Women at the front : hospital workers in Civil War America / Jane E. Schultz.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schultz, Jane E.

Series:

Civil War America.

Civil War America

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women--United States--History--19th century.

Women.

Women--Confederate States of America--History.

Hospitals--United States--Employees--History--19th century.

Hospitals.

Military nursing.

History.

United States.

Employees.

Hospitals--Confederate States of America--Employees--History.

Military nursing--United States--History--19th century.

Military nursing--Confederate States of America--History.

United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865--Hospitals.

United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865--Women.

United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865--Medical care.

Medical care.

Physical Description:

xiv, 360 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2004]

Summary:

As many as 20,000 women worked in Union and Confederate hospitals during the Civil War. Black and white, and from various social classes, these women served as nurses, administrators, matrons, seamstresses, cooks, laundresses, and custodial workers. Jane E. Schultz provides the first full history of these female relief workers, showing how the domestic and military arenas merged in Civil War America, blurring the line between homefront and battlefront. Schultz uses government records, private manuscripts, and published sources by and about women hospital workers, some of whom are familiar -- such as Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth -- but most of whom are not well known. Examining the lives and legacies of these women, Schultz considers who they were, how they became involved in wartime hospital work, how they adjusted to it, and how they challenged it. She demonstrates that class, race, and gender roles linked female workers with soldiers, both black and white, but also became sites of conflict between the women and doctors and even among themselves.

Schultz also explores the women's postwar lives -- their professional and domestic choices, their pursuit of pensions, and their memorials to the war in published narratives. Surprisingly few parlayed their war experience into postwar medical work, and their extremely varied postwar experiences, Schultz argues, defy any simple narrative of pre-professionalism, triumphalism, or conciliation.

Contents:

Part 1 On Duty

2 Getting to the Hospital 45

3 Adjusting to Hospital Life 73

4 Coming into Their Own 107

Part 2 The Legacy of War Work

5 After the War 145

6 Pensioning Women 183

7 Memory and the Triumphal Narrative 211.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [253]-341) and index.

ISBN:

080782867X

OCLC:

53483700

Online:

Publisher description