Now that qualified women can enter combat officially, it's a good time to remember the many roles women have played during wartime, whether military or civilian.
Writer Frank Moore dubbed classical women during the Civil War "Angels of Mercy" as they rolled bandages and patriotically waited for their men to come home. But he also understood that "the story of war will never be fully or fairly written if the achievements of women in it are untold. @ He knew that there were women soldiers in the Civil War, honored in DeAnne Blanton and Lauren Cook's book They Fought Like Demons. The stories of hundreds of women who assumed male aliases, wore men = s uniforms, and charged into battle as both Union and Confederate soldiers are compelling. Mary Ann Pittman and Loretta Valesques, for example, both raised a company of soldiers and later became spies.
More than a hundred years later, Marge Piercy = s 1980s epic novel Gone to Soldiers offered an important portrait of women = s experiences during WWII. Writing about women who ferried airplanes for the Air Force, served as intelligence officers in Europe, worked in factories to produce war goods and more, she put a female face on the reality of war.
Later, when Vietnam nurses lobbied for recognition, a new realization of women = s contributions and trials on the front lines emerged.
Still, many a wartime heroine has gone unnoticed or been forgotten. Claire Chevrillon was one of them. An English teacher in Paris in 1942, she served in the French Resistance for three years. In 1943 she was arrested and imprisoned. A What I remember about arriving, @ she recalled, A were the dark, subterranean, endless corridors through which I walked followed by a guard, as if in a nightmare." Chevrillon survived and wrote a 1985 memoir. A The instinct of one nation or race to dominate another doesn = t die," she said. "It grows insidiously, feeding on private and public concern, until suddenly it = s too late to prevent disaster. @
Minnie Vautrin was an American missionary in China during the 1937 A Rape of Nanking. @ Called the Goddess of Mercy for trying to save as many girls and women as possible, she repeatedly faced down threats and bayonets to provide asylum for refugees at the college she headed. A 1938 diary entry reveals her despair: A How long will this terrible situation last? How can we bear it? @ In the end, Vautrin could not bear it. After helping women locate their husbands and sons at war's end and teaching destitute widows how to survive, she returned to the U.S., committing suicide in 1941.
Ninety-nine Army and Navy nurses later known as the Angels of Bataan and Corregidor were captured in the Pacific by the Japanese during WWII. The first to be sent into the middle of battle, they became the only group of American women captured and imprisoned by an enemy. Before their incarceration, they helped build and staff hospitals in the middle of a malaria-infested jungle, pioneering triage nursing. Among them were women like Eleanor Garen, whose diary entry on a bad day read: A Garen, This is to yourself. Remember, life is not a bed of roses. @
An estimated eight to twelve thousand women served in the Vietnam War. Most of them were nurses; all had volunteered. Few were recognized as true veterans when they came home. One of them, Lily Jean Adams, was twenty-two years old when she worked as an intensive care nurse. She remembered what it was like comforting a dying soldier. A Sometimes they would say > don = t leave me! = And I wouldn = t. I had an inner sense that this was just as important as taking care of the living. @
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
