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The activist Dorothea Dix, the superintendent of Army nurses, put out a call for responsible, maternal volunteers who would not distract the troops or behave in unseemly or unfeminine ways: Dix insisted that her nurses be “past 30 years of age, healthy, plain almost to repulsion in dress and devoid of personal attractions.” (One of the most famous of these Union nurses was the writer Louisa May Alcott.)

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Working-class white women and free and enslaved African-American women worked as laundresses, cooks and “matrons,” and some 3,000 middle-class white women worked as nurses.

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Nearly 20,000 women worked more directly for the Union war effort.

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By war’s end, the Sanitary Commission had provided almost $15 million in supplies–the vast majority of which had been collected by women–to the Union Army.

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They, too, cooked and sewed for their boys. They provided uniforms, blankets, sandbags and other supplies for entire regiments. They wrote letters to soldiers and worked as untrained nurses in makeshift hospitals. They even cared for wounded soldiers in their homes.

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women are amazing in all ways

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Many Southern women, especially wealthy ones, relied on slaves for everything and had never had to do much work. However, even they were forced by the exigencies of wartime to expand their definitions of “proper” female behavior.

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Working-class white women had a similar experience: While their husbands, fathers and brothers fought in the Army, they were left to provide for their families on their own.

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In addition to their own plantation and household labor, many slave women had to do the work of their husbands and partners too

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Slave women were, of course, not free to contribute to the Union cause. Moreover, they had never had the luxury of “true womanhood” to begin with: As one historian pointed out, “being a women never saved a single female slave from hard labor, beatings, rape, family separation, and death.” The Civil War promised freedom, but it also added to these women’s burden.

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During the Civil War, women especially faced a host of new duties and responsibilities. For the most part, these new roles applied the ideals of Victorian domesticity to “useful and patriotic ends.” However, these wartime contributions did help expand many women’s ideas about what their “proper place” should be.

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White women in the South threw themselves into the war effort with the same zeal as their Northern counterparts.

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By the end of the war, these experiences had expanded many Americans’ definitions of “true womanhood.”

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More than 400 women disguised themselves as men and fought in the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War.

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During the Civil War, however, American women turned their attention to the world outside the home. Thousands of women in the North and South joined volunteer brigades and signed up to work as nurses.

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North and South joined volunteer brigades and signed up to work as nurses. It was the first time in American history that women played a significant role in a war effort.