February 20, 1865---"And ain't I a woman?"

FEBRUARY 20, 1865:       

Well-known violinist Camilla Urso (1840-1902), Prima Donna Madame Varian, Pianists Teresa Carreno and Edward Hoffman, and Signor Fellini, Baritone, all appear for the first of three Grand Concerts at Niblo’s Saloon in New York City. Tickets are $1.00. Reserved seats are 50 cents extra.  Urso was a child prodigy who played with both the New York and Boston Philharmonics during her career. Although she had been a resident of Nashville before the war she never returned to the South for any extended period of time after the war. She is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. 

Mollie Bean, who had fought at Gettysburg and been wounded (twice) as a member of the 47^th North Carolina (C.S.) Regiment while dressed as a male, is interrogated by Union officers after having been captured on February 17^th.  Declaring her “manifestly crazy,” they incarcerate Bean, who is charged with espionage for lack of evidence of any other wrongdoing. 

Of all segments of the American population during the Civil War conditions changed more for women than for any other group (possibly excepting slaves). As late as the 1850s, most women could not be property owners in most States --- property was held “in trust” for even adult and elderly women by their “nearest male relatives” no matter how distant or strained the relationship. 

This Old World legal approach changed as America expanded westward. On the frontier, the death of a male spouse by mischance or disease or Indian attack, or alternately, abandonment of wives and children, put tremendous pressure on the old system. Often, the “nearest male relative” of a widowed or abandoned woman with offspring was a thousand miles distant. Communications were poor, and male relations “back East” had no idea how to manage, and little interest in managing, unseen frontier properties with which they were completely unfamiliar. Thus, Western States began granting limited property rights, first to widows and then to abandoned females with children, although male authorities such as Judges and town councilmen (and they were all men) effectively dominated womens’ decisionmaking capabilities on a local level. 

The spouses of a fashionable "Boston Marriage" on their wedding day

As conditions changed out West they also changed back East. More progressive States such as Massachusetts began to recognize the female right to manage and dispose of property. Massachusetts in fact became so liberal that lesbian couples began householding together, able to dispose of and share property together. These “Boston marriages” had some limited recognition under State, though not Federal, law.  

At the outset of the Civil War women’s rights were still restricted, but were poised to expand greatly. Among the earliest area of growth was in the Nursing Service. Although Dorothea Dix had had to agree to hire only female medical caregivers who were “old and ugly” at the outset of the war, and although she enforced this rule as late as 1863, the demand for nurses, and more importantly, skilled nurses, began to override such absurd restrictions. 

Clarissa Harlowe "Clara" Barton (1821-1912), the Union's "Angel of the Battlefield" at Fredericksburg

Until the 1840s Nursing had been the unique province of (ironically enough) religious sisters and prostitutes in equal measure. Florence Nightingale’s great work during the Crimean War of the mid-1850s had legitimized Nursing, and Clara Barton, a Massachusetts Unionist, had imported Miss Nightingale’s techniques to America during the dawning days of the war. Barton would eventually found the American Red Cross. 

As an unchaperoned woman in the Union's army camps, Clara Barton was initially derided as a prostitute. On his deathbed, her father charged her to put her loyalty to the Union above her personal concerns about reputation. She was later decorated by U.S. Grant for her patriotic work.

Teaching was also a predominantly female profession, and it became more so during the war as men went to fight. The tradition of the “Old Maid” or the “spinster schoolmarm” took a body blow during the war as young, vital women stepped into the roles of mentors for the young people of their communities. 

As men went to the front, it became necessary to hire women to do work traditionally done by men. Women began working in Northern factories, weaving textiles, loading powder into shells, and doing other such “unladylike” tasks. 

The idea of women in the labor force took only a little longer to take hold in the South. Working women and girls were far more indispensable in the Confederacy given its smaller overall population. Women worked in high-risk jobs, such as at the Tredegar Iron Works, where they were at risk for injury or death dealing with munitions. Many did die in industrial accidents, both North and South. 

Women at work in a munitions factory during the war. Note the hats hanging on the wall

Women fought as soldiers on both sides, over 400 of them, in uniform, secretly, dressed as men, and there were a small number of female officers (like Union Major Pauline Cushman) who worked at Headquarters and / or behind the lines as spies, like Rose Greenhow, Belle Boyd, and Elizabeth Van Lew. Both the North and the South had a handful of female physicians and technicians in the ranks.

A Union nurse (perhaps Clara Barton herself) caring for hospitalized soldiers

Without men around, women became far more financially independent perforce, managing their own homes, bank accounts, farms and plantations. Women also found themselves at the forefront of critical social changes --- should they sell slaves South, manumit them, or allow them to be liberated (seized?) by Union troops?  Should they sell acreage or breed the mares? Should they butcher the cattle and the swine? Often, it was a woman’s decision that determined the fate of the old family farm or the postwar conditions to which the menfolk returned (if and when they returned at all).  

The South as a whole suffered an almost total economic dislocation due to the war, and there are areas of the South today that are arguably still experiencing post-Civil War aftereffects.

A young Confederate widow and her fatherless son

It is known, through pension records, that most Union widows (90%) remarried within ten years after the war (1875), a statistically significant portion of them to older veterans (as reflected in a bump in Survivor benefits in the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries). 

However, little is known about Confederate widows or indeed Southern marriage patterns after the war other than a general belief that the majority of these women did eventually marry or remarry, many to disabled Confederate veterans.. This is one of the most understudied areas of the Civil War.  

There were, of course, no pension records for the population of the Old South, and the Eighth Decennial Census of 1870 is uniformly considered the most incomplete and hence inaccurate census of the United States. What is known is that there was a vast imbalance between the number of available women and available men in the South following the Civil War. 

In 1880, 33% of Southern women were widowed and 20% of Southern women identified as having been Confederate widows, although it is uncertain how many of them had remarried in the interim.  The only sure thing is that the postbellum Southern birth rate was significantly lower than the antebellum birth rate, and remained depressed for generations thereafter.  

After the war, women both North and South guarded their newly-won independence, forming the core of the Progressive Era’s Women’s Rights Movement, and the Suffragette Movement, which gave the vote to women in 1920.

All these situations, of course, concerned white women exclusively. Black women (free and slave) always worked to support themselves and their children, or because, as slaves, they had no choice.  

Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), a New York-born Dutch-speaking ex-slave, criticized white males who consigned women to the category of the “weaker sex” in her fiery speech entitled Ain’t I A Woman?, the 1863 version of which is reproduced (without the usual transcription in dialect) below:

Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that betwixt the niggers of the South and the women of the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what is all this talking about?

That man over there says that “Woman” needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! 

And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! 

And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man --- when I could get it --- and bear the lash as well! 

And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! 

And ain't I a woman?

Then they talk about this thing in the head; what this they call it? ("Intellect," whispered someone near.) That's it, honey. What's that got to do with Women's Rights or Nigger's Rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full? 

Then that little man in back there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, because Christ wasn't a woman! 

Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! 

And now they are asking to do it . . . the men better let them . . . 

I’m obliged to you for hearing me out, and now old Sojourner hasn't got nothing more to say.

 This post is dedicated to Sandi