9. Women in the Civil War
The role of women throughout the American Civil War was diverse and widespread. Regardless of whether one was black or white, southern or northern, women were vital in the war efforts. Some were soldiers, nurses, or took control over their farms and families stations that the men usually would.
How to cite this source?
Remedial Herstory Project Editors. "9. WOMEN IN THE CIVIL WAR" The Remedial Herstory Project. November 1, 2025. www.remedialherstory.com.
When one thinks about war, what comes to mind first? Usually, it is soldiers and the political leaders of the time who in the 1860s were all men. As always we ask, “Where are the women?” During the American Civil War, the answer was: everywhere.
The Civil War was fought from April 1861 to April 1865 and began because the United States could no longer remain “half slave and half free” as Lincoln suggested. Southerners were threatened by Lincoln’s election and Northerners were not going to let them undermine a democratic election by seceding.
Women from both the North and the South were important actors in the war. As soon as the first shots rang out at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, women were active on the homefront and the front lines. They immediately assumed the roles of soldiers, couriers, nurses, spies, and caretakers of their homes, farms, and families in the face of severe danger and deprivation.
Leading up to the war, women influenced public opinion on the primary political issues of the time: ending slavery. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was the closest thing to a national bestseller and riled up the north leading to the war. The book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin touched the hearts of readers throughout the North and as far away as London. Queen Victoria is even said to have wept on reading the novel. There’s a famous story that, when he was introduced to Stowe, President Lincoln commented that she was "the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."
The most memorable song of the Civil War was Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Howe heard Union soldiers draft new words onto an old Methodist hymn to create “John Brown’s Body.” She adapted the hymn with words of her own intended to cast the war in moral and religious terms. The song was a popular and invigorating anthem among Union soldiers not only toward victory, but the moral imperative to end slavery.
She said:
“Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His heel,
Since God is marching on. As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free;
While God is marching on.
He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave.”
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Women Soldiers
Once the war began, women from both the North and the South sought to find their place in the war effort.
Neither the Union nor the Confederate military kept adequate records of women who served on the battlefield. This is likely because both sides actually forbade women from enlisting. In 1909, journalist Ida Tarbell inquired about women soldiers and was informed by the Army’s Adjutant General’, C. F. Ainsworth, that no women had fought in the Civil War; however, we know this was not true. Recent estimates indicate that anywhere from 400 to 1,000 women answered the call to arms for either the Union or the Confederacy.
Why did women join the fight? They went to war for the same reason as men. Some believed in the cause of their side, such as Loreta Janeta Velazquez, who revealed in her 1876 memoir that she had served as Lieutenant Harry T. Buford in the Confederate Army for eighteen months. She may have been able to obscure her gender identity because she was an independent soldier not attached to any regiment. She saw herself as a soldier, a spy, and a secret-service agent, dedicated to the cause of the Confederacy.
A few women went to war to be with their loved ones. Florina Budwin enlisted with her husband. They were captured together by Confederate forces and were sent to the horrific prison at Andersonville at the same time. He died there in 1862, and she succumbed to an unspecified illness after being discovered as
female and sent to a more humane prison in 1865. Budwin was one of a very few women who were prisoners of war.
Frances Clalin Clayton was a mother of three from Illinois. She enlisted as “Jack Williams” in order to join her husband in the Union Army. They fought side-by-side until he was killed, then, supposedly, she stepped over his body to continue fighting. She was honored as a veteran.
Some women sought adventure and wanted to do their part by serving their country. Sarah Emma Edmonds enlisted as “Franklin Flint Thompson” and served in the 2nd Michigan infantry regiment. When she first joined the army as Franklin Thompson, she was a male field nurse. In March of 1862, she was assigned to the role of mail carrier. This position allowed her to be involved in several battles without having to be on the battlefield. In August of 1862, during the Battle of Second Manassas, she was forced to ride a mule to deliver messages once her horse was killed. The mule threw her off, causing her to break her leg and suffer internal injuries which plagued her for the rest of her life. However, by Spring of 1863 Edmonds contracted malaria. After being denied furlough “Franklin Thompson” deserted and she resumed life as Emma. She spent the rest of the war volunteering with the United States Christian Commission as a nurse. She wanted to be fully involved in the war effort to serve the Union and was grateful for the chance to fight and not be compelled “to stay home and weep.” After the war she recorded her story as an epic adventure in an autobiographical novel that in some cases seems far-fetched. She wrote, “I was highly commended by the commanding general for my coolness throughout the whole affair, and was told kindly and candidly that I would not be permitted to go out again… I would consequently be hung up to the nearest tree. Not having any particular fancy for such an exalted position… I turned my attention to more quiet and less dangerous duties.”
A small number of people with female genitalia who enlisted in the war continued to live as men after the surrender at Appomattox. Jennie Hodgers enlisted in the 95th Illinois infantry regiment as Albert Cashier. Their identity was not discovered during the war, and they lived the remainder of their life as a man. Cashier received a military pension and spent their final years in a veterans’ home, where the staff found out about their biological gender, and forced them to wear a dress. Cashier was buried in their Union uniform, the casket was draped with the American flag, and was given a full military funeral. The tombstone has both their given name and the name that they chose for themself, Albert Cashier.
Loreta Janeta Velazquez, Public Domain
Annie Anna Etheridge, enfermera de la Guerra Civil, dominio público
Free Women Soldiers
Harriet Tubman served as a nurse, cook and laundress at Union occupied Fort Monroe in Virginia that houses refugee slaves. In June of 1863, Harriet Tubman became the first and only woman to lead a military expedition during the Civil War. She led 150 soldiers on three federal gunboats up the Combahee River in South Carolina to help free slaves from several prominent plantations. Altogether approximately 700 enslaved people were free on this expedition. Throughout the Civil War Tubman served the Union cause as a cook, a nurse, and a spy.
Tubman was paid only $200 for her years of service to the United States. She lived out her life in near poverty but is now remembered as a prominent abolitionist and crusader for women’s rights. Frederick Douglass, perhaps the most well known Black man of the time, wrote this of Tubman’s years on the underground railroad and the war, “Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day – you in the night. I have had the applause of the crowd and the satisfaction that comes of being approved by the multitude, while the most that you have done has been witnessed by a few trembling, scarred, and foot-sore bondmen and women, whom you have led out of the house of bondage, and whose heartfelt, ‘God bless you’ has been your only reward.” She was incredible.
Only a small number of women served in the military as soldiers. Instead, many chose to help through other means such as becoming nurses, teachers, or volunteers with ladies’ aid societies to help support the war effort.
Susie King Taylor, like Harriet Tubman, was previously enslaved. She, like many other African Americans, found herself seeking safety behind Union lines in South Carolina during the early years of the Civil War. She attached herself to the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first Black regiment in the US Army. While she was with them, she acted as laundress and cook, however, she also taught several members of the regiment how to read. Her ability to read and teach others how to read was an invaluable asset to the unit and per Thomas Wentworth Higginson helped create a “love of the spelling book [that] is perfectly inexhaustible".
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Harriet Tubman, Public Domain
Nurses and Doctors
Women such as Harriet Tubman in the North and Phoebe Yates Pember, Louisa McCord, and Ada Bacot in the South accepted employment in hospitals to help care for those wounded on the battlefield. Before the war began and depleted the amount of men available, men were the primary people involved in the field of nursing. During the war though a shift occurred placing women in the role of primary caregivers for wounded and dying soldiers. In the North, white and free Black women brought food, knitted socks, and homemade bandages. They also helped the soldiers write letters, and tended to the wounded, mainly as volunteers. In the Confederacy, enslaved women were required to perform nursing duties while their owners received compensation.
Upper-class white women also volunteered in hospitals, some doing so for income because of the financial losses they endured during the war. Before her wider fame as the author of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott wrote “Hospital Sketches,” published in Commonwealth, and eagerly read by families back at home in the north. Her work documented women’s military service and led to safety protocols in military hospitals.
In June of 1861, a group of private citizens with the support of the federal government created the Sanitary Commission, which was charged with improving the conditions at Union army hospitals. The Commission, which was run by men, collected nearly $15 million in in-kind medical supplies. The medical supplies that they collected were primarily created and provided by women.
Activist Dorothea Dix was appointed to the position of superintendent of nurses for Army hospitals in the Union. She set up a system through which women could volunteer for nursing assignments for three months at a time. Her goals were to train women in medical practices and professionalize nursing. She required that nurses be between 30 and 50 years of age, be physically healthy, and “plain looking.”
The best-known Civil War nurse was Clara Barton, called the “Angel of the Battlefield.” She aided
wounded soldiers in hospitals and made dangerous journeys behind Confederate lines to deliver much-needed supplies to Union army hospitals. When she was asked to defend her activities as unfeminine, she replied, “. . . if you feel that the positions I occupied were rough and unseemly for a woman—I can only reply that they were rough and unseemly for men.” After her service in the Civil War, Barton was instrumental in the founding of the American Red Cross.
The medical needs in the wake of the outbreak of the civil war also opened up the medical profession to more women than ever before. Rebecca Lee Crumpler was a nurse in Charleston, Massachusetts before the war began, during which she studied at the New England Female Medical College. She graduated in February 1864 as the country’s first female African American trained physician. Throughout the course of her career she focused on the health of poor women and children, but also worked for the Freedmen's Bureau in Virginia, where she treated recently enslaved people. Later in life she published A Book of Medical Discourses, one of the first medical treatises written by an African American.
While most women served as nurses, a notable exception was Dr. Mary Edwards Walker. Walker acquired her medical degree in 1855 from Syracuse Medical College. She married another medical student and they ended up opening their own medical practice. The practice and their marriage would both fail–the public had trouble accepting a woman doctor, and Walker refused to say “obey” in their marriage vows.
When the Civil War began, offered her services to the Union Army. Walker was initially denied a formal commission and served as an unpaid volunteer at first. She treated troops on the frontlines near Fredericksburg and Chattanooga. Eventually, in 1863, she would gain an official title: “Contract Acting Assistant Surgeon (Civilian)”--thus making her the first female US Army surgeon in the United States. While attending to her patients, Walker refused to wear the traditionally long dresses that most women wore at the time. She found them cumbersome and instead wore shorter dresses with pants underneath. In 1864, she was captured by Confederate troops and held for four months.
After the War, President Andrew Johnson awarded Walker the Congressional Medal of Honor–making her the first and only woman to receive the award. Walker would go on to become an activist for women’s rights. She, on several occasions, was arrested for wearing “men’s clothes.” Her choice of dress–pants, jackets, and top hats–sometimes drew criticism from other women’s rights activists. Of her wardrobe she said: “I don’t wear men’s clothes, I wear my clothes.” At the beginning of the 20th century, she became quite vocal in the fight for women’s suffrage, and even testified before the US House of Representatives in support of women’s suffrage. It is perhaps because of this activism that she was among those who had their awards revoked when Congress established the Medal of Honor Review Board in 1916.
Female nurses in the Civil War, Public Domain
Spies
Women were effective couriers of military messages, and they were very good spies, in part because most men, and many women, did not think women were capable of such dangerous activity. Rose O’Neal Greenhow was a wealthy Washington D. C. socialite whose social circle included Union officers. She listened as they discussed military operations and forwarded information to Confederate generals, using a network of volunteers, including her own daughter.
When Greenhow learned of Union plans to attack at Manassas in July of 1861, she sent courier Belle Duvall to General P. T. E. Beauregard with valuable information, helping the Confederates to thwart the attack in the first Battle of Bull Run. Greenhow was arrested and sent to prison later in 1861 but was still able to send messages to Confederate officers. She was released in 1862 and traveled to Europe on a diplomatic mission to raise funds for the Confederacy.
Isabella “Belle” Boyd was an effective Confederate spy. She gained notoriety by killing a drunken Union soldier who invaded her Virginia home in July of 1861. Boyd eavesdropped on a conversation among Union officers in May of 1862 and conveyed valuable strategic information to General Stonewall Jackson at considerable personal risk. A few months later, she was incarcerated but quickly released. Like “Wild Rose” Greenhow, Boyd served as a Confederate emissary to England in 1864.
The Union also had its share of female spies. Born in Richmond, Elizabeth Van Lew held strong abolitionist views, convincing her brother to free the family’s slaves in 1843. Elizabeth and her mother visited Union captives in Richmond’s Libby Prison, bringing food and medicine. The women also helped Union soldiers escape. Van Lew developed a web of spies who sent messages to Union officers revealing Confederate battle plans. She got past Confederate troops by hiding messages in hollowed-out eggs or by sewing them into the hem of her skirts. After the war, President Grant appointed Van Lew Postmaster of Richmond.
Freedwomen were some of the best informants. Southerners thought so little of their enslaved women that they would openly discuss strategy and leave maps laying about. Women would soak in that knowledge and flee to the Union lines full of rich intelligence.
Probably the most fascinating Black woman spy was an unnamed woman who served the Confederates as a laundress in Virginia just across the way from where Union soldiers were stationed. She would hang the literal dirty laundry of Confederate soldiers in such a way to provide a code that her husband on the other side would interpret.
On the home front, women stepped into new roles as proprietors of farms, businesses, and plantations in the absence of their husbands and other male relatives. In the North, women supervised the planting, tending, and harvesting of crops with the aid of their children and elderly relatives. They completed these tasks in addition to their regular jobs as cooks, seamstresses, and mothers. Many helped to supply the Union Army with food.
Rose O'Neal Greenhow, dominio público
Mujeres trabajando en el Arsenal de EE. UU., recargando cartuchos durante la Guerra Civil, Dominio público
Impact of War on Southern White Women
When the Massachusetts Bay Colony was settled, people came mainly in families. 17 women were aboard the Mayflower that landed at an abandoned Wompanoag village on Cape Cod in 1620. We do not know their thoughts upon landing. But we do know that Dorothy Bradford, the governor’s wife, fell overboard in the bay. Bradford barely recorded his wife’s death, writing “Death. Dec. 7. Dorothy, Wife to Mr. William Bradford.” Was she so distraught from the journey? Was she horrified at the cold New England scene? Was she longing for her life back home and the son she left behind? Did she commit suicide? Historians may never know. We do know that Mary Chilton, a 13-year old, was the first English woman to disembark.
In what would become the Massachusetts Bay colony, the first settlers were a mix of religious separatists and Puritans. The colony functioned largely like a Puritan theocracy. Women, daughters of the biblical Eve who “corrupted Adam” into eating the apple, did not have the right to question their male heads of house.
Nevertheless, women had to eschew traditional gender roles and ideals in order for the colony to survive. They worked the land, did construction, and ran businesses– things their sisters in England would have been appalled by. ten percent of people involved in trade in Boston were women– mostly widows.
Elizabeth Poole purchased land from the Wompanoag and was a stockholder in the ironworks. Many businesses that were “run by men” were actually run by their wives while they traveled.
Some women did not take kindly to the Puritan leadership’s treatment of women and began standing against the government. Perhaps most notable was Anne Hutchinson. Like many women of her time, Hutchinson gave birth to over a dozen children. She was not formally educated, but learned to read and write. Hutchinson was forty-three years old when she arrived in Boston from England in 1634. As a midwife, Hutchinson developed strong ties to local women and began holding meetings in her home. She became a spiritual leader and stood against the all-male authority which was a challenge to acceptable gender roles. She gained a following of both men and women by questioning Puritan teachings about salvation.
When church and community leaders became aware of her popularity and the content of her preaching, she was put on trial for heresy. Oddly, the trial did not condemn her for her religious ideas, but rather, took issue with the fact that those ideas were coming from a woman.
In the trial, Governor Winthrop said, “Mrs. Hutchinson, you are called here as one of those that have troubled the peace of the commonwealth…you are known to be a woman that hath had a great share in the promoting and divulging of those opinions that are the cause of this trouble…and you have maintained a meeting and an assembly in your house that hath been condemned by the general assembly as a thing not tolerable…in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex.”
At a time when men ruled and women were expected to remain silent, Hutchinson asserted her right to preach and overstepped her presumed place “as a woman”. Hutchinson’s husband supported her, but her former mentor, Reverend John Cotton, turned on her, describing her meetings as a “promiscuous and filthy coming together of men and women…” Hutchinson was excommunicated and their family was banished from the colony– forced to move away. Eventually, she and her children were killed in a raid by Native Americans, which some people think was provoked by the Puritans.
Hutchinson was a popular figure and many notable women were moved to her cause, including Mary Dyer. Dyer who joined Hutchinson and was thus expelled with her. Prior to expulsion, Dyer had given birth to a stillborn baby in Massachusetts. After she left, Governor Winthrop had the baby’s body exhumed and examined. He wrote a description of the baby’s deformed body and had it sent around the English world as evidence of God’s punishment for Hutchinson and Dyer’s heresy. At the time, many Puritans believed in the idea that “monstrous births”, or the births of children with varying levels of deformity or defect such as to label them “monstrous” were manifestations of the mother’s “sickness”. In this case, Dyer’s heretical behavior.
Dyer left New England and converted to Quakerism. She became a preacher, which was allowed within the Quaker faith, and returned to New England to protest a new law that banned Quakers in 1657. She traveled
"The Dukes Plan," by Robert Holmes, British Library. A decorative map showing the English fleet sailing into New Amsterdam in 1664.
Through New England preaching, and was eventually arrested. She would go on to be arrested, tried, and banished numerous times. Once, two Quakers were hung next to her, and she was spared because she was a woman. She was banished from Massachusetts, but Dyer was unrelenting. Despite pleas from her husband and family, she traveled again to Massachusetts, was arrested, and was there hung for her religious beliefs and actions. Her last words were, “Nay, I came to keep bloodguiltiness from you, desiring you to repeal the unrighteous and unjust law made against the innocent servants of the Lord. Nay, man, I am not now to repent."
Conclusión
Ya sea trabajando como soldados, espías, voluntarias, enfermeras o en el hogar, las mujeres participaron activamente en el esfuerzo bélico. Estas mujeres demostraron una enorme valentía y fuerza al apoyar tanto a la Unión como a la Confederación. Las mujeres del Norte apoyaron a la Unión y su misión de abolir la esclavitud. Las mujeres del Sur apoyaron a sus hombres en la lucha por los derechos de los estados, en particular el derecho a poseer esclavos.
Las mujeres fueron actores importantes en la guerra más devastadora de Estados Unidos. En ambos bandos del conflicto, como unionistas o confederadas, apoyaron los esfuerzos de sus tropas, mantuvieron la vida en casa en las peores circunstancias y cuidaron a los hombres heridos y moribundos de ambos bandos.
Al final de esta era, aún quedaban muchas dudas. ¿Cómo se reunificaría la nación? ¿Qué derechos se les otorgarían a los exesclavos y a las mujeres que trabajaron incansablemente al servicio de la nación? ¿Cómo honrarían las mujeres sureñas a sus seres queridos fallecidos y cómo esto crea la imagen de la Confederación que vemos hoy?
