In , her publisher asked her to write a book for "little girls. The characters and story parallel much of her life and that of her family. The protagonist, Jo March, is a tomboy, just as Alcott was, though by the end of the book she has become a lady. Her father had died two days before she did.
Read more about civil war nurses or see our list of famous women of the civil war. Eager to support the North, the budding author volunteered for a fledgling corps of female nurses. Lousia May Alcott, Library of Congress. For generations of Americans, Louisa May Alcott has been revered as the author of Little Women , the semi-autobiographical novel about four sisters living in Concord, Massachusetts, while their father served in the Civil War.
In Little Women and its equally popular sequels, Alcott was clearly the model for her heroine, Jo March, the rebellious tomboy who grows up to be a writer. The real Louisa May Alcott was a much more complex and interesting figure. In addition, she wrote serious novels for adults.
Perhaps the least well-known aspect of her surprising career is that she volunteered to serve as a nurse in the Civil War. When the war broke out, the Alcotts, like many other New England families, regarded the sectional conflict as a glorious crusade to end slavery. Unlike the fictional Mr. But his second daughter—who was by then approaching 30 and already accustomed to thinking of herself as a spinster, destined to become the breadwinner of their family—burned with desire to help the Union cause.
The only nursing care was provided by convalescent soldiers. Women began traveling to the battlefields and hospitals to try to aid their loved ones. Still, it was not until the summer of that women began to serve in numbers, and Surgeon General William Hammond issued Circular No. In this state of racial conflict, the fictionalized encounter of the young nurse from New England with a former slave from the Southern regions was a source of mutual disquiet.
The mixed color of mulatto assistants was conventionally associated with low instincts and the illicit attraction of their white fathers who had produced them as illegitimate progeny.
As for the Federal hospitals, they were based upon rigid racial and class hierarchies, such that colored workers were mostly employed as cooks and washers, and the highest level that a mulatto could reach was assisting nurses in manual tasks Massey The violent passions that they seemed to embody are precious ingredients for Nurse Alcott who had been actively at work on anonymous thrillers before the war.
In reversed conditions, in Hospital Sketches Tribulation Periwinkle contrasts Unionists with Southerners who cowardly attempt murders in wards patrolled by the nurses who, in revenge, humorously adopt with them the same mocking measures introduced in her comic presentation of the tonal variety of her working space:. I regret to say I did not deliver a moral sermon upon the duty of forgiving our enemies [ As a convinced advocate of the domestic management of sanitary crises, she reinterpreted her nursing experiences in a series of late Civil War Tales.
Thus, in addition to her Hospital Sketches and the collections of war tales written in the aftermath of that conflict, in the mid- and late s she wrote again about brothers fighting in opposite armies and confronted with homely strategies of reform in sanitation and public health that Alcott saw applied in many a benevolent institution in the City.
During that trip, the memory of her nursing service overlapped with the social management of the destitutes experienced by James Gibbons and his wife Abby Hopper, during one of the fiercest financial crises in Victorian America which seemed to reproduce a state of emergency comparable to the one that she faced in wartime. The story of a mutilated boatman who takes tourists across the river for a small fee is another story of war friendship in which a soldier places his comrade next to his mother after his fatal deeds.
Nicholas in The city of Concord had sadly forgotten the female descendants of the heroes of the American Revolution, who gathered at the North Bridge, where their ancestors dared challenge the British troops. The story of the Concord woman who became a spy and a messenger in also showed how women could fight for their country without using male violence.
And as the Civil War starts, Tabby is a grandmother determined to make bandages and supplies for the wounded soldiers out of that glorious table-cloth, in a patriotic recycling aimed to cure the soldiers. Thus, the precious item and relic from the American Revolution is used again to dress wounds, thanks to a female practical sense which knew how to respond to the urgency of the moment and to the empty rhetoric of the anniversaries, in hard times of scarcity "when patience ceased to be a virtue and rebellion was just" Nevertheless, they served to celebrate her proud generation of matronly reformers who played an unsurpassed leading role in the innovation of healing practices.
Their domestic management of disease and disorder served to redefine medical hierarchies and sanitary strategies that were promptly appropriated by the growing army of charitable ladies bravely confronting the new social emergencies brought about by the widespread bankruptcies and financial crises that cyclically accompanied the urban growth of post-bellum America.
Alcott, Louisa May. Hospital Sketches Bedford, Mass. Little Women Works by Louisa May Alcott. Claire Booss. New York: Avenel, Hospital Sketches and Camp and Fireside Stories.
Boston: Roberts Brothers, Silver Pitchers: and Independence. A Centennial Love Story. Boston: Roberts, Brown, Thomas J. Dorothea Dix: New England Reformer. Dall, Caroline H. Boston: Walker, Wise, Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. The next year, Alcott officially enlisted as a nurse at a makeshift hospital in Washington, D. C, where she was tasked with comforting dying soldiers and assisting doctors performing in amputations.
In the winter of , Alcott began advocating for the abolition of slavery in addition to her efforts as a nurse, but these efforts were cut short by her contracting of typhoid fever. Despite being relieved of her nursing duties, Alcott made light of her brief nursing stint in her publishing of Hospital Sketches in In order to complete this task, Alcott simply reflected on her childhood, specifically emphasizing her relationship with her three sisters.
She first published them as articles on the abolitionist magazine Commonwealth , later as a book. Two months after her arrival, she contracted typhoid pneumonia and had to go home. Illustration from a later edition of Hospital Sketches depicting John, a Virginia blacksmith.
During a typical day, she rose at 6 a.
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