The Nurse, the Veteran, and the Female Scientist: Dependency and Separation

Abstract

women into a position of power and authority that during the antebellum period they had only known, perhaps, in private. Between 1861 and 1865 more than twenty thousand women in the Union and Confederate states engaged in government and regimental Civil War hospitals, both as nurses and matrons. By fighting "disease, infection, and the medical infrastructure itself" they combined the nineteenth-century ideal of born nurturers with a new "soldierly aura" (Schultz, Women at the Front 3). By mid-war this somewhat awkward combination was a standard formula in numerous non-fictional and fictional nursing narratives, a sentimental subgenre that remained extremely popular throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. After 1865, the image of the self-sacrificial female humanitarian, who ignored sectional loyalties for the higher cause of saving lives, was a central emblem of the long-lived, and very powerful postwar discourses of cross-sectional reconciliation and national healing. First inspired by Abraham Lincoln's March 4, 1865, reworking of Psalm 147:3 in his Second Inaugural Address, to "bind up the nation's wounds" was America's peacetime credo for years to come. 1 Indeed, the praise of female nurses was a mainstay at veteran events, culminating with the 1924 unveiling of the "Nuns of the Battlefield" Memorial in Washington D.C. 2 On a less official level however, postwar reactions to the new female ideal of soldiering caretaker were by far more mixed and ambivalent. In some of the fiction of the day, female relief workers are deeply ambiguous literary figures that pose a threat, not only to the heterosexual order, but also to American culture at large. Together with the concept of male patient, the female nurse is part of a more general gendered constellation that preoccupied American society during the postwar era. Analyzing this constellation inspires a greater understanding of what may be called the American Reconstruction mind. Moving beyond established definitions of this era as social, political, and economic

Hidden Veterans: A Review of the Literature on Women Veterans in Contemporary Society

“…As mentioned earlier, some roles within the military appear more acceptable for women and usually attract a higher proportion of female recruits. Women in medical, nursing, or caring roles are generally accepted as they conform to the stereotypical role of women and war (Brintlinger, 2017; Twelbeck, 2015). Burkhart and Hogan (2015) observed that women in roles such as these appeared to experience the same trauma and combat exposure as that of their male colleagues, but less abuse than those women serving in historically male roles.…”