While the men were off fighting the war for the respective region their wives, daughters, and children would be asked to take the their place. Due to a labor shortage during the Civil war, women would get their first chance at working and having a voice. Ultimately it would give them the courage to step up for themselves and women’s rights. Both Northern and Southern women would be asked to go to work; however, their jobs would be much different.
In the North, where white-collar jobs were far and wide with the technological advance and the wealth of the Northern states, women would be asked to work in “white-collar government jobs, retail sales, and nursing, women found a permanent place in the workforce.” (Foner page 505) Women also organized some other notable jobs or volunteering on the behalf of the war and its campaign. Much like the organizations that we still have today that send care packages to our soldiers in the Middle East, “Hundreds of thousands of northern women took part in organization that gathered money and medical supplies for soldiers and sent books, clothing, and food to freedmen.” (Foner page 505) Northern women took part in jobs that lead to be activists for women’s rights following the civil war. Women life Mary Livermore, would emerge “from the war with a deep resentment of women’s legal and political subordination and organized her state’s first women’s suffrage convention.” (Foner page 506) Mary Livermore encouraged women to “think and act for themselves.” Other women like the Grimke sisters from Pennsylvania would arise to stand for women’s rights as well. In two passages from Angelina and Sarah Grimke they compare the political campaign to free slaves to the continued discrimination against women. The two women speak of how a women’s best weapon is prayer, but they still battle with comprehending how they are to take in slaves, when they themselves feel like slaves. Angelina Grimke ends her passage with these moving words that really made me think about a women’s perceptive during this time, and her role in the household: “What then can woman do for the slave, when she herself is under the feet of man and shamed into silence?” (Flexner) While northern women worked in offices and non-labor jobs, the women of the south would find themselves in a much different position.
Southern women contrary to their northern counterparts would find themselves conducting much more laborious duties: “the war placed unprecedented burdens on southern white women. Left along on farms and plantations, they were often forced to manage business affairs and discipline slaves, previously the responsibility of men.” (Foner page 510) There were few white-collar jobs, some which included working at the confederacy bureau, but it would be the women left to tend to the farm in the place of their spouses that would leave their legend behind. As the death toll continued to rise and the south was defiantly on the losing end:
…increasing numbers of women came to believe that the goal of independence was not worth the cost. The growing disaffection of southern white women, conveyed in letters to loved ones at the front, contributed to the decline in civilian morale and encouraged desertion from the army.” (Foner page 510)
A women’s power in words and her prayers would convey their soldiers to come home and quit the war.
As women from the north and the south stepped into roles that they had never dreamed of occupying they would set forth on a new expedition. Women final had a voice and would later come to realize that their voice was worth hearing. Later women like the Grimke sisters would lay grassroots for others to follow and eventually led to the Seneca Falls convention 1848. “Women alone will say what freedom they want.” (Foner page 434)
Works Cited
Foner, Eric. Give Me Liberty!: An American History. 2nd Ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2005. Print.
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