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 C H A P T E R T W O  Women, War, and Medicine At the top of anyone’s list of “Famous Women in the Civil War” is Clara Barton , who organized battlefield relief stations, visited Andersonville after the war to identify the dead and notify families, and in the 1880s established the American Red Cross. So when she told a Memorial Day audience in 1888 that at the end of the Civil War, “Woman was at least fifty years in advance of the normal position which continued peace . . . would have assigned her,” she had ample personal experience upon which to draw.1 Barton’s term “position ” referred to the women’s movement in general: the drive for suffrage, equal rights in the workplace, political voice, and gender neutrality in the courtroom. Was this assessment of the war’s impact on women’s rights an accurate one? Historian Mary Elizabeth Massey certainly thought so, according to her pathbreaking book on women and the war, published in 1966. The female presence in the public arena expanded markedly after the war, and there is no doubt that, as Massey concluded, “the Civil War compelled women to become more active, self-reliant, and resourceful, and this ultimately contributed to their economic, social and intellectual advancement.”2 With millions of working-age men engaged in combat, the two nations required women’s labor to maintain the functions of everyday life. And with thousands of those men in hospitals, the nations required an influx of hospital workers as never before. While in the modern era we see precise distinctions between roles such as doctor, nurse, social worker, and charity agent, the situation was much more fluid in the mid-nineteenth century. This chapter considers the stories of women who filled these various roles. Antebellum charity had emphasized the care of the worthy poor and of people unavoidably away from home and in desperate circumstances. Because of the war, vast numbers of men were away from home, beyond the reach of family support, and often disabled, and these men became the proper sub- Women, War, and Medicine 49 ject of organized national charity on a scale hard to imagine previously. How women would have fared if the war had never happened is anyone’s guess, but the conflict was clearly a vehicle that carried women from the home into the public sphere, bringing undeniable changes in their “position.”3 That the war also may have worsened their aggregate health, temporarily, was one side effect of this transformation. The “position” of women related not just to socially assigned roles but also to geography. The border between the private and public spheres— as well as between the home front and war areas—was stretched, transformed , and in places ruptured during the war. Historian Judith Giesberg has especially emphasized how the war displaced women from their usual places. “As they moved into new spaces, or expanded to fill the void left in old ones, women redrew the lines that separated home from war and mapped an alternate wartime geography dictated by the material conditions of war rather than the ideological constraints of gender.” Giesberg’s lens takes in not only the middle-class northern and southern women who have received the predominant attention from historians, but also the ways in which the war disrupted women’s lives on the farm and pushed working-class women into factories and other public work. Disruptions in the Confederacy were even more severe than in the Union, especially for black slaves and poor white women who struggled to survive in a world with many sources of danger and few sources of support.4 A simplistic narrative about the progress of medical women during the war that ignores these complexities is insufficient. In June 2012, historian Stephanie McCurry spoke to an audience of Civil War historians regarding such an approach—the emphasis on progress—as something “we used to do” in her plea for, instead, a gendered approach to Civil War history. And Thavolia Glymph told that same audience to be wary of searching for women heroes in the war, especially African American ones. For many women, the war was simply about survival.5 But historians of medicine have not completed the first lap in this historiographic race. We need to better recognize how the war altered the course of the feminist revolution in medicine that began when America’s first female physician, Elizabeth Blackwell, took her MD degree in 1849. Women have...

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