The role of women during the American Civil War – Part 6

Aren’t I a Woman?

How Women used their Sexuality during the American Civil War.

In the Gilded Age, Mark Twain wrote about the women who served in the Civil War. He elaborated that:

Custom insures the most sensitive person to that which is at first most repellent, and in the late war we saw the most delicate women, who could not at home endure the sight of blood, become so used to the scenes of carnage, that they walled the hospitals and the margins of the battle-fields, amid the poor remains of torn humanity, with as perfect self-possession as if they were strolling in a flower garden.1

Once the war had begun women left the hearth and entered the factory, picked up knitting needles, rifles, and bandages, and followed the armies which held their loved ones. They took on the masculine roles of the men that left them to fend for themselves, while they fought to save their lives. In the following discussion I will show how women during the American Civil War used sex and sexuality. As well as how they disguised their sexuality and took on masculine identities to gain power or anything they needed from those males that held sway over them.

Since before the war women began to put their social contract aside to speak out for the Freedom of others; even before they could speak out about their own such freedoms. The abolitionist movement began decades before the war started and from the beginning women faced opposition because of their sex. They were constantly interrupted by men who considered them inferior.2 The most influential of these women was Harriet Tubman. Born on a plantation in Maryland she worked as a slave until she escaped in 1849. As a women, and more importantly a run away slave Harriet put her sexuality aside to accomplish a total of nineteen trips across the Mason Dixon to help free the oppressed; endangering her own freedom in return. She took a masculine identity, being known as “Moses” to those who she helped to free. The name was given because like Moses in the Old Testament, she too helped to lead her people out of slavery and into the Promised Land. After her time as a conductor, so to speak, in the under ground railroad, she turned to anti-slavery speeches, were she told of her experiences in slavery, and her expeditions to free slaves. On one account she had approximately twenty-five runaways hide in