“Are We Not All Soldiers?”: Northern Women in the Civil War Hospital Service

Abstract

A photograph of three women in dark dresses, white aprons, and beehivelike white hats has been used by historians throughout the 20th Century as evidence that young, uniformed nurses served in general hospitals during the Civil War. This is a fine example of historical halftruth: the women in the photograph were young and uniformed, but they were not Civil War nurses. They were New Yorkers who had volunteered to work in a food concession at the Sanitary Commission's metropolitan fundraising fair in April, 1864, and they were dressed in traditional Normandy costumes to sell Normandy cakes. The 20th-century historian who first identified this photograph expected nurses to wear white hats, even though no female hospital worker in Civil War America to my knowledge ever wore professional headgear or a uniform.