speech+katie+&+rachel~civil+war

Rachel- Hello, I am Rose, and I am Mary. Your teacher informed us that you students are doing a unit on the civil war. We volunteered to come in and tell you a little bit about home life during the civil war. When you hear the phrase "civil war," most of you think of life on the battlefield. The bloody scenes with man killing man. Well, we are here to tell you that the bloody battles between men did not only affect men, but the women they left behind. Katie- If you think about it, the women were the reason that families stayed together, as well as their whole life structure. When our husbands went away to war, we not only had to do our hard labor, but theirs. We had to make, sew and wash clothes, make three meals a day, not only for our kids, but for the soldiers that came in for care. We had to tend the fields and work in the farms, fetch wood, run our taverns and general stores, while balancing in volunteer hours at our local hospitals.

Katie- You may think that clothes are very simple to make, but their not. If you think about all the different styles of dresses, and the intricate designs, such as the elegant dresses, the day dresses, tea dresses, the promeade dresses, and the childrens clothing, that is a whole bunch of things to sew. Not to mention that it takes mental exhaustio and physucal exhaustion, with your body cramping up from sitting their making clothes for hours. If you think of the hours it would take to make these dresses, if you are not rich enough to buy them, they would take most of the day, considering you have to get the materials, hand wash all those clothes where your hands gert worn, tired and cracked, wait for them to dry, and press them. That is a lot for a days' work. But we are not finished.

Rachel-Next, we will talk about the hours of volunteer service at the hospitals. Hospitals formed aid societies, like us, to provide soldiers with socks, undergarments, shirts, gloves, blankets, shoes, comforters, handkerchiefs, scarves, bandages, and food. We also plan and attend bazaars, fairs, concerts, raffles, and dances to raise money for army supplies. We also had to take the role of the male occupation of nursing during the Civil War, taking care of the Confederacy's wounded as best as we could. Because many Georgia towns became battlefields during the war, us local women often inadvertently became frontline nurses. Hospitals were set up anywhere—homes, such as mine, churches, town halls, and streets. Other women that we were friends with and volunteered with left their homes to care for wounded troops on the front lines. KAtie- Also, older women were more likely to work in the hospital by donating their time or needed items. But when we were volunteering, we were younger women, and we most likely, if I recall, traveled to other towns or even states to help out at hospitals. Women who had a husband, son, or brother fighting in the war were more likely to feel the need to contribute themselves, such as us. We felt that we should contribute some time because someone could be taking care of our husbands, and we could return the favor by taking care of theirs.

Rachel- One of the biggest, most time consuming events of the day are running the tavern, and working on the farm and fields. First, let me give you a glimpse of day at the farm. Now, finishing everything on the farm takes about the whole day. Imagine taking all those hours and cramming it down to about two hours. I am not just talking about a few jobs on the farm, such as milking the cow or getting the eggs from the chickens, but the whole lot of it. Our planter or landowner assigned each family a small tract of land to farm and provided food, shelter, clothing, and the necessary seeds and farm equipment. After I harvested the crops, with my back aching for rest, I took the cotton to market and after deducting for the "furnish" (the cost of the items the tenant had been furnished during the year), and gave half of the proceeds to the tenant. This is known as sharecropping. Also, slaughtering was a very emotionally tiring process for us women to go through.

Katie- The other major job for the day is taking the role of the tavern owner. In my tavern, their is a kitchen, dairy, farm, rooms to sleep in. I own a bed and breakfast tavern, as well as a drop in for dinner tavern. With this, you see I also have to wake up very early in the morning to cook the breakfast, or wake up at various hours of the night if their are any complaints. For dessert, I would make pies and other baked goods and would place them in the ice house, which sits behind the house, to cool. In the winter, ice would be cut from the river and laid down in the sawdust in the icehouse to keep the food through the hot summer. I brought in two kinds of baked goods that i sell at the tavern. One is coffee cake, and the other is applesauce cookies. Most of a my customera come to eat, drink, sleep or do all three. My husband was very well known for his great food, so I had the burden of copying his great recipes and perfecting them, because they expected the great food, even though a different person was making the food. At night, I supplied them with a hot meal and cider. It took a lot of arm strength to churn the cider, which was so tiresome. I would also have to wash our customers sheets and bed linens as well as mine and my children's.

Katie- As you can see, these daily, tiresome, time-consuming jobs were no easy labor. Even the small jobs, such as chopping the wood, and sweeping the porch took a lot of time and work. They were back-to-back, which meant full-on working with no breaks throughout the day. Rachel- Considering that men had to do their jobs, such as running the tavern and farming, because they were very strong and had a lot of willpower, this burden was overbearing to us women, adding all the other responsibilities and duties they had to complete in the first place. If it were not for women, life would be hard to restart for the men fighting in the war, for they would have to start and rebuild their life from scratch.