What was the role of women during the American Civil War?
Many women served as nurses, about 3,000 women held paid nursing positons, and many thousands of others wroekd as volunteers. “The war is certainly ours as well as men’s” said Kate Cummings of Mobile, Alabama, who became the matron of a large Confederate hospital. Women frequently wound up working in conditions that were not much less dangerous than those on the battle lines. They nursed under artillery fire or served in hospitals for soldiers with communicable diseases like smallpox. women in both the North and South organised relief efforts, and the Northern Women’s relief 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. Although men still occupied the top jobs in the commission, women had a great many managerial duties. The necessary supplies were “almost universally collected, assorted, and dispatched, and re-collected, re-assorted, and re-dispatched, by women
