Sunshine for Women WHM 2002, ToC | Home

from Lynne Griffin and Kelly McCann, The Book of Women: 300 Notable Women History Passed By [Holbrook, Mass.: Bob Adams, Inc., 1992] pp. 18-19

Because each of the entries for the individual women is so short, I have included all of the entries under the category: Civil War Heroines Women Who Made a Difference in America's Bloodiest War

Mary Bickerdyke
Mary Bickerdyke was a one-woman whirlwind whose sole aim during the Civil War was to more efficiently care for wounded Union soldiers, no matter what. If improving the level of care meant scrubbing up after filthy, incompetent doctors, then she would scrub every surface in sight. If improving the level of care meant antagonizing the hospital staff by threatening to report drunken physicians, then she would antagonize them. If improving the level of care meant ordering a staff member who had illegally appropriated garments meant for the wounded to strip the clothes off, then she would order him to strip! Bickerdyke stepped on a lot of male toes, but she won most of her fights. One ruffled male appealed to General William Tecumseh Sherman to take action against her, but was disappointed by the reply he received: "Well, I can do nothing for you; she outranks me."

Mary Livermore
Hearing of desperately bad conditions in Union camps, Livermore, the wife of a Chicago minister, put her children under the watchful eye of her housekeeper and started full-time work founding chapters of the United States Sanitary Commission. She initiated over three thousand chapters of the local organizations in the Midwest, and is given credit for saving Grant's troops at Vicksburg from succumbing to an epidemic of scurvy. Livermore did it by supplying such massive amounts of fresh produce to the Union lines that a contemporary observer noted that "a line of vegetables connect(s) Chicago and Vicksburg."

Sally Tompkins
Because the South lacked the North's tremendous resources and railroad capacity, private hospitals had to do the job of the Union side's Sanitary Commission. In Sally Tompkin's facility, 1,260 of 1,333 wounded Confederate soldiers survived, a recovery level no other facility on either side of the Mason-Dixon line would match during the war. Tompkins managed her Richmond, Virginia, facility with a staff of seven -- and that figure included Tompkins herself.

Mehitable Ellis "Aunti" Woods
Woods was so devoted to the Union soldiers from her home state of Iowa that she secured her own commissary wagon and personally made supply runs to the front lines -- unaccompanied. She was often questioned by military officials about her authorization, but she routinely passed through by simply answering that she was going 'to see my sons, all of whom are in the army." She made thirteen perilous trips in all.

Annie Wittenmeyer
Wittenmeyer, too, financed her own trips to the front, where she brought over $130,000 worth of supplies. When she saw her own brother being provided with substandard infirmary rations (coffee, rancid bacon, and bread), she established her Special Diet Kitchens to bolster the often inedible army fare offered to wounded and dying Union soldiers.

For More Information

      Mother Bickerdyke Connects Northern Communities to Their Boys at War

      Mary A. Livermore

      Annie Wittenmeyer

Return to Women's History Month 2002 Table of Contents

e-mail sunshine@pinn.net