User:MEParker/sandbox

The Civil War was generally a time of challenges to traditional gender norms, as women mobilized themselves to participate in the war effort and left the home in droves to serve as charity workers, nurses, clerks, farm labourers, and political activists. Across the Confederacy, upper-class women assembled all-female home guard militias, drilling firearms usage and training to protect their plantations, properties, and neighbourhoods from Union invasion. Military training became mandatory at some private girls’ academies. One female militia in LaGrange, Georgia--a uniquely militarily vulnerable city, poised halfway between the industrial powerhouse of Atlanta and the original Confederate capital at Montgomery, Alabama--engaged in diplomatic negotiations with the invading Union army in April 1865, using the threat of violence to obtain a promise that their city would not be ransacked. As concerted a challenge to gender norms as these all-female militias would seem to pose, however, the participants were careful to otherwise keep well within gender norms, and to avoid the impression of usurping male protective roles.

The most dramatic and extreme challenge to gender roles, then, came with those women who participated in the Civil War as fully-enlisted combatants. Though not particularly well-known today, it is estimated that there are over 1000 women who enlisted in both the Union and Confederate armies under assumed male identities. The female soldiers were not operating within a vacuum, responding blindly to the stimulus of war. Unlike the members of the all-female militias, the female enlisted soldiers were drawn disproportionately from working- and lower-middle-class backgrounds--and therefore represented a radically different cultural milieu. Mid-nineteenth-century working-class culture, for example, was generally familiar--if not comfortable--with female cross-dressing, with the phenomenon being prominently featured in popular theatrical and literary pieces with mass audiences.

Women had different motivations for joining the army, just as did their male counterparts. A common reason was to escape pre-arranged marriages. Sarah Edmonds, for example, left her home in maritime Canada and fled to the United States to avoid marriage--but took the ultimate protective step of dressing as a man and enlisting in the Union Army to avoid detection. Loreta Janeta Velazquez, on the other hand, was driven to enlist by more personal motivations; inspired by the example of Joan of Arc and other historical women warriors, she was idealistic about feminine potential on the battlefield, insisting that,“when women have rushed to the battlefield, they have invariably distinguished themselves.” Sarah Rosetta Wakeman had been living as a man long before the outbreak of the war, hoping to find better-paying work on the riverboats of New York rather than as a female domestic servant. She was, therefore, compelled to enlist by an economic imperative; the prospect of steady pay as an enlisted soldier in the Union Army appeared to be preferable to the instability of day labour. Whatever the original motivations of the individual female soldiers, however, they ultimately took part in the war on similar terms as their male brothers-in-arms.

The existence of illicit female soldiers was an open secret in both the wartime Union and Confederacy, with stories commonly shared in both soldiers’ letters and newspaper articles. Awareness trickled out into the general public--and civilians were duly fascinated by these women warriors. This curiosity is reflected in the literature of the period. Wartime romance novels idealised these women as heroines sacrificing themselves for love of country and menfolk, while Frank Moore’s popular 1866 history Women and the Civil War: Their Heroism and Their Sacrifice prominently featured an entire chapter on the female soldiers of the war. Although it establishes the fact that women warriors were clearly objects of curiosity for the American public, Moore significantly softened and romanticised their experiences in order to make them more palatable to a general audience. For instance, Moore refers to one particular female soldier as an “American Joan of Arc”, attempting to frame her wartime exploits within a recognisable paradigm of holy war and divine inspiration.

Regardless of generally warm popular opinion, however, female soldiers actually faced significant suspicion and opposition from within the armies themselves. Female soldiers were generally successful at physically disguising themselves; their shorter height, higher voices, and lack of facial hair escaped comment in an army heavily dominated by adolescent boys, while their own feminine shapes could be obscured through breast-binding. Recruits deemed to be of ambiguous gender, for example, were often subjected to improvised tests to check their gendered responses. One such test was to toss a soldier an apple; if he held out his shirttails to catch the apple as if in an apron, he would be deemed to be a woman, and would be subject to further investigation. Female soldiers who were most successful at blending into military life were those who had been presenting as male even before they had enlisted: Sarah Wakeman, for example, had been living as a man and working on canal boats in New York prior to joining the Union army, while Jennie Hodgers had likewise assumed a masculine identity long before the outbreak of the war.

Women who passed the scrutiny of their fellow soldiers, however, were nonetheless expected to perform to the same standard--and so female soldiers largely blended in with their male fellows-in-arms, performing the same duties with fairly minimal risk of exposure. Those who were caught typically were exposed while wounded and receiving medical care in battlefront hospitals. Others, however, escaped detection for the entire war, and returned home to resume their normal lives and feminine gender expression--with a few notable exceptions. Female veteran Sarah Edmonds, the runaway Canadian bride, lived under the masculine identity of Franklin Thompson for the rest of her life, and even was granted a pension for her service by Congress in 1886, while Jennie Hodgers continued living as Albert Cashier before being discovered and forced back into feminine dress after having been institutionalized for dementia in 1913. The participation of so many women in the Civil War, however, was an uncomfortable subject for the US Army for many decades; the fact of female service was officially denied by the army until well in the twentieth century.