“She Must Have Women’s Clothes to Put On”: Gendered Enforcement of Physical Spaces in the Civil War Militaries

During the U.S. Civil War, hundreds of women and other female-assigned soldiers served in the Union and Confederate armies as men, with a number of them discovered in the ranks. This paper considers the ways in which the two warring armies gendered military-affiliated spaces as male, and how they fought to maintain that gendering when female-assigned soldiers were discovered in male-defined spaces. I consider the question of gender enforcement in these physical spaces through the experiences of female-assigned soldiers in two places of frequent soldier presence and potential discovery: army hospitals and transport trains. Female-assigned soldiers were aware that hospitals and medical interventions risked exposing a sex that their society solely categorized as “woman” and therefore non-military. Trains, meanwhile, were a major area of policing due to fears of desertion, which offered an opportunity to police gender boundaries as well. This paper is part of a larger dissertation.