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Women, Slaves, and Free Blacks in the Civil War

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Women, Slaves, and Free Blacks in the Civil War

History/110
25 Feb 2015

1. What roles did Northern women play in the war effort on the Union side during the Civil War? What roles did Southern women play in the war effort on the Confederate side during the Civil War? How did the war affect each group?
Northern women contributed greatly to the Civil War effort for the north. As the north was more industrialized, women took on jobs that were traditionally done by men. They worked in manufacturing, worked in retail, and took care of more things around their homes. Northern women took care of the homes and children and often did things around the house that the men mainly use to do. Some women decided to take a more serious support of the war effort by becoming nurses and tending to the wounded men as they returned from the front lines. Some women attached themselves to various units and took on support roles for the units. These support roles included cooking, laundering, clothing repair and nursing. All of these duties were in an effort to alleviate extra efforts on the men’s part. A few women even volunteered to take on intelligence gathering roles and conducting clandestine operations to gather information from confederate units. These would infiltrate confederate units and create rapport with influential members of a unit in order to solicite and gather intelligence that could be used against them. Information such as troop movements, troop strength, current operations, and future operations. They would also gather intelligence about troop morale. All of this information that was gathered could be used to shape future operations to be conducted by the North.
Southern women played many of the same roles for the confederacy. One of the additional duties that they filled in for the men was to tend to their plantations and to oversee the slaves that were to tend

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