Women at Gettysburg, 1863

An eighth grade project where students rewrote biographies of Civil War people in first person was nearly impossible for a hundred eighth graders until I discovered this book. The accounts of forty women at Gettysburg from townspeople to wives of both sides give girls an equal opportunity to relate and connect to the people and events of the Civil War. Even with the "big names" such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Sarah Emma Edmonds, Clara Barton, Rose Greenhow, and Mary Todd Lincoln, women doctors, a few more spies, women soldiers, abolitionist/suffragettes, there were not enough women's biographies for the females in my middle school's eighth grade. There is no dearth of men's biographies. I was so desperate the last time my class did a Civil War reenactment that one girl ended up as the wife of Arthur MacArthur since the encyclopedia described him as a hero of the Civil War and the father of Douglas MacArthur. We assumed Arthur was married! The girl had to extrapolate the barebones information into a story from Mrs. MacArthur's point of view as did generic nurses in the Sanitation Commission or bits gleaned from the indexes of the Civil War epics by Shelby Foote; creative but difficult for many.This is the second year using Women at Gettysburg, and I hope to bring the time, the people, and the events alive even better this time.

Conklin presents a well-researched view of the roles of women in the Civil War by concentrating on those who were involved in the Battle of Gettysburg. By focusing on one battle, one place, she is able to give us a broad range of what women could do to aid the war effort. Many are common women forced to open their homes to the thousands of wounded from both sides out of compassion and necessity. Some are volunteer nurses who travel with the hospitals. There are soldiers - the anonymous woman whose body was found in uniform on the ground after Pickett's Charge. There are nuns, wives, scavengers and helpmates. Women who worked along side the men to fight the respective causes. We can apply what we learn here to other places in America during this turbulent time and realize that women were more than just the girl who waited at home or the tireless nurse. They were an essential element of the war effort that has been greatly underestimated and ignored. Presented in a format that is both personal and easily accessible to all, it's a must-read!