Print

The Military and American Society 3 with their husbands’ units and encamped alongside the men. American Rev- olutionary War scholar Holly Mayer’s work on camp followers offers a frame- work for understanding the particular experiences of women who were part of a “military community,” a social unit in which families, merchants, and other camp followers “live and work with the military and accept, willingly or not, its governance of their affairs.”4 In this world, the “way of life rein- forced female dependence at the same time it demanded female fortitude and, occasionally, supported female initiative.”5 In Mayer’s study of camp followers during the American Revolution, a woman’s most patriotic act was to send her father, brother, husband, or sons to war, and in doing so, “sub- ordinate her needs to those of the nation.”6 Disease caused 90 percent of military deaths, and in response, by the late 1770s, the army had established sanitation regulations and standards and a standardized list of medicines for every hospital. Thanks to the health care work of Florence Nightingale with British troops in the Crimean War in the 1850s, nursing earned a reputation as an accept- able career for middle-class women in the Victorian Era of the mid-­nineteenth century. This improved image of the nursing profession crossed the Atlantic, and when the U.S. Civil War broke out, women on both sides of the Mason- Dixon line ministered to sick and wounded soldiers as civilian nurses. In the summer of 1861, U.S. Secretary of War Simon Cameron appointed Dorothea Dix Superintendent of Female Nurses of the Union Army in order to estab- lish a civilian volunteer nurse corps. Dix, a teacher and reformer who had worked to raise awareness of the conditions of prisons, poorhouses, and mental institutions, instituted a rigid set of requirements women must meet to join her corps. Applicants had to be between the ages of thirty-five and fifty, be in good health, and demonstrate strong moral character. Neither Dix nor any of her nurses held military rank.7 Other women provided notable nursing and other health care services during the Civil War. Clara Barton, who would go on to found the American Red Cross, worked independently and ministered to both Union and Con- federate troops. Sally Louisa Tompkins, daughter of a wealthy Virginia busi- nessman, opened and funded a Confederate hospital in a Richmond mansion. Confederate President Jefferson Davis commissioned Tompkins a captain in the Confederate States Army, making her the first American woman inducted into a military. The efforts of Dix, Barton, Tompkins, and other women dur- ing the Civil War helped to professionalize nursing, not only in the eyes of the military but also in the civilian medical world. They brought attention to the impact of sanitation on mortality rates, and their cleanliness practices influenced hospital sanitation policies and measures after the war. Despite the work nurses did for Union and Confederate troops in the Civil War, the U.S. military did not establish a permanent place for women’s med- ical service in wartime. When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898,