Date of Award

5-2022

Document Type

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

Department

History

Advisor/Committee Chair

Michitake Aso

Committee Member

Laura Wittern-Keller

Abstract

My research has focused on specific women in the Civil War that held the occupation of soldier, spy/scout, nurse or camp follower during the war and how their work in the war challenged the gender roles of the 1800s. I argued that the war has been an agent of change as women were able to hold male dominated roles that were involved in the war. While most of these women had not gone in with the intention of challenging those gender roles, those women had indirectly done so. To help with this project I have analyzed many sources to help prove this idea. For my secondary sources I had looked at books such as Women on the Civil War Battlefront by Richard Hall that discussed the role of women on the Civil War Battlefront and analyzed their contributions to the war. I have also analyzed sources that deal with gender and sex relations during the 1800s to bring in context to the situation. For primary sources, I have analyzed the memoirs, diaries and letters of these women to see how they describe the jobs that they did during the war and how they approach it. My research has covered the Civil War years and the few years following the war to establish how these women had gone in not as agents of change but to aid in the war. The outcome of that help challenged the gender roles of the 1800s.

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