The Great American History Blog: Women's history

Showing posts with label Women's history. Show all posts

Friday, October 12, 2018

Not Your Grandmother's Southern Belle: Hispanic Woman and Confederate Soldier

Civil War re-enactors have been challenged by some women in recent years to allow them to “join the ranks”. If re-enactors today find this problematic, how must men have reacted in the Civil War? But life and history are both complex.

Cuban-born Loreta Velasquez, disguised as a man, enlisted in the Confederate army as Lieutenant Harry T. Buford in 1860. According to military records, under the name Harry T. Buford, she raised a company of volunteers from Arkansas and fought in the battles of 1st Manassas, Ball’s Bluff, and Fort Donelson. In 1862 her disguise was discovered and she was discharged from the army. Velasquez then enlisted with the 21st Louisiana Infantry regiment and went on to fight at Shiloh. Velasquez's disguise was discovered yet again and she was once again discharged. The resourceful Velasquez then became a spy for the Confederacy, often posing as a man.

After the war the now widowed Velasquez moved to Nevada, where she authored a book, "The Woman in Battle", a non-stop thriller patterned after the tales about famous gunfighters. She was married and widowed three more time before her death in 1897 at the age of fifty five (?).

Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Civil War

A brief look at love, sex, and marriage in the Civil War. The book covers courtship, marriage, birth control and pregnancy, divorce, slavery and the impact of the war on social customs.

The Confederate Woman: Soldier and Spy

These fictional memoirs are based on the true story of a southern belle who defied convention to become a front line soldier and spy for the Confederacy.

Shoes! Shoes! Shoes! Prada Shoes!

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Margaret Sanger on Preventing a Permanent Criminal Underclass

In her book, The Pivot of Civilization, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood offered this prescription for eliminating the permanent criminal underclass:

There is but one practical and feasible program in handling the great problem of the feeble-minded. That is, as the best authorities are agreed, to prevent the birth of those who would transmit imbecility to their descendants. Feeble-mindedness as investigations and statistics from every country indicate, is invariably associated with an abnormally high rate of fertility. Modern conditions of civilization, as we are continually being reminded, furnish the most favorable breeding-ground for the mental defective, the moron, the imbecile. "We protect the members of a weak strain," says Davenport, "up to the period of reproduction, and then let them free upon the community, and encourage them to leave a large progeny of `feeble-minded': which in turn, protected from mortality and carefully nurtured up to the reproductive period, are again set free to reproduce, and so the stupid work goes on of preserving and increasing our socially unfit strains."

The philosophy of Birth Control points out that as long as civilized communities encourage unrestrained fecundity in the "normal" members of the population—always of course under the cloak of decency and morality—and penalize every attempt to introduce the principle of discrimination and responsibility in parenthood, they will be faced with the ever-increasing problem of feeble-mindedness, that fertile parent of degeneracy, crime, and pauperism. Small as the percentage of the imbecile and half-witted may seem in comparison with the normal members of the community, it should always be remembered that feeble-mindedness is not an unrelated expression of modern civilization. Its roots strike deep into the social fabric. Modern studies indicate that insanity, epilepsy, criminality, prostitution, pauperism, and mental defect, are all organically bound up together and that the least intelligent and the thoroughly degenerate classes in every community are the most prolific. Feeble-mindedness in one generation becomes pauperism or insanity in the next. There is every indication that feeble-mindedness in its protean forms is on the increase, that it has leaped the barriers, and that there is truly, as some of the scientific eugenists have pointed out, a feeble-minded peril to future generations—unless the feeble-minded are prevented from reproducing their kind. To meet this emergency is the immediate and peremptory duty of every State and of all communities.

Love, Sex and Marriage in VictorianAmerica

We think we know the Victorians, but do we? The same passions, strengths and weaknesses that exist now, existed then, but people organized themselves very differently.

Monday, June 08, 2015

Rape in the American Civil War

I Had Rather Die: Rape in the Civil War

By Kim Murphy

This is a very gritty book that will forever change your view of the Civil War as a clash involving knights errant and their ladies fair. War is nasty and brutish, and author Kim Murphy pulls no punches as she attacks the darkest side of the Civil War.

In the chaos and disorder of war, the weak and vulnerable suffered the most. Women and children bore the brunt of rape and brutality in the Civil War. Poor women more than rich women, and black women most of all. Reading like a police blotter, Murphy’s book catalogs in detail the crimes perpetrated against the weak. This is the real history, of real people, often overlooked by those historians primarily interested in the military and political aspects of the war and not in the impact of war on ordinary people. It is not a pretty story.

Murphy spent some seven years researching this book, and the end result is a remarkable piece of scholarship, in an area of the Civil War avoided by male historians. Her spare style adds to the gravity of the subject. Rather than editorializing, or pontificating, Murphy lets the facts speak for themselves, which makes the record even more damning.

Most of the available records involve Union soldiers (most Confederate records having been destroyed during the war), and are an indictment of the military system of justice, up the chain of command, and including President Abraham Lincoln. Many soldiers committed atrocities, but skipped away from their crimes either free or with minimal sentences because of their records as “good soldiers.” Far more were excused than punished.

This book is a must read for all serious students of the Civil War.

CIVIL WAR CIVILIAN LIFE: MANASSAS,VIRGINIA

A brief look at the impact of war on civilians living around Manassas based on first person narratives and family histories.

Women Doctors in the Civil War

A quick look at women doctors and medicine in the Civil War for the general reader. Technologically, the American Civil War was the first “modern” war, but medically it still had its roots in the Middle Ages. In both the North and the South, thousands of women served as nurses to help wounded and suffering soldiers and civilians. A few women served as doctors, a remarkable feat in an era when sex discrimination prevented women from pursuing medical education, and those few who did were often obstructed by their male colleagues at every turn.