How did the civil war affect women?
It had a big effect on women on both sides. women on both sides organised relief efforts, in the north the women’s efforts soon became a national organisation, the United States Sanitary Commission, which performed a critical role in providing food and medical services for the soldiers. The necessary supplies “were almost universally collected, assorted, and dispatched and re-collected and re-dispatched, by women, representing with great impartiality every grade of society in the Republic’ sadi Alfred Bloor of the Sanitary commission. In the south, a lot of women were left to run plantations while their husbands were away at the war. Many of them were very unhappy about this, and petitioned the Confederate government to let their husbands come home. many were afraid that, with their husbands gone, their slaves would rise up and kill them. Or just run away. “I dread our house servants going and having to do their work” wrote mary Lee, a Virginia woman whose male slaves ran away in 1862,
