The Database is Finished!

It took me two months, but the database is finally finished!  Woot!!
One of the things I was very interested in seeing was just who these women worked for.  Dix only recruited so many women--so where did the rest of the women fit in?  Here's the breakdown:

• 21% were contract nurses: women who enlisted or made contracts with individual doctors or surgeons rather than going through Dix, the USSC, or the USCC.  These women were paid 40 cents a day.
• 18% enlisted under Dix and were a part of her nursing corps.  They also received 40 cents a day.
• 11% were regimental nurses, who traveled with the regiment to the front lines.
• 11% served with the Sanitary Commission
• 3% served with the Christian Commission
• 12% volunteered their services and were never paid, per their own request.  They didn't work for any larger organization.
• 2% worked directly for the army in some capacity--these are my "outliers," women like Kady Brownell, Mary E. Walker, and Mary Hooker, who served as soldiers, spies, or surgeons.
• .1% were arsenal workers--poor Mary Dougherty was the only one I found.
• 22% I couldn't identify.  Sometimes it was because there was nothing in the file.  More often, however, it was because these women called themselves "volunteer nurses" which could mean anything under the sun.

I'm a little surprised at the numbers, honestly.  For one, I thought the USCC numbers would be higher, since Wittenmyer (a USCC agent) was operating the hospital diet kitchens, but most of the women who worked in the diet kitchens didn't identify themselves as Christian Commission workers--in fact, the Christian Commission is barely mentioned.  Instead, diet kitchen workers received their pay from the federal government, which effectively makes them contract nurses.
The number of regimental nurses also surprised me.  In early June, 1861, Simon Cameron (Lincoln's first Sec. of War) issued an order that "women nurses will not reside in the camps, nor accompany regiments on a march," and there were several general orders issued throughout the war that removed women from the front lines.  Though, there's not much point in ordering the women away if they aren't already there to be ordered away...so apparently, despite all efforts to the contrary, women did attach themselves to regiments and follow them to the front lines.  At least half of my regimental workers also had a husband or sons in the regiment they were attached to--which gives them a strong reason for staying.
Another aspect I wanted to look at was color.  I managed to positively identify 6 women as black, usually through sheer dumb luck.  I think I mentioned this in a previous post, but color was not something the Pension Bureau asked about.  The only way for them to tell was for the records to say "colored contract nurse" or "contraband" or someone to mention something in correspondence.  Otherwise, short of hitting the census records, there's no way to tell.
4 of my black nurses were contract nurses--meaning they made arrangements with individual doctors or hospitals to work in return for pay.  That I expected.  I also found one women who was part of Dix's nursing corps: Jane Howard; and one woman who worked as a regimental nurse: Patsey Green.  That I did not expect.  I also did not expect Jane Howard's application to have the signatures of Ellen Tolman and Caroline Burghardt.  Then, I started looking at the success rates.  Only two of these women managed to secure pensions.  However, of the four that didn't, only two applied after the ANPA.  The other two were rejected on the grounds that there simply was no legislation that allowed the government to pension women.  Keeping in mind that 6 women does not a full story make, a 50% success rate post-1892 is pretty dang good.
A couple more interesting numbers: the vast majority of women (over 200) had no attorney when they applied for their pension.  Since the ANPA stated that any legal help in prosecuting these pensions had to be gratuitous, I'm not surprised.  James Tanner (the former Commissioner of Pensions who offered to help the WRC nurses) is listed as attorney for at least 20 women, Ellen Tolman is listed in 5 (and acts as witness in several others), and Wittenmyer is attorney in 11 (but is, again, used as a reference in at least a dozen more).  No one else comes close to managing the number of claims they do.
The final stat: success rates.

• 10% were abandoned
• 10% were rejected outright
• 7% didn't state if the claim was successful or not
• 73% were accepted

 Of the 73% that were accepted:

• 60% went through the Special Act process (meaning they could have been passed before the ANPA, or that they fulfilled the spirit if not the letter of the ANPA and got their pension via Special Act post-1892)
• 40% did not

Also, out of that 73%:

• 88% were accepted right off the bat
• 9% were originally rejected and the claimants either filed again or managed to get a Special Act
• 2% were rejected twice, and had to apply a third time
• 1% were rejected three times, and had to apply a fourth time

I know the Special Acts passed pre-1892 are skewing the success rate stats, and I will be going through at some point and getting better numbers on those so I can get a better sense of the ANPA success rate.  But if you halve the number of accepted pensions to account for the majority of the Special Acts (and I know, somewhere out there, a stats person is crying), the success rate suddenly becomes almost 1 in 2, where before it was 3 in 4.  Wonder what the rate was for soldiers...
Okay, no more numbers, I promise!  This week is dedicated to writing the rough draft to my intro, and I promise I'll be posting so you can see what I'm up to.  There's a lot of stuff I haven't touched on yet, and I really want to talk about Jane Howard's file.  So much to do!!