The anniversary of the firing on fort sumter, everybody has different ideas about what the nation is supposed to become. We have gone through that with the idea that africanamerican men who had fought for the union what americas of should be, and certainly white southerners had in idea about what america should be. The northerners who won had an idea of what america should be. The indians and the chinese at out west had ideas about what america should be and certainly the northern men who had won the war had ideas about what the country should be. The critical question as to what it was going to be was who was going to have a say in it. We have gone to that as well, but who had a say in what that new nation was going to be was going to have a dramatic affect on what it eventually became. Today i want to talk about women and womens lives in the late 19th century and their role in what was really the reconstruction, the true rebuilding of the north, south, and the west into a new nation