Previously, the usual task for a colonial woman during a battle, was to wait at home worried for their husbands to return. When the Civil War happened, the women would no longer stand to watch their husbands leave for war and “refused to release their hold upon the men of their households although the government had taken them out of the home and organized them into an army.” (Myers 156) Many women did not want to see happen, which happened so many times before, in which the men would go off to fight and men would then care for the wounded. T

The war’s pressures extended out further than women being in army’s, but at the home front as well. Women were faced with untraditional responsibilities as their husbands were away from the farms. As more and more men enlisted in the army, there were fewer male relatives for the farm women to rely on for help with the plantations and farming. “As they gradually took up the decision making power that had been in the men’s hands, they too faced distinctive challenges.”(Myers 153) Women had to step forward and run the farms and plantations or else the men would not have a home to come back to when the war was over.

Many of the women in the war shared stories of how their womanly insticts came in handy for the occupation of a nurse. The women were able to bring the dying soldiers exactly what they needed and, “maternal gifts of protection and healing.”(Myers 160) Women were completing the

Some topics in this essay:
Civil War, Annie Wittenmeyer, Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, , War Previously, Sanitary Commission, civil war,