5 Reasserting work, space and gender boundaries at the end of the Second World War When you come out of the Forces you will have eight weeks’ leave in which to look round and take stock of your position … You have seen much, and you will bring to civilian life a broadened outlook. It may be that during your period of service you concentrated on one special branch of nursing work, while possibly losing touch with developments in other fields. Perhaps you held posts of great responsibility … While you have been away, those at home have had to carry on as best they
Negotiating nursing explores how the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service (Q.A.s) salvaged men within the sensitive gender negotiations of what should and could constitute nursing work and where that work could occur. The book argues that the Q.A.s, an entirely female force during the Second World War, were essential to recovering men physically, emotionally and spiritually from the battlefield and for the war, despite concerns about their presence on the frontline. The book maps the developments in nurses’ work as the Q.A.s created a legitimate space for themselves in war zones and established nurses’ position as the expert at the bedside. Using a range of personal testimony the book demonstrates how the exigencies of war demanded nurses alter the methods of nursing practice and the professional boundaries in which they had traditionally worked, in order to care for their soldier-patients in the challenging environments of a war zone. Although they may have transformed practice, their position in war was highly gendered and it was gender in the post-war era that prevented their considerable skills from being transferred to the new welfare state, as the women of Britain were returned to the home and hearth. The aftermath of war may therefore have augured professional disappointment for some nursing sisters, yet their contribution to nursing knowledge and practice was, and remains, significant.
domesticated within their protection systems. This line of inquiry considers how current gender boundaries have developed historically and in relation to the political process in Israel. Second, within the context of these gender boundaries and symbols, the chapter turns to the politics of women’s resistance in order to explore women’s alternative understandings of security. Israeli women have organized around
Sociology of Nursing (Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone, 1978). 11 Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse 203 Negotiating nursing and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 24; Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-Bird, ‘Women in the firing-line: The Home Guard and the defence of gender boundaries in Britain in the Second World War’, Women’s History Review 9, 2 (2000): 232. 12 Noakes, Women in the British Army, 127. 13 For a useful and erudite examination of the involvement
protect their womenfolk.59 Negotiating these sensitive gender boundaries, nurses on active service overseas worked to expand traditional nursing work, developed an autonomy that they had hitherto not known and brokered their place as women in a war zone, ‘the one impregnable male bastion’.60 Personal testimony and the nurses’ war This book uses a range of personal testimony material, including oral history, diaries, letters and memoirs to examine the work of nurses on active service overseas and their place within the Second World War medical services. Although nursing
deputising for him when he went on safari or local leave.’28 This was even more the case with 9 Helen Sweet and Sue Hawkins missionary nurses, many of whom founded and ran small rural hospitals and clinics with only occasional medical support through much of the first half of the twentieth century.29 Echoing Fletcher’s argument about the balance between the centre and the peripheries of Empire, Nestel argues that as a result of the thin-spreading of medical staff in the outposts, ‘class and gender boundaries between doctor and nurse became increasingly blurred in the
of innovation and ingenuity in order to manipulate the surroundings into habitable places. These skills link nursing judgements to ones that are high in ‘indeterminacy’, skills more usually associated with the critical clinical judgements of medicine,14 and therefore requiring careful negotiation of professional and gender boundaries. In this way, the work of nurses on active service overseas reversed the more usual ideas about men and women’s wartime work. Historians including Summerfield, Juliette Pattinson and Sonya O. Rose explore the feminisation of masculine
company of their combatant patients, but were not allowed to be frivolous with them and had to always call them by their surnames.72 It seems as if even on the home front, by the end of the war this had changed in some hospitals.73 As early as the First World War, the use of humour, and especially laughter, was openly supported. Staff and patients saw its importance for crossing class and gender boundaries and therefore dissipating the potential difficulties present in a military hospital.74 There was a general acceptance that it created cohesiveness between patients
. Shifting work and gender boundaries As nurses extended and expanded their work beyond the ‘normal’ remit of nursing practice,7 the gender and professional boundaries between medicine and nursing blurred. On active service overseas nurses increasingly ‘stood in’ for their medical colleagues as the exigencies of war demanded. One sister, part of the BEF evacuating Marseilles in June 1940, wrote that the colonel of her unit asked her about the medical fitness or otherwise of the patients: ‘He said he could not find the M.O. to ask him. I gave my opinion.’8 Sister Mary
force. Second, the focus on diplomatic negotiation not only increased the status of military leaders but usurped the momentum of popular struggle during the occupation era and the Palestinian uprising when women were prominent at the grassroots level. Women have responded in two major ways to the gender boundaries underlying diplomacy, national security and state building in Israel. On the one hand