No Man’s Land
If you’ve been hanging out here in the Margin’s for a while, you may have noticed a pattern to histories about women’s contributions in times of war. Groundbreaking women kick their way through a closed door against the military and society’s objections. After they prove their worth, the military opens its arms in invitation, and women answer the call. And once the war is open, the doors slam shut again—or at least most of the way shut—and in a remarkably short time almost no one remembers what the women did.
The story Wendy Moore tells in No Man’s Land: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran Britain’s Most Extraordinary Military Hospital during World War I is no exception to that pattern.
No Man’s Land is the fascinating account of how two women overcame the social boundaries of their times to create an exemplary military hospital—and how those boundaries slammed back into place for the women who worked there when the war ended.
Prior to the war, women doctors were limited to treating women and children. When doctors and suffragettes Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson offered their services to the British army, they were rejected immediately. Undeterred, the two women opened, supplied and staffed military hospitals with the support of the French Red Cross, first in Paris and later in Boulogne. Their largely female staff treated hundreds of soldiers wounded in the French battlefields.
Murray and Garrett were so successful that the British Army asked them to establish a hospital in London after they returned to England. They gathered women from across the English-speaking world to work as doctors, nurses, and orderlies.* The 500-bed all-female “Suffragette Hospital” treated more than 26,000 patients over the course of four and a half years. It became a model of military medicine, known for the brilliance of its surgeons, its pioneering medical techniques, and its understanding that patient morale was as important as medicine.
When the war ended, the doctors and staff of the “Suffragette Hospital” discovered that proving they could not only do the job but do it brilliantly was not enough. Like all the other women who had taken on “men’s jobs” in the war, they were expected to step aside in favor of soldiers returning from war. Female doctors were expected to go back to working in hospitals run by women for women and children. The hospitals that had depended on female doctors during the war replaced them with returning men without apology. Medical schools that had welcomed women students in the war now refused to accept them on the grounds that male students preferred to study in all-male classrooms.**
No Man’s Land is a story of feminist aspirations, bureaucratic hurdles overcome, medical innovation, and unexpected freedoms created in the turbulence of war. It is an important and well-written addition to the growing body of forgotten women’s history.
*American philanthropist and suffragist Dora Sedgewick Hazard recruited twenty elite women from upstate New York to work as orderlies. When they arrived at the London hospital, they were met with a huge Stars and Stripes in the courtyard and the hospital choir singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Nicknamed “the Hazard Unit,” they were the only all-female American unit to serve in the war.
**In one case, male students signed a petition saying they didn’t want female students in the school because it would jeopardize the school’s rugby record. Can you say GRRRRR?
The heart of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Ernie Pyle’s War
A handful of the journalists who reported on the Second World War have kept a place in the U.S.’S historic memory in the years since the war: Edward R. Murrow, William Shirer (1), Margaret Bourke-White, cartoonist Bill Mauldin.(2) Even within that short list, Ernie Pyle was and is a special case. Only Mauldin came close to Pyle’s ability to both portray and embody the experience of the combat soldier at the front. He gave people back home what he once described as a “worm’s eye view of the war,”(3) and in the process created the prototype of the G.I. as and everyday hero.
In Ernie Pyle’s War: America’s Eyewitness to World War II, historian James Tobin tells the story of how Pyle became a popular, if idiosyncratic, columnist before the war and then how he transformed his gift for telling the small story and recognizing the small detail into powerful and often lyrical reportage from the front. It is perhaps not surprising that Pyle turns out to be a more complex, though no less appealing, figure than his popular persona.
Tobin begins and ends the book with Pyle’s death in the Western Pacific. I cried both times. The first time I cried after reading a draft of a column Pyle wrote in anticipation of the end of the war in Europe. V-E Day (Victory in Europe) came three days after Pyle’s death.(4) The piece is heart-breaking, dark, and beautiful, and an excellent introduction to Pyle’s work for those of us who come to the biography knowing Pyle only by reputation. (Which I suspect is most of us.) His editors chose not to run it, perhaps because it was darker than most of his work.
I cried the second time because, with Tobin’s help, I had come to know him. I watched him find a way out of the Kansas plains of his childhood and build a career as a newspaperman. I rode along as he traveled across the United States in a Dodge convertible coupe with his wife, Jerry—known to the readers of his column as “That Girl Who Rides With Me”—and chronicled the stories of unknown people in unknown places. (Much as I love a road trip,(5)I can’t imagine living out of a car for seven years. Seven years!) I worried about Jerry’s descent into mental illness and Pyle’s own struggles with depression. I sympathized with his growing exhaustion. And I stood beside him in my imagination in North Africa, and the beaches of Normandy, and the Pacific island where he met his death.
Much of the power of the biography comes through Tobin’s use of excerpts from Pyle’s writing, because boy could Pyle write. For that matter, Tobin is no slouch.
Ernie Pyle’s War is powerful look at a journalist reporting from a war zone that should appeal to anyone interesting in biography, war correspondents, or World War II. Quite a model to live up to.
1) Who in some ways doesn’t belong in this list.He is remembered more for the books he wrote after he left Europe in December 1940 than for his reporting. And wonderful books they are.
2) If you think a cartoonist can’t be a journalist, give his Pulitzer Prize-winning work another look.
3)In case anyone is interested, Pyle did not coin the phrase “worm’s eye view.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known use of the term appeared in the satirical magazine Punch in 1908.
4)While I would like to claim that I careful planned the timing of this post to coincide (sort of) with the 75th anniversary of V-E Day—May 8, 1945—that would be a lie. It was just sheer dumb luck.
5)And a quick glance at the Road Trip Through History category here on the Margins will attest that I do. View this post in the browser, scroll through the categories box in the sidebar, and click away for nine years of road trip stories. (6) Here’s a link directly to the first one, in which I described what I like in a road trip and clearly had no idea it would be the first of many:
6) Nine years almost to the day. Another anniversary that wasn’t on my mind when I started writing this post.
In Praise of Nurses
I don’t know about you, but at the moment my grasp of my calendar is shaky. I’m over scheduling myself for Zoom events, in part because my May calendar has all the now scheduled stuff on it as well as my virtual stuff. I missed Independent Book Store Day, the last Saturday of April, which I normally push HARD. Now I’m slipping in under the wire to run a post for National Nurses Week, a celebration that runs each year from May 6 through May 12* here in the United States. Under other circumstances I might have decided to wait until next May, but at the moment I feel we need to celebrate nurses more than ever.
In honor of the men and women who are on the front line of patient care in corona virus wards around the world, here are links to some of my favorite posts about nurses over the last few years:
Florence Nightingale Does the Math
Amy Morris Bradley: Civil War Shin-Kicker
Cornelia Hancock: Civil War Nurse, Reformer, Muse
Edith Cavell: “Patriotism is Not Enough”
Nurses in the Vietnam War: A Guest Post by Lynn Kanter
To the nurses I know, and the nurses I don’t: thank you for a hard job well done.
* Florence Nightingale’s birthday