Nursing During The First World War Essay

The focus of this paper will be on nursing during the First World War, also known as the Great War. Nursing during the war gave new opportunities for women during the war. The roles they took on during the war gave some difficulties along with those new opportunities. The first part of this essay will focus on nursing and how it became a profession. We will then examine the different situations women faced during the war as nurses. By looking at the situations that women faced, including the struggles and gains they went through, we can see how women’s lives changed during the war. We will also be examining the individual’s who experienced the war first hand. These experiences will help to explain why the Great War changed the lives of women.
Sofia Jex-Blake is one woman who believed that medicine was a profession that women should be involved in. She believed women should be healers and that being educated was not a shame. Sophia Jex-Blake noted this, “If it be argued that the study of natural sciences may injure a woman’s character, I would answer, in the words of one of the purest-minded women I know, that “if a woman’s womanliness is not deep enough in her nature to bear the brunt of any needful education, it is not worth guarding.”” Although Sophia Jex-Blake was a woman who became a doctor, she clearly was a woman who believed other women could achieve great things and participate in medicine. Nursing first appeared in Europe, Florence Nightingale, was the first women to be a nurse and made the profession open to women in medicine. Florence Nightingale’s role seems to be overstated by many in the efforts of nursing by the later half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. By this point in her career, she was more involved with the administrative side of the work. Before this the main medical professions were male dominated. Now that there was a side of medicine that allowed women to participate, more and more women were able to enter fields of study with medicine related topics. Women were even able to take on leadership roles as head nurses and to help speak at conferences to promote the nursing efforts. As the war approached this became more common as volunteer nursing became a very important part to help the war efforts. These nursing efforts were helped along by the establishment of the Red Cross (in 1863) and the St. John Ambulance (in 1877). These organizations, particularly helped in the organizing of volunteer nurses. Although nurses had been a part of the medical industry for over sixty years, at the time of the Great War, they still faced many challenges and often discrimination from the doctors, who were