•Susan-Mary Grant Battlefields: Women and the Union

Battlefields: Women and the Union
In her study of women’s writing and the Civil War, Elizabeth Young quotes
Henry Ward Beecher’s declaration that “manhood,—manhood,—
MAN
-
HOOD
, . . . has made this nation She goes onto observe that Lincoln, too,
“offers a fantasy of national self-fathering, in which masculinity circulates as the literary lifeblood, as well as the literal cannon-fodder, of the injured body politic. In the land of the self-made man she notes, the story of national self-division—like the birth of a nation—apparently needs no mothers As a consequence, the focus of studies of the Civil War has been on its male protagonists, be they politicians or soldiers, reproducing a narrative in which Lincoln, his generals, and their privates successfully labor to reunify the nation Warfare is, of course, as Jeanie Attie reminds us,
“naturally gendered juxtaposing masculine qualities of aggressiveness and strength with what are perceived as more feminine nurturing qualities.
The battlefront, in this context, is regarded as a wholly masculine environment, while the home front is feminine. Patriotic propaganda both reinforces and is itself predicated on these distinctions, encouraging men and women to assume gender-appropriate roles to further nationalist objectives.”
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As far as Civil War historiography is concerned, the most obvious outcome of this has been a persistent reluctance to acknowledge that some women actually served in the ranks as soldiers or if the fact is accepted a tendency to dismiss such individuals as cranks. This, according to Deanne
Blanton and Lauren Cook, is very much a twentieth-century perspective that developed in the period following World War I. In the Civil War’s immediate aftermath there was widespread—if not universal—support for women who were revealed as having adopted a male guise and taken up arms for their cause, so long as their motives for doing so were deemed to be romantic and/or patriotic rather than purely economic. However,
by the time that historians such as Bell Wiley and Mary Elizabeth Massey turned their attentions to the subject in the mid-twentieth century, such women were viewed in a less positive light. Wiley described the reaction of their contemporaries to such freaks and distinct types as one of amused tolerance while Massey suggested that female soldiers were seen as
“mentally unbalanced or immoral individuals and concluded that there was no question that many and probably most of the women soldiers were prostitutes or concubines Modern scholarship has challenged this conclusion, and has suggested that contemporary observers sought to emphasize reasons for women soldiers transgressive behavior that provided some comfort moral debasement on the one hand, or love of a man, pure adventuresomeness, and ardent patriotism on the other In part, such negative imagery has held since women’s direct military contribution cannot be deemed to be decisive, so the impulse to challenge the stereotype has, until
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recently, been lacking. Women’s absence from the Civil War’s purely military narrative does not skew the interpretation of tactics and strategy in any significant way—although it does raise the question of how each side maintained an army in the field in the first place.
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The focus of much recent work on female combatants, therefore, is essentially corrective. It aims to highlight, and explore the implications of,
the fact that women took a larger role in the actual fighting of the Civil War than the following index entry—which appeared in a relatively recent study of Civil War soldiers—might suggest women, Confederate treatment of flags made by military camps visited by as widows It is now clear that some women did, in fact, take a combatant role. Exactly how many did so remains a moot point. Civil War nurse Mary Ashton Livermore noted that a figure of about 400 was circulated at the time, but she estimated that to be on the low side. Leonard proposes a figure of anywhere between
500 and 1,000. To put this in some perspective, some 20,000 women served the Union as nurses or general support staff, and over 3,000 nurses were regular employees of Union army. It is worth stressing that neither Wiley nor
Massey dismissed the idea of the female soldier entirely. Wiley discussed a wide selection of women who were discovered disguised as men in the
Union army, and in assessing their motivations for seeking combat concluded that many were inspired by a purely patriotic impulse. Massey, too, took seriously the tendency she noted among Civil War woman to be breaking out in all directions at once, and nothing said to or about them could force them back into the fold . . . Instead of talking about their rights she argued,
“they were usurping them under the cloak of patriotism It is all the more unfortunate, therefore, that in discussing women who chose a combatant role they used such inflammatory words such as freaks and “prostitutes.”
Indeed, the Union general William Rosecrans was exhibiting a more restrained—but recognizably military—sensibility when he expressed no more than his flagrant outrage on the occasion of one of his sergeants giving birth, an act which, he observed,“is in violation of all military law and of the army regulations.”
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Historians have put a great deal of effort into identifying individual women whose combatant role can be verified, including Sarah Emma
Edmonds, Jennie Hodgers, and Sarah Rosetta Wakeman. In the process, of course, some of the more dramatic stories of female valor that did the rounds in the aftermath of the war have taken a bit of a beating. Livermore singled out the actions of both Nadine Turchin and Annie Etheridge, of the 19th
Illinois and rd Michigan, respectively, in her story of the war Turchin,
according to Livermore, took over command of the regiment when her husband, John, fell ill, while Annie Etheridge was found in the field,
often in the thickest of the fight Leonard, however, has stripped away much of the veneer from Livermore’s story of Turchin, noting the improbability
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of her ever being permitted to assume command of the 19th Illinois, and offering evidence from Turchin’s diary that, by 1863 at least, she was not in the habit of joining the troops on the battlefield. At the same time, she does not dismiss the validity of Turchin’s complaint that women were, in her words, Eternal slaves of fatal destiny permitted by men to be everything but intelligent beings authorized to enjoy the rights guaranteed to

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