Dutch nurses and the Great War: on caregiving and gender

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1910 female nurses were allowed to work in Dutch military hospitals. However, it proved difficult to find them. The blame was partly directed at nurses themselves: they didn’t have the right background and didn’t fit into military, male discipline. The nurses themselves blamed the Dutch Red Cross who had failed in its mobilizing task. The typical Dutch situation – neutrality resulting in a lack of urgency to create a strong military nursing corpse – thus gave rise to discussions on femininity and professionalism in military nursing. The war also provoked criticism of militaristic use of female care and again neutrality was at the bottom of this. Dutch nurses working in warzones could write more easily about the horrors they witnessed, leading to questions about the role of wartime medicine. During the interwar period the peace movement made medical care one of its targets. This pacifist protest was shared by some female nurses. They too described women as ‘mothers’ and ‘givers of life’, just like (male) soldiers and officers who stood up for female war nurses, but with opposite intentions. Instead of being ‘disciplined’ and ‘chaste’, they sought the right preconditions to be able to do their job properly, thus leading to critique on – for example – the uncomfortable nurses’ uniforms. Though the critique attracted some attention, it did not last, partly because of another war coming. In this war finally ‘real’ female war nurses went to work. Although disagreeing with the critique itself, as far as their uniform concerned, they were happy to benefit from the pacifist-feminist critique.