Getting Underway

I hate introductions.  You feel like you have to say something witty or profound.  Lucky for you, dear reader, you get neither.  Just a simply hello and a brief introduction to what this blog is all about.
I created this blog to talk about my research for my senior Honors thesis, to help me organize my thoughts, make sense of things, and hopefully elicit some feedback.  My research focuses on Civil War army nurses--specifically, those who applied for pensions in the years after the war.  Only a year into the war, the Federal government realized that it needed to provide for disabled soldiers returning home--this was the beginning of a massive expansion of the pension system.  By 1892, it was possible for any white man to receive a pension as long as he could prove he had served in the Union army, and pensions amounted to around half of the federal budget!
And the women?
The women are a different story.
Until 1892, if a woman wanted a pension, she applied for a Special Act of Congress.  It wasn't until the late 1880s that legislation was put forward that would allow women who served as nurses for at least six months to receive a pension.  The Army Nurses Pension Act finally passed in 1892.  In the intervening 27 years, however, hundreds of women applied for pensions.  I want to find out who these women were.  Where did they come from? What was their economic status?  Were they employed?  Were they single, widowed, married and with children?  What drove them to apply for a pension?  Did they succeed or did they fail?  Is there a reason behind their success or failure?  When widows or blacks applied for pensions Congress often played the moralizer: successful petitioners were respectable, literate, and, at least for women, dependent (i.e. still a widow--you could not remarry or they yanked the pension).  Did Congress play the same game with the nurses?
Then there's the Pension Act itself.  What was the drive behind the legislative push?  Why did Congress pass it?  Was this just Congress finally realizing that if the men were getting pensions right and left, they'd better let the women in on the deal too? (Somehow I doubt that...)  Or was there a greater political movement behind the Pension Act?  Were women, in short, becoming politicized, and becoming major political actors in their own right?
The best way to answer these questions is to look first at the pension records themselves.  So, for the next five weeks, I will be pulling pensions as close to 24/7 as I can get.  Every night (knock on wood), I'll report my findings here.
So, here's to five weeks of successful research.  Wish me luck!