| Union troops in 1861 assumed that soldiering would express pure masculinity, courage shorn of domestic restrictions. Within months, encounters with pervasive hardship, sickness and wounds caused soldiers and civilians to think again. To ameliorate suffering, they transferred home ideas and practices into the army.; Efforts proceeded on several levels. Ideologically, soldiers adapted supposedly feminine, nurturing virtues such as patient endurance and attention to domestic detail to promote the "manly" traits of stoic self-sufficiency and inurement to suffering. Racially, prejudiced white soldiers espoused the use of African-Americans for "female" servile and "brutish" fatigue labor as a means of conserving whites for "more manly" combat. Relationally, to offset affliction, soldiers partnered into households cemented by varying intensities of devotion: from avowed mutual guardianship that sometimes superseded combat duties, to fraternalism that always molded helpfulness to fit current duty, to occasional cooperation. Institutionally, Northerners protested the new, mass-produced care delivered by the army medical service and the U.S. Sanitary Commission by contrasting it unfavorably to loving, individualized home nursing. Medical personnel and relief agents, to legitimate their work, soon declared themselves proxy kin to soldiers, as proof rendering increasingly personalized aid. The family motif also cleared space for genteel women in military hospitals by purging intimate patient care of sexual connotations.; Northerners' ubiquitous use of domestic ideals as reforming principles showed some flexibility in American gender notions, but also circumscribed responses to suffering. Defining disability as a private problem meant that disabled soldiers often struggled alone to maintain manly independence. Soldierly brotherhood paradoxically guaranteed attrition so long as comradeship required faithfulness in combat. Because white soldiers' notions of family rejected racial mixing, domestic metaphors often hindered black equality in army institutions; blacks equally uncomfortable with white paternalism countered with the metaphor of friendship to promote improvement. Caregivers who individualized their solicitude to patients, frequently undercut the efficiency of their organizations. Finally, "Lady" nurses needed constantly to guard their domestic mystique or lose status, while majority male and working-class female nurses often found their fine work forgotten because they were not "ladies". |
