“The Civil War: Nurses, Wives, Spies, and Secret Soldiers”, one of the chapters from Gail Collins’s book America’s Women chronicles the situation/state of American women during the Civil War. It seems to suggest that both women’s attitude as well as their state/condition during the war depended on several factors. However, in most cases, it is women’s social and economic background that should be treated as the crucial factor influencing women’s lives. In order to support this argument, several issues/instances will be examined/discussed intis paper, namely: women’s attitude to the war, their patriotism and occupations during it. Although Collins describes the lives/situation of both Southern and Northern women during the years of the Civil war, this paper limits itself to/concerns/covers the situation of the Confederate women only, due to its short length of this paper.…show more content… Commenting in several cases of women who enlisted to the army or acted like spies, Collins makes it clear that they were rather exceptions than the rule and often were the result/consequence of the romantic behaviour/thoughts of the women: for instance, women wanted to remain/stay near/close to their husbands (193-4). For the most part of the women though, the war meant hard toil, the risk/threat of being injured during the battles/military campaigns in their neighbourhood and even loss of their homes (Collins 190-1,
