Gender issues in the American Civil War
The advent of photography and easier media distribution, for example, allowed for greater access to sexual material for the common soldier.
[4] The middle-class women North and South who volunteered provided vitally needed nursing services and were rewarded with a sense of patriotism and civic duty in addition to opportunity to demonstrate their skills and gain new ones, while receiving wages and sharing the hardships of the men.
She was an energetic organizer who established the American Red Cross, which was primarily a disaster relief agency but which also supported nursing programs.
African American women, on the other hand, had experienced the breakup of families for generations and were once again dealing with this issue at the outbreak of war.
They cut back on purchases, brought out old spinning wheels and enlarged their gardens with peas and peanuts to provide clothing and food.
The households were severely hurt by inflation in the cost of everyday items and the shortages of food, fodder for the animals, and medical supplies for the wounded.
[18] The overall decline in food supplies, made worse by the collapsing transportation system, led to serious shortages and high prices in urban areas.
When bacon reached a dollar a pound in 1863, the poor women of Richmond, Atlanta and many other cities began to riot; they broke into shops and warehouses to seize food.
[22] Historian Jonathan Wiener studied the census data on plantations in black-belt counties, 1850–70, and found that the War did not drastically alter the responsibilities and roles of women.
The age of the groom increased as younger women married older planters, and birth rates dropped sharply during 1863-68 during Reconstruction.
A captured Confederate officer whose true sex was previously unknown by the guards gave birth in a Union prison camp.
[26] Across the Confederacy, upper-class women assembled all-female home guard militias, drilling firearms usage and training to protect their plantations, properties, and neighborhoods from Union invasion.
[29] The most dramatic and extreme challenge to gender roles, then, came with those women who participated in the Civil War as fully enlisted combatants.
Unlike the members of the all-female militias, the female enlisted soldiers were drawn disproportionately from working- and lower-middle-class backgrounds—and therefore represented a radically different cultural milieu.
Mid-nineteenth-century working-class culture, for example, was generally familiar—if not comfortable—with female cross-dressing, with the phenomenon being prominently featured in popular theatrical and literary pieces with mass audiences.
"[33] Sarah Rosetta Wakeman had been living as a man long before the outbreak of the war, hoping to find better-paying work on the riverboats of New York rather than as a female domestic servant.
[34] Whatever the original motivations of the individual female soldiers, however, they ultimately took part in the war on similar terms as their male brothers-in-arms.
[36] Although it establishes the fact that women warriors were objects of curiosity for the American public, Moore significantly softened and romanticised their experiences in order to make them more palatable to a general audience.
For instance, Moore refers to one particular female soldier as an "American Joan of Arc", attempting to frame her wartime exploits within a recognisable paradigm of holy war and divine inspiration.
[37] Regardless of generally warm popular opinion, however, female soldiers actually faced significant suspicion and opposition from within the armies themselves.
[38] Female soldiers were generally successful at physically disguising themselves; their shorter height, higher voices, and lack of facial hair escaped comment in an army heavily dominated by adolescent boys, while their own feminine shapes could be obscured through breast-binding.
[40] Female soldiers who were most successful at blending into military life were those who had been presenting as male even before they had enlisted: Sarah Wakeman, for example, had been living as a man and working on canal boats in New York prior to joining the Union army,[41] while Jennie Hodgers had likewise assumed a masculine identity long before the outbreak of the war.
[44] Others, however, escaped detection for the entire war, and returned home to resume their normal lives and feminine gender expression—with a few notable exceptions.
Female veteran Sarah Edmonds, the runaway Canadian bride, lived under the masculine identity of Franklin Thompson for the rest of her life, and even was granted a pension for her service by Congress in 1886,[45] while Jennie Hodgers continued living as Albert Cashier before being discovered and forced back into feminine dress after having been institutionalized for dementia in 1913.
[48] On 24 April 1863, Union President Abraham Lincoln signed the Lieber Code, which amongst other things contained one of the first explicit prohibitions on rape.
Some historians have speculated that this growth can be attributed to a depression, and the need for women to support themselves and their families while their husbands were away at war.
Other historians considered the growth of prostitution to be related to the women wanting to spread venereal disease to the opposing troops.
Period drawings depicting Davis in full women's dress (bonnet included) were used to ridicule the Confederacy's former president.
