war memorial is that is allows an opportunity to tell the stories of many military women whose stories have gone unheralded over the centuries. The purpose of this paper is to discuss, in particular, the case of women who served in the military during the Civil War.
Images of women during the American Civil War often depict women as Florence Nightingale-type nurses, spies who used their womanly wiles to navigate between the North and the South, or brave domestics who guarded their homes and reputations while the men were off fighting. On the other hand, accounts of the war often depict men as heroic soldiers, bravely fighting under horrific conditions and either dying with honor or living to fight another day. These depictions, however, ignore the fact that women served as soldiers as early as the Revolutionary War. For example, there is the case of Deborah Samson, who disguised herself as a man and was assigned to spy for the Union Army. Her disguise was not discovered until she acquired a brain fever and had to be treated by a military physician.
Thus, during the earliest American military conflicts, the American Revolution and the War of 1812, women served on the battlefield as nurses, spies, water bearers, cooks and washerwomen. Another early-recorded case of a woman serving as a soldier in the American military is that of Elizabeth Newcom. During the Mexican War (1846-1848), Newcom enlisted in Company D of the Missouri Volunteer Infantry as Bill Newcom. She marched 600 miles from Missouri to winter camp at Pueblo, Colorado, before authorities discovered she was female and discharged her.
Nonetheless, reports are that by the Civil War as many as 400 women may have followed Newcom's example. One of those w
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