3.30 pm: St Patrick’s Day Creative Workshop at DMK Újkerti Community House
6 pm: “Men’s Fight Only? Women in the American Civil War”
Presenter: István Kornél Vida, Ph.D. Assistant Professor University of Debrecen, Institute of English and American Studies North American Department
In the decades prior to the Civil War, the lives of American women were shaped by what historians call “the Cult of True Womanhood”: devoting their lives’ full attention to their husbands and children in the private, feminized domestic households. The coming of the Civil War, however, forced women out of the artificial safety of this sphere, into public life in ways unimaginable even a few years before. Thousands of women in the North and South joined volunteer brigades to work as nurses, many were hired as spies or secret agents, some even served in the military disguised as men, not to mention the hundreds of thousands who performed all the men’s duties on the home front. This was the first war in American history in which women contributed to the war effort in a significant way. This talk commemorates them as part of the women’s history month as well as the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War.
