Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America (review)

In Women at the Front, Jane Schultz reveals that Civil War nursing was a more diverse enterprise than we thought, as free black, enslaved, and working-class white women shared hospital space with middle-class and elite white women, Catholic nuns, and convalescent soldiers. Convinced that the best care for ailing soldiers could be provided at home, women, North and South, braved disease, dodged bullets, and overcame racism to recreate domestic spaces in field hospitals, hospital transport ships, general hospitals, and alongside battlefields. This was no easy matter, primarily because of the state of nineteenth-century medicine but also, as Schultz argues, because female hospital workers "were ambivalent about each other" (p. 7). But Schultz describes relationships that were much more than merely ambivalent. Indeed, if the Civil War hospital was a home away from home—one that women inhabited along with injured soldiers and insecure male surgeons—it was nothing if not dysfunctional.

Schultz carefully documents the systematic ways in which African American, working-class, and regimental women were hired as "laundresses" and "cooks" and elite white women as "nurses" and "matrons" (and a few doctors)—a hierarchy that carried over to the postwar era when black women were denied a meager nurses' pension because they did not have the right job title. Beyond the labels, hospital work was more dangerous for nonelite and African American women, who were consigned to the fever wards, expected to scrub the floors and do the laundry, and who were raped by soldiers. That very few cases of rape were reported in hospitals is testament to the averted gaze of black women's white colleagues. Schultz's is the most comprehensive study to date, putting to rest any lingering hope of finding in Civil War nursing the origins of a collective female consciousness. Then again, it should be no surprise that—given the state of race, class, and gender relations in antebellum America—black and white, elite and poor women could not overcome their resentment and suspicions of one another long enough to initiate a sustained challenge to the male military-medical establishment. We are indebted to Schultz for this revealing account of hospital battles.

Nor is it surprising that, after witnessing such a horrific loss of life, "not one of [the nurses] became an advocate to end war" (p. 244). Even Mary Livermore, wartime nurse and postwar socialist, continued to romanticize the Civil War when she imagined a future free from war. "When a handful of men can annihilate an army," Livermore mused in a speech on the Philippine War, "war ceases to be war, and becomes assassination." (Mary Livermore, "The Battle of Life," n.d.)

It was no lack of imagination that steered Livermore's generation away from pacifism—their war had been a noble one, having erased a great moral evil from the land. Perhaps the diversity of hospital workers helped feed this romanticization—at least for northern women, who could see hospitals as evidence of a progressive, modern society that emerged from the war triumphant, even as racism, sexism, and classism persisted in the postwar years. Indeed, every generation since has found a way to forgive its own war(s) with similar self-satisfaction. Seeing war as an engine of modernity is easier when women and people of color are in the picture—not merely as passive recipients of the war's outcome but active agents in the fighting. It is this observation that has led to Ed Ayers's worry that settling on a triumphant narrative has made it easy for Americans to see war as an agent of progress. (Edward L. Ayers, "Worrying About the Civil War," in What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History [W. W. Norton, 2005], 125–30.) Drew Faust, too, has wondered if women's historians have simply accepted the inevitability of violence...