Literature Network » Louisa May Alcott

Seldom thanked, never praised, and scarcely recognized: gender and racism in Civil War hospitals.

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From: Civil War History
Date: 20020901
Author:Schultz, Jane E.

Before the Battle of Fredericksburg in late 1862, thirty-year-old Louisa May Alcott went to work at Georgetown's Union Hotel Hospital in the District of Columbia. As a Northerner from the rural community of Concord, Massachusetts, Alcott worried that white co-workers at Union Hotel would scorn her ignorance of African Americans and her untried abolitionist views. Expecting to be found out as a false abolitionist, Alcott instead encountered white co-workers who reviled her for speaking to blacks; one nearly fainted when she cradled a black toddler. White nurses, she noticed, were ...

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