Female Soldiers of the Civil War
In some areas of the country, local women formed Home Guard units in order to protect the homefront while the men and boys were gone. Some of these groups consisted only of teenagers and young women, who practiced and drilled and made their own uniforms to look like those worn by male soldiers.
When the war first began, it is written that most of the women enlisted in order to be close to their husbands, sweethearts, or brothers. They probably didn’t think about the hardships they would encounter in camp, on the march, or in battle. This was not an easy thing they chose to do—to disguise themselves as men and enlist in the army.
Even the women who nursed the wounded in the Civil War hospitals, didn’t have an easy time of it. They were ridiculed and called impure. The women who chose to fight were treated more harshly, accused of being insane, and sometimes disowned by their families.
Some of these women were discovered and discharged from the army. Others were allowed to remain. Some served through the entire war and were never found out. Jennie Hodgers, a native of Ireland, took the name of Albert Cashier, and not only served through the entire war—she posed as a man her entire life, and was only discovered near the end of her life.
All of these women took masculine names. They cut their hair short, wore pants, bound their breasts, and learned to swear and walk like men. Their gender was often not discovered unless they were severely wounded. Some were killed in battle, and only then was their sex revealed.
In the early stages of the war, women soldiers were praised by the press. The escapades of cousins Mary and Mollie Bell were reported in the Richmond newspapers. The Bells, aliases Bob Martin and Tom Parker, were teenaged farm girls from Virginia, whose uncle had left them to join the Union army. The girls enlisted in a cavalry regiment under the command of Confederate General Jubal A. Early. With the help of their captain, the Bells served for two years before their gender was discovered.
Mary Livermore, a member of the Sanitary Commission, was instrumental in helping discover a female soldier in an Illinois regiment. Mary wrote: “One of the captains came to me and begged to know if I noticed anything peculiar in the appearance of one of the men, whom he indicated. It was evident at a glance that the ‘man’ was a young woman in male attire, and I said so.
“The young woman was called out of the ranks, but begged the officer to allow her to remain and keep her disguise as she had enlisted with her husband's company to be with him. She was escorted out of camp. That night she leaped into the Chicago River in an attempted suicide.
“She was rescued by a policeman and when Livermore met her again she said: ‘I have only my husband in all the world, and when he enlisted he promised me that I should go with him; and that was why I put on his clothes and enlisted in the same regiment. And go with him I will, in spite of everybody.’”
A Sandusky Ohio newspaper reported in December 1864 that a baby was born to a female Confederate officer who was then imprisoned at Johnson’s Island in Lake Erie.
Mary Owens was discovered to be a woman after she was wounded in the arm. She returned to her home in Pennsylvania to a warm reception. She had served for eighteen months under the alias John Evans.
Frances Hook, aka Frank Martin, enlisted with her brother in Illinois. She was wounded at the Battle of Stones River, Tennessee, in December 1862. Her sex was discovered, and she was mustered out of the Union Army. She re-enlisted several times, as did other women soldiers who were discovered.
Sarah Emma Edmonds, a native of Canada, alias Franklin Thompson, enlisted in the Second Michigan Infantry in May 1861. Her regiment participated in the Peninsula campaign and the battles of First Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Antietam. She deserted in April 1863 because she contracted malaria and feared that if she were hospitalized she would be found out.
The actions of these Civil War women flew in the face of nineteenth-century society's portrayal of women as frail, subordinate, and passive. Recent chroniclers have begun to note the gallantry of women soldiers during the war.
Simply because they didn’t fit the traditional female role, they shouldn’t be excluded from historical writings. And while many of these women accompanied the men closest to them to war, we shouldn’t assume that they were any less patriotic or less committed to their countries than their male counterparts.
Copyright © 2006 Maggie MacLean
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