 war, Juliet Hopkins sold her estates in New York, Virginia and Alabama and gave the proceeds to the Confederate government to establish hospitals for Confederate soldiers. She then went to Richmond to serve as chief matron of the hospital corps for Alabama.
Motivated by everything from patriotism to poverty to a sense of vocation, many white women found themselves working outside the home and earning money for the first time in their lives. The Southern shortage of labor was so severe that even some black women, free and enslaved, found new opportunities to work for wages. The unpaid labor of enslaved women across the Confederacy also formed a critical component in supplying the war effort.
The presence of so many women in the workplace challenged the widely accepted doctrine of separate spheres - the male domain of politics and business, and the female world of household and family. This guaranteed that the workforce would never return to its prewar status and began a redefinition of women's place in American society.
Medical work was one of the most significant ways that Confederate women contributed to the war effort. Women rarely worked as nurses outside the home in the antebellum period, but numerous wartime factors, including the lack of available manpower and Confederate women's close proximity to battlefields, demanded their increased participation.
Most Confederate nurses were working class and enslaved women who endured grisly and dangerous conditions. Only those with the calmest stomachs were appointed to field hospitals by surgeons familiar with their skill and conduct under pressure. Most women, however, worked or volunteered in established military hospitals at military depots and near battlefields.
In Virginia, where so much of the war was fought, there were many such opportunities for dedicated women to provide essential physical and psychological care to sick and wounded soldiers. In September 1862, the Confederate Congress passed a law granting women official positions in the army medical service, 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