation discovered 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 savings of life as this,” said a senator from Louisiana. Suddenly, people on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line switched from regarding nursing as an inappropriate job for well-bred women to seeing it as one for which they were uniquely qualified.

  Still, authorities were wary of putting young girls in intimate contact with bedridden soldiers. Dorothea Dix, when she was appointed superintendent of Union nurses, set a minimum age of thirty for her volunteers and demanded they be “plain looking women.” As the war went on and the need for medical assistance became more desperate, Dix ignored her own regulations. But she was firm in the beginning. One young woman from Auburn, New York, was told that she could volunteer only if the elderly family physician agreed to accompany her. She wrote a friend that if she ever became a nurse, it would be in an “Old Maid’s Hospital.” Elida Rumsey Fowle was rejected because she was only nineteen years old and instead became a sort of early era USO. She entertained the patients with songs and stories, giving more than 200 performances in a year, and established a soldier’s library in Washington. Later she and her husband also collected medical supplies and delivered them to the front.

  Fowle and the other volunteers who took care of the wounded during the early parts of the Civil War were basically on their own. They determined where the fighting was, wheedled their way through to the front, and did what they could to help. Neither the Union nor Confederate Army was in any way prepared to feed and clothe its soldiers, let alone care for them when they were injured. In the first terrible years of the war, wounded men died on the battlefield after lying there for days, untended, in the hot sun. There was no organized system of getting them to a field hospital. It took an enormous leap for well-bred women to enter the gory army hospitals to tend the wounded men, and it’s hard to imagine the kind of daring they must have needed to get to the battlefield unescorted. Yet a number of them managed to do it, on their own.

  “I AM A U.S. SOLDIER…AND THEREFORE

  NOT SUPPOSED TO BE SUSCEPTIBLE TO FEAR”

  Clara Barton was one of those restless New England spinsters of the nineteenth century who spent their lives going from place to place, living with friends and relatives, never finding a spot to settle in. She was intellectual, athletic, and afflicted with periodic bouts of depression. (She was also an advocate of free love, but if she ever acted on her beliefs, she was extremely discreet.) A talented teacher, she quit a good position in New Jersey when a man was appointed head of a public school system she had founded. She became one of the first Patent Office women in Washington and was, remarkably, paid the same salary as the male workers, although the Commissioner of Patents never dared include her on the official roll of employees he sent to Congress.

  When the war began, one of the first New England volunteer regiments that traveled through Washington on its way to the South was the Sixth Massachusetts. Nearly forty of the men in the unit had been Barton’s pupils, and the mothers of Clara’s “boys” targeted her as a useful go-between in sending food and clothing to their sons. Soon her house was so crammed with boxes that she had to move. The turning point in Barton’s life came when she realized that the lovingly packed gifts that piled up in her living quarters were not just special treats. The soap, fruits, and other presents were dire necessities for men serving in an army bereft of supplies. The medical situation was worst of all. There were not enough field hospitals, and those that existed sometimes lacked even bandages. There was not enough medicine and certainly not enough medical staff. Doctors operated with instruments that had not been disinfected, and they dosed the men with quinine and morphine, when they were lucky enough to have even that. Most of the wounded died—nine out of ten men with abdominal injuries failed to survive their treatment. When trains bearing the wounded arrived back from the fr
ont, they brought fallen soldiers who had not been given anything to eat or drink for days. Katherine Wormeley, a Union nurse, described the cargo of the trains as “a festering mass of dead and living together.” Although the official recruitment of nurses went slowly, anyone who wanted to help out could find an open field of opportunity.

  Barton began actively soliciting donations and supplies. The women she contacted responded with a flood of fruit preserves and soap and lemons to combat scurvy. Within six months Barton had filled three warehouses. She bought perishables like bread with her own scanty funds and distributed her wares at military hospitals. Once the hospitals were better organized and flooded with female volunteers eager to hand out food or wipe fevered brows, Barton began to meet the ships and trains carrying back wounded men from the front. The next obvious step was to get to the battlefield itself, and after months of bureaucratic wrangling, she got permission to pass through the lines with her wagons of supplies. It would be the last time she would bother to ask. The army became so grateful for her efforts that soon she began to get unofficial leaks directing her to the next site of the fighting.

  After the war, Barton became famous as the organizer of the American Red Cross, but her finest hours came in those hectic, disorganized trauma centers of the Civil 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. At Antietam, when doctors were not available, she removed a bullet from a soldier’s face while another wounded man held his head still. Later, when the operating room came under fire and the male assistants fled, Barton stayed to hold down the table where a surgeon was operating. “I am a U.S. soldier you know and therefore not supposed to be susceptible to fear,” she said. (Barton’s critics noted later that she was definitely susceptible to the urge for self-promotion.)

  Barton was not the only woman who assigned herself to organize health care on the battlefield. Mary Ann (“Mother”) Bickerdyke first arrived at an army camp in Cairo, Illinois, to deliver a relief fund. Seeing the filthy, overcrowded hospital tents, she simply got to work cleaning and nursing, without asking anyone’s permission. In her Quaker bonnet, she trotted across nineteen battlefields in four years, lantern in hand, searching for the wounded. She was famous for ordering everyone around, and her reputation gave her the clout to get away with it. An army surgeon who challenged one of her orders was told: “Mother Bickerdyke outranks everybody, even Lincoln.” When a brigade marched past her, exhausted after a long day of rushing toward the front but forbidden by the officer in command to rest, Bickerdyke simply yelled “Halt!” and was able to distribute soup and coffee before the officer could get his men moving again.

  “A HOSPITAL HAS NONE

  OF THE COMFORTS OF HOME”

  In the South, nurses had to deal with the irregularities created by a conflict carried out on home territory, where families were often close enough to help care for their wounded, or to get in the way of those who were trying to do so. Phoebe Yates Pember, a thirty-nine-year-old widow who became matron of Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond, had a patient whose wife came for a visit and stayed for weeks, giving birth to their daughter on his cot. Pember cared for the new baby, who was named Phoebe in her honor, and got the mother a ticket home. She then learned that the woman had abandoned her child at the station. Rousing the father, she discharged him and sent him home with little Phoebe. As in the North, the first female Confederate nurses were mainly women who simply started helping out. Mary Rutledge Fogg of Nashville was so appalled at watching wounded soldiers die in her own city that she raised money to recruit nurses. She then informed the government that her volunteers were on the way to the front lines in Virginia, whether anyone was ready to receive them or not. Women’s organizations created wayside hospitals around the country that could aid wounded soldiers making their way home.

  Some found a strange sense of liberation in their duties. “Nobody chided me then as unwomanly, when I went into a crowd and waited on suffering men,” said Rebecca Latimer Felton. “No one said I was unladylike to climb into cattle cars and box cars to feed those who could not feed themselves.” Still, Southern women did not flock to serve. “Are the women of the South going into the hospitals? I am afraid candor will compel me to say they are not! It is not respectable, and requires too much constant attention, and a hospital has none of the comforts of home,” wrote Kate Cummings, who said she was very tired of hearing her female friends tell her what they would do if only they were men.

  As the war went on, women on both sides volunteered to nurse in order to stay with their husbands. Others signed up after they learned their loved ones had died in battle. Whatever the impulse, they frequently wound up working under conditions that were not much less dangerous than those on the battle lines. They nursed under artillery fire or served in hospitals for soldiers with communicable diseases like smallpox. They worked themselves into a state of exhaustion that left them susceptible to typhoid or pneumonia. “I have had men die clutching my dress till it was almost impossible to loose their hold,” said Lois Dunbar. During the battle of Pea Ridge, Mary Ellis remembered standing at the operating table for hours “with the hot blood steaming into my face, until nature rebelled against such horrible sights and I fainted, but as soon as possible I returned.” Annie Etheridge was dressing the wound of a soldier when he was hit by a shell and torn to pieces. Delia Fay marched with her husband’s regiment, carrying her own supplies as well as the load of any sick soldier she came upon. Anna McMahon, who came down with a fatal case of measles, looked up at the doctor and asked: “Have I done my duty?” On being assured that she had, she sighed, “Good-bye, I will go to sleep,” and died. Rebecca Wiswell volunteered to dress the wounds of men who had been shot through the bowels. “The worst case no doctor ever dressed but three times; then he was left in my care and I did it five months,” she said later. And for some of them, it was the best part of their lives. “We all know in our hearts that this is thorough enjoyment to be here,” wrote Katharine Wormeley from a Northern hospital ship.

  But the number of women who wanted to give soldiers inspirational tracts or home-baked treats outstripped those who sought to be nurses. Southern hospital personnel passed around the stories of volunteers who killed dysentery patients by feeding them sweet delicacies. Francis Bacon, a Northern surgeon, complained of being “subjugated and crushed by a woman who sings the Star Spangled Banner copiously through all the wards of my hospital.” Doctors on both sides of the conflict often preferred Catholic nuns as nurses because they were used to hard work and discipline and inclined to be deferential. Eventually 617 sisters from twenty-one different religious communities served in either Union or Confederate medical facilities. Nuns were not exempt from the anti-Catholic hysteria that was rampant in America at the time, and Dorothea Dix refused to appoint them as government nurses. But the army physicians, and the nuns, managed to work around her.

  “GIRLS HAVE MARRIED MEN THEY WOULD NEVER

  HAVE GIVEN A THOUGHT OF”

  For all the reports of ladies living high in Richmond or shirking their nursing duties, the vast majority of Southern women suffered during the war, and they began to realize that they were going to suffer a great deal more when it was over. There was a sense of universal loss, which the postwar Southerners would soothe by creating a mythology of the glorious prewar South, like Scarlet O’Hara’s Tara. “My happy life! I love to think of it now,” wrote Sarah Morgan, a Louisiana girl, in her diary. “Until that dreary 1861, I had no idea of sorrow or grief.” Some mothers had lost four, five, even seven sons in the war. Brides of less than a year were left widows. In what the whole South came to regard as an emblematic tragedy, the beautiful Hetty Cary of Richmond married a handsome Confederate general in one of the social highlights of the
season, only to return to the church three weeks later to bury him. General Robert E. Lee wrote to his wife that he found the change in the young socialite’s appearance shocking. There were 80,000 widows just in Alabama—three-quarters of them in dire distress.

  Nearly a quarter of the men of military age in the South were killed, and perhaps another quarter returned home wounded. To make up to the men for what they had lost, Southern girls were urged to do their part by marrying handicapped veterans. “Girls have married men they would never have given a thought of had it not been thought a sacred duty,” wrote a North Carolina woman whose daughter had just taken the plunge. “You would never believe how our public speakers…excite the crowd to this thing.” While many men returned with an empty sleeve or ruined leg, ready to begin a new life, a good many others suffered from more complicated and destructive wounds. They were alcoholics, or depressives, or simply lost souls from the prewar era, unable to make a postwar life for themselves. It was a crisis that the narrow prewar life of wealthy Southern manhood had paved the way for. Sarah Morgan wrote that she intended to marry a man who had a profession because a rich man could lose his money “and Master is turned adrift on the tender mercies of the world, without the means to turn an honest penny, even if he had the inclination or energy, which most rich men do not…so he quietly settles down, and goes to the dogs, not forgetting you, but insisting on your company for the first time in your married life.”