![]() ![]() Hilde discusses what she calls the South’s “labor dilemma.” While some white men were decent nurses, others shirked their duties. The next two chapters focus on the daily challenges of working in Civil War hospitals. Sanitary Commission to facilitate relief work, the South was dependent on these smaller, but no less important, community and regional networks. While some opened up their homes, others developed wayside hospitals, in which they cared for men passing between the home front and battlefronts, which “displayed the ingenuity and organizational prowess of women” and were integral in “facilitating the movement of military men” (126, 129). Southern women collaborated to manage and treat the wounded. Women not only nursed their male patients but also provided food as well as emotional and spiritual guidance and helped soldiers die a “good death.” Hilde next examines the important contributions civilian women made in the form of ladies’ associations and relief societies. As Hilde argues, in the nineteenth century “every mother was a nurse,” and soldiers were comforted by the presence of female caregivers who took the place of mothers, sisters, and wives (76). Most important, perhaps, were the relationships women developed with the soldiers. ![]() Conceptions of antebellum nursing were the standard by which wartime care was measured, and since women were not able to fight, they saw nursing as “their gendered wartime option” (58). Hilde turns next to the many women who patriotically labored for the Confederate cause. ![]() There was a clear chain of command: after surgeons, matrons were responsible for the administration of the hospitals, including managing the staff and supervising the domestic arrangements in the hospitals-among them cleaning, making beds, and distributing food and medicines. ![]() The second chapter traces the official and unofficial duties of the female hospital workers. Women’s early success in these institutions, namely lower mortality rates than in the general hospitals, led to legislation sanctioning the official hiring of female nurses. It begins with an examination of the hospitals that women started before the government was able to assume control over medical care in the new Confederacy. The book is divided chronologically into eight core chapters, though each chapter focuses on a novel thematic dimension of Confederate wartime nursing. This is an important assertion, especially for Hilde’s audience of Civil War memory scholars, who have yet to consider fully the broader implications of wartime nursing as women navigated the postwar gender landscape. The successes female hospital workers had in treating patients, working with surgeons, and doing administrative work in the hospitals not only challenged antebellum gender stereotypes but inspired “greater confidence in women’s capabilities and an expanded vision of female citizenship” (221). In doing so, she casts light on a much broader issue, namely the transformative impact of wartime nursing for southern women. Drawing on the letters, diaries, memoirs, and postwar reminiscences of mostly white upper- and middle-class women, Hilde demonstrates how southern hospital workers transferred the antebellum ideal of motherly care from the home to the hospital and in the process extended their moral influence to soldiers, surgeons, and society as a whole. Tracing the long tradition of nineteenth-century female benevolence, Libra Hilde’s book deftly elucidates the contributions, sacrifices, and challenges southern women faced as they came together to provide for sick, wounded, and dying troops in the Civil War South. ![]()
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