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In this study of Confederate nursing, Libra R. Hilde persuasively contends that the middle- and upper-class white women who healed the sick and comforted the dying contributed meaningfully to the Confederacy's unrelenting demand for medical care. Because these women set out to perform nursing in the name of domesticity and Confederate nationalism, surgeons and soldiers eventually welcomed their life-saving work.

The book focuses on Confederate “matrons,” the middle- and upper-class white women who served as administrators, coordinating the labor of convalescing soldiers, slaves, and other white women in areas that often included cooking, laundry, nursing supplies, and the overall care of the ailing soldier's body and mind. Hilde uses pay scales and budget lines to estimate that well over one thousand women served in such positions across the South at the height of the war. Like other studies of Civil War nursing in the North and South, Hilde reaffirms the profile of the idealized female caregiver: matronly, middle aged, unmarried, and childless. Widows were especially prized.

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