Posts Tagged ‘Civil War’
Cornelia Hancock: Civil War Nurse, Reformer, Muse
As the official superintendent of the Union Army’s newly minted nursing corps, Dorothea Dix had a clear vision of what her nurses should look like. Only women between the ages of thirty or thirty-five and fifty would be accepted. “Neatness, order, sobriety and industry” were required; “matronly persons of experience, good conduct or superior education”…
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Confederate Nurses, Part 2
Union Secretary of State Stewart Cameron accepted Dorothea Dix‘s offer to organize an army of nurses without taking the time to define what her position would entail or how she would fit into a military medical bureaucracy, which was itself in a state of transformation. As a result, Dix was in constant conflict with the…
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Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy
Nursing wasn’t the only role that women played in the American Civil War. Women on both sides of the conflict organized soldier’s aid societies, effectively transforming homes, schools and churches into small-scale factories and shipping warehouses in which they made and collected food, clothing and medical supplies. Eighty years before Rosie the Riveter, they worked…
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