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== Breaking the Stereotype ==

Many belles responded to the call with a sense of duty and pride, while an even greater number deemed this type of work to be unfit for a lady. Kate Kumming, a dedicated Confederate nurse, recalled being told that the hospitals were no places for women and that was not considered “respectable to go into one.”<ref>Kate Kumming, quoted Cunningham, 73.</ref> In April 1862, Kumming arrived in Corinth, Mississippi at a hotel that had been converted into a hospital. She was initially unaware of the sights, sounds, and smells she would encounter and confessed to her journal that the “foul air” made her “giddy and sick,” and that it was necessary for her to “kneel, in blood and water.”<ref>James McPherson, ''Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 479.</ref> Circumstances such as these were in stark contrast to anything these women experienced in the Antebellum Era.