![]() ![]() Black women, both enslaved and free, worked in factories and military hospitals. Working-class and immigrant white women manufactured cartridges and shells. Upper-class white women raised money for the army and processed the government's paperwork, printing currency and sorting mail. Which is strange, because women were the ones keeping the besieged, unhappy city - and the machinery of the Confederacy - going. With very few exceptions - first lady Varina Davis, Union spy Elizabeth Van Lew - the women of the war have vanished from Richmond's memory. Sally Tompkins slaying a microbial dragon with a sword. We came close: Back in the '60s, Monument Avenue almost got a Salvador Dali-designed aluminum statue of Confederate Capt. There are no big monuments to Richmond's Civil War women. “In the midst of suffering and death … a woman must soar beyond the conventional modesty considered correct under different circumstances,” hospital matron Phoebe Pember wrote after the war. ![]()
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