Thesis (M.A.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1994. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-103). Also available via the Internet.

Female camp followers throughout history have followed troops into the field fulfilling supply and labor needs which the military structure could not. This pattern began to change during the American Revolution as governments and military commanders tightened their control on the military. Emerging army patterns and new attitudes concerning women acted to discourage the informal reliance on women and to encourage a more formal and controllable reliance on military units. By examining women with regular army groups, a stronger understanding of these women's lives and choices becomes possible. This study examines the number of women involved, the reasons they chose to follow military troops, the life they found with the military, and military commanders' attempts to control women and their behavior. Between five thousand and twenty thousand women traveled with military forces during the Revolution for reasons of economic need, a sense of duty, and love. They cleaned, cooked, nursed, and helped in gun crews for occasional pay, rations, and the chance to stay with their husbands, sons, and male friends. Disease, childbirth complications, and violence within and outside camp claimed their lives. Meanwhile, military leaders issued orders against straggling, riding the wagons, looting, and the illegal sale of alcohol in an effort to control the women's behavior. Such efforts only achieved intermittent success. / Master of Arts

The American Civil War is often framed as exclusively masculine, consisting of soldiers, god-like generals, and battle; a sphere where women simply did not enter or coexist. This perception is largely due to the mobilization of approximately six million men, coupled with the Victorian era which did not permit women to engage in the public sphere. Women are given their place however, but it is more narrowly defined as home front assistance. Even as women transitioned from passive receivers to active participants, their efforts rarely defied gender norms. This thesis looks at Confederate female camp followers who appeared to defy societal conventions by entering the male dominated camps and blurred the lines between men and women’s proper spheres. While camp followers could be expanded to include women of the lower class, including black women, laborers, slaves and prostitutes, only middle and upper class white women are analyzed because they were the ones required to maintain respectability. More specifically, I analyze unmarried women, female soldiers, bereaved women and nurses. Barbara Welter articulated and labeled the concept of public versus private spheres, plus the attributes necessary to achieve respectability as the Cult of True Womanhood. The Cult of True Womanhood demanded that women be pious, pure, and submissive within the domestic sphere. It is with this foundation that the camp followers can be analyzed. Their actions appeared to break with the Cult of True Womanhood, but when they explained in memoirs, newspaper accounts, and journals why they entered the camps, they framed their responses in a way that allowed them to appear to conform to the cult.