Week 9: Medicine and Wars

 In the past century nurses played a large role in the World Wars. However, they faced multiple kinds of discrimination and prejudices during and after their wars. In WW1 there were 21,480 serving nurses. Women could not vote at this time, and many were warned away from medical school by societal standards. These women had to learn just before their deployment, and previously educated women were asked to stay and make up for the lack of men at home, despite facing a large difference in pay from the spaces they would be filling. Although over 20,000 nurses served, relatively few women were awarded medals and got little press during and after the war, except for the media displaying them as a romantic concept which greatly devalued their work in the minds of people at home. Black women and Immigrants were allowed to be nurses in the U.S, but were not allowed to travel overseas to help with the war efforts. Nurses also had to be between 25 and 35 years of age, unmarried, and graduates of hospital training schools with more than 50 beds, which eliminated many black women from applying as they could only gain training segregated hospitals with less than fifty beds. In World War Two 59,000 women served as Nurses and were regarded as some of the best in the world, and had an astonishingly low rate of death. Only four percent of those treated by nurses on the field died of their injuries or disease later on, demonstrating the value of the nurses on the field. Despite these Nurses efforts, when they came back home they were discouraged from nursing and many had to become waitresses or factory workers instead, due to medical offices devaluing female nurses by underpaying them and forcing them to work long hours. Many women had to join a Nursing's Guild to be able to be a nurse while getting paid enough with the proper hours. World War Two was also during a period of heavy racism in the U.S, and the government put in a quota of the number of black women that were able to serve as nurses. That number was 56. This quota was only dropped by the last year of the war, and before then these nurses were only allowed to treat black soldiers if stationed at camps, had to eat in segregated halls and faced segregated towns. They were made to only treat black soldiers and prisoners of war, which felt like a betrayal as many did not want to treat the enemy and these men usually had relatively little injuries, wasting the nurses use in the war.  Because of these constant devaluations of female nurses work even in the period where they were the most influential, female nurses still face many discriminations today. Their value is consistently ignored by the government and hospitals, with some in hospital nurses only earning $18 an hour. Media about nursing has been the most harmful towards nurses, and things like books and movies romanticized their work making it seem easier than it was, causing men in the medical field at that time to be influenced by these works and ideas which is still affecting today. 

sources: 

The History of Wartime Nurses | Duquesne University

African American Nurses in World War II | National Women's History Museum (womenshistory.org)

Nurses begin quest for professional recognition after World War II | Kaiser Permanente