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Civil War

What were some of the roles that Northern and Southern women filled during the Civil War? How did these roles support or undermine traditional gender expectations?

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the conflict also provided many women with new opportunities for public responsibility and leadership, and led them to consider a new identity for themselves. For decades women had taken important posts in the nation's voluntary associations for charity and reform. Now these organizations proliferated and grew to unprecedented size in response to national and community crises.

Many women and children took to the fields in order to maintain family farms. Women had long performed farm labor, from cooking, washing and cleaning to taking part in the planting and harvesting of crops. In 1862 a Department of Agriculture report concluded that "in the civilization of the latter half of the nineteenth century, a farmer's wife, as general rule, is a laboring drudge... on three farms out of four the wife works harder, endures more, than any other on the place..."Rural women often lived amidst great ...

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Roles of the southern and northern women during the civil war and how they were outside the stereotypes.