Historians have made much of the role women played during the Second World War – people like Rosey the Riveter stepping up to do essential jobs when men went into battle. A new book suggests the same thing happened during the Civil War, and author Cokie Roberts says they did some more exotic jobs as well.
NPR’s Cokie Roberts has spent a lifetime watching Washington and writing about women in American history. Her latest book combines the two topics, exploring the fate of women in the nation’s capital during the Civil War. At first, she says, many wives, mothers and daughters left town.
“You had a huge number of Southern women who were here before the war, and of course once secession happened, they decamped.”
But others arrived to take their place.
“Government girls were known in World War II, showing up in Washington by the hundreds, but that was also true, much to my surprise, in the Civil War, and some of them first started showing up just to make a living. The men were gone, and they needed to have a job.”
Some served as journalists or propagandists writing for the Union, while others spied for the confederacy, and a few went to work for the treasury, which was printing extra money to fund the war.
“The money came off the printing presses, it still does by the way, in these great, enormous sheets, and now of course, machines cut them into individual bills, but then it was somebody sitting with a pair of scissors, and as the treasurer of the United States said , ‘Women are just better with scissors than men are.’”
Many men wounded in battle were sent to Washington for care, and for the first time, women served as nurses.
“We think of nursing as women’s work, but that started in the Civil War.”
Roberts wrote the book after reviewing dozens of diaries and letters recounting the times from a female perspective – among them, papers from the first lady of the confederacy, Varina Howell Davis.
“The women’s letters are just so much better than the men’s. They are funny and feisty and frank, and one of her letters that I just love was when she wrote to her mother when she discovered that her good friend was about to marry Stephen Douglas, the senator from Illinois, and she was furious. She said, ‘She’s much too good for him,’ and then she said it was a good thing a water system was coming to Washington so maybe he’d bathe more often. Otherwise, people would have to build bigger rooms with better ventilation, because he smelled so bad.”
Another, the wife of John Quincy Adams, called President Buchannan a heavy old toad. But women were not always provocative. Some, like the wives of Jefferson Davis and Ulysses S. Grant, played peacemakers when the war finally ended.
“When the two of them met, it was news in all the papers in the country – the First Lady of the confederacy and the wife of the general who defeated the confederacy becoming friends, and she then went to the dedication of the Grant memorial very publicly, and what this was was an act of public reconciliation.”
The book is called Capital Dames. Roberts hopes it helps to remedy the unfortunate habit of historians who have too often ignored half of the world’s population – the women who played an equally compelling role in our past.