Race, Gender, and Bureaucracy: Civil War Army Nurses and the Pension Bureau

Race, Gender, and Bureaucracy: Civil War Army Nurses and the Pension Bureau Jane E. Schultz Introduction Approximately 18,000 women worked in Union military hospitals during the Civil War, most of whom were working-class black and white women paid wages of 6 to 12 dollars per month to labor as cooks, laundresses, matrons, and nurses.1 When legislation to pension army nurses was enacted thirty years after the war, it favored middle-class white women and not the black and working-class women more likely in need of monthly assistance. This essay examines the gender and racial discrimination to which female hospital workers were vulnerable both during their service and after it when they attempted to secure pensions. It considers not only hospital work performed during the war but contested definitions of that work a generation later. Placing the history of legislation to pension army nurses in the more general context of military pensioning sheds light on the exclusionary practices of the United States Pension Bureau at the end of the nineteenth century. Through close observation of the pension application process, we may also glimpse the working relations of men and women, African Americans and whites, and slaves and free people in Union Civil War military hospitals. Initially this work makes visible the demographic diversity of women who performed relief work; it also surveys that group of women who, having served, petitioned the Pension Bureau years later to have their service recognized. It shows how the Union Surgeon General's classification of female hospital workers on the basis of race and social class at the time of their service determined their success in winning pensions after passage of the 1892 act. This work also contributes to the historical dialogue about the professionalization of American nursing. Barbara Melosh, Susan Reverby, and Darlene Clark Hine have described nursing as a site for ideological conflict during the postwar years when training schools and hospital programs were established to educate and initiate women into a profession.2 My reading of Civil War-period hospital and pension records reveals that the subordination of female hospital workers and the further subordination of those workers based © 1994 Journal of Women's History, Vol 6 No. 2 (Summer)__________________ *An earlier version of this study was presented at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Baltimore, Md., on November 2,1991. 46 Journal of Women's History Summer on racial and class differences were well under way during the war years. As they attempted to claim occupational status for their wartime work, army nurses initiated the turf wars that nursing students and educators would take up in the 1870s and 1880s concerning their status relative to physicians, and to nurses from other classes and racial groups. This research also adds to a growing body of work on gender and social welfare policy in the United States. Linda Gordon, Virginia Sapiro, Gwendolyn Mink, and Barbara Nelson have all argued that the goal of American social welfare in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to shore up male independence and to keep female recipients of the government's largesse dependent on men.3 Former Civil War nurses' efforts to obtain pensions in their own behalf clearly challenged this gendered model of social welfare; asking for pensions required government sanction of female independence—not easily granted when, after the Dependent Pension Act of 1890, huge numbers of widows and soldiers' dependents were being added to the pension rolls.4 In an intricate study of the politics of military pensioning, Theda Skocpol notes that a number of factors, sentimental and economic, contributed to the widely held view that Civil War veterans were "morally deserving" of pensions. She reports that by the 1890s the government was spending 41.5 percent of its income on 966,012 Civil War pensioners, and a backlog of "several hundred thousand claims" clogged the machinery of the Pension Bureau.5 In such a climate, the Bureau could do little to detect fraudulent claims, and widows frequently became the targets of Bureau suspicion. Union Army nurses had their work cut out for them: in both lobbying for legislation and in assembling individual pension claims, the burden rested...