Negotiating Nursing: British Army Sisters and Soldiers in the Second World War by Jane Brooks

Abstract

Reviewed by: Negotiating Nursing: British Army Sisters and Soldiers in the Second World War by Jane Brooks Corinna Peniston-Bird Jane Brooks. Negotiating Nursing: British Army Sisters and Soldiers in the Second World War. Nursing History and Humanities. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. xii + 236 pp. Ill. $120.00 (978-1-5261-1906-3). The exigencies of war suggest the potential or the need for change in existing gender identities and relationships. In Negotiating Nursing, Jane Brooks traces the impact of the war on the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service (QA), established by royal warrant in 1902. In the Second World War QA nurses were posted to war zones with their medical colleagues following the recognition that early treatment of the war wounded increased recovery rates. Nurses had multiple challenges to negotiation: their male and female colleagues, the physical spaces, evolving modes of practice and treatment regimes, and their femininity. Nursing exemplified the rhetoric of paradox that characterizes constructions of femininity, and femininity at war in particular: in their interactions with the doctors and the broken combat male, for example, they were to be both subservient and independent, collaborative and reserved, feminine and neuter. [End Page 474] Over the course of five chapters Brooks covers the nature of nursing work in the context of active service overseas, the challenges to nursing care within a mobile war, the contradictions inherent in being female in places of danger, the rapid development of nursing skills and technologies, and demobilization. In the return to peace, and in the postwar context of the welfare state, "the problem for nurses and other women workers was that the normality that was sought was one based on the male hegemony of the mid-twentieth century. Normality meant women being returned to the home, childbirth and child rearing" (p. 183). The main contribution Brooks makes to understandings of the history of British nursing in the Second World War emerges from her commitment to personal testimony for her source materials; these include oral histories, diaries, letters, and memoirs, many unpublished. Such an approach is of particular value in a profession based on "oral rather than written transmission of knowledge" (p. 9). This also makes the most of a genre that seldom fails to challenge the written record. In this case the sources highlight in particular the differences between regulation and practice, the sharing of knowledge gained in the field rather than the textbook, and the tensions between tradition and innovation. Just as members of the auxiliary forces were sometimes taught by male peers or officers to handle weapons, often in contravention of official policy, so might nurses find that individual doctors or situations enabled them to take on roles and responsibilities hitherto reserved for men. "Army nurses shifted the boundaries of their surgical practice as the exigencies of war demanded, and neither they nor their medical colleagues showed any of the professional anxieties of their counterparts on home soil" (p. 149). Herein lay also the reason that much of these innovations remained "for the duration": the lapsing of rigid hierarchies and methods did not translate well into the medical spaces and societal roles of peace. The potential of wartime experiences to instigate enduring change was therefore, in Brooks's word, "squandered." This is not a finding unique to the Second World War: there is ample evidence that nurses in the Boer War, the First World War, and the Vietnam War had similar experiences of complex gendered contradictions and change limited to the short term—and preferably abroad. The contribution made by Negotiating Nursing is to insert the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service of the Second World War into familiar themes in nursing history and the debate over gendered social change in the Second World War. [End Page 475] Corinna Peniston-Bird Lancaster University Copyright © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press