1. Women: Role and Effects
Kitty Adair

2. Background ideal women were homemakers
private, feminized domestic sphere
“True women” devoted lives to creating a clean, comfortable home for their husbands and children
During Civil War, women started working outside the home
joined volunteer brigades
worked as nurses

3. Women in the Union
organized ladies’ aid societies to supply Union troops with food, clothing, and money
June 1961: United States Sanitary Commission created to combat bad hygiene and bad food
working class white women, free black women, and enslaved black women worked as laundresses, cooks, and matrons
3000 high class white women worked as nurses
Activist Dorothea Dix, superintendent of Army nurses, insisted all her nurses were “past 30 years of age, healthy, plain almost to repulsion in dress and devoid of personal distractions”

4. Women in the Confederacy
worked in the same jobs as the union
had much less money
provided uniforms, blankets, sandbags, and other supplies to the troops
worked as untrained nurses in makeshift hospitals
many wealthy Southern women relied on slaves and never really had to do any work

5. slaves and freewomen
slaves had to do their normal jobs, plus the jobs of the husbands who were away at war
left to provide for their family on their own

6. women spies
Pauline Cushman-Union Spy: worked with the Army of Cumberland; gathered info about enemy operations, identified Confederate spies
Mary-Elizabeth Bowser-Union Spy: after her master died, his wife secretly granted Mary freedom; brought supplies to Union and secretly conveyed messages b/w prisoners and Union officials
Rose O’Neal Greenhow-Confederate Spy: used powerful social connections to get info on Union military activity and stole secret coded messages

7. Pauline Cushman, Mary Elizabeth Bowser, and Rose O’Neal Greenhow
women spies cont’d
Pauline Cushman, Mary Elizabeth Bowser, and Rose O’Neal Greenhow

8. Bibliography http://americancivilwar.com/women/women.html
Women in the Civil War. (n.d.). Retrieved December 8, 2014, from