Women at War
The Civil War plunged all of Kentucky society into conflict at the national, sectional, state, community, and family levels. By their own choice or through harsh circumstances, women found themselves in new roles, some of them unimaginable just a few years before.
Not only did they take sole responsibility for homes, farms and businesses, they also sought outside employment as nurses or factory workers and used their voices to protest conditions on the homefront and the escalating destruction of the war.
The presence of women in the CWGK archive is limited because of the masculine orientation of politics in the nineteenth century, not to mention the fact that women were disenfranchised until the passage of the 19th Amendment. Yet, women of the Commonwealth, black and white, petitioned Kentucky’s governors during the war to advocate for their own equality and immediate material needs.
The documents highlighted in this lesson are a selection of “typical” letters to the governor. As a group, they show transitions in women’s rights and their involvement with the government throughout the war years.
Grade Levels & Kentucky Teaching Standards
8th grade
8.C.RR.1
8.C.RR.3
High School
HS.C.CV.3
HS.C.KGO.2
HS.C.KGO.3
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Thavolia Glymph, The Women's Fight: The Civil War Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Harvard University Press, 2012).
Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
Anne E. Marshall, "A 'Sisters' War: Kentucky Women and their Civil War Diaries." Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 100, no. 3 (2012): 481-502.
Jane E. Schultz, Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America (University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
Framing Questions
- Why did women write to the governor?
- How did women exercise agency (the ability of individuals to alter their conditions) during the war?
- How does the role of women change over the course of the war?
Terms for Discussion
Coverture: a common-law system in the United States where upon marriage a woman’s legal identity was merged with her husband’s. As head of household, the husband inherited all of his wife’s money and property and controlled all finances. With some caveats this system applied to marriage in Kentucky in the 1860s, severely limiting the wife’s independence.
Patriarchy: a society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it.
Gender: the socially constructed and mutable characteristics a society attributes to women and men that can vary depending on culture and time.
Activities
The Caroline Chronicles
A primary and secondary source reader with accompanying writing and in-class activities. This teaching unit documents the life of an African American woman bound and accused of murder in Louisville. Through it, students encounter firsthand testimony about women’s work, opportunity, and peril during the Civil War.
Story Board
Using Commonwealth of Kentucky v. Sally E. Grant, Warrant or George Nichols, Affidavit, create a six-block storyboard (pdf) that depicts the event.