'Fighting My Way Through': Northern Rural Women in the American Civil War

Abstract

Rural women are almost entirely absent in the voluminous scholarship on the American Civil War. Yet women were more than volunteers and nurses during this conflict; they also worked the land, helping the North to achieve an unprecedented agricultural output, despite the enlistment of millions of Northern men in the army. This thesis tracks the fate of two Vermont farm families in order to analyse rural women's wartime experiences. Using their personal letters coupled with local histories, Vermont newspapers, government documents and a range of printed sources focused on rural life, this thesis maps the way farmwomen coped with the challenges of running farms alone. Widely recognised during the war for their contribution in sustaining the Northern economy and feeding the army, rural women would later be thoroughly forgotten.