PDF Mastery; Tyranny; and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World by Trevor Burnard in History

Description

As many as 20;000 women worked in Union and Confederate hospitals during America's bloodiest war. Black and white; and from various social classes; these women served as nurses; administrators; matrons; seamstresses; cooks; laundresses; and custodial workers. Jane E. Schultz provides the first full history of these female relief workers; showing how the domestic and military arenas merged in Civil War America; blurring the line between homefront and battlefront.Schultz uses government records; private manuscripts; and published sources by and about women hospital workers; some of whom are familiar--such as Dorothea Dix; Clara Barton; Louisa May Alcott; and Sojourner Truth--but most of whom are not well-known. Examining the lives and legacies of these women; Schultz considers who they were; how they became involved in wartime hospital work; how they adjusted to it; and how they challenged it. She demonstrates that class; race; and gender roles linked female workers with soldiers; both black and white; but became sites of conflict between the women and doctors and even among themselves.Schultz also explores the women's postwar lives--their professional and domestic choices; their pursuit of pensions; and their memorials to the war in published narratives. Surprisingly few parlayed their war experience into postwar medical work; and their extremely varied postwar experiences; Schultz argues; defy any simple narrative of pre-professionalism; triumphalism; or conciliation.