French Volunteer Nursing and the Myth of War Experience in World War I

Abstract

IT SEEMS PARADOXICAL to unite these two words: woman and war. and war ... [I]f there are two words made not to go together, it is these two: war and women. The first quotation is from a speech to a women's organization Paris 1912, the second, from an article L'opinion publique appearing early 1940.1 World War I had done nothing to clarify a relationship between women and war France. Even the title of the L'opinion publique article, Les femmes et la guerre, mirrored that of several World War I publications decades before.2 Although a few writers had placed women during or, most daringly, in the war, as had Gaston Rageot La franqaise dans la guerre (1918),3 the most common connection was and. Women and war could be juxtaposed, but what had the one to do with the other? Although the trenches of World War I ran through northern France, which meant that some French women lived its midst, and although many French women worked to support the war effort directly, as munitions workers or military employees, for example, or indirectly, by replacing men civilian jobs, those who made public opinion France had difficulty envisioning a relationship between women and the war.4

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