![]() ![]() ![]() Nearly all had to reckon with unfamiliar financial transactions - whether hiring help or stretching an inadequate military paycheck or seeking assistance from relatives and neighbors. Farm women, whose previous tasks had mainly consisted of gardening, cooking, cleaning, and clothes-making, now also learned to be threshers, harvesters, wood-choppers, and animal-slaughterers. Everywhere - in cities and rural villages, in farms and in factories - women took on new jobs and responsibilities, often motivated chiefly by economic necessity but also adopting a mantle of patriotic sacrifice. Only now, that arena encompassed not simply individual homes but the wide-ranging northern "home front". For many northern women, especially those who were white and middle class, the war accentuated the message that women must devote themselves whole-heartedly to the domestic arena. Still, women in all walks of life withstood dramatic changes. And, only after 1863, and the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation, did military service become a significant factor in the lives of African American families. Moreover, with a smaller percentage (less than 50%) of eligible northern men serving in the Union army, compared to 75% of eligible men in the Confederate army, many northern women felt the war's effect indirectly. With the exception of those in Pennsylvania and the border states, women of the Union knew little about enemy invasions and military displacement. In the Union states, women experienced a different kind of war than their counterparts in the Confederacy. ![]() So powerful has the Scarlett image become that both scholars and students of the Civil War have almost completely lost sight of southern poor white and African-American women, as well as those, black and white, who lived north of the Mason-Dixon line. Yet, while fragments of real-life events may have found their way into Scarlett's story, the real history of women during the Civil War covers a more complex and varied spectrum of experiences, ranging from enslaved women fleeing plantations and seeking refuge with the Union army northern and southern women looking for work in factories and government service southern white women angrily challenging the military and economic policies of the Confederate government and women everywhere struggling with the hardships and the violence of war. Or if they don't think specifically about Margaret Mitchell's fictional creation, they imagine feisty southern belles, lovely yet willful like Scarlett, defying Yankee invaders but also enduring the poverty and deprivation of wartime. Think "women during the Civil War" and many conjure an image of Scarlett O'Hara. Bannister of Company H, 13th New Hampshire Infantry Mary Bannister, wife of Private George H. ![]()
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