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MEN AND AUTHORITY: THE UNION ARMY NURSE AND THE PROBLEM OF POWER.
The women of the North became involved in every aspect of the great national effort to win the Civil War. In particular, they became the backbone of the massive private system of supply, relief, and medical aid which sprang into being immediately after the firing on Fort Sumter and provided what a bewildered and weakened central government could not: an efficient distribution network to support the men in the field. This network was composed of many strands, but its largest and most famous element was, of course, the United States Sanitary Commission. Women participated in the many tasks of this agency, but were most prominent in the work of running the USSC's web of ten thousand local aid societies -- and in the grueling work of nursing in military hospitals.
At least nine thousand women served as nurses for the Union Army. About 3200 of these were officially appointed by Dorothea Dix, the Superintendent of Women Nurses in Washington, D.C., and received regular wages of 40 cents and soldier's rations per day. They were joined by nuns, and by some 4500 temporary menial employees, usually female contrabands, who received wages of $10 per month under General Orders. Finally, there was a sizeable but indeterminate number of all kinds of unpaid volunteers: women affiliated with a state relief agency or a sanitary commission, women whose neighborhoods had become embroiled in the fighting, or women who had arrived to nurse relatives -- an accepted practice -- and simply stayed on.(1)
In addition to the predictable problems of weather, sickness, battle, and despair, the Civil War nurse had to deal with what she saw as yet another enemy: the arbitrary power of men in authority. On the simplest level, this took the form of male resentment at female interference in the established order of things. Georgeanna Woolsey and a fellow nurse once picked up a party of wounded that was larger than expected and included some cases of typhoid. The captain of the steamer at first refused to allow typhoid below decks in contact with his crew. But this ploy was easily overpowered with a feminine counterstroke: Georgy did "the terrible' and her friend "the pathetic"...