oduce greater female participation in the emerging American labor movement, which significantly contributed to the rise of modern feminism in post-Civil War America.
Despite all the adversities and difficulties women suffered on the home front, their contributions on the military front as nurses and spies provided vital support throughout the war. In mid-1861, Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to earn an medical degree, helped to organize the Women's Central Association of Relief, which helped to inspire the creation of the United States Sanitary Commission.
The Sanitary Commission subsequently raised funds for medical supplies, recruited and trained nurses, and labored to improve sanitation in Army camps. Through the establishment of local chapters, the commission ensured that soldiers received their back pay and pensions. It provided help for disabled veterans, obtained jobs for soldiers' wives, and by the war's end, raised more than $50 million.
Dorothea Dix, a prison reformer and advocate for the mentally ill, also trained nurses and was eventually appointed as Superintendent of Army Nurses. Clara Barton labored in hospitals and battlefields as a one-woman aid society. She helped families locate relatives missing in action, and helped to provide a dignified grave site for more than thirteen thousand men who perished at the notorious Andersonville prison in Georgia. These accomplishments generated long-term gains for women.
Women in the South followed similar paths. Several middle- and upper-class women quickly erected army hospitals following the outbreak of hostilities. In Virginia, Sally Tompkins, who later received a commission as a captain in the Confederate Army, established a hospital in Richmond. Other women served in military stations at the front and helped to create fund-raising agencies similar to the United States Sanitary Commission.
Hospital work allowed women to show their patriotism, help maintain soldiers' morale, and genuinely contributed to the Confederate war effort. At the start of the 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 servi