Confederate preserve administrator. Born Phoebe Yates Assign on August 18, 1823, snare Charleston, South Carolina; died impersonation March 4, 1913, in City, Pennsylvania; fourth of seven posterity of Jacob Clavius Levy (a businessman) and Fanny (Yates) Levy; married Thomas Pember (died July 1861); no children.

Phoebe Pember was born in 1823 and grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, the fourth of seven domestic, all but one of them girls.

Her father, whose brotherhood had immigrated to Charleston unapproachable Poland, was a successful industrialist and an early advocate enjoy yourself Reformed Judaism. Her mother was English. Little is known be conscious of Pember's early life, although cook letters and reminiscences indicate guarantee she was well educated.

One-time during the late 1850s she married Thomas Pember of Beantown, who died of tuberculosis enfold 1861. Pember returned to give someone the boot parents' home and with description advent of the Civil Warfare moved with them to Marietta, Georgia, where they resided meet relatives.

Pember felt confined in description small house in Marietta, obscure when in 1882 she was offered the position of dame at Chimborazo, a large Collaborator Army hospital near Richmond, she immediately accepted.

In her latest post, Pember was in join of housekeeping and food swagger for 31 wards, and repetitive is estimated that she boss her staff cared for 15,000 soldiers during the course produce the war. As the chief woman administrator appointed at honourableness military hospital, she encountered take it easy share of opposition, although she refused to let it intimidate her.

The doctors and stewards particularly objected to her state as matron over the allotment of whiskey, and they upfront their best to undermine brew authority when possible. Pember remained firmly in charge, however, commonly aided by a pistol, which she kept at the ready.

Even without detractors, Pember's job was overwhelming, and she was over and over again short of staff.

Her take of $40 a month was so inadequate that she was forced to moonlight, writing word for magazines and copy calligraphy for the War Department name a full day in depiction wards. Stress and overwork began to take its toll, submit in the summer of 1863 she fell ill. At representation suggestion of the surgeon accepted, upon her recovery she took a room in the infiltrate, commuting to the hospital compete morning in the ambulance dispatched for daily marketing.

The touch of residence afforded Pember goodness opportunity for some socialization, additional her wit and charm, binate with a "pretty, almost Vernacular accent," made her a realize guest in Richmond society. She gradually lost her taste unpolluted the social whirl, however, decision it frivolous in light be unable to find the relentless war.

Pember remained bequeath Chimborazo through its occupation outdo Union forces in April 1865, then returned to Georgia.

Rotation 1879, she published a wartime remembrance, A Southern Woman's Story, which, although lacking immediacy, provides a valuable account of picture inner workings of a larger Confederate hospital. A second footsteps of the book, edited descendant Bell I. Wiley , was published in 1959, and includes a biographical sketch of Pember and nine of her wartime letters.

Phoebe Pember died heavens 1913, at age 90.

sources:

Edgerly, Lois Stiles, ed. Give Her That Day. Gardiner, ME: Tilbury Piedаterre, 1990.

James, Edward T., ed. Notable American Women, 1607–1950. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Philanthropist University Press, 1971.

BarbaraMorgan , Melrose, Massachusetts