Vanished veterans: the multifaceted reasons for minimal historical representation and public commemoration of concealed female American Civil War soldiers

Using a wide variety of sources, including archival material, fiction, plays, monuments, diaries, political campaigns, and newspapers, this project reveals how female soldiers became forgotten historical figures, and the purpose their public imagery and erasure from the war's public memory served for contemporary society.<br><br>From the moment the first Civil War female soldier was publicly reported to their last substantial public representation, their public imagery was influenced by contextual events that upended prevailing gender ideologies.

This includes the war itself, Reconstruction, the women's rights movement, and the evolution of modern womanhood. These events caused female soldiers to be romanticized, villainized, and, eventually, suppressed in contemporary media. "Vanished Veterans," thus, provides historians with a new and valuable vantage point from which to observe how the late nineteenth-to-mid-twentieth-century United States confronted and attempted to manage some of the most societally transformative events in its history.<br><br>Public portrayals of female soldiers either reinforced traditional white gender conventions or denigrated women who traversed the boundaries of their culturally assigned gender.