Women of war

Gender, modernity and the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry

Juliette Pattinson

• Verlag: Manchester University Press
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526145642
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: History
• Thema: Modern British History

Women of war is an examination of gender modernity using the world's longest established women's military organisation, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. These New Women's adoption of martial uniform and military-style training, their inhabiting of public space, their deployment of innovative new technologies such as the motor car, the illustrated press, advertisements and cinematic film and their proactive involvement in the First World War illustrate why the Corps and its socially elite members are a particularly revealing case study of gender modernity. Bringing into dialogue both public and personal representations, it makes a major contribution to the social and cultural history of Britain in the early twentieth century and will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars working in the fields of military history, animal studies, trans studies, dress history, sociology of the professions, nursing history and transport history.

1

‘Fresh laurels for the brow of womanhood’: The formation of a female nursing yeomanry

As anxieties about the possibility of an invasion circulated in Edwardian Britain, ex-cavalry Sergeant-Major Edward Baker established an independent female unit of mounted first aiders trained to undertake ambulance work behind the front line. He had first conceived the notion of his Corps, which took the name First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, or FANY, after being wounded in the shin in a cavalry charge against the Mahdists in 1898 at the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan. The inhospitable landscape proved taxing to the horse-drawn field-ambulance wagons that slowly navigated the terrain, and he was left unattended on the battlefield for several hours before being located and taken to the base medical post. He later was to record in the first issue of the FANY magazine Women and War that there was a ‘missing link somewhere in the Ambulance Department’,¹ and though he himself was fortunate, many soldiers were dying of injuries that, if treated earlier, would otherwise not have proved fatal. Indeed, in the South African War, 13,250 men died from their wounds, and nearly 3,000 as a result of disease, whereas far fewer (5,774) were killed in action.² Further service with his regiment, the Twenty-First Lancers, in that war confirmed his view that ambulance wagons, now drawn by oxen, which lacked springs and jolted their wounded passengers over the rocky terrain were wholly inadequate to assist small mobile mounted units of fighting men.³ Medical personnel riding saddle-horses could, he recognised, traverse the open ground far more quickly. Moreover, as various nursing publications observed, Cape Town had been ‘invaded’ by ‘idle society women’, ‘nurses only in name’ rather than those equipped with any training, each of whom was ‘posing as a ministering angel with Parisian gown and headgear’. Such ‘untrained women’ were, one wounded soldier wrote, ‘no good at all’.⁴ Baker undoubtedly saw an opportunity to improve competency.

What motivated a man of relatively lowly social status to found an organisation of elite mounted female first aiders? A useful contemporary parallel may be Dr Hector Munro’s Flying Ambulance Corps, which was formed, albeit by a more highly educated and socially privileged man, following the declaration of war. Member May Sinclair speculated on the Commandant’s reasons: ‘Is it uncanniness? Is it obstinacy? Is it dreamy innocence? Or is it some gorgeous streak of Feminism? Is it the New Chivalry, that refuses to keep women back, even from the firing-line? The New Romance, that gives them their share of divine danger?’⁵ Whether it was folly, idealism, egalitarianism or gallantry that prompted Baker to establish a women’s military unit, he spotted an opportunity to harness the enthusiasm and finances of wealthy women, providing training in first aid to those who were prepared to pay. Upon his return to Britain, he ‘thought out a plan’ to tackle the high mortality rate: he envisaged a band of courageous, socially elite, skilled horsewomen trained in first aid, following in the wake of the cavalry and horse artillery, and, after the fighting had finished, galloping side-saddle among the dead and wounded to tend to soldiers’ injuries and to assist in their transportation to the dressing stations. As FANY Mary Marshall recalled, their remit of collecting the wounded from the battlefield had ‘an echo of the Boer War’.⁶ Three years later, the Corps, ‘the first of its kind’, had ‘created a world-wide interest’, and in ‘the opinion of military experts of all nations’ had a ‘great future’.⁷ It was Baker’s ‘FERVENT WISH’ that ‘every woman in Britain’ would join such an organisation. Having received instruction and regular training, the unit had ‘reached the highest possible stage of efficiency, and is READY TO TAKE THE FIELD at a moment’s notice, should there be the necessity to mobilise the defending forces of the country’.⁸ He deployed the rhetoric of sacrifice, noting that women would ‘ride with the skirmishing parties, take their chances with them, and, if spared’, undertake their task of ‘succouring’ the wounded. This, he acknowledged, was ‘a great work to ask of a woman’. However, he was confident that ‘should ever the horrors of war loom on our horizon THEY SHALL NOT SHIRK the task in front of them, but will ride forward with stout hearts and willing hands to render a great service to our country and gain fresh laurels for the brow of womanhood’.⁹ Thus, while Baker’s vision was couched in conventional terms of morally superior women undertaking their duty by providing comfort to men as they had done for centuries, he simultaneously envisaged a much more modern, extended, active and physically demanding role for women that placed them in a position of considerable danger on the battlefield. His idea clearly struck a chord, and adventurous women, keen to escape the suffocating confines of Edwardian femininity, flocked in great numbers to his novel organisation eager to serve their country in the event of war.

Analysis of the years prior to the outbreak of a localised conflict that soon evolved into a protracted total war spanning the globe has animated historians for decades. Military historians such as Edward Spiers, Stephen Badsey, Tim Bowman and Mark Connelly have examined the wide-ranging changes the army instituted in order to make itself into a more modern force.¹⁰ The pervasiveness of imperial sentiment that underpinned the formation of various youth organisations in this period has been discussed by Alan Warren and Robert MacDonald.¹¹ The myriad social and political domestic crises that unfolded in the Edwardian period, including class conflict, the controversy over female suffrage and the debate over Irish Home Rule, that resulted in a ‘deep-seated malaise’ have been the subject of studies by Samuel Hynes, Donald Read and David Powell.¹² Women’s voices have largely been silenced in these analyses. The FANY, comprising privileged women who left written accounts of their lives, were featured regularly in contemporary newspaper articles and were interviewed decades later, can help historians fill that void, adding much to our understanding about the mood of the Edwardian period. They make a fascinating case study, not least because they were so pioneering: Baker’s unit was the first military force to mobilise women, to wear uniform and to undertake training in preparation for war. Despite their very modernity, to date, the formation of the FANYs in the prewar period is discussed in just two scholarly works. In her excellent wide-ranging account of women in the army in the first half of the twentieth century, Lucy Noakes has six pages on the FANY in a chapter entitled ‘Early Days: Women and the Armed Forces before 1914’.¹³ And in her monograph on the First World War FANY, Janet Lee includes a chapter on the social context in which the Corps was founded, focusing on the rigid class structure of Edwardian society, ‘scientific’ theories of female subordination, and emerging educational opportunities and legal changes to women’s status.¹⁴ The early Corps is thus ripe for a comprehensive analysis, and the next three chapters in this study on gender modernity examine its formation, its adoption of martial dress and its increasing professionalisation under female members.

This chapter examines the climate in which the Corps was formed and that inspired Baker’s rousing article, with its penchant for florid language and indented capitalised text; the dual rationale of nursing and equestrianism that was central to his notion of the organisation; and the social composition of its membership, upon which rests part of the claim that these were exemplars of modernity. As we shall see, the formation of the organisation was the process of a complex interplay of social factors: it was the vision of a man living in the past but was populated by New Women who were very much wishing for a different future.

A nation in arms: the militarisation of civilian life

The FANY was founded in a period of intense introspection. Baker’s notion of a mounted unit of female first aiders, which was overladen with ideologies of class and gender, may have had its roots in a colonial past but it was firmly embedded in contemporary anxieties circulating in Edwardian Britain about its declining place in the world in the face of challenges to its hegemony.¹⁵ Barely a year after the successful campaign in Omdurman in which Baker was wounded, the country was plunged into a disastrous and protracted campaign whereby a group of 40,000 white South African farmers of Dutch descent seeking independence in the Cape and Transvaal repeatedly fended off a British force more than ten times its size. It took thirty months to foil these attempts and very nearly ended in defeat. The South African War dealt a severe blow to British self-assurance, exposing many deficiencies, not least of which was the vulnerability of the military system, and the years that followed were ones of fear and self-examination. The country was particularly in shock at revelations about the high proportion of would-be volunteers who were rejected for being physically unfit. As the leader of the Scouting movement frequently asserted, ‘You cannot maintain an A-1 Empire on C-3 men.’¹⁶ The National Service League, formed in 1902 and born out of that context of near failure and resultant fear, sought to highlight the army’s shortcomings in fighting a future war and campaigned for compulsory military training for all physically fit ei...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: Daughters of war – Gender modernity and the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry
• 1 ‘Fresh laurels for the brow of womanhood’: The formation of a female nursing yeomanry
• 2 ‘Hussies’, ‘freaks’ and ‘lady soldiers’: Constructing the uniformed woman
• 3 ‘Determined women full of initiative and vision’: The professionalisation of a voluntary women’s corps
• 4 ‘Here we were, girls of the twentieth century’: Active service in the First World War
• 5 ‘Gloried in her grotesque and spurious manhood’: Driving in the First World War
• Concluding thoughts
• Bibliography
• Index