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Reviewed by:
  • Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America
  • Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein
Jane E. Schultz . Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America. Civil War America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xiv + 360 pp. Ill. $34.95 (0-8078-2867-X).

In this volume, Jane E. Schultz has determined to show the reader the diversity of female workers in Civil War hospitals, North and South, as well as the variety of capacities in which they served. Women as young as fifteen and as old as sixty-five held hospital positions, as did women of all classes, from the elite to the slave.

Schultz has organized her book into two parts. The first part, with four chapters, details women's wartime hospital experiences. Chapter 1 gives a good overview of the women by class and position, utilizing some statistical studies and graphs in a helpful way. Chapter 2 concerns the whole matter of getting to the hospital, especially the obstructions caused by well-intentioned family members (often male) and friends who believed that a hospital was no place for a woman. Schultz also addresses the differences between women who volunteered their services and refused to accept pay, and those who needed all the money they could earn in hospital employment. Chapter 3 details the physical conditions that the workers experienced in the hospitals. In chapter 4, Schultz discusses the developing confidence of some of the female workers, as well as their conflicts with surgeons over authority, corruption, and poor patient care.

The three chapters in part 2 deal with the postwar lives of women hospital workers. Chapter 5 traces the types of class-dependent jobs that women held after they left the hospitals (unless they were members of the elite who did not need to work). After Congress passed legislation to give pensions to needy former Union soldiers, female nurses and their supporters agitated for similar legislation to reward women's service. This legislation, passed in 1892, required evidence to prove a woman's service, which many from the lower classes had difficulty providing. In chapter 6 Schultz examines the struggles of Union women seeking these pensions. Finally, in chapter 7 she describes both Union and Confederate attempts to memorialize the workers' Civil War experience, especially through writing.

Schultz, not surprisingly, focuses a great deal on matters of race, class, and gender, with the strongest emphasis on class. Class usually determined the type of job a woman would hold and her rate of pay. The higher her class, the more likely that a woman would be a matron (in the South), a supervisor of some sort, or a nurse. Working-class and black women were more likely to be labeled and paid as cooks or laundresses, even though many of them actually nursed patients on a regular basis. These categorizations made it difficult or impossible for some of the neediest of Union women to get pensions in later life.

Conflict is also a major theme of the book, which is evident in at least four contexts: conflicts between women who wished to serve in military hospitals and family members who opposed their participation; conflicts between women hospital workers and supervising surgeons or other male authority figures; conflict between women of various classes during their hospital employment; and conflict between black and white women hospital workers.

Academic historians may appreciate some of Schultz's discussions presented [End Page 174] in the context of various theories of race, class, and gender, such as those of historian David Blight, who has studied the development of postwar attitudes toward blacks. Less theoretically minded readers will enjoy Schultz's numerous examples from the careers of women hospital workers. While the postwar material contains many interesting insights, it occupies about two-fifths of the text—a proportion that this reviewer found excessive. Nevertheless, both professional and lay readers with an interest in Civil War medicine will profit from this book.

Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library
Springfield, Illinois
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