quipped and poorly fed soldiers in the field. In the large cities
women were holding highly successful "Sanitary Fairs" to raise funds
for the Sanitary Commission. In fact, through the women, civilian
relief was organized as never before in history. Individual women too,
Susan knew, were making outstanding contributions to the war. Lucy
Stone's sister-in-law, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell,[148] a friend and
admirer of Florence Nightingale, was training much-needed nurses,
while Dr. Mary Walker, putting on coat and trousers, ministered
tirelessly to the wounded on the battlefield. Dorothea Dix, the
one-time schoolteacher who had awakened the people to their barbarous
treatment of the insane, had offered her services to the
Surgeon-General and was eventually appointed Superintendent of Army
Nurses, with authority to recruit nurses and oversee hospital
housekeeping. Clara Barton, a government employee, and other women
volunteers were finding their way to the front to nurse the wounded
who so desperately needed their help; and Mother Bickerdyke, living
with the armies in the field, nursed her boys and cooked for them,
lifting their morale by her motherly, strengthening presence. Through
the influence of Anna Ella Carroll, Maryland had been saved for the
Union and she, it was said, was ably advising President Lincoln.

Susan herself had felt no call to nurse the wounded, although she had
often skillfully nursed her own family; nor had she felt that her
qualifications as an expert housekeeper and good executive demanded
her services at the front to supervise army housekeeping. Instead she
looked for some important task to which other women would not turn in
these days when relief work absorbed all their attention. It was not
enough, she felt, for women to be angels of mercy, valuable and
well-organized as this phase of their work had become. A spirit of
awareness was lacking among them, also a patriotic fervor, and this
led her to believe that northern women needed someone to stimulate
their thinking, to force them to come to grips with the basic issues
of the war and in so doing claim their own freedom. Women, she
reasoned, must be aroused to think not only in terms of socks, shirts,
and food for soldiers or of bandages and nursing, but in terms of the
traditions of freedom upon which this republic was founded. Women must
have a part in molding public opinion and must help direct policy as
Anna Ella Carroll was proving women could