The American Civil War was a significant factor in the development of the women’s suffrage movement. The Civil War transformed many areas of American society, including the lives of women. Women found empowerment in helping others, learned they could support themselves financially, and discovered untapped strengths on the front lines. Many took their new found skills and focused their energies on women’s suffrage. Without their experiences during the Civil War, American women may have had a much longer battle for the right to vote.
Women who pledged to aid soldiers found empowerment. Sewing circles, temperance organizations, and church groups took their capacity to organize and shifted their focus to aiding soldiers. They put on fairs and bazaars, selling goods of all kind, to raise funds. After a time, Northern women who participated in national relief organizations became frustrated with how they were managed by men, so they formed their own groups to organize fundraising events and fairs that they could control.(1) After discovering she would need her husband’s signature to construct a building, with her own funds, for the Chicago Sanitary Fair, Mary Livermoore “registered a vow that when the war was over [she] would take up a new work – the work of making law and justice synonymous for women.”(2)
Women left behind at home learned they could be economically self-sufficient. Women on both sides were often left to manage the family farm and to do the work of men. A few northern women found success and greater wealth for their families than when their men had managed the farm.(3) Women also took on extra work to make ends meet; often sewing commercially at home, selling homemade products, taking in borders, or working in mills. Some Southern women took advantage of the high prices of goods and reworked old collars, sleeves, and other finery for resale.4 Northern women at home grew to expect the government to compensate them for the loss of their husband’s income or, worse, their husband’s lives. In 1862, Congress heard their voices and created “a new pension law that would provide a starting point for future pension legislation down through the end of the century.”(5)
Women who worked on the front lines discovered strength in new situations. Many served the U.S. Sanitary Commission alongside the fighting men. In the Commission, they distributed clothes, food, medicine, and bibles. Other women washed soldier’s clothes, cooked their meals, and brought water and ammunition to the men in the fight (6). Women who served as nurses learned they could handle the horrors of war as well as any man. Nurse Clara Barton was helping a wounded soldier when a bullet passed through her sleeve and into her patient. After the war, Clara Barton went on to found the Red Cross, while other nurses opened and attended the very first nursing colleges for women. “Women who had learned to value their own efforts and abilities during the war ‘were not willing to fold their useful hands when the war was over, and let the old order of things reestablish itself.’”(7)
After the Civil War society expected women to return to their antebellum roles, but womankind did not forget what the war had taught them about their capabilities. The freedoms and mental attitudes women experienced from 1861 to 1865 gave the women’s suffrage movement the fuel it needed to succeed. Although it would take until 1920 and the Nineteenth Amendment for women to have the vote nationally, the Civil War was a significant step in the development of women’s suffrage. “Full, heavy skirts, restricting corsets, vast crinolines, bustles, hampering tied-back skirts, long trains, hobble skirts…they underline women’s inactivity, which made possible such fantasies of dress. All this disappeared with the Great War and the long-overdue emancipation of women which was part of the new structure of society that emerged from it.”(8)
(1)Paul A. Cimbala et. al., Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Early America: From the Colonial Era to the Civil War, Edited by David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, Daily Life Through History, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 206-207.
(2)Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Early America: From the Colonial Era to the Civil War, 223.
(3)Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Early America: From the Colonial Era to the Civil War, 195.
(4)Dorothy Denneen and James M. Volo, Daily Life in Civil War America, Daily Life Through History, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 242.
(5)Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Early America: From the Colonial Era to the Civil War, 196.
(6)Michael J. Varhola, Everyday Life During the Civil War, Edited by David Borcherding, (Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 1999), 120.
(7)Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Early America: From the Colonial Era to the Civil War, 223.
(8)Alison Garnsheim, Victorian and Edwardian Fashion: A Photographic Survey, (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1981), 22.
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