Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America

Civil War America

by Jane E. Schultz

As many as 20,000 women worked in Union and Confederate hospitals during America's bloodiest 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, 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 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.

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As many as 20,000 women worked in Union and Confederate hospitals during America's bloodiest war. Black and white, and from various social classes, these women served as nurses, administrators, matrons, seamstresses, cooks, laundresses, and custodial workers. Jane 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. Examining the lives and legacies of Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, Susie King Taylor, and others, Schultz demonstrates that class, race, and gender roles linked female workers with soldiers, both black and white. These same factors also stoked conflict between the hospital women and doctors and even among the women themselves. -->

Genres: Civil War, History, War, Biography

376 pages, Paperback

First published May 31, 2004

About the author

Jane E. Schultz is Professor of English and Director of Literature at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century literature and culture and in the medical humanities. Her book Women at the Front: Female Hospital Workers in Civil War America received Honorable Mention for the 2005 Lincoln Prize.

Reviews

[Leslie Goddard]

I have decidedly mixed feelings about this excellently researched book about the women who provided relief work at hospitals during the American Civil War.

On the one hand, it adds a lot of detail and nuance to our understanding of these women. They did not just work as nurses (in the modern way we think of nursing) but as laundress, cooks, custodians, wait staff, etc. — and often the lines blurred. They were white and black, elite and working-class (much more working-class than middle or upper). There were thousands and thousands of them, in contrast to our usual image of just a few. Their own class and racial backgrounds heavily influenced what work they did and how that work was received.

I especially loved how modern their experiences often felt. Nurses had to deal with class and gender norms that heavily structured how they perceived their own work — not to mention surgeons whose own insecurities led them to treat underlings high-handedly. Nurses’ own egos and insecurities could work to their own downfall -- or surprising independence of action. The incredible bureaucracy and variety of medical structure created endless complications to these women’s stories.

On the other hand, I struggled with the complex academic writing used in drawing insights and conclusions from this wonderful wealth of evidence. There seemed to be at times an assumption that the reader was familiar with academic writings (e.g. on subjects such as 19th-century female writing), which I have only a passing experience of.

In explaining this book to another reader with a deep interest in women’s history and Civil War history (but no academic affiliation), I struggled to explain in my own words what the book’s larger arguments and conclusions were.

Certainly this book makes a tremendous contribution to our understanding that women’s hospital work was far more complex, both at the time and in its legacy for the women themselves, than previously perceived.

[Sara Madden]

I used Women at the Front while researching the enormous, often invisible world of women’s medical labor during the Civil War.

That history became one of the foundations of The Twelve Who Walked by Moonlight.

I wanted the Whitaker sisters’ hospital work to feel larger than the familiar image of the saintly Civil War nurse. Women cleaned wards, cooked, washed bodies and bedding, carried supplies, comforted the dying, challenged surgeons, managed chaos, and performed the endless physical labor required to keep hospitals functioning.

Much of that work disappeared behind the more dramatic histories of battles and generals.

Schultz helped me think about the hospital as its own wartime landscape—and about the women who entered spaces they had been told were inappropriate for them simply because people needed care.

The Moonlight Ward is fictional.

The women whose labor made places like it possible were not.

Used in research for: The Twelve Who Walked by Moonlight

[Mickey]

When I visited the Civil War Hospital museum in Richmond, I was impressed and motivated to go deeper into what it was like for the women serving there. So I bought this book at the museum book store. I would recommend a visit to the museum, but I was only so-so on the book.

The author did exhaustive research -- the final 30% of the book are her notes, bibliography, and index -- but the writing style wasn't very engaging to me. "This person did this. That person's experience was X." The book is divided into seven chapters: Chapter 1, "Women at the Front" is extremely dry and chock full of statistics. The next three chapters were my favorite, as they highlighted first person accounts of getting to the hospitals, adjusting to hospital life and "coming into their own." (I especially enjoyed descriptions of nurses getting a little bold and challenging doctors, some of whom knew a lot less about medicine and how to care for their patients than the women did.) The scope of the book was huge, encompassing whatever knowledge the author could find on ANY hospitals that cared for patients during the Civil War, on either side. She remarked quite often that data was much more difficult to obtain for the Confederacy, as many "hospitals" were just the homes of regular citizens, and other hospital buildings and records were destroyed in the war.

The last two chapters of the book, about pensions and long-term memories and legacy, were again a little dry.

The book would be a great research source. As I was reading solely for my own enjoyment and enlightenment, I think it would have been better if it had just consisted of Chapters 2, 3, and 4, which dealt with in-the-moment life experiences.

[Jess B]

The first part of the book talks about the experiences of women (of various social classes and racial backgrounds) in the war itself I found this part the most interesting, especially being able to see how some things in nursing (I'm a nurse) have been there since the beginning (for example, the nurse v. surgeon, nurse v. hospital administration struggles and the hardening effect on hospital workers when exposed to death over and over). The book goes on to talk about the hospital worker's lives after the war; what they did with their lives (including some discussion of how women's roles in the Civil War may or may not have influenced the later shifts for women's rights), the fight for pensions, and writing memoirs. The last part was particularly boring (for me). The author focuses a lot of the book on talking about how women's social background or race influenced their experiences in the war and their lives afterwards (for example, working class and black workers were often assigned to being laundresses and cooks, and post-war, this influenced their ability to get pensions (the pensions were only for nurses who met certain criteria; the government didn't care that the laundresses and cooks often ended up doing nursing duties), what jobs they were able to get post-war and how receptive the public was to their stories).