More than 25,000 American women traveled to Europe during the First World War as nurses, volunteers, and journalists. This project explores the writings of some of those women, with a particular focus on three women who spent time on the Western Front during the war: Peggy Hull, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant. All three wrote professionally from the front lines, but their writing offers readers a view of life away from the battlefield, largely dominated by women. They wrote about French domestic life, working conditions in France, and their own experiences as American women in the middle of a war zone. Writing at a time when American women actively debated about how to organize their own professional and domestic lives, these women engaged with those ongoing conversations. Their war experiences shaped their understanding of the world and gave them opportunities to consider how they might reconstruct society according to different principles. The war became a space for experimentation and exploration for women who were interested in fashioning new kinds of professional lives, remaking domesticity, and fostering an new ethic of solidarity out of the rupture of war.
Although what scholars now consider to be the dominant narratives of the First World War were mostly written in the 1920s, “I am going to be a veteran of this war” makes the case that there are important insights to be gleaned from reading what women had to say during the war. Many of these texts, because they appeared in the midst of war, are less polished and definitive about the meaning of the conflict than those that would come later; they grapple actively with the issues that were most central to the lived experiences of the women who produced them—most notably, how they might be able to organize their personal and professional lives and what opportunities might arise for them and women like them out of the turmoil of the war. he first chapter, focused on Peggy Hull, explores the carefully crafted image of her presented in the pages of the El Paso Morning Times, at once intrepid reporter and girl-next-door, as a way of examining the professional constraints and opportunities these women experienced. The second examines Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s writing about the domestic spaces of the Western Front in light of her earlier writing about motherhood, marriage, and housework and argues that the war opened up possibilities for her and others to reimagine the constraints of American women’s domestic lives. Finally, the dissertation closes with Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant’s experiences following a battlefield injury and her reflections on the work ethic and spirit of the women who staffed front-line hospitals. For all three women, the war marked a significant professional and personal landmark in their lives, and their writing reveals the ways in which they saw themselves as participants in history.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/49345 |
| Date | 30 September 2024 |
| Creators | Evans, Katherine A. |
| Contributors | Howell, William Huntting |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
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