CWL---The Civil War's Women Nurses: Humanitarian. Moral. But Professional?

The Inhospitable Hosptial: Gender and Professionalism in Civil War Medicine, Jane E. Schultz, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and History, 17:2 [1992], pp. 363-392.

The enthusiastic embrace by women of the benevolent organization, especially those focusing upon the health concerns of soldiers, was remarkable during the American Civil War. In the hospitals of the Union and the Confederacy, 20,000 women served. Enslaved and free black women, upper class white widows, farm women, and others served as nurses, matrons, cooks and laundresses provided paid, forced, and unpaid labor. Schultz's review of several hundred published and archived diaries, memoirs and letter collection reveals that female nursing evolved during a trend of increasing medical professionalism which was guided by men. (364-365)

In military hospitals, personal interactions of brought forth coping strategies by women. Their avoidance of the 'medical models of professionalism was a protest against male authority' that after the war were embraced. After the war in hospital training schools placed nurses at the bottom of the hierarchy. Obedience and discipline were principles were emphasized in the curriculum. Dissent and protest was not encourage among nursing students. Schultz focuses not on the post-war emerging professionalism of nursing, but the behavior of nurses that emerged as conflicts arose between male surgeons and female attendants regarding corruption, bureaucratic inhumanity and morality in Civil War hospitals. (365-366).

Between June 1861 and October 1863, Dorothea Dix appointed 3,200 women to nursing positions. In October 1863, the surgeon general allowed surgeons to appoint nurses. Frequently chosen by surgeons were Catholic nuns who would not be paid and required very little in regard to housing. Vows of poverty and self-sacrifice along with experience in asylums and orphanages seemed to suit the nature of nursing as it was recognized by doctors. Female U.S. Sanitary Commission agents at time assumed nursing duties on hospital transport boats and ships. The Union paid female nurses 40 cents a day and one ration. Cooks and laundresses earned between six and ten dollars a month. (336-367)

Untypical but noteworthy are Esther Hill Hawks and Mary Edwards Walker, both educated by medical colleges. It was inconcievable for a women to have military rank yet both performed service. Hawks tended to black federal soldiers in South Carolina and Walker performed emergency medical services at Fredericksburg in December 1862 and later Chickamauga in September 1863. The Confederacy established a pay scale for female nurses, yet it appears that most Confederate nurses provided temporary and unpaid services. (368-369)

Nurses' duties consisted of keeping clean patients with their beds and clothes, preparing and serving food and perscriptions ordered by the surgeon, and writing for and pass time with them. Military hospitals were plagued by cascading issues. Chief among was the issue of relating the early 18th century mindset of allopathic medicine to the emerging mid-19th century mindset of homeopathic medicine. Additional issues included military rank, hospital inspectors, medical competency examinations and graft among vendors and quartermasters. (370-373)

Women entered situations in which 'status anxious' poorly supplied and trained surgeons. These doctors declared that the best service to be done by women be at the bottom of the chain of command. Ratios of doctors to patients, nurses to surgeons, male nurses to female nurses created difficult situations particular to the size of the hospital. Schultz believes the small hospital homes of Richmond held fewer bureaucratic dilemmas than the larger general and pavilion hospitals like Chimborazo in Richmond. The post-war memoir by Phoebe Yates Pember reveal this. Jane Stuart Woolsey, a nurse at Washington DC hospital offered a similar reflection on her experience. (373-374)

Image Source: Civil War Nurses

On June 25

On this day in ...
... 1898, ending a often-snowy journey begun in Vancouver in May, the 9-member Salvation Army Field Force at right, which included 2 women, Ensign Rebecca Ellery, a missionary, and Lieutenant Matilda Aitken, a nurse (middle row, left and right, respectively), arrived in Dawson City, Yukon, Canada, to provide food, shelter, and medical services to Klondike gold miners. (photo credit) The mission they started endured until 1912.


(Prior June 25 posts are here, here, and here.)

Remembering women in service

On this Memorial Day, we note a recent discovery:
In a corner of Washington's Arlington National Cemetery stands the Women in Military Service for American Memorial, "the only major national memorial in our nation's history to honor and pay tribute to all servicewomen of the United States Armed Forces — past, present and future." (photo credit)
Dedicated in 1997, the 4-acre monument, including glass tablets and a reflecting pool, lies at the cemetery's Ceremonial Entrance. Inside may be found a computer database about a quarter-million of the 2 million women who've served, as well as multimedia exhibits including photographs (like that at right of Margaret (Zane) Fleming, an Army nurse at a Korean War MASH unit), recordings, and items used by U.S. servicewomen throughout the centuries.

On May 21

On this day in ...
... 1780 (230 years ago today), a daughter, Elizabeth, was born into a banking family in Norwich, England. They were "'relaxed'" Quakers, dressing in clothes more colorful and fashionable than was typical for their denomination. Over time she grew more serious, married and gave birth to 11 children. Elizabeth Fry became renowned for her work in English prisons, among them Newgate, where women were detained. Among her achievements was an end to shackling of women convicts during transport. She founded a prisoners' aid society and testified before Parliament. Her work extended beyond prison reform to include aid for the poor, training of nurses, rights for women, and abolition of the death penalty. As posted, societies bearing her name continue to work toward these goals. Fry's been depicted on Britain's £5 note (above right) since 2002. (credit)


(Prior May 21 posts are here, here, and here)

On March 12

On this day in ...
... 1862, Jane Delano (left) was born in Schuyler County, New York, and soon after lost her father, a casualty of the Civil War. Following a short stint at teaching, she enrolled in the Bellevue Training School for Nurses, graduating in 1886. Her reason?

I think the nurse's profession is a fine one, and I like it.

Delano not only practiced but also taught nursing. She served as superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps from 1909 to 1912, and then founded the American Red Cross Nursing Service, which tended to those injured in World War I. During an inspection of conditions in postwar France, she contracted an ear infection and died in 1919 at a base hospital. She's buried in Washington's Arlington Cemetery.

(Prior March 12 posts are here, here, and here)

On December 17

On this day in ...
... 1996, nurses from New Zealand, Canada, Spain, and Norway, plus a Dutch architect -- all 6 Red Cross aid workers -- were "shot dead as they slept in a hospital in Chechnya," a civil-war-torn region of Russia. The killers were "masked men" who invaded the hospital 11 miles southwest of Grozny at 4 in the morning. The site was "clearly marked" as a "Red Cross centre." No public trial of accused ever was held; the purported mastermind was killed "in a rebel bomb attack" 5 years later.

(Prior December 17 posts are here and here.)

On May 19

On this day in ...
... 1918, No. 1 Canadian Hospital, Canadian Army Medical Corps, in Étaples, France, was bombed by German airplanes. As a result of the air raid 25-year-old Katherine Maude MacDonald became the first Canadian nurse to die in action, during World War I. MacDonald (right) had graduated from the nursing school at Victoria Hospital in London, Ontario, and worked for as a private nurse before traveling to England to become a military nurse. (photo credit) She would receive a military funeral, burial in Étaples Military Cemetery, and posthumous award of the British War Medal and the Victory Medal.
... 1967, the Soviet Union ratified a treaty banning nuclear weapons in outer space. The Soviet Union, the United States, and Britain had signed what's commonly called the Outer Space Treaty -- known in full as the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies -- in Moscow on January 27th of the same year. The U.S. Senate had approved it 88-0 in April; in full, 79 states had signed the treaty in interim months. Entry into force awaited ratification by Britain and 2 additional states. That would occur on October 10, 1967. (photo credit)

(Prior May 19 posts are here and here.)

On February 19

On this day in ...
... 1881, to give effect to an amendment to the state constitution the previous year, legislators made Kansas the 1st state in the Union to outlaw alcoholic beverages. Among those at the forefront of this Kansas temperance movement was the hatchet-wielding activist Carrie Nation (left).
... 1897, in Stoney Creek, Ontario, a 40-year-old woman whose infant son had died after drinking impure milk, Adelaide Hunter Hoodless (below right), founded the Federation of Women's Institutes of Canada -- motto, "For Home and Country" -- for which a primary goal was the pasteurization of milk. A onetime student at the Ladies College not far from the farm where she grew up, Hoodless wrote a textbook entitled Public School Domestic Science. She also would help found the National Council of Women, the Victorian Order of Nurses, and the YWCA in Canada. She died in 1910.

(Prior February 19 posts here and here.)

On July 31

On this day in ...

... 1998 (10 years ago today), Britain announced that it would ban the use of landmines unconditionally. Legislation passed a month earlier "after public pressure to do so" -- would have permitted "British troops to deploy mines in 'exceptional circumstances.'" On this day, however, that exception was removed. This paved the way for British ratification, on this same day, of the 1997 treaty banning landmines; that is, the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer or Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction. Britain's action came a month before the 1st anniversary of the death of Princess Diana, a vocal advocate of the treaty.

... 1811, Janie Currie Blaikie Hoge was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A welfare worker, fundraiser, and wartime nurse, she worked to recruit other nurses to care for wounded Union troops during the Civil War. Hoge wrote of her work in The Boys in Blue (1867) (left). Following the war, she helped to establish the Evanston College for Ladies. Among the leaders of the college was temperance advocate and suffragist Frances E.C. Willard; when the institution merged with Northwestern University, Willard became dean of the university's Women's College.

Research----Worth a Dozen Men: Women, Nursing and Medical Care During the American Civil War; Dissertation In Search of a Publisher

Worth a Dozen Men: Women, Nursing and Medical Care During the American Civil War, Libra Rose Hilde, Harvard University, 2003.

CWL--- I am probably one of a small group who periodically search Dissertation Abstracts to find new scholarship on the Civil War. Also, I am one of a even smaller group who actually borrow dissertations through inter-library loan and read a few chapters of a dissertation just for fun; dissertations are not indexed, so I read chapters. Well, what can I say? I am like that. And yes, I do read the 30+ page bibliographies.

Jane E. Schultz's, Women at the Front: Hospital Workers In Civil War America (2004) looks broadly at women, such as laundresses, cooks, matrons and nurses in soldiers' hospitals during the war. Libra Rose Hilde's dissertation, Worth A Dozen Men, focuses on nursing during wartime. The nursing profession, its ideals and it practical applications provide the focus of the first 130 pages of the dissertation. The social changes which the profession of nursing passed through are presented in the next 400+ pages. The movement of females into the nursing profession, the conflicts male doctors and female nurses, and the emotional support of female nurses for male patients are thoroughly presented.

Hilde's tenth chapter stands as a nice complement to Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering (2008). 'Far From Home and Mother: Death in Civil War Hospitals' begins with Ada Babcock's diary entry. "There was another death . . . he was very much frightened, & I am told wept nearly all day yesterday. I am so sorry I did not know it, I would have gone to him & tryed [sic] to ease his last moments." Also, Chapter 7, Women's work in Civil War Hospitals, stands well by itself. "The traditional female roles shaped middle and upper class women's official duties in the South. Expectations regarding motherhood, domestic nursing, and female sympathy and piety determined a typical suite of unofficial duties that women . . . from ward nurses to chief matrons, added to their daily routine." (p. 315)

"Middle and upper class Southern women frequently lacked experience with the more basic labor involved in their positions. Suddenly place in charge of a kitchen and feeding hundreds of men, Phoebe Pember quickly adapted despite unfamiliarity handling certain types of food. "For the first time I cup up with averted eyes a raw bird . . . .' " (p. 323) The chapters I read frequently use anecdotes similar to Pembers' to illustrate the the point being made.

A small or large publisher, looking for a an item in the Civil War field, would do well to examine Hilde's dissertation for a book length or booklet length publication.

Photo: Nurses and Officers of the U.S. Christian Commission at Fredericksburg, Virginia. Library of Congress

On this day

On March 26, ...
... 1953 (55 years ago today), U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao was born in Taipei, Taiwan. Her family emigrated when she was 8; she attended high school in Long Island, New York, and eventually earned an M.B.A. degree from Harvard. Before assuming her present position in 2001, Chao'd served as Director of the Peace Corps from 1991-92. Appointed to lead the Labor Department in 2001, Chao's the 1st Asian-American woman ever appointed to the Cabinet of a U.S. President.
... 1888 (120 years ago today), Elsa Brändström was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. The daughter of a Swedish diplomat, during World War I she was moved, upon seeing Germans held as prisoners of war in Russia, to become a nurse. The care she gave those POWs earned her the nickname "Angel of Siberia" and, in 1951, posthumous recognition on a German stamp (right). Having moved to Germany after the war, when Adolf Hitler took power she and her husband fled to the United States, where they helped to care for European refugees. She died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a few weeks shy of her 60th birthday.

On October 8, ...

... 2004, Kenyan environmentalist Dr. Wangari Maathai became the 1st African woman ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize. As early as 1976 she had advocated the planting of trees as part of a Green Belt Movement (about which she's written the book at left); 30 million were planted across the continent. A parliamentarian and professor, she is also an activist for women's rights.
... 1643, Jeanne Mance (right), 39, opened the Hôtel Dieu, the 1st hospital in Montréal and the 1st lay hospital anywhere in North America. Herself the continent's 1st lay nurse, Mance cared for indigenous Canadians and French settlers until her death in 1673. (photo of stained-glass window depicting Mance © Religieuses Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph and Hôtel-Dieu du Centre Hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal)