Abstract
Nursing, like teaching, had long been accepted by the public as a suitable role for women. But unlike headmistresses and teachers, in the early to mid-nineteenth century, nursing was undertaken largely by poor, uneducated women who could find no better employment. This was to change radically as nursing reforms demanded higher standards and better educated women. Reforms began when Florence Nightingale, (credited as the founder of the modern nursing profession), took a post as superintendent of the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in London. In 1854, with the outbreak of the Crimean War, Nightingale was appointed to lead a relief mission to Scutari. Within weeks she had overturned the systems, putting army doctors to shame and reducing the death rate among the wounded from over 40 per cent to just over 2 per cent. She returned a national heroine. Money raised for the Nightingale Fund established the world’s first modern training school for nurses at London’s St. Thomas’s Hospital in 1860. By 1907 Nightingale nurses had revolutionised hospital care throughout the English-speaking world.1
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Notes
Anne Summers, Angels and Citizens: British Women as Military Nurses 1854–1914 (Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1988), pp. 237–270.
C.S. Peel, How We Lived Then (John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1929), p. 127.
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See Hugh Popham, F.A.N.Y. The Story of the Women’s Transport Service 1907–84 (Leo Cooper in assoc. with Seder & Warburg, 1984).
Diana Cooper, The Rainbow Comes and Goes (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958), pp. 117–129.
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady (Virago, 1987), p. 171.
May Wedderburn Cannan, Grey Ghosts and Voices (Kineton: The Roundwood Press, 1976), p. 75.
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Susan R. Grayzel, ‘The Outward and Visible Sign of Her Patriotism: Women, Uniforms and National Service During the First World War’, British History, vol. 8, no. 2, 1997, pp. 145–164.
See Cooper, op. cit., p. 120; Cannan, op. cit., p. 95; May Sinclair, A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (Hutchinson, 1915), p. 20.
Dame Katharine Furze, G.B.E., R. R. C., Hearts and Pomegranates (Peter Davies, 1940), p. 332. Commandant in Chief of the VADs and subsequently Director in the Navy (equivalent to Rear-Admiral) and directly involved in the setting-up of the WAAF.
Joanna Russ, The Female Male (The Women’s Press, 1985), p. 92.
Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (Sage Publications, 1993), p. 191.
Michael Wheeler, Heaven, Hell, & the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 31.
Florence Farmborough, Nurse at the Russian Front: A Diary 1914–1918 (Constable, 1974), pp. 22–24.
Mabel Lethbridge, Fortune Grass (Geoffrey Bles, 1934), pp. 31, 32.
Violetta Thurstan, Field Hospital and Flying Column (G.P. Putman’s Sons, 1915), p. 178.
Mary Borden, The Forbidden Zone (William Heinemann Ltd., 1929), pp. 51, 52.
Bagnold, Edith, Diary with No Dates (Virago in assoc. Heinemann Ltd., 1978; 1st pub. 1918), p. 8.
Baroness, T’Serclaes, Flanders and Other Fields (George G. Harrap & Co., 1964).
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 182.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 an Introduction (Penguin Books, 1976), p. 27.
Tate, Trudi, Modernism, History and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 83
Tylee, Claire M., The Great War and Women’s Consciousness (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 190–202; Higonnet, op. cit., pp. 215–216.
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© 2009 Christine Etherington-Wright
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Etherington-Wright, C. (2009). Nurses and VADs. In: Gender, Professions and Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595026_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595026_4
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