- Joined
- Dec 23, 2014
Good question about shoes. When the newly enlisted soldiers received their uniforms, they would have received the Army shoes. Presumably they might have sent their shoes back home with their other civilian clothes?
A lot depends on whether you're Union or Confederate. Assuming the farm wife and daughters were able-bodied enough and/or had the machinery to do farm work, Northern farms prospered during the war. (If they didn't, the women often ended up in the local poorhouse.) Mary Livermore, in her My Story of the War, talks about seeing women driving reapers and mowers in the fields as she traveled through the Midwest getting support for the Sanitary Commission. She also describes lots of farm women bringing in produce to donate to the big Chicago Sanitary Fair. In the Confederacy, it was a different story, especially for those living in war zones where everything was devastated and many women became refugees, as described in @Brendan's post above.
Many farm families made their own shoes, since they already had the raw material in the form of animal hides. So your farm girl may have had a pair of homemade shoes for farm work and a nicer pair (probably bought used from a peddler) for church and social events. There are lots of instances of women wearing men's shoes if they could find them in a smaller size. On a ghoulish note, in war zones, there was a lot of robbing of dead bodies after battles. (I'd rather not contemplate that one.)
Here are a few of the modern historical sources I've read:
Judith Giesberg, Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front. Especially confronts the poverty issue.
Judith Giesberg, Civil War Sisterhood: The U. S. Sanitary Commission and Women's Politics in Transition.
Nina Silber, Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War.
While I've avoided the Confederacy, being a Union person, I have read that wonderful work on Southern women, Drew Gilpin Faust's Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War.
The notes and bibliographies of these works are a great source for CW-era diaries, the best way to find out how women coped with the war. My impression, which may be incorrect, is that there are lots more existing diaries of Southern women than Northern. Diaries still keep popping up as people clean out their attics. Many out-of-print works are now available to read online.
My favorite diary is still Rachel Cormany's, in The Cormany Diaries: A Northern Family in the Civil War, ed. James C. Mohr. Left at home after her husband's enlistment with their baby daughter in Chambersburg, PA, ostensibly with her husband's family (who weren't much help), Rachel managed to survive by doing sewing and on what her husband could send her (much augmented when he became a commissioned officer in 1864). She was a college graduate from a coeducational university, highly unusual in those days. Also, Chambersburg was not exactly the safest place around since several Confederate invasions went through there.
A lot depends on whether you're Union or Confederate. Assuming the farm wife and daughters were able-bodied enough and/or had the machinery to do farm work, Northern farms prospered during the war. (If they didn't, the women often ended up in the local poorhouse.) Mary Livermore, in her My Story of the War, talks about seeing women driving reapers and mowers in the fields as she traveled through the Midwest getting support for the Sanitary Commission. She also describes lots of farm women bringing in produce to donate to the big Chicago Sanitary Fair. In the Confederacy, it was a different story, especially for those living in war zones where everything was devastated and many women became refugees, as described in @Brendan's post above.
Many farm families made their own shoes, since they already had the raw material in the form of animal hides. So your farm girl may have had a pair of homemade shoes for farm work and a nicer pair (probably bought used from a peddler) for church and social events. There are lots of instances of women wearing men's shoes if they could find them in a smaller size. On a ghoulish note, in war zones, there was a lot of robbing of dead bodies after battles. (I'd rather not contemplate that one.)
Here are a few of the modern historical sources I've read:
Judith Giesberg, Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front. Especially confronts the poverty issue.
Judith Giesberg, Civil War Sisterhood: The U. S. Sanitary Commission and Women's Politics in Transition.
Nina Silber, Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War.
While I've avoided the Confederacy, being a Union person, I have read that wonderful work on Southern women, Drew Gilpin Faust's Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War.
The notes and bibliographies of these works are a great source for CW-era diaries, the best way to find out how women coped with the war. My impression, which may be incorrect, is that there are lots more existing diaries of Southern women than Northern. Diaries still keep popping up as people clean out their attics. Many out-of-print works are now available to read online.
My favorite diary is still Rachel Cormany's, in The Cormany Diaries: A Northern Family in the Civil War, ed. James C. Mohr. Left at home after her husband's enlistment with their baby daughter in Chambersburg, PA, ostensibly with her husband's family (who weren't much help), Rachel managed to survive by doing sewing and on what her husband could send her (much augmented when he became a commissioned officer in 1864). She was a college graduate from a coeducational university, highly unusual in those days. Also, Chambersburg was not exactly the safest place around since several Confederate invasions went through there.
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LOL
Bringing the