 My name is Rebecca Taffel and I am the director of programs at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. I don't work here at the museum. I work with Elizabeth Sackler to provide extra support to the Center for Feminist Art. And I'm thrilled to have Nina Silver here today to discuss women and the Civil War, the American Civil War. Since its opening in 2007 the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art has become an exhibition and education facility dedicated to the past, present and future of feminist art. As the permanent home to the iconic work The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago, the Center strives to raise awareness of feminism's cultural contributions to educate new generations about the meaning of feminist art to maintain a dynamic learning facility and to present feminism in an approachable and relevant way. The galleries here, I hope you've all had a chance to go see the two groundbreaking shows out there. Rachel Nevone regarding Rodin and newspaper fiction The New York Journalism of Junea Barnes are just one piece of the Center for Feminist Art. At its core it's a place for open and free discourse, conversation and the exchange of ideas. And Dr. Sackler particularly emphasizes this point, we celebrate dialogue and debate. Elizabeth Sackler unfortunately could not be here today because of ongoing health issues but she asked me to express how delighted she is to have Nina Silver join us today. Dr. Silver's brilliant research illuminates the complex changes in both the roles and attitudes of women during the Civil War. With an eye toward a comparison between women in the north and in the south, Dr. Silver's work explores the crucial starting points for the late 19th century feminist struggle for social and political equality and how these struggles continue to be remembered. Just a personal note, I was raised in South Carolina and so I learned about the Civil War from a very early age and thought pretty much I had heard everything there was to hear, but I came across Dr. Silver's book Daughters of the Union and it was really wonderful to hear an aspect about history that I hadn't heard and I feel like it was omitted a lot from the conversations that we had in schools in the south. So it's a real pleasure for me to hear you speak today. Nina Silver is a professor at Boston University since 1990 and has focused her research and teaching on the US Civil War, US women's history and the history of the American South. Her books include the Romance of Reunion, Northerners in the South, 1865 to 1900, Divided Houses, Gender in the Civil War, and Daughters of the Union, Northern Women, Fight the Civil War. Also, Gender and the Sectional Conflicts. She's been the recipient of numerous grants including the Charles Warren Fellowship at Harvard University, a Fulbright Senior Lectureship at Charles University in Prague and a Senior Research Fellowship through the Boston University Humanities Foundation. Aside from her teaching and research, Professor Silver has also worked on numerous public history projects ranging from museum exhibitions at Gettysburg National Military Park to film projects on the Civil War and Reconstruction Era. Professor Silver is currently working on research on a new project that examines the various ways the Civil War is remembered, memorialized, and invoked in the years of the Great Depression and the New Deal. So I am delighted to welcome Dr. Silver up here to join us. Well, thank you all for coming. I can't see because I don't want to put this on. Thank you all for coming and spending this lovely February afternoon here with me inside. And thank you to the Sackler Center for having me here. It's actually fun. I've never seen the Judy Chicago exhibit, so I'm really excited that I can walk around and see all this stuff. Yeah, there's some women from the Civil War there too, so check that out. Oh, I will. Well, I'll edge closer to the mic. Can you hear me? All right. So yeah, it's actually very exciting for me to be here and to kind of soak in the atmosphere. And I'm excited to have this opportunity, especially to talk about the subject. I think Rebecca suggested it's, you know, in general, I think the subject of women and the Civil War is an overlooked subject. But I'm also looking at a particular aspect, which is particularly overlooked, which has to do with northern women during the Civil War. And what I'm going to try and do this afternoon is kind of meld together ideas from different things that I've written about, which are both sort of this comparative view of women north and south, but also with more emphasis on women in the north, so we can kind of appreciate this group that I think has been underappreciated. And I should explain also that in what I'm going to talk about today, there's more emphasis on white women than on African American women. And I'm doing this because I think, you know, the Civil War has a particular dramatic and distinctive effect for African American women, especially in terms of the way the Civil War gets linked with slave emancipation. And I decided, you know, it doesn't really make sense to kind of piggyback this whole other story onto what I'm saying today because it does have its own distinctive path. But I think it certainly, you know, there's references, there's places where we can talk about it. It can be part of our conversation after the lecture, so that's all perfectly, perfectly fine. The starting premise that I have for this subject is a very simple and straightforward one, but also a very important one. And that is that gender matters when we're trying to understand the Civil War. And in fact, I would say that no less an authority than Abraham Lincoln himself believed that gender mattered when understanding the Civil War. So the story is often told, there's, you know, it's probably apocryphal, but the story is told nonetheless that when Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe sometime in 1862, he referred to her as the little lady who wrote the book that made this great war. Now, if the story is true, of course, Lincoln was referring to Harriet Beecher Stowe's book Uncle Tom's Cabin. It was written in 1852. We had Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin. And of course it was a very significant book, very influential in terms of the way it aroused people's opinions and passions on the question of slavery and abolition. And I don't think Abraham Lincoln was a smart man. I don't think he thinks that Stowe, this individual woman writer, personally caused the Civil War. But I do think there was a way in which Abraham Lincoln implied that women's concerns, especially the very deep moral and religious concerns that many women brought to the anti-slavery movement, that those kinds of things helped to shape the contours of the Civil War. And you had women like Harriet Beecher Stowe, who I think did just that. They sort of interjected a very personal and moral component to the discussion about slavery and abolition. And Lincoln, I would say in this way, was doing something that a lot of people did, both in the North and in the South. That is they were connecting their cause with women. And by connecting their cause with women, they could give their cause a moral cue. They could sort of say, oh, we're not fighting for just our own personal ambition or gain. We have women's backing here. So in that regard, it has something more righteous behind it. And this is a common thing. It was common at the time of the Civil War. It's common throughout history. Soldiers often go to war and they say, you know, I'm fighting for my home. I'm fighting for my women. They're trying to say that first and foremost, their commitment is to their wives and to their mothers and their family. And that way they hope they can endow political objectives with this aura surrounding the home. Now, one of the most striking things to me about the Civil War was that there's actually a difference in terms of the way Northerners and Southerners made this connection between the war and the home. And Confederates, I found, Southerners made those kinds of connections much more often than Unionists did. So more than others, the Confederates, I think, spoke the language of home and the family and of women when they went to war. And this brings me to one of the central themes that I'm going to talk about, which is that north and south in this conflict obviously divided on many things, especially on the question of slavery and the expansion of slavery. But among the different things they divided on, they also had very different ways of thinking about gender. And that this affected their participation in the Civil War. Now, when I say gender, basically it's just this word for saying not just the things that men and women did, but also the ideas, the kind of prevailing ideas that society had about the roles that men and women should play. And I think at the time of the Civil War, one of the things that's so striking is that Northerners and Southerners thought very differently about gender, and they thought very differently about the way gender intersected with the cause that they were fighting for. And those differences, I would say, had important consequences for the things that men and women did in those two sections in the course of the war. So that's one theme, that there are these different ways of thinking about gender in the north and the south. A second theme, I would say, is that despite the attention that has been given often to southern women during and after the Civil War, despite the lack of attention that has been given to northern women other than Abraham Lincoln making this tribute to Harriet Beecher Stowe, it is really, I think, northern women who we should be remembering. And partly we should remember northern women because their side won the war. That's kind of important. But I also think that women in the north made a more important contribution to their cause than southern women made for their cause. Now, that's going to kind of run against, I think, kind of prevailing thinking about this because we often think of those southern women going, you know, at all lengths and doing anything. And we have, I think, a very vivid image of southern women and the kinds of things they did in the course of the Civil War. And I would say probably for most people the prevailing image they have of southern women in the Civil War is that. I don't even have to say her name. Scarlett, I think, comes to everybody's mind. It's a predominant image. You talk about women in the Civil War. It has this kind of prevailing effect on people's imaginations and what they envisioned women's participation in the Civil War was like. And in fact, I would say that northern women, which obviously Scarlett was not, northern women over the years have been the victims of a disease that I refer to as scarlet fever. Because everything has sort of been erased under this blinding light of Scarlett O'Hara. Everybody kind of forgets about what northern women did because all they can think about, certainly they're not thinking about what Mammy did, but they're certainly thinking about what Scarlett did. The problem, I think, of Scarlett fever runs rampant everywhere. Even where I teach, I teach in Boston. I teach at Boston University. We even have a case there of Scarlett fever. I will ask this question. I don't know if anybody knows the answer. Anybody know the name of the Boston University mascot? Probably not. I like to ask this question. Anyway, just in case, there's always a stray person who happens to be from Boston University or follows college sports teams. The BU mascot is a terrier, and his name is Rhett. And you might ask, why does Boston University have a mascot named Rhett? Well, the answer is because, no, well, this is the answer. I've asked this question over the years, and the answer I always get is this. No one loves Scarlett, and that is Boston University's school color more than Rhett. And just, I'm sure you were wondering, what does Rhett look like? It doesn't look anything like Clark Gable, so that's him. He's kind of a poor imitation of Clark Gable, really. I know, at least they could give him a whatever. So here's this problem of Scarlett fever. Now, it's true that Northern women have been far removed from some of the central places where the Civil War was fought. The war was not fought in their backyards. It wasn't fought in their frontyards. It wasn't fought around the corner from where they lived, unless they lived in Gettysburg. So in that regard, they seem less significant than some of the most central Civil War participants. But one point that I hope I'm going to register today is that for a variety of reasons, we should no longer disregard Northern women when we think about the Civil War. So, let me begin. I'm going to say a little bit about the research that I've done and how it opened up questions about the different ways that Northerners and Southerners talked about gender and about women. And one of the things I was struck by, and this is particularly when I started to read letters that Civil War soldiers were writing, was the way they made particular references to women and families in the letters that they wrote. So for example, Confederate soldiers wrote things like this. Quote, we have everything to fight for our wives, children, land, and principles. If you just want to read the quote, there it is. We have everything to fight for our wives, children, land, and principles. Or some of them said this, the aid of every loyal son is now needed to defend the rights and honor of his political mother, where nestles the home of his wife and children, and where is deposited all his property for their support. In other words, there was a way in which the cause that they were fighting for seemed to revolve very closely around homes and families and women and dependents and these very personal kinds of things. And that was different from the language that Union soldiers used when they went to war. They said things like this, home is sweet and friends are dear, but what would they all be to let the country go to ruin? Or some of them said things like this when writing to their wives, my duties to my country are of more importance now than my duty to you. Alright, so in other words, Union soldiers did something different. They made a sharp distinction between the cause of the country and the cause of the home. And unlike the Confederates, they ranked these things and they clearly made the case that the country was more important in their ranking than the home and the family. Now, to some extent, we can understand this. Confederates felt they had to protect their homes and their families. There were Yankees who were coming to invade them. But in fact, the Confederates used this kind of language even before there was any kind of Yankee invasion on the horizon. This was the language that they used when they talked about secession. This was the language they used when they talked about the way of life that they were trying to protect. And that's the key that I'm trying to get here, that this was a way in which they described their way of life. In other words, as I see it, it wasn't surprising to see Confederates talk so strongly about defending their homes because for white Southerners in these years before the Civil War, the home defined them. The home gave them an identity. And most importantly for white men, it gave them a source of power. These men, these southern white men, were part of a plantation. Many people would say patriarchal society in which their power as white men came from being masters over their homes. And I'm actually using the word master here not to stand very strict like a slave master kind of way, but a more general idea of being a master. And I'm using the word home not just in a strict sense of a building where people lived, but the surrounding farm and the plantation that was attached to that home. And this is different from northern men. I would say northern men, they derived power not from a local thing like a home, but really from a larger thing that they might have called the marketplace. It might have been a bank. It might have been a place of business. It might have been some kind of shop where they worked. Perhaps it was the town center. But it was a place where their power was reinforced especially when cash got exchanged, when money got exchanged. Southern white men, and here I mean both slaveholders and non-slaveholders looked for power in this more personalized domain of a home. So obviously for slave owners, a big part of that power was controlling the labor of slaves. But I would say even non-slaveholders gained power at home because they could control their dependence. They could control maybe not their slaves, but they could control the things their wives did. They could control the work that their children did. And this I think is the basic idea that you hear in the letters that Confederate soldiers were writing and the way they talked about their cause. Because ultimately I think what was most important for them was maintaining this home and their family so that they could continue to be the master over this domain. And one of the things that they objected to more than anything was this idea that a government might interfere with their ability to be the master over this domain. So, as I've already suggested, Union men wrote letters and sentiments that sounded very different. They made this very clear separation between the home, the family, women on the one hand, and fighting for a nation. They didn't blend those things together and in fact they tended to rank the nation higher than the home. So you get these kinds of things that Union men wrote, the home is sweet, but we can't let the country go to ruin. Or one Union soldier who was particularly blunt when he said, first my God, second my country, third my mother. Dear mom, you're third. I think Union men really kind of felt this commitment to something that Confederates didn't. It was like this country was sort of this abstraction almost. It was this thing that stood above the immediate things that you had around you in terms of your home and your family. And in fact it's true, they were going to a far off place. They were going to subdue what seemed to many people a kind of foreign people. So they weren't to the same extent defending their immediate homes and their families. But it's interesting and important, I think, to see how willing they were almost in this cold-hearted sort of way to belittle the fight for the home to put their mothers actually in third place. I think Union soldiers though would not have thought they were being cold-hearted. They would have said this in fact was the natural order of things as far as they were concerned. Because these were men who derived their power not really from controlling land, from personal property, but they gained their power from a position in the marketplace, from stores, from banks, from places of economic exchange. And in fact, from the standpoint of northern men, the home was not a place that gave them power. The home was this place associated with women. It was a place where women did their chores, where women took care of children, and there was no cash value associated with it. It had no really significant, as far as they could see, economic importance. And they called it women's separate sphere. Right? It was its own thing. Women had that sphere. They did their own thing there. But it was not the place that really gave them that sense of power and authority. And so I would say it was actually not that much of a stretch for northern men to then rank the nation higher than the home, because in fact the home wasn't really their sphere. It wasn't as important to them as it was to men in the south. All right. So that's our first point, which is kind of to say that there's a very different way in these two sections that they're thinking about where gender fits, where men's roles fit, and where women's roles fit. All of this talk, fighting for the home, fighting for the family, elevating the nation above the home, all of this had important implications for the experiences and attitudes of northern and southern women during the war. And so I wanted to now proceed to that point what all of this meant directly in terms of the experiences that southern women, southern white women and northern white women had during the war. Well, initially to talk about women in the south, women in the Confederacy, I would say those women could not help but feel a sense of importance in the southern war effort. How could they not feel a sense of importance given how much the war seemed to be about them? Right? That's what their men were saying. This is all about protecting my home, my children, my wife, and this war is all about you, dear. And for many white women in the south, this translates into this initial burst of enthusiasm, of patriotism, with many women feeling motivated to do whatever they could. That they should make flags, they should join societies, they should write inspirational poetry, they should write letters. A journalist who was from London and was stationed in the south early in the war believed that many men, when the war started, as he put it, would willingly stand aside if they could and not join the fight. But he said, there are no women in this party woe betide the northern soldier whose head is within reach of a southern woman's arm. And we can see here, this was a cartoon from the period, which sort of, you know, if you can sort of see some of the facial expressions, I mean, it kind of gives you an idea that some of the men are a little on the reluctant side about going, and the women are the ones who are saying, get out there and do what you're supposed to be doing. Many years later, after the war was over, you know, 50, 60 years later, the southerner, Virginia Durr, was commenting about this and she said, you know, she could feel some of that same pull towards the cause of the confederacy when she heard some veterans at a confederate reunion talk about defending what they called, quote, pure white southern womanhood. I got to thinking, Virginia Durr recalled, she said, I got to thinking that I was pretty hot stuff to have the war fought for me. And that's what it seemed like, that the war was being fought for these women. Beyond this initial burst of enthusiasm and excitement, though, I would say it was difficult for these women, white women in the South, to really sustain a long-term commitment to the war effort. And the reason I say this is because the Civil War South, in the middle of the 19th century, was a difficult place for a woman to be a very active and aggressive person. The standards of behavior, the sense of etiquette for ladies, all of this gave them a very, very narrow sphere of acceptable activity. Furthermore, the whole notion of being a lady in the South in the 19th century meant that you really should not exert yourself too hard because if you were a real lady, you had slaves. You had slaves who did the work for you. And if you weren't a lady who actually owned slaves, chances are you were a woman who aspired to own slaves, and so you aspired in some way to be like a lady. And that attitude, I think, very much limited what white women felt they could do. There were even some women who were reluctant to weave cloth at home, and this was something that the South needed. There was a blockade that was going on. The South couldn't get a lot of textiles during the Civil War. They couldn't get fabric. People couldn't make the clothes they needed. There were a lot of people who were saying, even the President, Jefferson Davis of the South, was saying, if our women would just make some cloth at home, that would show that we can be independent and we don't have to rely on the North. A lot of women said, no, I'm not going to weave any cloth because I'm going to use weave cloth. And in fact, this would have been typical. This is actually a photograph from, I think it's from the 1850s, and if you can actually see what this woman is. I asked my husband who sort of knows more about these things than I do, but he says it would have been what you used to, I think especially for wool, to kind of clean, for carding, exactly. And it's noteworthy that the woman who's holding this is a slave woman, and that would have been the attitude on the part of many white women in the South that working with fabric textile production was something that slaves did, and they objected. They objected to doing that. Even more, the Confederacy enshrined a particular idea about gender and women's roles that left a lot of Southern white women unprepared for the kind of chaos and devastation that came once they were in occupied region, once they were under siege by enemy forces. So Southern white women, I think, found it very difficult to keep supporting the war the more it dragged on, and the more it seemed as if the whole purpose of the war had been undermined, right? So again, let's go back and remember, Confederate men go off to war and they say, this war is about fighting for women and homes and families. And here are these women at home, and they're saying, jeez, we're suffering worse than we ever were, and our home is a shambles, and we don't have anything to live on, and you said that this was a war about women and homes and families. Well, wait a minute, something's not right here. So if the whole purpose of what you were fighting for now seems to be undermined and subverted, it's going to make it kind of difficult to say, sure, I'll keep going along with that agenda, but wait a minute, you're not going along with that agenda. Why should I go along with that agenda? So I think there's a big morale problem that they had on their hands, and it reflected in the fact that a lot of white women in the south begin to show more and more unwillingness about supporting the war. By 1863, so about midway through the war, there were thousands of letters a day that women were writing to their husbands, to their brothers, to their fathers, urging them to come home. This was a typical one. My dear Edward, wrote his wife, Mary, I would not have you do anything wrong for the world, but before God, Edward, unless you come home, we must die. All right, that's pretty dramatic. I don't think she's kidding. So, and women, we're saying, you know, we can't keep up the work that we're expected to do. We can't control slaves who are much more interested in fleeing and leaving slavery than they ever were. We can't stand up to union invasions. We can't even keep ourselves from starving. These kinds of letters, I think, had an effect. They motivated men to desert the arming. They certainly weakened the morale of Confederate soldiers. And I would point out, I think union soldiers got those kinds of letters too, but I don't think they felt quite as obligated to respond to those letters precisely because they had never said in the first place, I'm fighting for my home and my wife and my family. They had said, you know, I made it perfectly clear. I'm not fighting for the home and the wife and the family. I'm fighting for the nation right now, and that's why this home and family thing has to take a backseat. So I don't think they felt quite as obligated to respond as the Confederates did. By the end of the Civil War, the desertion in the Confederate army reached devastating proportions, not just because women were writing letters. They had other problems too, let's face it. But women's discontent played a role in decreasing the manpower in the Confederate army, and this was not something the Confederacy could afford. Now we're going to switch to the other side, and how women in the North who supported the Union cause were affected by all the language that they heard and the kind of whole orientation that their society had about women. So again, recall, women, these women are hearing this very different message, a message that says their cause is not really about defending the home and the family, that God came first, the country came second, mothers came third, somewhere down the line. How do they react, and what do they do? Well, it might seem counter-intuitive to say that an ideology that ranked mothers in third place would also give women a keener sense of national identity, but in fact, actually, I think it did. I think these women had to accept this idea that the war was not really about them. They had to accept the idea that their immediate concerns right now were relatively low, but they were also being told that the big cause of the Union was critical and that everybody's support for that big cause of the Union was needed. And you can hear in the letters that northern women write a sense of that national belonging, a sense that they were connected to the cause that they were fighting for, because they used phrases like, my country, our country. They didn't, as was often the case prior to this, they didn't use the phrase your country if they wrote to their husbands or their male relatives. And they argued also that their patriotism should be judged in a more, I guess you'd say, ideological kind of way. It wasn't so much how fiercely they attacked their invaders or how many sacrifices they made. They said any woman could make a sacrifice. Any woman, even a southern woman, could make a sacrifice. They said a different standard was necessary to evaluate just how loyal a woman was to her country's ideals. The point explained one woman was not to rip up fine dresses and turn them into bandages. This is what Confederate women were doing, but to cultivate, as she put it, a healthy, intelligent patriotism in the social and domestic circles of our land. Now, I'm not going to say that Confederate women don't, in their own way, demonstrate a form of patriotism. They did. But I think that the Confederacy in general created a much more limited version of patriotism. A limited version of patriotism that was about the home and the family. It was very kind of what you could see in your immediate surroundings. And I think in the Union, they had a kind of bigger, maybe it's a more abstract idea of what the nation was. In addition, I would say if Northern women accepted this idea that the war was really this critical struggle about saving the nation, they also came to accept the idea that as women, they might have to go beyond the immediate purview of their sphere, even if it was just temporary, in order to address the current crisis. So that there was a sense that there was this bigger thing out there than just their immediate sphere and that they too had to make a contribution. And again, one other point, which I think is not at all insignificant, is that for these women in the north, the idea of being a lady and owning a slave were not mixed up together the way they were in the South. There was not the same denigration of doing hard physical labor, right? There wasn't a way of saying, oh, I can't do that work because only slaves do that. They generally did not say that in the north. And this in turn opened up the possibility that Northern women might do work, might take on roles that were not usually expected of them. So while you have, for example, Southern white women who were unwilling to weave fabric, people were commenting on how in the north, you had some of the most elite, fashionable, wealthy women getting together, making clothes, making sewing things, sort of being active participants in something that Southern white women in many cases shunned. People commented repeatedly on how busy and energetic Northern women were. They were doing all kinds of chores they had never done before. Mary Livermore, who was an organizer with the U.S. Sanitary Commission, she noticed how much women were out in the fields. She saw women on mid-western farms doing jobs previously done by men. They were driving horses and weepers through the fields. They were cutting the grain with a rapid clicking sound showing that they were going to take on these kinds of responsibilities that they hadn't done before. Other women were running plows, shopping wood. In some places they were working in factories. And it was celebrated. It was considered, you know, this was an important contribution that women were making to the war effort. I should have had actually, I realized, too late I realized, I should have made sure to have more like Brooklyn specific I mean, this is Watertown because I'm from Massachusetts, so I always, you know, have a lot of like Watertown Massachusetts. This is a Watertown Massachusetts arsenal of ploy drinks of a war. I'm guessing that there was some place in Brooklyn where women were making armaments too, but I don't want to commit to that yet until I do some more research on it. And what's interesting too is men, Northern men were often encouraging their women, their wives, their female relatives to do these things and they wanted them to be able to fend for themselves, right? They didn't want these women to be helpless. They wanted them to get out there and work. He said to his wife, he was a Quaker so he uses the language of Quakers. He says, I want thee to take hold and do for thyself and use thy own judgment about matters and learn to lean on thyself so that if I should be called away thee will have a knowledge of business to make a living for thyself. Right, don't just sit around but actively get involved in this process. Northern women in many cases even went further than this by becoming actively involved in politics. And here I would say what was particularly striking was not just that they wrote letters to Abraham Lincoln, which they did do a lot of that, or other political leaders, or that they wrote petitions and sent them on to Congress, they did a lot of that. But what was interesting is that the way these women began to take a direct and immediate interest in partisan politics, right? And for years people would have said, oh, political parties, that's totally, you know, backroom deals, cigar smoke, that's in party politics. Well these women got very actively involved in party politics and they made the argument, we have to. We have to because the men who are usually the ones running the levers of the parties are away. They're at war. And somebody has to do this to kind of fill this political vacuum. And this would have been particularly strong among Republicans, the Republicans being sort of the predominant pro-war party at the time of the Civil War. All the Republican men, or most of the Republican men had gone off to the war and there really was a vacuum they felt that had to be filled in the Republican party, at least, you know, showing up for meetings, showing up for rallies, convincing people to vote for Republican candidates. If they didn't do this, then the Democratic party might take over. And in fact, the Republican party was so concerned about this that they hired women to be lecturers. And this was Anna Dickinson, who was a prominent political lecturer for the Republican party, because they wanted somebody who could get out there and talk to women specifically, who could give women the important political arguments of the day. Men in the army also encouraged their wives to take a direct interest in politics. I know ladies are not usually interested in such matters, said one Connecticut soldier to his wife, but the time has come when they, as well as the sterner sex, must put a shoulder to the wheel. And as he explained further, he said, putting a shoulder to the wheel could even include, quote, spitting upon those who had anti-war leanings. And women, for their part, took those words to heart. But they realized, I think, even more acutely than before that they lacked political power. You know, so here they are, they're sort of this mixed message. They're being told, be more political, exert a political influence, and then, you know, when else would you become acutely aware of the fact that you don't actually have as much political influence as you would like to have. So while you have this soldier from Connecticut who said to his wife you should spit on those people who opposed the war, there was another northern woman, also from Connecticut, who believed that something more powerful than spit should be part of her political arsenal. I think she wrote to her husband, who was a soldier in the Union Army, she wrote, I think they had ought to let the soldier's wives vote while they are gone. Don't you? You know, if the soldiers aren't there to cast their ballot, well, put a woman in there to cast his ballot. And no doubt, I would say a lot of women after the war was over remembered some of these kinds of lessons. It didn't necessarily mean that they all joined the suffrage movement and became active suffragists, but I think it fostered an atmosphere for discussing women's rights that was a more open atmosphere than what existed in the south. This willingness to do what was ever necessary to help the war effort also meant that a far larger number of northern as opposed to southern women became nurses. Now, in fact, we tend to think, you know, the typical job that women are going to do in the time of war is become a nurse. Well, actually, that wasn't really true at the time of the Civil War. When the Civil War started, nursing tended mostly to be done by men who were recuperating from illnesses and wounds. You kind of think, well, that doesn't sound actually like a good idea, but nonetheless, they didn't know a lot about germs. But they had, you know, often men were in the position of nurses. Well, you see a big turnover right at the moment of the Civil War when more and more women become involved as nurses. A lot of them, you know, this was soon after the Crimean War. Florence Nightingale was kind of a big example. She had gone off to war and she, you know, sort of sent this signal that said even very refined, well-to-do women could be a nurse and that was okay. So she was an influence on many women. Northern women kind of took up this idea and some southern women did too, but southern women were much more reluctant about becoming nurses than northern women were. And when you think about it, does anybody hear a nurse? Oh, good. All right. So think about, you know, so here you are, you're a nurse. Oh, I'm so happy I asked that question. So you think you're a nurse and, you know, so one of the things you have to do when you're a nurse is you've got to interact with people you don't know, strangers. Men, possibly. Their bodies might not be clean. Their bodies are probably diseased. Their bodies are probably, you know, a mess, actually, because here it is in the middle of the war. And this is quite a obstacle for women in the 19th century. I mean, you know, it's one thing if you were just to say, okay, all you're going to do is deal with children's bodies or all you're going to do is touch other women's bodies. But in the time of war, you're going to touch men's bodies. You're going to touch men's bodies and they're going to be dirty bodies and they might not come from your same social class and I mean there's all kinds of problems connected with it. And southern women, many of them said, ooh, I'm not doing that. I'm not doing that. Maybe I'll visit with the soldiers in the hospital. Maybe I'll take them a gift basket. Maybe I'll take them some fruit. Maybe I'll read to them. But the idea that you actually had to kind of sit with them and touch their bodies, no, that was something else. And in fact, a lot of southern white women said, I'm not doing that. The main women you would have found in a confederate hospital at the time of the Civil War would have been either free black women or enslaved black women who were impressed into doing that work. Either they had to do it for minimal wages or they had to do it because they were slaves. So a lot of southern white women would not. Emma Crutcher, for example, who was a woman from Mississippi, she worked in a confederate hospital and she said, quote, I shall never take on myself anything that a servant can do as well and never do anything that a lady may not with perfect propriety do. All right, well there's a lot of things that you're not going to do when you go to a hospital and it meant that there was a persistent lack of nurses for the confederacy. Throughout the course of the war they were constantly in need of more nurses. In the north it was a different story. Women volunteered in such large numbers that the United States government appointed a special director for women nurses. She was a Massachusetts reformer by the name of Dorothea Dix. They had a lot of women volunteering in different kinds of capacities. This was just an illustration where you had Catholic nuns who were volunteered as nurses but also lay women, non-religious women who were nurses. This actually was showing a whole variety of activities women were involved in. A photograph from a union field hospital showing women right there nursing and unlike women in the south they did not shy away from medical care. The actual dirty work associated with nursing. Louisa May Alcott. Have you heard of Louisa May Alcott? Later she's famous. She writes this novel also about the Civil War. Louisa May Alcott was herself a nurse. She worked for a month in a Washington D.C. hospital until she fell ill from typhoid. There she is. She wrote an account about being a nurse. It was called hospital sketches. It's really a delightful read. She realized that some kind of barrier had to be transcended when women took up this work because it was even for northern women, it was a new and challenging obligation. Her book I think is in many ways a testament to what it meant to transcend this barrier. She was asked soon after she arrived to wash a group of wounded men who came right from the Battle of Fredericksburg and she sort of realized this was a kind of tipping point for what had usually been expected of respectable ladies. She writes, I drowned my scruples in my wash bowl, clutched my soap manfully and assuming a business like air made a dab at the first dirty specimen I saw. What I love about this is it sort of suggests she had to have seen that she was doing something that ladies didn't usually do because as she said, she had to do it manfully. She had to do it in a whole different kind of way than she was used to doing. And I think because women like Louise Mayalkott had this ability to drown their scruples and I think southern women had more trouble with that, northern women and northern women nurses especially, managed to give better care and more sustained care to wounded soldiers. In fact, there's some people who speculate they say that one thing that women nurses were able to do was reduce the number of amputations in the Union Army. So surgeons, of course, are notorious, they say, oh, there's a problem with that limb, cut it off. That arm is wounded, cut it off. And the women said, you know what, I could save that arm if you let me, the first inclination is to do what a surgeon does. And the women nurses say, you know, if I clean this the right way, if I treat it the right way, I could probably save that limb. And in fact, you know, there are some statistics that say because of the care that nurses gave to soldiers, they do save limbs. And that makes a big difference because a soldier who has not lost his limb can still be a soldier and a soldier who's lost his limb is probably going to go home. But I think their ability to work as nurses makes an important difference. In sum, I would say northern women supported the Union War effort in a more sustained and consistent way than southern women did for the Confederacy. They took up slack on the home front. They did economic work. They were politically involved. They made a difference, certainly in terms of the medical care they provided to Union men. And I would say even more that these contributions flowed directly from the particular way in which their society had thought about gender so that they did not automatically think that hard and difficult work would be degrading for women. They did not discount that idea that women could do that work. And generally they encouraged women to apply themselves with a degree of independence to their own particular sphere. So in the end, I would say northern women probably did not conclusively seal the deal for the Union victory, but I think they certainly made a difference. Thank you. Questions too. Those who want to stay and talk and chat. What about resistance? You know, there was I was telling my friend, the other nurse in the room about there's a book out now about the First World War that had resistance women's roles in that resistance. They connected with the suffragette or suffrage movement in England. And I know it was a different kind of war, but Were there women resistors? Were women like part of the peace movement? Yeah. Well, you know, it depends if you're going to talk more yourself. The main resistance to the war in the North was Democratic Party. Democratic Party feels like they should end the war as quickly as possible. Democratic Party doesn't want anything to do with emancipation or abolition. And so, yes, there would have been some women. I actually don't think the women who supported that view were very actively displaying their resistance. I'd say the women who actually were more actively involved were the ones who were not resistance. The ones who were like committed abolitionists. Because those women absolutely supported the war. They were committed abolitionists. I mean, they might not have always supported Abraham Lincoln, but they supported the things that the Republican Party was doing. They, you know, wanted the war to continue. They certainly wanted emancipation to, like, come out at the end of the war being over. So I would say, though, the resisting women at least in the North, yes, would have, like, mumbled and rumbled. But I don't think they were, like, really, you know, actively resisting. As the war turned solid for the South. The Southern women were getting close to them. They didn't Southern women with the newspapers or whatever, they must have known them. And weren't they being propelled into their lady, lady ship aside, if you will, and get involved and get involved and help? Yes. I mean, there are certainly some women who are involved and they do, you know, they do go to the hospitals and they do those things, but I think, I mean, honestly, I think as the situation got worse in the South, it became even harder because there was a sense of, you know, what are we really doing this for? I mean, there are actually some accounts, you know, what's interesting is there are some accounts that suggest as the war gets closer and closer to the end of the South, that a lot of, you know, ladies in Richmond say, oh, let's have a ball, let's have a party, let's, you know, have a big, like they actually sort of take almost this opposite attitude of, you know, this isn't, celebrate now because soon I'm not going to be able to celebrate at all, so that there's really a, I mean, honestly, I don't want to say this is a generalization, I don't, I would not say that this characterizes all of them, but I would say that there was the attitude of the Southern Belle. There's something of the attitude of the Southern Belle, yes, absolutely, and I think for women who are rich, there was really an attitude of, I'm sick of this war, all this war has done to make me suffer and I want it over as quickly as possible, yeah. But there's going to be women who are working in class. Yes. I mean, there's not going to be people who work in factories. I mean, in the South, in the North, yes. There are, I mean, everybody's not an absolute plantation person. Right. What were those women, how were they drawn in or not in the South? Well, it's interesting. So there are, and one, I would say there's not as large a percentage of women in the South who are factory workers. Because they can have factories to employ those women to the same extent. So there are a few. One of the biggest is in Richmond and it was an arsenal, an iron factory in Richmond and it did employ a lot of working class women. And so for a time, you know, it was a good source of employment, I'd say, for those women. But within a couple of years, you know, the problems are Confederate money doesn't buy much. Supplies are low. There's this blockade. A lot of them, you know, like they rely on sort of basic food things like flour, which, you know, at some point people in the war cost $400 a barrel in Richmond, you can imagine. If you're a working class woman and you work in this factory you can't afford that. In the spring of 1863 the women who work in that Richmond factory have a riot. They take to the streets of Richmond. They, you know, roll out barrels of flour. They just go into stores and they take it because they can't afford to buy it. You know, there's like a thousand of them that gather in the streets of Richmond and they say, we are sick of this. And finally, you know, the president, Jefferson Davis goes out and says, please, go home, go home. You know, finally they do. But there is a lot of, you know, and I don't know if it all would have expressed itself as we hate this war, but it certainly expressed itself as we are really frustrated because we can't survive anymore. Just thinking of the popular depictions of white southern women and I'm remembering that movie, I think it's called Old Men Old Women and I remember the movie, the acting was great, but I don't remember if it was a fictional or based on a true story and so I was wondering from my aesthetic that was a very important story. It made it sound like it was literally an exception. Right. Well, yeah, no, no, no, it is a fictional story, but what is interesting about it, and I think it captures, that's interesting, is I mean, this is what I remember from it. But what, I mean, you get this sense from that, that the southern home front was almost like this world of women, right, because so many men were gone and that is true in the south. And one of the things that's interesting, which I should have probably mentioned, is a much, much, much higher percentage of men in the south are in the army like, I think 50% of the men who are eligible in the north are in the army. 75% of men who are eligible in the south are in the army. So, it's really like this sense that we're our own men. I mean, you wouldn't walk around northern cities and it would have felt like, okay, you know, maybe there's a war going on maybe not, just some men here, you know, but in the south, you would walk around and say we're our own men. And that's what I remember, it was sort of like women have to be in together women have to figure out how to do things and I think they do. I mean, they do so it's not like they're not taking any kind of initiative but I think, I don't think they are happy about the position that they've been put in where they have to fend for themselves. It's not like they say, oh, this is great a moment of liberation for me. They're like, this is nice. So, I don't think the map felt portrayed like, never made it. Yeah, yeah. But you know what, it's definitely on Amazon. It is on Amazon. But it could still range from there.