Nurses, Military

Background

At all times, from the colonial period to the present, most of the personnel in the medical services have been men. In the period before the Civil War, women occasionally served in temporary roles, usually after major battles. Nevertheless, some very notable women emerged throughout the 19th century in roles of administrator, organizer, and caretaker. During the Civil War, the U.S. Sanitation Commission, a federal nonmilitary agency, handled most of the medical and nursing care of the Union armies, together with necessary acquisition and transportation of medical supplies. Dorothea Dix, serving as the commission's superintendent, was able to convince the medical corps of the value of women working in their hospitals. Equally important was Clara Barton, whose Civil War nursing efforts had earned her the nicknames “Angel of the Battlefield” and the “American Nightingale.” In 1881, Barton helped found and served as the first president of the American chapters of the International Red Cross. No women nurses were involved officially in the Indian Wars but the Spanish–American War required nurses to help with large numbers of sick soldiers. Dr. Anita Newcomb McGee was put in charge of selecting contract nurses to work as civilians with the U.S. Army. In all, more than 1,500 women nurses worked as contract nurses during that 1898 conflict.

Professionalization was a dominant theme during the Progressive Era, because it valued expertise and hierarchy over volunteering in the name of civic duty. Congress consequently established the Army Nurse Corps in 1901 and the Navy Nurse Corps in 1908. The Red Cross became a quasiofficial federal agency in 1905 and took upon itself primary responsibility for recruiting and assigning nurses. In World War I the Red Cross recruited some 20,000 registered nurses (all women) for military and Navy duty in 58 military hospitals; they helped staff 47 ambulance companies that operated on the Western Front. More than 10,000 served overseas, while 5,400 nurses enrolled in the Army's new School of Nursing. The women were kept well back from the front lines, and although none was killed by enemy action, more than 200 had died from influenza by war's end. Demobilization reduced the two corps to skeleton units designed to be expanded in the event of another war.

Eligibility at this time included being female, white, unmarried, a volunteer, and a graduate of a civilian nursing school. Julia Flikke, for example, the assistant superintendent of nurses at a Chicago hospital, enlisted and became chief nurse at an Army hospital in France, then served on a hospital train that rushed casualties from the aid stations to the longterm care hospitals. Flikke remained in the Army after the war. After 12 years at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., she was promoted to captain and became the assistant superintendent of nurses. She succeeded in creating new billets for occupational therapists and dieticians. She became superintendent, with the rank of colonel, in 1938. Flikke's small headquarters in 1942, though it contained only 4 officers and 25 civilians, supervised the vast wartime expansion of nurses. She only took unmarried women between the ages of 22 and 30 who had their R.N. degrees from civilian schools. They enlisted for the war plus six months and were dropped if they married or became pregnant.

...