Though they had always held significant roles on the family farms during the antebellum years, women were not physically able to do all of the strenuous work that a running farm calls for. Oftentimes, northern women would turn to close neighbors, elderly parents or, if fortunate enough, brothers for help in doing daily chores. These extended family members were welcomed with open arms whenever they could lend a helping hand as many northern women were left at home with very young children who could not help or contribute to the daily chores.



For those women who could not rely on the help of nearby neighbors, family members or older children, their farms often failed and they had to make extraneous amounts of adjustments. Some moved in with other family members and hired themselves out to their neighbors and performed work on their farms in order to reap in an income(1).  Women relied on the skills they already had and took in extra laundry, sewing and boarders. During these meager times they also took the opportunity to collect old debts from friends and employers(2). 



One form of income that became especially popular during the Civil War was that of a seamstress. Military arsenals advertised for sewing women and hundreds answered the call, crowding into cities competing for jobs. This copious amount of seamstresses led subcontractors to cut their wage rates so that they worked longer hours for lower pay(3).



As counterparts to the rural women of the North, women who occupied northern cities had to fill their husbands’ roles as well. When their husbands enlisted, many urban women suddenly found themselves thrust into the task of running family stores, handling large expenses and managing boardinghouses. Along with writing instructions in letters on how to handle these various tasks, Union soldiers often made sure that neighbors or elderly fathers was consistently checking in on their wives to see how smoothly affairs were running(4).



Foreign to northern women, though, was working in munitions factories. However, women embraced this job as their patriotic offering to the cause, and some even gave up their lives for the job and cause.

The most famous, as well as the most tragic, account of a Civil War munitions factory mishap is the Allegheny Arsenal explosion. During the afternoon of September 17, 1862 a series of explosions disrupted the residents of Allegheny, Pennsylvania. As people rushed towards the arsenal to discover what had happened, they stumbled upon what the Pittsburgh Gazette called “an appalling sight”(5).  Girls caught on fire were seen screaming from the burning building, and as the building continued to burn women jumped from windows in an attempt to escape. Limbs, bones, shards of clothing and some bodies of the seventy-eight victims were found hundreds of feet from the scene of the explosion. On September 27 the coroner’s jury issued a verdict that found three officers and two civilians in charge of the Allegheny Arsenal responsible for “gross negligence” and went on further to demand that the army take the correct measures “to ensure the safety of the lives and property of our people from a calamity far more destructive and appalling than has yet befallen us”(6).

While not all factory women’s stories contain such a dramatic tale, the Allegheny Arsenal explosion represents how many women manually helped their country and what they risked for their country. During the Civil War, women held one-third of all manufacturing jobs in the North(7).   Many of women occupied jobs in factories that were already fairly indigenous to their gender, such as textiles and shoe manufacturing. Whatever position they did hold, however, was highly overlooked and hardly ever encouraged.



(1)Giesberg, Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front, 31.

(2)James L. Stokesbury, A Short History of the Civil War (New York City: William Morrow and Company, Inc, 1995), 255.

(3)Gallman, The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front, 105.

(4)Gallman, The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front, 107.

(5)Giesberg, Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front, 68.

(6)Giesberg, Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front, 69.

(7)Gallman, The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front, 107.