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Women's Role In The Civil War

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Elléa MONNIER RAGAIGNE The Civil War The Civil War marked a turning point for women and their role in society. Before the Civil War, work for most women was in the home. Women were expected to cook and clean to make the home comfortable for the family and presentable for guests. With the outbreak of the Civil War, women took on new roles to support their families and the Confederacy. They worked in a variety of capacities, from cooking to nursing to actually fighting on the frontlines. There were many women playing important roles in the Civil War, including nurses, spies, soldiers, civil rights advocates and promoters of women’s suffrage. Most women were engaged in supplying the troops with food, clothing, medical supplies. But there …show more content…

By working their own fields, as well as taking jobs in local industries, women provided troops with food, uniforms, and other necessities. They formed aid societies to provide soldiers with socks, shirts, gloves, blankets, shoes, comforters, scarves, bandages, and food. In more isolated areas, women worked as individuals to send supplies to the soldiers. In addition, white women took on the traditionally male occupation of nursing during the Civil War. Because many towns became battlefields during the war, local women often inadvertently became frontline nurses. Hospitals were set up anywhere: churches, homes, town halls, and streets. Other women left their homes to care for wounded troops on the front lines, seeing battle and its ravages …show more content…

Men were seen as the head of their households, head of the factories, and heads of the government. In 1861, whether living in the North or in the South, men gave up their traditional lives to volunteer for the Union or the Confederacy. Their willingness to go off and fight for what they believed in left thousands of women with no means or ideas of how to support themselves or their children. Men were the leaders and women having no rights were heavily dependent upon their husbands. Because of the absence of males in society, the obligations of supporting a household fell on the

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Women had a strong contribute towards the American Civil War. Women around the civil war were noted as nurse, spies and the maintainers of the household in the absence of their man. All with those notions, surprisingly enough, women along with the men, bore arms and charged into the battle. The vast majority of the actions, contributions, activities, and assistance towards the war went unnoticed. Jane E. Schultz, an associate professor in American studies and women’s studies at Indiana University stated in the book Women at the Front that the women contribution in the war were of all different race, religion, class and region.

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