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== Conclusion ==
While Dix and Livermore were actively pursuing social reform and education during the 1840’s, Mrs. Virginia Clay of Tuscaloosa, Alabama was attending balls. She described scenes of “belles of the town” looking “resplendent in fresh and fashionable toilettes.” Twenty years hence, Phoebe Yates Pember, who was of the same social standing as Mrs. Clay, was holding her finger on a man’s artery in order to keep him alive. While women on the plantations complained about disciplining their slaves, nurses were dealing with the rowdiness associated with hundreds of young men being confined together. According to Kate CummingKumming, “the most unruly and dastardly in our hospitals have been from Louisiana.”<ref>Cunningham, 91.</ref>
These women worked tirelessly to help their cause and to comfort the young men of the Confederacy. Although their previous work experiences did rival their counterparts in the North, these courageous women eschewed decorum and sacrificed their comfortable lives in order to care for the wounded and make the last moments of the dying more tolerable. What they witnessed no longer allowed them to be belles. They were no longer pure and meek. During the course of the war, Chimborazo hospital alone treated 77,889 patients. Throughout the entire war, there were only 1,000 female Confederate nurses. Given these numbers, we get an idea of how tirelessly these women served. They were doing the work of women, not the work of belles.
