This is American History TV's Lectures in History podcast. This week, a class on the role of women in the Civil War. It's taught by former Purdue University and current University of Virginia professor, Caroline Janney. This episode was recorded in 2010.

So today we are going to be talking about women in the Civil War.

And in 1866, historian Frank Moore wrote that, quote,

The story of the war will never be fully or fairly written if the achievements

of women in it are untold.

Of the 31 million Americans who were living during the Civil War, keep in mind that the Civil

War was between April of 1861 and April of 1865, of the 31 million Americans, 15 million of those were women.

So it seems only natural that we examine how the war affected them, and conversely how they affected the war.

So today we're going to talk about women, Northern women, Southern women, Union women, Confederate

women, black women and white women, and how they experienced the war.

I want you to keep in mind some of the comparisons that we're going to be making.

I want you to think about what they shared in common and the ways in which their experiences

diverged.

So let's start on the northern home front.

We're going to look at the homefronts first, and then we'll switch to the battlefront.

We'll start with the northern home front.

How many of you read Little Women, if you've read Little Women?

Okay, that gives you a pretty good idea.

We'll talk a little bit about Louisa May Alcott in a few minutes, about the experience of Northern women on the home front. For the majority

of Northern women, the war was not literally at their doorsteps. But of course, their lives

were altered by the conflict. Keep in mind that their experiences would differ based on where they lived if they lived in Massachusetts as opposed to Indiana, by the class, by their income, all of these things, whether or not their husbands or sons or brothers fought in the war, all of these would shape their wartime experiences.

But we're going to start with benevolent societies.

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