"A Certain Restless Ambition": Women Physicians and World War I

Abstract

FOR TEDDY ROOSEVELT, WORLD WAR I WAS THE GREAT ADVENTURE. AUthor Mary Austin called it an exhibition of masculinity run amuck.1 Many physicians saw it as a little of both. Despite its horrors, the war beckoned with the triple enticements of adventure, service, and professional advancement. To women physicians, however, the outbreak of war deepened a crisis of professional culture dating at least from the turn of the century.2 During the late nineteenth century, women doctors won wide acceptance caring for women and children. They owed their success, they often claimed, to a fruitful combination of medical science and womanly tenderness. But by World War I, the institutions of medicine's separate sphere -all-women's medical schools, hospitals, and medical societies -were in decline.3 The very idea of a woman's sphere, the cultural matrix for Victorian professional women, was under attack.4 Scientific, impersonal, and bureaucratic ideals were beginning to crowd out the altruistic, heroic model of nineteenth-century professionalism. 5 Nevertheless, the transition to the culture of modem professionalism was far from smooth for women doctors. They wished to be identified with the rising prestige of modem medicine. Yet they were unwilling to abandon their