A Topic hardly written about. Women Soldiers In The Civil War. The outbreak of the Civil War challenged traditional American notions of feminine submissiveness and domesticity with hundreds of examples of courage, diligence, and self-sacrifice in battle. The war was a formative moment in the early feminist movement. In July of 1863, a Union burial detail at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania made a startling discovery near Cemetery Ridge. Among the bodies covering the ground--the wreckage of the Confederate attacks during the battle--the Union men found a dead woman wearing the uniform of a Confederate private. The burial detail had stumbled upon one of the most intriguing stories of the Civil War: the multitudes of women who fought in the front line. Although the inherently clandestine nature of the activity makes an accurate count impossible, conservative estimates of female soldiers in the Civil War puts the number somewhere between 400 and 750. Long viewed by historians as anomalies, recent ...
