Wars tend to be seen from a male point of view, but women always play a major role, and the Civil War was no different.

Heroines of the Civil War is a special interest class that will be taught beginning Wednesday, April 18, at Copiah-Lincoln Community College.

The Civil War changed forever the perceived role of women in the United States. Not only willing to give up their husbands, sons, brothers and lovers, they also joined their men on the battlefield as soldiers; they became nurses and spies. Those who did not join the fight were left on the home front to do a man’s job, and they did it with a vengeance!

The total number of women who served in one capacity or another during the Civil War can never be known. More than 450 women are documented as serving as soldiers (even one from Natchez), but there is evidence that many, many more served. They fought in every battle from the first to the last for both the North and the South. They lay on battlefields in agony and died, many buried in unmarked graves.

The women spies risked life and limb for their respective sides. Their stories are the stuff of action fiction. They carried documents in their undergarments, flirted and ferreted information from their “enemies,” rode through storms and swam rivers and, in some cases, gave their lives or wound up in filthy prisons for their cause.

Possibly the most impressive were the nurses who volunteered and witnessed the horrors of mid-19th century medicine and hospitals. According to the Union Surgeon General, “The Civil War came at the end of the medical middle ages.”

“We operated in old, blood-stained and often pus-stained coats,” one surgeon remembered.

On her first day in a Confederate hospital Mary Kate Cummings wrote, “Nothing that I had ever heard or read had given me the faintest notion of the horrors witnessed here.”

But the nurses with little or no training arrived to give assistance, often unwanted and unappreciated by the medical staff. They became hospital administrators, emptied bed pans, cleaned wounds and wards, and rid the hospitals of as much stench as they could. They brought comfort and solace to injured and dying men.

The women on the home front had to learn to “man-up” in a world where, up until this time, their actions would have brought social scorn. They raised children and crops, repaired the holes in the roof, or, if they were lucky, volunteered their time to sew uniforms and tents and knit socks and blankets to raise money through women’s aid societies.

After the war, these women went back to the ordinary life of wives and mothers, or to dedicate themselves to the care of veterans, or to live their lives as men, or to become doctors and lawyers; the list is endless and endlessly fascinating.

To learn more about the Heroines of the Civil War, you are invited to attend a four-week Special Interest Class at Copiah-Lincoln Community College, from 6 p.m. to 7:15 p.m. Wednesday, April 18, 2012. I will teach the class.

For more information and to register for class, contact Beth Richard at 601-446-1103.

 

Judy Wiggins is a retired instructor of American Literature at Copiah-Lincoln Community College.