Cavalry Charger
Major
- Joined
- Jan 24, 2017
It was a response to starvation conditions in a male organized society. The authorities were baffled because, like slaves, women were not members of the political society.
'In Atlanta first, on March 18. Then Salisbury, N.C., the very next day. Then came Mobile, Ala., then Petersburg, Va., and Macon, Ga. Richmond, the biggest street action of all, happened on April 2—followed by six more riots. It was an unnervingly coherent set of events, each local, but so closely spaced, so similar in pattern, that by the time the wave hit Richmond, conspiracy theories abounded. “That they are the emissaries of the Federal Government…is difficult to doubt,” the Richmond Daily Examiner claimed. Such seemingly connected and highly organized events were beyond the capacity of mere women; this had to be the work of men, professionals, Yankee operatives.' (Taken from link in OP)
It seems you were right here @jgoodguy There was no expectation that women could organize in the way men could.
'The riots were spectacular, and they were numerous. Mobs of women numbering from a dozen to 300 or more, armed with Navy revolvers, pistols, repeaters, bowie knives and hatchets, carried out at least a dozen attacks (there were rumors of more) on stores, government warehouses, Army convoys, railroad depots, salt works and granaries. The attacks occurred in broad daylight, and they were all perpetrated within the space of one month, between the middle of March and the middle of April 1863.Marker Text: On April 11, 1863, during the American Civil War, sixty-five Columbus women armed with knives and pistols rallied at this site and marched down Broad Street raiding the stores of speculators before police could restore order
Southern officials could hardly say they hadn’t been warned. For months their mailbags had been filled with angry letters from poor white women demanding relief from their suffering condition: the return of husbands and sons from the army to help them make bread, more food or money from the commissioners of the poor, government controls on runaway inflation in food prices, crackdowns on speculators, revision of conscription laws. Some had threatened to take matters into their own hands.
And then at least some of them did' (Taken from link in OP)
I imagine it was quite shocking to see women armed and 'dangerous'. Desperation will do that, especially where starving children are concerned.
It also appears true that the government took a number of steps towards relief. So, to my mind, 'big business' had a lot to do with the subsequent suffering. Not being willing to crackdown on speculation may have been part of the reason for the defeat of the Confederacy. We could create a divide between men and women based how society operated at the time, but I do wonder if women had been in business then, would it have been any different? Business is business after all.