Rehabilitating Bodies by Long Lisa A.;

Author:Long, Lisa A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Nursing Bodies: Civil War Women and Postbellum Regeneration

O women of America! into your hands God has pressed one of the sublimest opportunities that ever came into the hands of the women of any race or people. It is yours to create a healthy public sentiment; to demand justice, simple justice, as the right of every race.

—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “Women’s Political Future”

And what, then, of the women? Were they infected with the sickness of battle? On the contrary, many turn-of-the-century women writers reclaimed Civil War nursing as a position of power and authority, one that superseded that of the patients they had tended. Although veterans’ memories of war service were clouded by illness, by the turn of the century women nurses’ vision of the Civil War was clear. Indeed, they laid a strong claim to historical authenticity via the unique healing abilities that were associated with their war service. In Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s address during the 1893 World’s Fair, cited at the beginning of the chapter, she claims that women are the divine instruments of God’s desire to create a “healthy public sentiment.” God has literally “pressed” that responsibility onto women’s bodies, specifically their capable hands. They are nearly divine means of rehabilitation. Harper and her contemporaries needed to exploit the trope of nursing in order to respond to contemporaneous theories of women’s biological and racial disease solidifying after the war. The multifarious character of nursing activities during the Civil War—the counseling, secretarial work, cleaning, cooking, laundering, and, most important, the mothering performed—was detached from the war by medical theorists and eugenical scientists and recast as a sign of female irresolution and illness. White women were accused of maternal culpability—that is, their scattered attentions and compromised reproductive organs were responsible for the waning of the race. African American women were even more unfit, their bodies supposedly insensible and oversexed; miscegenation would tragically pollute the white race.

White nurses and memoirists Mary Livermore and Mary Gardner Holland, African American author Harper, and African American nurse and memoirist Susie King Taylor rehabilitate the maternal body through the trope of nursing, making women’s corporeality a force of regeneration apart from their vexed reproductive capabilities. Countering the logic of hysteria, which focused attention on women’s wombs, the word nursing implicitly moved the public gaze to women’s productive breasts and capable hands. Of course none of the Civil War nurses depicted here are described literally as breast-feeding. However, the trope of Civil War nursing demonstrates that women’s bodies produced metaphoric nutrients that infused the sick bodies of men and the body of the nation without diminishing their own corporeality. This interpretation of nursing resisted postbellum theories of bodily energy, which posited that bodies had limited resources: if a woman expended energy in one part of the corporeal economy (say, engaging in intellectual work) other body parts (e.g., the reproductive organs) would suffer. The Civil War did not induce corporeal lessening for nursing bodies; on the contrary, it fostered expansion. Only such multiple, aberrant, even mythical bodies were able to effect corporeal and cultural rehabilitation.

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