Women at the Front
Subtitle: Hospital Workers in Civil War America
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: May 19, 2004
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 328
ISBN-13: 9780807828670
Subjects: American history: c 1800 to c 1900; Women's studies; Women; History: American; Ethnic Studies - African American Studies - General; Women's Studies - History; History - Military / War; United States - Civil War; USA; Hospitals; History; Confederate States of America; Women's Studies - General; 19th century; Civil War, 1861-1865; Staff; United States
First sentence: A widely reproduced photograph of three women in dark dresses, white aprons, and beehivelike hats has been used by modern historians as evidence that young, uniformed nurses served in military hospitals during the Civil War.
Description: "As many as 20,000 women worked in Union and Confederate hospitals during the Civil War. Black and white, and from various social classes, these women served as nurses, administrators, matrons, seamstresses, cooks, laundresses, and custodial workers. Jane E. Schultz provides the first full history of these female relief workers, showing how the domestic and military arenas merged in Civil War America, blurring the line between homefront and battlefront." "Schultz uses government records, private manuscripts, and published sources by and about women hospital workers, some of whom are familiar - such as Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth - but most of whom are not well-known. Examining the lives and legacies of these women, Schultz considers who they were, how they became involved in wartime hospital work, how they adjusted to it, and how they challenged it. She demonstrates that class, race, and gender roles linked female workers with soldiers, both black and white, but also became sites of conflict between the women and doctors and even among themselves." "Schultz also explores the women's postwar lives - their professional and domestic choices, their pursuit of pensions, and their memorials to the war in published narratives. Surprisingly few parlayed their war experience into postwar medical work, and their extremely varied postwar experiences, Schultz argues, defy any simple narrative of pre-professionalism, triumphalism, or conciliation."--BOOK JACKET.