Women of War

On my way to Florida, where I'll be spending this week with my parents, I stayed the night Sunday with my aunt and uncle in Macon, Georgia. We had a lovely visit including an afternoon spent touring around Macon. My aunt is very knowledgeable about her town and shared much of its history with me.

One of our stops was at a memorial to the women of the Confederacy and it really stayed with me. I'm sure there were women, dressed up as men who fought in that war but this memorial commemorates the women who stayed at home and kept things going through some extremely tough times. it was good to see them recognized.

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One side of the monument, which is an obelisk, perhaps twenty feet in height, bears a three dimensional image of a women with one hand on a child's head and one on a spinning wheel. I suspect this is the image that their men held dear while they fought their lost cause. I also suspect that the reality for a lot of women bore a closer resemblance to what went on in the movie Cold Mountain. Be they share croppers or plantation owners, those women had a rough go of it.

There is a scene in that movie where Nicole Kidman's character, who is a daughter of privilege left alone by the war, is trying to build a fence with Catherine Zellweger's character, who is a practical backwoods kind of girl. The Zellweger character is astonished by the lack of useful, real world skills that the other woman possesses. Kidman's character throws up her hands and says she possesses many skills; she can play the piano, she can sing, she can host large dinners, she can speak French and she can embroider beautifully. What she can not do is plow, plant, harvest, build, hunt or do any of the things she needs to do to survive.

I suspect this was the situation a lot of women found themselves in when their bright boys marched off. In addition to finding ways to feed and clothe themselves and keep their farms going, women left alone are prime targets for raping, pillaging and looting and had to protect themselves against that as well. How many of us would be able to do it? Some were successful; many were not.

The opposite side of the memorial is a three dimensional carving of a woman giving water to what appears to be a dying soldier. That was another reality. As things started to go badly for the southern soldiers, the wounded began to pour into southern cities and towns and the women had to tend to them. If you've ever been in Georgia or Louisiana or Mississippi in the summer you can imagine what that must have been like. No air conditioning, no clean, sterile hospitals, just row after row of filthy, wounded, dying men to care for. The smell must have been overwhelming. The women, like they do everywhere then and now, rallied and did what they could in circumstances that I doubt they could ever have imagined before the start of the war.

This is a monument to the women of the South, it is Macon, Georgia, after all, but this is not a monument designed to praise a lost way of life or make a political statement about the issues over which that war was fought. It is a small remembrance for a seldom recognized group of people who were fighting their own, very different kind of war back home. Whether it be the Civil War, the World Wars, Vietnam or Iraq, while the soldiers are off doing different things in faraway places, there are a whole bunch of people at home getting on with the business of living, made much more difficult by having to do it alone and while worrying about the safety of their loved ones. I'm glad Macon, Georgia, thought to remember and recognize them.

Although I've not seen it, i know there is a Civil War Women's Memorial in Gettysburg commemorating the efforts of all women and specifically the efforts of Elizabeth Thorn who, while six months pregnant, buried the first 91 casualties of the Battle of Gettysburg. Do you know of any others? Or for that matter, do you know of any other memorials to the non-combatant women of any war? Please share them if you do.