Thousands of Confederate relief workers were slave women, and later contrabands, who found work in Union hospitals from Kentucky down to Louisiana and from Maryland down to Georgia. We have no reason to believe that Confederate women constituted a smaller percentage of the hospital force in the South, which suggests that as many as 10,000 or more women did similar work there. The tabulation of these dusty index cards revealed that more than 21,000 women alone had been on Union payrolls as nurses, cooks, matrons, laundresses, seamstresses, waitresses, and chambermaids. At the National Archives, I discovered, among other treasures, the Carded Service Records of Union Hospital Attendants. Historians have told us from 1865 on that several thousand women served as nurses in hospital, camp, and battlefield in the Civil War. Myth 2: Only several thousand women served as nurses in hospital, camp, and battlefield.
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Among them were women like Hannah Ropes, active in the abolition movement in Massachusetts, who had been out to “bleeding” Kansas in the 1850s and Abby Hopper Gibbons, a New York Quaker, who had been involved in numerous philanthropic initiatives for free blacks and later contrabands. Obviously, more women stayed home producing goods and laboring on their farms than went to war, but the significant group of women who chose this more active military role believed that they were representative American women who could volunteer their institutional and domestic knowledge on behalf of soldiers. But the more significant group were domestic laborers, the thousands who provided hospital relief services in urban centers, military camps, and the field. The stories of the several hundred women passing as soldiers in the ranks are intriguing and suggest the extent to which gender was a more permeable category of identity in the 19 th century than we might once have believed. Myth 1: The most significant role of women during the Civil War was as soldiers-in-cognito. We are now able to dispel ten common myths about women’s roles in the Civil War. Twenty-five years ago, when I began to contemplate a dissertation topic concerning women’s work on Civil War battlefields, a prominent historian asked me, “ Were there any women at the front?” Since then, historians have documented the lives of women immersed in military operations in camp, field, and hospital, and have expanded the notion of “the front” to bring into range women whose households were situated in battle zones.