Jane Schultz

During the Civil War, as many as 20,000 women worked in Union and Confederate hospitals serving as nurses, administrators, matrons, seamstresses, cooks, laundresses, and custodial workers. Jane Schultz, in her book Women at the Front, used government records, private manuscripts and published sources to provide the first history of these female relief workers. In this month's illustrated lecture, Dr. Schultz will discuss how she arrived at the number of these women and will address the conflicts that arose due to racial and class diversity and their subordinate status in military hospitals. She will also analyze the pensioning of hospital workers in the 1890s.