NARRATOR: That's First
Lieutenant Shaye Haver, Captain
Kristen Griest, and Major
Lisa Jaster, the first women
to graduate from US
Army Ranger School.
2015 was the first
year women were even
allowed to participate in
the Army's elite and famously
grueling ranger school.
And now the military has
opened up all combat positions
to women, no exceptions.
Women's participation into the
rank and file during wartime
has been a persistently
contentious issue.
And the road to acceptance
has been hard won.
And as you can see here in
the Women In Military Service
For America Memorial,
their role over the years
has continued to expand.
A lot of this can be traced back
to the Civil War, where women
were able to achieve a standard
of independence and empowerment
unlike any previous time
in American history.
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In the early 1800s in
America before the Civil War,
women were not seen as
equal to men, like, at all.
Women had very little
property rights,
did not have many opportunities
for higher education,
could not vote, and basically
lived as second class citizens.
Married women were generally
relegated to the home
and expected to do little
else than domestic work.
But starting in the
1820s, some younger women
started living on their
own in boarding houses
and working in textile
mills in New England.
This was a totally new concept.
Out of these movements
came a movement
to give women greater
abilities outside of the home.
NARRATOR: This is Jane
E Schultz, professor
of English, American Studies
and the Medical Humanities
at Indiana University
in Indianapolis.
And the primary
exponents of that movement
were Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and Susan B Anthony.
NARRATOR: You may know Susan
B Anthony from the coin.
But both she and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
could see that women
weren't getting a fair deal.
And they set out to do something
about it on a national level.
In 1848, Stanton
and her colleagues
established the first
Women's Rights Convention,
where they proclaimed that
women were equal to men
and deserved the same
rights and opportunities.
It's this sort
of urge to reform
the construction of gender
in the mid 19th century
that I think really helps
jumpstart women's work
during the Civil War.
The Civil War
was the first time
that the women's rights
movement of the 1800s
got to put the reforms
they were working on
into practice on a large scale.
Not only did women
take jobs in the front,
but they had more
responsibility at home,
because the men were
going off to battle.
So they really
stood in for men.
And this gave them, I
think, a real hunger
for being out in the
public sphere, which
was the area that women had not
really specialized in as much
before the war.
And while women were
assuming more responsibility
outside the domestic
sphere, they
were also working in new
roles on the battlefront.
In the war itself, by far
the most significant group
of women who did work
expressly for the war effort
were women who did
relief work and nursing.
At the beginning
of the war, nursing
was a male dominated occupation
with women generally being
banned from work
in field hospitals.
But as casualties
mounted, it became clear
that more help was necessary.
In 1861, Dorothea Dix, an
educator and social reformer,
led a group of volunteer
female nurses to Washington
and petitioned the US government
to recognize their desire
to aid in the war effort.
The Secretary of War agreed.
And the US Sanitary
Commission was
born with Dorothea Dix
as the superintendent.
This really opened
up nursing to women.
And they were able to play a
larger role in the Civil War
than in previous conflicts.
In the union alone, there
were over 21,000 women
who did such work.
NARRATOR: Though their
support was welcome,
a lot of men, especially
those trained before the war,
were resistant to
women in those roles.
I think we could say
fairly clearly that most
elite surgeons thought
that women would
be a hindrance and a bother.
But that would change
throughout the course
of the war.
And a few women would
rise up through the ranks
and take on even
more prominent roles.
Perhaps the most well known of
these women was Clara Barton.
Of course, many people know
the name of Clara Barton.
She was an immensely hard
worker, very disciplined
person.
She was a schoolteacher
before the war.
When the war broke
out, Clara Barton
was one of the first volunteers
to care for wounded soldiers.
However--
Clara Barton did not want
to become a nurse in the way
that other women during the
Civil War became nurses.
She wanted to do
things on her own.
She thought the system of
sending aid through the War
Department and the US Sanitary
Commission was too inefficient.
So she decided to cut
out the middlemen.
And so she began to stockpile
supplies in Washington DC
and hired some
teamsters, people who
drove wagons, our current
truck drivers, they were called
teamsters, and asked them,
when she learned of a battle
on hand, to come
with her and take
her supplies to those soldiers.
In August of 1862,
she gained permission
from Quartermaster Daniel
Rucker to bring her operation
to the front lines.
Risking her life to bring
supplies and support
to the troops, she
became known as the angel
of the battlefield.
And in the years
following the war,
Clara Barton continued to show
her compassion for the wounded
and became the founding
president of the American Red
Cross.
But women also
fought in the war.
There were over 400 documented
cases of women joining the army
and fighting on the front lines.
Some women went to war to
be with their loved ones.
Others were seeking
adventure or a paycheck.
But many just wanted
the opportunity
to defend their country
like the men were doing.
But women were, by law, not
allowed to join the army.
So they had to resort
to other methods
to slip through the
recruitment process.
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The typical uniform of
a soldier was usually
baggy enough to
hide any identifying
female characteristics.
And women often took
it a step further,
adopting many habits associated
with men, like smoking,
gambling, and swearing.
One famous case was Jennie
Hodgers, aka Albert Cashier.
She enlisted in the
95th Illinois infantry
and fought in over 40 battles.
She lived in the ranks.
There are soldiers
who mentioned her, not
realizing that he was a her.
There's even a report of
Hodgers being captured and then
escaping by overpowering
a prison guard.
Jennie Hodgers was
never discovered.
And after the war, she
continued to live as a man.
It wasn't until 1910, when
she received a serious injury,
but it was discovered that
she was, in fact, a woman.
I'm sure that in the case of
Jennie Hodgers, Albert Cashier,
he/she was a transgender
person in an era
before we had any vocabulary or
experience to understand that.
Although the fact that
women served as soldiers
during the war wasn't
well known at the time,
Susan B Anthony and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
argued that female
service on the front lines
was a huge step forward
for gender equality.
But the aftermath
of the Civil War
was more complicated than that.
We would expect
that after the war,
there would be great
advances for women.
But one of the things that
historians, in particular, have
learned in looking at war
is that after wars, we have
a very conservative reaction.
By the 1870s, there were
women who simply moved back
into the domestic space.
The reason it's a
complicated answer
is that despite this
period of conservatism that
happens after the
war, generally,
I would say that
certainly the war helped
catapult the cause of women
to work outside of the home.
Here's a quote from Sarah
Edmonds Seelye, also known
as Franklin Flint
Thompson of the Second
Michigan Infantry, about her
experience during the war.
"I could only thank God
that I was free and could
go forward and work.
And I was not obliged to
stay at home and weep."
While you wouldn't think
it, the expanded roles
in society for women, whether
it be Army Rangers or CEOs,
had their beginnings
in the Civil War.
Although we still
have a long ways to go,
the women who served
as nurses and soldiers
during the Civil
War showed that they
could take on roles
predominately thought
of as only for men.
And they helped shape
and redefine gender roles
as we know them now.
So what do you think?
Did the Civil War open up
opportunities for women?
Can war bring about
lasting change?
Or is it just a flash
in the pan, as they say?
Let us know in the comments.
This episode was brought to
you by PBS Learning Media,
a great source for classroom
resources on Civil War history.
If you're interested in finding
more videos and lesson plans
on what we talked
about today, check out
our page on learning media.
And for a more dramatic
take on the Civil War,
check out Mercy Street on PBS.
Jane E Schultz was a
historical adviser on that show.
And a lot of what
we talked about
gets talked about
over there too.
So head over to pbs.org
to check it out.
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