Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War Read Online Free PDF Page A

quickly become dispensable barriers to entry to the profession. Amateurs commanding lower rates of pay and privilege then might march into hospitals and set postwar nursing back to the nineteenth century.
    And well-meaning “society ladies” who wanted to do their bit were actually getting in the way. On November 30, 1914, the Saint John Daily Telegraph reported the indignation of the profession when a hundred C.A.M.C. nurses crossed the Channel to take up their work at No. 1 Canadian General Hospital in Boulogne only to find that “lady amateurs [had] dispossessed them by buying their rooms over their head” for a higher rent. In Britain, where trained nurses were still struggling for protection through state registration, aristocratic women without any nursing experience were being allowed to assume positions of responsibility as directors or “lady superintendents” in war hospitals, a situation nurses chafed under and considered imminently dangerous to patients. The British Journal of Nursing regularly denounced “the inefficient amateur who, with practically no qualifications, is welcomed . . . smothered with lightly-earned brooches and medals, and given altogether false notions of her own value in national emergency.” Editorialists among British nurses scorned the V.A.D.s as “undisciplined kittens,” and dismissed their enthusiasm as “sentimental excitement” based on false ideas of what it meant to nurse.They considered the V.A.D.s’ quest for experience at the elbows of trained nurses a dangerous imposition. Occasionally, they lashed out with sarcasm at the higher-profile imposters: “[T]he half-penny papers have shown us some wonderful specimens of ‘nurses in War dress’. . . . The Duchess of Westminster is quite in Puritan pose . . . with the addition of very high-heeled shoes and a liberal display of silk stocking. What the wonderful ruby and diamond cross suspended on her bosom denotes, we do not know, but the pet wolf-hound has gone along — and will, presumably, prevent its being snatched by the battle-field ghoul, when her Grace is under fire picking up the wounded.” Other nurse editorialists were more admiring of the V.A.D.s’ work and appreciative of their assistance, though still firmly critical of a system that continually betrayed trained nurses. Indeed, in Britain, the V.A.D. question was bound up with the wider struggle to elevate the nursing profession above that of domestic servant. British nurses, looking ahead, wanted to prevent thousands of volunteers swamping postwar hospitals claiming they had received their “training” in military wards and thus reducing the trained nurses’ certificate to worthlessness.
    Public opinion, though, failed to grasp the nuances of the debate, with many calling it “ungallant” to complain in time of crisis and the papers barely distinguishing between trained and untrained nurses. As far as onlookers on both sides of the Atlantic were concerned, anyone who signed up to help the wounded was to be commended — the privileged girl perhaps even more so for her greater sacrifice. Headlines such as “Society Girl Forsakes Social Frivols for Stern Duty of Nurse,” published in a New Brunswick paper, rewarded and inspired similar acts of selflessness. Nonetheless, there was an undercurrent of suspicion that V.A.D.s might take advantage of their newfound freedoms abroad: a few postcards in circulation showed flirtations — or worse — between V.A.D.s and soldiers.
    In Canada, a few thousand men and women were recruited as “V.A.D.s” early in the war to protect Canadians in various ways in the event of an invasion. The men were gradually absorbed by the army, but the women — mostly well-educated, unmarried, in their twenties and thirties, and middle class, who could afford both the training programs and the time for unpaid work — evolved