ce, and, like their Northern counterparts, Southern nurses helped to eliminate barriers for others.
The most genteel and well-paid positions were reserved for middle- and upper-class white women. The Confederate government, particularly in Richmond, hired them to sign banknotes at the Treasury, sew uniforms for the Clothing Bureau, and sort letters at the post office. Schoolhouses and academies across the Confederacy hired them to nurture and instruct children and youths.
Working class and poor women, both black and white, often entered into occupations that their wealthier counterparts considered distasteful. Factories in larger cities - particularly Richmond, also the industrial capital of the Confederacy - employed hundreds of women, whose small hands and presumed manual dexterity were considered ideal qualifications for tasks such as making ammunition.
The majority of Southern women eventually withdrew their support from the Confederate government. Many poor, working class, and even some upper-class white women came to believe that the Confederate government did not protect them or represent their interests, or simply that the cost of continuing the war was too great. This erosion of Southern women's support for their government ultimately undermined the war effort and contributed to the fall of the Confederacy.
Some Southern women remained loyal to the United States throughout the war, and many expressed their Northern sympathies by feeding and quartering Union soldiers, hiding escaped Union prisoners, or like Elizabeth Van Lew of Richmond, serving as spies. As women suffered increasing privations on the home front, many previously loyal Confederates began voicing their discontent in diaries, newspapers and letters to the Confederate government and loved ones on the battlefront.
The war forced women into public life in ways they could scarcely have imagined a generation before. The experiences of women in the North and the South shattered the myth that women could not endure the rigors of economics, politics and hard physical labor. No longer content to sit at home and leave the decision making to men, women gained self-confidence from their ordeals, which fortified the growing feminist movement and eventually helped countless women achieve unprecedented personal success in post-Civil War America.
In the immortal words of diarist Lucy Buck of Front Royal, Virginia:
We shall never any of us be the same as we have been.