United States History Student Edition

Battlefield Nurses During the Civil War, thousands of women on both sides served as nurses. The idea of women nurses on the battlefield was a relatively new one, and many doctors did not welcome them. They said that women were too delicate for the bloody work of wartime hospitals. Some men also felt it was improper for women to tend to the bodies of men they did not know. Strong-minded women disregarded these objections. Serving with the Union army, Mary Edwards Walker became the first female army surgeon and later received the Congressional Medal of Honor. Dorothea Dix helped persuade officials to let women work as nurses. She became the superintendent of nurses for the Union army and recruited large numbers of women to serve. Another Northerner, Clara Barton, became famous for her work helping wounded soldiers. After the war, Barton founded the American Red Cross. In the South, Sally Tompkins set up a hospital for soldiers in Richmond, Virginia. Tompkins held the rank of captain in the Confederate army and was the only female officer in the Confederate forces. Susie King Taylor, an African American woman who escaped slavery, served as a nurse among African American troops in South Carolina. In her youth, Taylor had illegally received an education. Besides nursing the wounds of African American soldiers, she taught many of them to read and write. The women who served in wartime hospitals came face-to-face with terrible brutality.

BIOGRAPHY DOROTHEA DIX (1802–1887)

As a young child, Dorothea Dix was sent to live with her grandmother

because her family home was abusive. Later, she suffered from illness and was eventually sent to Europe to recover. There

Thousands of Southern civilians became refugees —people displaced by war. Even those people who lived outside the war zones suffered. As the war dragged on year after year, many areas faced shortages of food and everyday supplies. As one observer noted, the South depended on the outside world “for everything from a hairpin to a toothpick, and from a cradle to a coffin.” The Southern economy relied on selling cash crops, such as rice, tobacco, and cotton, and using the profits from those sales to buy the products they needed. Now, trade with the North had stopped, and the Northern naval blockade limited trade with the rest of the world. Common household items became scarce. Most people had to learn to do without. she met mental health care reformers who inspired her to work to improve mental health care in the United States. She pushed for state reforms and opened several mental asylums. In 1861, Dix became superintendent of women nurses for the Union army. Besides setting up military hospitals, she worked to improve training and career opportunities for military nurses. Dix served until the end of the war without pay. Making Connections Consider the different work Dix completed in her professional and public life. What do these choices reveal about her character?

During the Civil War, more than 2,000 women served as nurses in hospitals on both sides. Most were volunteers.

refugee a person displaced by war

PHOTO: (tl)FLHC 90/Alamy Stock Photo; (br)Fotosearch/Archive Photos/Getty Images; TEXT: (1)Ersatz in the Confederacy, by Mary Elizabeth Massey. Copyright © 1952 by University of South Carolina Press

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