Myth 4: Women were motivated by patriotism to serve in relief capacities. Regardless of section, we can be sure that middle-class women were in a minority of at least 2:1. We can only guess at the demographics in the Confederate hospital system because many hospital records were burned when Richmond fell in 1865, but it is likely that 20 percent of the female workforce consisted of slaves hired out by their owners. Almost none of the black women who made up 11 percent of the total were called nurses, whereas virtually all of the Catholic sisters involved in relief work–perhaps as many as one-fifth of the total–were hired as nurses. When literate, well-connected women entered the service, they were called nurses the working class and those who lacked literacy were given jobs as cooks, laundresses, matrons, waitresses, seamstresses, and chambermaids. In fact, elites were no more than one-third of the entire group of hospital workers (even fewer in the South).
We were under the mistaken impression that they constituted a majority because most of our information about relief work came from books written by white middle-class women, whose literacy and social access made them more visible than other workers. In fact, white middle-class women constituted a minority of relief workers in both North and South. Myth 3: White middle-class women constituted the majority of relief workers. Altogether this was the mobilization of a lot of women.
Among Southerners were also rural white women (the yeomanry), far more numerous than the planter class, who found ready work in military settings in the absence of breadwinners. Thousands of Confederate relief workers were slave women, and later contrabands, who found work in Union hospitals from Kentucky down to Louisiana and from Maryland down to Georgia. We have no reason to believe that Confederate women constituted a smaller percentage of the hospital force in the South, which suggests that as many as 10,000 or more women did similar work there. The tabulation of these dusty index cards revealed that more than 21,000 women alone had been on Union payrolls as nurses, cooks, matrons, laundresses, seamstresses, waitresses, and chambermaids. At the National Archives, I discovered, among other treasures, the Carded Service Records of Union Hospital Attendants. Historians have told us from 1865 on that several thousand women served as nurses in hospital, camp, and battlefield in the Civil War. Myth 2: Only several thousand women served as nurses in hospital, camp, and battlefield.
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Among them were women like Hannah Ropes, active in the abolition movement in Massachusetts, who had been out to “bleeding” Kansas in the 1850s and Abby Hopper Gibbons, a New York Quaker, who had been involved in numerous philanthropic initiatives for free blacks and later contrabands. Obviously, more women stayed home producing goods and laboring on their farms than went to war, but the significant group of women who chose this more active military role believed that they were representative American women who could volunteer their institutional and domestic knowledge on behalf of soldiers.
But the more significant group were domestic laborers, the thousands who provided hospital relief services in urban centers, military camps, and the field. The stories of the several hundred women passing as soldiers in the ranks are intriguing and suggest the extent to which gender was a more permeable category of identity in the 19 th century than we might once have believed. Myth 1: The most significant role of women during the Civil War was as soldiers-in-cognito. We are now able to dispel ten common myths about women’s roles in the Civil War. Twenty-five years ago, when I began to contemplate a dissertation topic concerning women’s work on Civil War battlefields, a prominent historian asked me, “ Were there any women at the front?” Since then, historians have documented the lives of women immersed in military operations in camp, field, and hospital, and have expanded the notion of “the front” to bring into range women whose households were situated in battle zones.