Women's Role In Antebellum America

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Introduction
In antebellum America, a woman’s sphere was generally thought to be on the home front. Thought by many to be the purer, fairer sex, women were looked at as weaker than —and therefore more dependent upon— men. Women in this time period were expected to be subordinate to male relatives (e.g. her father or husband), and, depending upon social class, were responsible either for cooking, cleaning, and keeping house, or for overseeing the servants (i.e. slaves) who performed these tasks. It was also considered a women’s duty to care for and nurse back to health those members of her family who were sick or injured. The idea of formally trained nursing was “virtually nonexistent” in America at the time, and any medicines or treatments prescribed by an actual doctor were also expected to be carried out by women.
All of this changed with the onset of the Civil War. Men on both sides of the conflict grabbed their available weaponry, left their homes, and either joined voluntarily, or were conscripted into, the Union and Confederate Armies, leaving behind their wives and children. Male doctors and surgeons were the societal norm, …show more content…
Widely held was the belief that women would only “be in the way” of such an undertaking. For this reason, both Union and Confederate female nurses alike found themselves ostracized and looked upon with suspicion by their male colleagues. In fact, according to Mary Phinney, the prevailing attitude in her first hospital assignment was “hatred towards women nurses.” She even goes on to discuss the hearty efforts these men made to drive women nurses out of the hospital entirely. One surgeon even told Harriet Eaton he hoped she would be “killed before he saw [her]

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