Middle West US
Exploring Midwest History and Culture
A Mother’s Work: Mary Bickerdyke, Civil War-Era Nurse
May 6, 2026
Megan VanGorder
“She ranks me.” This succinct declaration, attributed to prominent Union generals, has been passed through historical memory and become the three-word phrase that encapsulates both the power and the peculiarities of Mary Bickerdyke’s Civil War service. In its most frequently cited form, the story goes like this: an officer complained to Sherman that Bickerdyke was ignoring orders, moving through camps, requisitioning supplies, or reorganizing hospital spaces without proper authorization. When pressed to discipline her, Sherman reportedly waved off the complaint with the remark, “She ranks me.” It is a humorous wartime anecdote with some serious implications. What does it really mean? How could a working-class widow from Galesburg, Illinois, outrank men like William T. Sherman or Ulysses S. Grant? In A Mother’s Work: Mary Bickerdyke, Civil War-Era Nurse, I take these questions as a point of departure to examine Bickerdyke’s life and fascinating journey, and to investigate the broader meanings and possibilities of women’s caregiving labor in the nineteenth century…Read More
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“Here on the prairies of Illinois and the Middle West we can see a long way in many directions…Here there are no barriers, no defenses, to ideas and aspirations. We want none; we want no shackles on the mind or the spirit, no rigid patterns of thought, no iron conformity.”
-Adlai Stevenson