Women were active in American life during the Civil War. While so many men were away fighting, women worked to provide for their families and help fill the vacancies left by men in the military. Many--including Elizabeth Van Lew, Harriet Tubman and Belle Boyd--served the Union and Confederate efforts by working as spies and scouts. At least 400 women on both sides, including Franny Wilson of New Jersey, were discovered disguised as soldiers.
When New Orleans was "occupied" by Union forces, the Confederate women of the city waged a campaign of insults on the Union troops. They crossed streets, left rooms, gave nasty glances, offered insults, and even spat on soldiers, instructing their children to do the same. One woman even emptied a chamberpot on a Union captain. This campaign ended rather abruptly, however, when the head of the "occupying forces," General B. F. Butler, declared that any women insulting or mistreating Union officers would be treated like prostitutes.
In addition to taking over family businesses and farms, Northern women worked in civil service and in factories. Women were also important to the Confederate industrial effort. The Confederate Ordnance Department hired over 500 women to fill cartridges, a job that was so dangerous that explosions at two factories killed over 45 women. While the Union provided most uniforms in the North, Confederate troops largely depended on the volunteer efforts of Southern women. These women formed sewing circles which supplied caps, sandbags, uniforms, flags, blankets and other items to Confederate soldiers. After the first two years of the war, the volunteer organizations had to provide their own material for the items they made.
Women on both sides made the biggest and most visible impact on the Civil War through their work in nursing. Many others served as nurses. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first American woman to earn a medical degree, organized 3,000 women in New York City into the Women's Central Association for Relief (W.C.A.R.). Out of the W.C.A.R. came the United States Sanitary Commission, made up of 7,000 local chapters. Volunteers took care of the wounded, and helped reduce the spread of disease in army camps. It became the most important institution created by women during the war.
In June of 1861, Dorothea Dix was appointed superintendent of nurses for the US Army. Dix set a minimum age of 30 for nurses, and specified that they be "plain in appearance," to minimize temptation for soldiers and trouble for nurses. Most of the nurses worked in hospitals, although some, like Mary Ann ("Mother") Bickerdyke, served at battle sites. Initially, women were not allowed on battle sites. Mother Bickerdyke refused to turn back, however. When she was asked on what authority she was acting, she answered: "I am here on the authority of God." She eventually served at nineteen different battle sites.
After Massachusetts troops entered Baltimore, Clara Barton, an employee of the US Patent Office, organized a program for the relief of the soldiers. She began a campaign to raise money for medical supplies, and the US Surgeon General gave her permission to accompany army ambulances and distribute "comforts for the sick and wounded" and help nurse the injured. Barton worked with the sick and wounded for three years, including those at the Wilderness and Bermuda Hundred. Appointed superintendent of nurses in Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler's command, she went on to organize a program to locate soldiers missing in action. By interviewing Union soldiers who returned from Confederate prisons, she was able to establish the status of missing soldiers, and notify their families. In 1881, Barton founded the American Red Cross, which performed many of the tasks she herself had done during the Civil War.
In the Confederacy, women faced more deeply-intrenched traditions which held nursing to be an occupation too indelicate for ladies. Nevertheless, many Southern women organized to care for the wounded. Communities opened up their homes to establish makeshift hospitals for the injured and sick. When military hospitals were set up, however, many women had to struggle before the male surgeons would allow them to help. Sally Tompkins began her own infirmary in Richmond, avoiding the gender conflict. Confederate President Jefferson Davis commissioned her a captain, and "Cap'n Sally" cared for over 1,300 men during the war.
The Civil War may have helped influence the progress of the movement for women's rights. When the war ended and slavery was later abolished; a large number of abolitionists, many of whom were female, lost their focus. Many took up the cause of women's suffrage, which had been going on in earnest only since the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. In addition, the effect of taking so much responsibility in the home front and as nurses and Sanitary Commission workers gave many women a greater taste of social and economic equality than they had ever experienced before. This taste may have helped disprove the female stereotype of frailty and intellectual inferiority in the minds of both men and women.