American Nurses in the First World War. Exemplified by Female Literary Works (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, http://www.uni-jena.de/, language: English, abstract: This term paper focuses on how American nurses, representing white middle-class women, coped with the trauma nursing in the First World War caused. In addition, it will be discussed how they dealt with societal constraints concerning women in general and women in the nursing profession in particular.

Women have long been neglected as authors about the First World War. Things changed during the last three decades when more and more researchers began to uncover women's voices. They have argued that women present an important part in the canon of First World War literature. Even though it started as European war, some American women joined the war effort, long before the United States entered the conflict. Mostly these women were employed as nurses in army hospitals along the frontline. For nurses the First World War somehow meant a new sense of freedom, even though they sticked to the domestic world of caretaking.

The study shows how the mud of the western front provided an opportunity to rise from the limited domestic sphere to the battlefield of the modern world. "The memoirs The Forbidden Zone" by Mary Borden and "The Backwash of War" by Ellen La Motte are among the best known female literary works and will serve as examples to show she characteristics of female wartime writing. While women could not directly attest to the experience of the trenches, they were the only ones able to explore war's all-consuming effects. Therefore, women's voices like Borden's and La Motte's deserve much more attention, as their texts hold a not yet fully discovered truth and richness of accounts of the First World War.