Women in the Civil War

Frances Clayton

   I chose to go the route less traveled by looking into women in the Civil War.  These women pushed the gender and racial boundaries during the antebellum and Civil War era.  Women during this time were bound to the gender conventions of the day, but throughout the war, many women were becoming more liberated by becoming soldiers in the war.  Liberation came in all forms such as through work, education, spirituality, abolitionist activities, financial independence, dress, speech, behavior, and occupation. 

Frances Clayton (disguised)

    Not only were white American women overcoming the gender conventions of the time, but the free black women were also putting forth the effort of becoming liberated as well.  In Anne Marshall’s article, she talked about free black women and how they faced the same gender conventions, economic hardships as white women, but they also confronted racism.  Not much research has been done on the free black women and their lives.  The free black women faced the double burden of being both black and female, and as Marshall argues, “defined womanhood in ways that sometimes challenged society’s expectations and beliefs about them” (214).

    Additionally, Marshall also brings up how women also fought in the battlefields, which was something that at the time women were not permitted to do.  Not only did women serve in their “gendered jobs” as self-sacrificing nurses during the war, but they were also spies, scouts, and even soldiers.  I find this following fact particularly interesting that historians have concluded that at least a thousand, possibly several thousand women served as soldiers in the Civil War (215).  While this number seems insignificant to the total number of soldiers in the war on both sides, to me, this was a significant feat considering the limited social, economic, and political opportunities that these women had at the time. Writing in 1888, Mary Livermore of the U.S. Sanitary Commission remembered that:

            Some one has stated the number of women soldiers known to the service as little less than four  hundred. I cannot vouch for the correctness of this estimate, but I am convinced that a larger number of women disguised themselves and enlisted in the service, for one cause or other, than was dreamed of. Entrenched in secrecy, and regarded as men, they were sometimes revealed as women, by accident or casualty. Some startling histories of these military women were current in the gossip of army life. (2) 

  These women violated the normal gendered boundaries in many important ways such as the way they dressed, their behaviors, their occupation, and even their speech.  Of course these women had to disguise themselves as though they were male in order not to have their secret found out.  The point that I am making is that the antebellum women, and even the freed black women were overcoming the gendered norms of their day, and sought out to liberate and change their way of life. Their actions should not be overlooked by any means.  But  I am curious as to these women’s motives at the time.  Was it to follow their lovers and husbands into battles and they felt compelled to fight?  Was there a hint of their own rebelliousness against the limited world in which they lived?  Was this their form of liberation?  I find these women interesting. 

Blanton, DeAnne. " Women Soldiers of the Civil War." National Archives. 25. no. 2  (1993).  http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1993/spring/women-in- the-civil-war-1.html (accessed January 31, 2013).

Marshall, Anne. "The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women during the Slave Era, and: Women on the Civil War Battle Front." Civil War History. 53. no. 2 (2007): 214- 215. 10.1353/cwh.2007.0038 (accessed January 31, 2013).

Interpreting the larger meaning of Secession, the Confederacy, and the War

Here’s something to get us started in the blog. You may comment on this entry. (Note that this entry does not fit the research assignment requirements listed on BlackBoard.)

Most interpretations of the War era revolve in some way around slavery; my interpretation, as presented in this class, follows that framework. Other interpretations minimize the importance of slavery in the War era, or see slavery less as a causal factor in itself than as a result of more fundamental changes in economy or society. One non-scholarly (and entirely unconvincing) interpretation that minimizes slavery’s importance comes from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, whose website we’ve looked at in class. That organization interprets Confederate action in the War era as a protection of Constitutional liberties. This interpretation, as I see it, not only denies the historical reality of slavery, but it also erases entirely the history of Black southerners.

Another approach, much more intellectual stimulating, comes from the Marxist tradition. You can find a summary in the blog of retired Berea College professor Mike Rivage-Seul  (in a rather lengthy review of the recent movie, Lincoln). Marxist analysis sees historical change as driven by conflicts over “mode of production,” or the means by which subsistence and wealth is produced. As new classes of people able to exploit labor and wealth emerge, they compete with established classes for control over economic structures. In Marxist terms, the Civil War in the U.S. was ultimately a contest between rising industrial and financial classes (exploiting a class of wage labor) on the one hand and the remnants of the aristocratic, seigniorial class, represented by Southern planters (who were lords over slave labor). The victory of the North solidified the new age of capitalist dominance in the US (and the world). This is, of course, sweeping, deep-structure history, in which immediate and specific events are less important than broad changes in underlying economic relationships. Most historians today (including me) do not accept this narrative in full; few of us, for example, see Southern planters as an aristocratic class occupying a distinct mode of production from that of northern industrialists. Nonetheless, it is an interpretation that demands careful thought.