A Southern Woman's Story

Phoebe Yates Levy Pember (1823–1913) was a member of a prominent American Jewish family from Charleston, South Carolina, and a nurse and female administrator of Chimborazo Hospital at Richmond, Virginia, during the American Civil War. She assumed the responsibility informally at the age of 39 and eventually over 15,000 patients came under her direct care during the war. Pember remained at Chimborazo until the Confederate surrender in April 1865. She published her memoir soon after the war, in March 1866, serialized in a Baltimore magazine called The Cosmopolite as "Reminiscences of A Southern Hospital. By Its Matron." In 1879, it was published in book form as A Southern Woman's Story: Life in Confederate Richmond. The memoir, which details her daily life through anecdotes of the war years, remains one of the best sources for understanding the experiences and ideas of upper-class Southern Jewish women before and during the Civil War.