Gender and Racism in Civil War Hospitals

            This article by Jane Schultz addresses a subject she thinks has been mostly ignored by historians, the place of African American females in the war. She feels these women attributed just as much if not more than white females but were given no credit for it. They were given the jobs nobody else wanted like working in disease hospitals and doing the laundry for the soldiers. Schultz digs deeper than most historians have and not only discusses black women during the war but also how they interacted with the white women they worked with.

            Schultz brings up a point we have discussed a lot in class about white women experiencing a lessening of their social power so they had to exert their power over someone and that someone was the black women they worked with. They would give black women the harder work they didn't want to do. That is when black women were allowed to work around white women. In most cases black women were not allowed to work as nurses except in all black hospitals or disease hospitals where white women did not want to work. Schultz keep reiterating how many white women were for freedom for black people but were still did not want to accept them as equals.

               Schultz states that “a hierarchical system developed where white people could nurse non-infectious soldiers of either race, while African Americans were expected to nurse everybody else”. This is a point that is brought up in class a lot and “would come to define the Reconstruction era”. It seems almost like white women wanted the recognition for their work in the war and black women were ignored; this was a war fought by white people to them and black people should be grateful and take what they could get. Schultz did a lot of research and proves her point very well and this article would be an excellent read for anyone interested in women’s history.

 Schultz, Jane E. "Seldom Thanked, Never Praised, and Scarcely Recognized: Gender and Racism in Civil War Hospitals." Civil War History 48, no. 3 (2002): 220-236.