Keele Research Repository

This article provides the first extended analysis of Confederate home nursing in the American Civil War (1861-65). Home nursing was an integral component of Confederate health care outside of the regulation of the Confederate Medical Department and relied on the willingness of individual and collective groups of middle and planter class white women to open private homes to ailing Confederate soldiers. The gendered labor of home nursing wedded the gap between the shortcomings of the Confederate Medical Department and the needs of its people, on both the front lines and the home front. In doing so, home nursing provided a new channel for women to engage with Confederate nationalism in tangible and local ways.