Gendered Nature Of The Civil War example essay topic

Both the women of the Union and the Confederacy had important roles not only on the home front, but also on the battlefields. Though these women came from different backgrounds and were fighting for very dissimilar causes, they took on related jobs during the war. Women such as Clara Barton became field nurses. Others, like Pauline Cushman, became spies for their cause. Women also aided in actual battles by assisting the men who used guerilla warfare. Before and after the Civil War, gender in the North was divided.

While the men marched off to war, the women were to stay at home and tend to the children and the housework. Preserving the Union became a noble, exalted role, which could be shared by both men and women in the appropriate spheres. With the outbreak of the war and the idea of safeguarding the Union, the barriers between genders were broken down. Patriotic propaganda sanctions existing patterns of gender relations, calling on men and women to assume gender appropriate roles to further nationalist objectives. Women of the North became great patriots like the men and suspended their privilege that excluded them from taking part in war and not leaving the men to fight the good fight. They shared the burdens of wartime with the men.

Northern Women undermined assumptions about female household labor and challenged the gendered nature of the Civil War. In an attempt to clarify their relationship both to the market and to state, they raised the issue of accountability; if they were to produce household and hospital goods for the war effort, they would require assurance that their labor was not wasted or squandered. And as the war progressed, women's voices became louder and the women were being heard. They were recognized as being a crucial part in winning the war. In 1866, Charles Stille remarked that the, "earliest movement that was made for an army relief began, as it is hardly necessary to say, by the women of the country". Without the women at home making clothes, bandages, and etc., the men of the North would have never made it through, let alone be a threat to the Confederacy.

Like the North, gender responsibilities during the war were split; women stay home and men go to war. Yet, unlike Union women, Southern women struggled to make the Confederacy a common cause. Their patriotism was not as tangible as that of the Northern women. Confederate women quickly came to the realization that the South's crisis must be "certainly ours as well as that of the men". Women's politics in the secession crisis was a politics of ambivalence. They were torn as to whether they should support the Confederate cause.

In 1861, however, Southern women still largely accepted the legitimacy of divisions between the private and the public, the domestic and the political, the sphere of women and the sphere of men. It seems that the Condferderate women could be considered the antithesis of the Union women who were quick to take part in their own cause. Even though both the Union and Confederate women join the Civil War efforts at different speeds, the majority of them became war nurses. In July 1862, Katherine Wormeley wrote to a friend talking about her twelve weeks as a nurse on hospital ships. She looked back saying that she and the other nurses "worked together under the deepest feelings, and to the extent of our powers, shoulder to shoulder, helping each other to the best of our ability, no one failing or hindering another. She was upset, "to feel that it was all over".

Like Wormeley, a woman by the name of Clara Barton also volunteered her time as an aid to the soldiers. Clara advertised for supplies and distributed bandages, socks, and other goods to help the wounded soldiers. In 1862, she was granted permission to deliver supplies directly to the front, which she did for the following two years. Women began to take on leadership positions in the field of nursing and also formed recruitment organizations like the Women's Central Relief Association (WCR A) which was founded by Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell in 1861.

The field nurses were an integral part of the Civil War. They risked their own lives on the battlefield to save their men, but they did not care because it was all for their separate causes. Women were not only nurses; they were also spies like Pauline Cushman who made her debut as a Union spy at a dinner in honor of Confederate president, Jefferson Davis. In her pamphlet, The Romance of the Great Rebellion, published in 1864, she proclaimed that her toast to Davis had launched her career in espionage.

She wrote that she had an interview with a Union marshall soon after which "satisfied him of my earnest loyalty to the Union, he suggested to me that my patriotism and nerve might be well employed as a 'detective' in the secret army service". She stressed the fact that she had to empathize with the Confederacy and gain their trust. She did this very well and she was well-known amongst the Confederates as well as her male counterparts of the Union forces. Other women spies were known to be circulating all around the North and the South and they were highly publicized. Two of the most notorious were broth from the South, Rose Greenhow and Belle Boyd. Greenhow is sometimes credited with the Confederate victory at the Battle of Bull Run because she brought substantial information on timing, troop strength, and last-minute strategic decisions to Confederate generals.

Bell Boyd, on the other hand, ran across a battlefield to give Stonewall Jackson information on Union troops he was about to attack. Before that, she had smuggled quinine and carried notes back and forth across the border. Women spies who crossed enemy lines would carry firearms, medicine, and other needed materials in their hoop skirts, reticles, parasols, and corsets. Mary Chesnut noted in a diary entry that Confederate women spies coiled letters in their long hair. These female spies showed the strength and the willingness of women in the war and how crucial they were. Guerilla warfare was a prominent combat technique used during the Civil War; women from both camps became both victims and participants of it.

They did not necessarily fight other men, or women for that matter, but they did help out some guerillas. Guerillas depended on the women as allies. Women provided supplies and information, but it was also a psychological necessity-a reinforcement of their belief that they were defenders of the local virtues against alien invaders. Guerillas treated the women with respect to show that they were not savages. In October 1863, four guerillas, broke into the home of Lucy Jane McManus. They told her that they were looking for her husband, and that when they found him "they would soon put him under the sod", and that they meant no personal harm.

Guerilla warfare was neither a blessing nor a burden for the women of the war, though it did affect them on both personal and physical levels, depending on the woman's individual situation. Women of the Union and the Confederacy are both recognized as playing significant roles in the Civil War. Whether it was nursing, spying, or providing help with guerrilla warfare, the women of the north and south advocated their causes by assisting in whatever way was possible for them. Without their strength, fearlessness, and willingness to help, the men of the war would more than likely not have succeeded in any way.