War Girls: The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry in the First World War (review)

This affectionate account of the FANY provides a detailed history of a new institution flowering in the First World War after its small start in 1907 following the Boer War. As befits a professor of women's studies, Janet Lee has given considerable attention to the question of creating a new institution during suffrage agitation, and the challenge that that presented to assumptions about proper behavior for young women of the educated middle class. Its origins lay in cavalry warfare and the need to bring medical attention speedily to the field of battle. The solution outlined was to put young women in a dashing scarlet-and-navy uniform and have them ride to the wounded. Of course, only the prosperous were likely to have the money to keep a horse and pay for the outfit as well as the training. Edwardian FANY were often tomboys with a lively sense of the potential of imperial adventure.

Then came the First World War, and a few of the FANY wasted no time in proposing themselves as contributors to solving the urgent problems of battlefield casualties and the large number of wounded. Initially they operated with the Belgian army, and then the French, while the British Red Cross were more doubtful about their contribution and distrusted their capacity for independent improvisation and their frequent refusal to obey or follow orders. Lee looks closely at several sites of operations in France and Belgium and provides a vivid narrative of adventure and slog combined. The nurses worked in horrible conditions doing arduous nursing tasks without much equipment or expertise except that gained on the job. The book provides a lucid exposition of some of the more general arguments about the First World War as a period in which institutions often extended amateurism and professional expertise simultaneously. Lee follows the Higonnets' argument that the war provides a double helix of two genders related and separate at the same time, and another of innovation and the consolidation of existing attitudes. The particular success of the FANY was to demonstrate that women could show mechanical aptitude, physical endurance, and organizational innovation.

One of the most interesting aspects of this story is the way in which social class continued to carry such weight in the expectations and activities of these young women, who exploited their influential contacts to stay near the Front and expand their operations thereby. It is a lively story well told. Even if in the end the argument about "new cultural possibilities" tends to overstate the theory of these nurses' actions, War Girls adds a substantial and detailed account of a group of women who made a distinctive contribution to the battlefield.