NARRATOR: That's First Lieutenant Shaye Haver, Captain Kristen Griest, and Major Lisa Jaster, the first women to graduate from US Army Ranger School.

2015 was the first year women were even allowed to participate in the Army's elite and famously grueling ranger school.

And now the military has opened up all combat positions to women, no exceptions.

Women's participation into the rank and file during wartime has been a persistently contentious issue.

And the road to acceptance has been hard won.

And as you can see here in the Women In Military Service For America Memorial, their role over the years has continued to expand.

A lot of this can be traced back to the Civil War, where women were able to achieve a standard of independence and empowerment unlike any previous time in American history.

[music playing] In the early 1800s in America before the Civil War, women were not seen as equal to men, like, at all.

Women had very little property rights, did not have many opportunities for higher education, could not vote, and basically lived as second class citizens.

Married women were generally relegated to the home and expected to do little else than domestic work.

But starting in the 1820s, some younger women started living on their own in boarding houses and working in textile mills in New England.

This was a totally new concept.

Out of these movements came a movement to give women greater abilities outside of the home.

NARRATOR: This is Jane E Schultz, professor of English, American Studies and the Medical Humanities at Indiana University in Indianapolis.

And the primary exponents of that movement were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony.

NARRATOR: You may know Susan B Anthony from the coin.

But both she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton could see that women weren't getting a fair deal.

And they set out to do something about it on a national level.

In 1848, Stanton and her colleagues established the first Women's Rights Convention, where they proclaimed that women were equal to men and deserved the same rights and opportunities.

It's this sort of urge to reform the construction of gender in the mid 19th century that I think really helps jumpstart women's work during the Civil War.

The Civil War was the first time that the women's rights movement of the 1800s got to put the reforms they were working on into practice on a large scale.

Not only did women take jobs in the front, but they had more responsibility at home, because the men were going off to battle.

So they really stood in for men.

And this gave them, I think, a real hunger for being out in the public sphere, which was the area that women had not really specialized in as much before the war.

And while women were assuming more responsibility outside the domestic sphere, they were also working in new roles on the battlefront.

In the war itself, by far the most significant group of women who did work expressly for the war effort were women who did relief work and nursing.

At the beginning of the war, nursing was a male dominated occupation with women generally being banned from work in field hospitals.

But as casualties mounted, it became clear that more help was necessary.

In 1861, Dorothea Dix, an educator and social reformer, led a group of volunteer female nurses to Washington and petitioned the US government to recognize their desire to aid in the war effort.

The Secretary of War agreed.

And the US Sanitary Commission was born with Dorothea Dix as the superintendent.

This really opened up nursing to women.

And they were able to play a larger role in the Civil War than in previous conflicts.

In the union alone, there were over 21,000 women who did such work.

NARRATOR: Though their support was welcome, a lot of men, especially those trained before the war, were resistant to women in those roles.

I think we could say fairly clearly that most elite surgeons thought that women would be a hindrance and a bother.

But that would change throughout the course of the war.

And a few women would rise up through the ranks and take on even more prominent roles.

Perhaps the most well known of these women was Clara Barton.

Of course, many people know the name of Clara Barton.

She was an immensely hard worker, very disciplined person.

She was a schoolteacher before the war.

When the war broke out, Clara Barton was one of the first volunteers to care for wounded soldiers.

However-- Clara Barton did not want to become a nurse in the way that other women during the Civil War became nurses.

She wanted to do things on her own.

She thought the system of sending aid through the War Department and the US Sanitary Commission was too inefficient.

So she decided to cut out the middlemen.

And so she began to stockpile supplies in Washington DC and hired some teamsters, people who drove wagons, our current truck drivers, they were called teamsters, and asked them, when she learned of a battle on hand, to come with her and take her supplies to those soldiers.

In August of 1862, she gained permission from Quartermaster Daniel Rucker to bring her operation to the front lines.

Risking her life to bring supplies and support to the troops, she became known as the angel of the battlefield.

And in the years following the war, Clara Barton continued to show her compassion for the wounded and became the founding president of the American Red Cross.

But women also fought in the war.

There were over 400 documented cases of women joining the army and fighting on the front lines.

Some women went to war to be with their loved ones.

Others were seeking adventure or a paycheck.

But many just wanted the opportunity to defend their country like the men were doing.

But women were, by law, not allowed to join the army.

So they had to resort to other methods to slip through the recruitment process.

[music playing] The typical uniform of a soldier was usually baggy enough to hide any identifying female characteristics.

And women often took it a step further, adopting many habits associated with men, like smoking, gambling, and swearing.

One famous case was Jennie Hodgers, aka Albert Cashier.

She enlisted in the 95th Illinois infantry and fought in over 40 battles.

She lived in the ranks.

There are soldiers who mentioned her, not realizing that he was a her.

There's even a report of Hodgers being captured and then escaping by overpowering a prison guard.

Jennie Hodgers was never discovered.

And after the war, she continued to live as a man.

It wasn't until 1910, when she received a serious injury, but it was discovered that she was, in fact, a woman.

I'm sure that in the case of Jennie Hodgers, Albert Cashier, he/she was a transgender person in an era before we had any vocabulary or experience to understand that.

Although the fact that women served as soldiers during the war wasn't well known at the time, Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued that female service on the front lines was a huge step forward for gender equality.

But the aftermath of the Civil War was more complicated than that.

We would expect that after the war, there would be great advances for women.

But one of the things that historians, in particular, have learned in looking at war is that after wars, we have a very conservative reaction.

By the 1870s, there were women who simply moved back into the domestic space.

The reason it's a complicated answer is that despite this period of conservatism that happens after the war, generally, I would say that certainly the war helped catapult the cause of women to work outside of the home.

Here's a quote from Sarah Edmonds Seelye, also known as Franklin Flint Thompson of the Second Michigan Infantry, about her experience during the war.

"I could only thank God that I was free and could go forward and work.

And I was not obliged to stay at home and weep."

While you wouldn't think it, the expanded roles in society for women, whether it be Army Rangers or CEOs, had their beginnings in the Civil War.

Although we still have a long ways to go, the women who served as nurses and soldiers during the Civil War showed that they could take on roles predominately thought of as only for men.

And they helped shape and redefine gender roles as we know them now.

So what do you think?

Did the Civil War open up opportunities for women?

Can war bring about lasting change?

Or is it just a flash in the pan, as they say?

Let us know in the comments.

This episode was brought to you by PBS Learning Media, a great source for classroom resources on Civil War history.

If you're interested in finding more videos and lesson plans on what we talked about today, check out our page on learning media.

And for a more dramatic take on the Civil War, check out Mercy Street on PBS.

Jane E Schultz was a historical adviser on that show.

And a lot of what we talked about gets talked about over there too.

So head over to pbs.org to check it out.

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