1) Nurses
2) Hello Girls
History's glory goes to fighting men. They deserve it don't you think?
But when it comes to women backing their boys in battle, the initial response was providing services and gathering information through these services.
Women have been performing in various forms of nursing activity as part of a maternal instinct. We have don't caring deeds for babies, ill and the dying. There are so many things needed for the helpless ones from cleaning, eating, bathing, mobility as well as moral support. Only a few women in history have been given "by name" mention, like Florence Nightengale and Clara Barton. This is evident when I am doing Civil War portrayals, I'm frequently referred to as Mary Todd Lincoln when just being a typical discreet Victorian. That's all the public knows!
The Civil War started the change as society supports Clara Barton's American Red Cross. You see, even though her fight to establish this organization, there were still many Civil War veterans suffering from illness and amputations 30 years after the war. As women were being tapped as a valuable resource in this field of nursing, recognition was gradual. Although women were challenging dress reform, they were also entering as nurses and even as doctors. Women's education grew and so was their demand for the right to vote in the late 1800s. That leads us to the big test of WW1 nursing.
Nurses
Geneva Casstevens name is on the Illinois WW1 memorial as the only woman. The only woman listed in the Honor Book as a WWI fatality was a Unit W
nurse, Geneva Casstevens (1871-1918). She grew up in Beecher City, but
transferred her nursing registration to Springfield before joining the
unit. Unit W, which included 12 area physicians, 50 orderlies and 21
nurses, was formed and commanded by Major (later Lt. Col.) D.M. Ottis, a
surgeon associated with St. John’s Hospital. Ottis formed the unit in
the fall of 1917 and raised $10,000 for equipment and expenses. The unit
was abruptly called up in January 1918 and sailed for Europe on May 1,
1918. It was deployed to a military hospital at Knotty Ash, near
Liverpool, England.
The unit reported one other death — that of
Capt. Francis Fletcher (1879-1918), a physician who practiced in Auburn
and Chatham, from a perforated ulcer. “No other losses were suffered by
the unit, although many of them were severely ill with influenza and
from the strain of the work which fell upon them during the raging
epidemic of this malady,” the Journal reported in May 1919. Unit W
cared for a total of 14,000 patients at Knotty Ash, first under tents
and later in a hastily built hospital designed by Ottis and his staff.
Capt. Robert Smith told a Journal reporter when the unit returned:
Our
patients were American and Canadian soldiers. Practically all of them
were medical cases until after the signing of the armistice when
thousands of wound cases passed through our hands. Practically all of
those who lived through the first 48 hours after having been wounded or
having undergone surgical operations, lived through their treatment when
they reached our base hospital and were sent home as convalescents. The
greatest number of patients that we cared for at one time was 1,250.
This was during the influenza epidemic.
Most Unit W members
returned to Springfield in May 1919, although six nurses were detailed
at the last minute to Russia, where Allied units briefly intervened in
the Russian Revolution. All but one of the group were from Sangamon
County. They were: Nellie Alvey and Bertha Weinert of Buffalo, Annie
Ferguson of Springfield, Ethel Foster of Chatham, Mary Talbott of
Glenarm and Mary Korloski of Decatur. After working in Murmansk and
Archangel, the last nurses returned to the U.S. in July 1919.
Source : Sangamon County Historical Society
Memorial on Find-a-grave:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/76020988/geneva-e_-casstevens?fbclid=IwAR0_E-Nw-7SkJY28EYV1GhEZF6R817k7mgYmghBL1qjyeBuwmo2xXBGQ0co
My portrayal/impression of a WW1 nurse
References:
American Experience
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/the-great-war-american-nurses-world-war-1/
Role of Australian Nurses
http://anzacs-roleofwoman-ww1.weebly.com/role-of-nurses.html
America Enters the 20th Century
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kL9VjPjyavFWAQBKT0bUV-S_Bi-kW6ze8xPM5-wLGKk/edit#!
Red Cross History WW1
https://www.redcross.org/content/dam/redcross/National/history-wwi.pdf
Hello Girls
Today, hitting the call button on an iPhone is hardly a daring feat of ingenuity and skill. But during the First World War, connecting people to each other over the telephone was a critical, difficult, and often dangerous skill. And it was one that was performed in part by a group of over 200 women, whose fight to be recognized as soldiers endures to this day. The women were a part of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. They worked over a large network of telephone lines that had been built extremely fast in order to service the war over large swathes of France. The women worked the intricate switchboards that connected the front lines with supply depots and military command. To call their work essential would still be understating how vital it was to the overall war effort. Without bullets to shoot and rations to stay alive arriving as they were needed, the war could not be waged at all.
Hello Girl Grace Banker receiving the Distinguished Medal of Service for her work
After
the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, General John Pershing discovered
that military communications on the Western Front were in disarray. In
response, he called for women to join the U.S. Army Signal Corps and
become "switchboard soldiers." At the time, author Elizabeth Cobbs
observed, “telephones were the only military technology in which the
United States enjoyed clear superiority" and 80 percent of all telephone
operators were women. More than 7,600 women applied for the first 100
positions before applications for the newly formed Signal Corps Female
Telephone Operators Unit were even printed. From the thousands of
American women who applied to be "Hello Girls," as they became known
colloquially -- all of whom had to be bilingual in English and French --
only 223 were ultimately accepted into the unit. The women of the
Signal Corps soon took over the critical role of connecting military
telephones across the front, allowing the front lines to communicate
quickly with commanders; at the height of the war, they were connecting
150,000 calls a day.
Most of the women accepted into the Signal
Corps were already experienced switchboard operators and, after
completing Army training in Maryland, the first operators left for
Europe in 1918 under the lead of Chief Operator Grace Banker, a Barnard
College graduate who worked as a switchboards instructor. Soon, members
of the unit were operating the switchboards for the American
Expeditionary Forces in Paris and 75 other French locations as well as
multiple locations in Britain. By July, the Hello Girls had tripled the
number of calls that could be managed by the Army telephone service in
France, vastly improving war-front communications.
When Baker
arrived with the first team of 33 telephone operators, they were
assigned to the American Expeditionary Force Headquarters in Chaumont,
France. Later, as the final major Allied offenses of the war approached,
Banker was asked to move to the front, along with her five best
operators. During the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, equipped with gas masks
and helmets, they operated from the trenches under artillery bombing.
Banker was later honored with the U.S. Army's Distinguished Service
Medal for her services with the First Army headquarters during the St.
Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne Offensives. Following the Armistice, Baker
continued to work with the Army of Occupation at Coblenz, Germany until
she returned home in September 1919.
Shortly after the
Armistice, the chief signal officer for the First Army wrote in his
final report that "a large part of the success of the communications of
this Army is due to... a competent staff of women operators." The women
of the Army Signal Corps swore the Army oath, wore regulation uniforms,
observed military protocol, and served courageously under often
harrowing conditions, yet after the war, the women discovered that U.S.
government considered them "civilian" employees. By denying them veteran
status, the women who had served were denied veterans benefits, medical
care, honorable discharges, military funerals, and even the right to
wear their uniforms.
At least 24 bills were introduced to the
U.S. Congress over the course of fifty years to have the signal
operators' military service officially recognized. It wasn't until 1977,
when only eighteen of the original Hello Girls were still alive, that a
campaign led by former operator Merle Egan Anderson finally resulted in
a bill successfully passing and being signed by President Carter that
officially recognizing the veterans' status of the Signal Corps
telephone operators. Egan herself finally received her official
discharge paper in a ceremony in Washington in 1979 when she was 91
years old.
The Hello Girls' incredible story is told in the new
picture book "Grace Banker and Her Hello Girls Answer the Call: The
Heroic Story of WWI Telephone Operators" for ages 6 to 9 at https://www.amightygirl.com/grace-banker-hello-girls
For adult readers, we recommend Elizabeth Cobbs' excellent biography "The Hello Girls: America's First Women Soldiers" at https://www.amightygirl.com/the-hello-girls
There are also two fantastic historical fiction novels for adults about these brave women: "Switchboard Soldiers" (https://amzn.to/3JTzCmQ) and Girls on the Line" (https://amzn.to/3AdOQA8)
For
more stories of heroic women who served during WWI, check out "Women
Heroes of World War I: 16 Remarkable Resisters, Soldiers, Spies, and
Medics" for teens and adults, ages 13 and up, at https://www.amightygirl.com/women-heroes-of-world-war-i
And
for books for adults about the women who later served during World War
II, visit our blog post, "Telling Her Story: 40 Books for Adult Readers
About Women Heroes of WWII," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=24501
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