THIS BOOK RECORDS the participation of American women abroad in World War I---and their efforts to end it. Most of these 25,000 women have vanished from memory. Identifying them and discovering their records exercised our ingenuity and kept us wandering through space and time.
Fortunately, that letter- and diary-writing generation laid a wide paper trail. But the publishing practices of the time strain the detective skills of the researcher. Books appeared anonymously or pseudonymously, without clues to the qualifications of the writer. Many a proud father turned over bundles of his daughter's letters from overseas to a printer unedited, pausing only to blank out all the proper names, leaving the reader to wonder when and why his daughter had gone overseas. Sometimes the letters (dated only by month and day) stop in the middle of her experiences, without explanation. Often the reader cannot tell whether she was British or American until page 145---if ever.
Letter and diary writers in the custom of the time, to protect other women from unladylike publicity, often identified them only by an initial. Edith Gratie Stedman wrote of working with a Dr. C., an American who had driven an ambulance in Salonika and "an all round corker." A corker indeed, but who was she, what kind of doctorate did she hold, and what was she doing in Paris?
Or one catches a tantalizing glimpse of adventure in a sketch, the details of which the writer has forgotten or never knew, as in her son's reminiscence of Helena Crummett Lee, in the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College: "At the outbreak of World War I she and her daughters helped found a hospital in France, worked with the French women in the fields, and brought about the capture of a German spy in an unused tower of their château."
Circumstances like these complicate the problem of judging credibility and ultimately drive researchers to rely on an educated sense of probability. Take, for instance, the enthralling story told by Chief Nurse Stevens in "Under the Red Cross Banner," in Elaine Sterne's Over the Seas for Uncle Sam (New York: Britton Publishing Co., 1918). In these stories collected from patients in government hospitals, Stevens claimed service under the flags of France, England, and the United States. She alleged that she had seen on the battlefield the bodies of Frenchwomen dragged to their trenches by the Germans---a ubiquitous atrocity story. A British friend, she said, helped her to a job as matron of a British hospital ship of four thousand beds loaded with casualties from the Dardanelles, in which post she was to be gazetted a major in the British army. She threw in also a tale of shipwreck, in which her ship was torpedoed and she stayed in the water three hours. Well, maybe. But the "eyewitness account" of the familiar atrocity story, the improbability of the British appointing an American to such an important post, and the editor's inability to vouch for her kept us from using Stevens's evidence.
Or consider the anonymous War Nurse, The True Story of a Woman Who Lived, Loved and Suffered on the Western Front (New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corp., 1930). The author's candid remarks, particularly because they incorporated some information we already knew to be reliable, tempted us to hope that in this book, published twelve years after war's end, we might find illumination on subjects that the inhibitions of women writing a decade earlier had obscured. "I think there was less living together among Americans on war service than there was among the English and the French. This was partly due to the fact that it was the unconventional type of woman who originally went in for war work in France, the woman who had already stepped outside the hard and fast rules laid down by society. The pre-war nurse was suspect as peut-être pas femme honnête [perhaps not a respectable woman]. The correct young girl, who was the first to find her way into American war work, was the last to find her way into French war work." (pp. 151, 162) But alas, the patness of the melodramatic plot and the rather sensational style drove us to conclude that we were dealing with fiction: fiction that certainly contained much fact, but offered us no way to distinguish.
But judging on the basis of style also presents its difficulties, so much have fashions changed. The researcher must take care not to be derailed by the sentimentality of a Grace Livingston Hill, who after all had access to the best sources of the Salvation Army women.
We made several arbitrary decisions on parameters. Most importantly, we chose to write only about Americans. But we salute here the brave British women whose initiative and daring inspired the sympathy and emulation of our subjects. It's heartening that scholars like Diana Condell, Jean Liddiard, Gail Braybon, and Penny Summerfield have begun to tell the British women's stories.
We confined ourselves almost entirely to the duration of the fighting, from August 1914 to November 1918, resisting the impulse to follow the postwar work of women in reconstruction. We included American women married to Europeans: their work was distinguished from that of Frenchwomen, for instance, not only by the necessities the war imposed on many French women but also by the American tradition of volunteerism and by the Americans' Stateside connections, which enabled them to produce all sorts of help on request.
We have relied heavily on primary sources, though when well-researched secondary sources are available---notably in organizational histories---we have not hesitated to use them. We have documented all direct quotations, and most incidents that cite a particular woman. Our undocumented statements, including our generalizations, are just as firmly based on evidence, not on speculation. Because this book focuses on the experience of individual women, we have not mentioned many of the organizations employing American women overseas who did outstanding work. In spite of the widespread publicity given Edith Cavell and Mata Hari, we found no trace of American women agents overseas, but the American intelligence system, then in its infancy, confined itself largely to domestic concerns. We hope that we have neglected no profession or occupation in which American women overseas engaged (though we stumbled across female news photographers at the penultimate moment), but we sadly acknowledge that we have omitted mention of thousands of individual women with stories just as significant, adventurous, and engaging as those we include.
As we write, the terminology for Americans known during World War I as "Negroes" or "colored people" is in flux. Afro-Americans? African-Americans? Blacks? After much hesitation and some consultation, we have decided to stay with the well-established usage of "blacks," except, of course, when another term is used in a quotation.
Librarians have been our lifeline. We particularly thank Ann Penniman and her staff of the Essex, Connecticut, public library, who have fielded questions ranging from the spelling of Lifebuoy soap to an allegation of a peace conference in Vienna in 1917, and who have exploited the marvelous resources of the interlibrary loan system, enabling us to do much of our work at home. We also deeply appreciate the help of Eva Moseley and the other knowledgeable women who assisted our work at the invaluable Schlesinger Library, even in their temporary quarters with the thermometer up and the air conditioning down; of Elizabeth Norris, Librarian/Archivist at the YWCA National Headquarters; of David Koch, Archivist of Special Collections at Southern Illinois University; of Gloria Gavert, Archivist at Miss Porter's School; of Margaret Jerrido and Jill Smith, Archivists at the Medical College of Pennsylvania; of Maynard Brickford and his staff in the Archives of the American Library Association at the University of Illinois; of David Keogh and Pamela Cheney at the Military History Institute; of Barbara Paulson of the Health Science Library at Columbia University; of Elaine Trehub, the Archivist at Mount Holyoke College; of Jean Berry of the Wellesley College Archives; and of Millie Ettlinger, the Archivist for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Our debt extends also to the staffs of the Houghton Library, the New York Public Library, the Bentley Library at the University of Michigan, the Friends' Historical Library at Swarthmore, the Nebraska State Historical Library, the Indiana State Historical Library, the Smith College Library, the Vassar College Library, the Library of Congress, and the library of Yale University--- especially to the people there who scurried after an extension cord so that we could establish our computer at the refectory lectern in their Gothic reading room.
We thank with special gratitude of the irreplaceable guidance given us by Helene M. Sillia, longtime historian of the Women's Overseas Service League. Our agent, Elizabeth Knappman, has always been our staff, never our rod. Amy Mintzer read our work with sympathetic insight, helped us identify gaps, and challenged us into thought. Michael Millman efficiently fostered the book through the press.
We appreciatively acknowledge a travel grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities which enabled us to spend an invaluable week at the Schlesinger Library.
Finally, we bow to that third person created by and dominant in a collaboration.
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PREFACE 1. The Entrepreneurial War 2. Common Experiences
3. To the Rescue
4. Binding Up the Wound
5. Aid and Comfort
6. The Black Record 7. The Hello Girls
8. The Reporters
9. The Novelists
10. The Women's War Against War
11. The Front as Frontier work under copyright
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