Women and Men at Sea: Gender Debate aboard the Hospital Ship Maine during the Boer War, 1899-1900

Two plagues . . . at present afflict South Africa—the plague of flies and the plague of women.

—Times (London) reporting comments by Frederick Treves, 28 April 1900

Winston Churchill wrote of his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill: "While I had been busy in South Africa my mother had not been idle at home. She had raised a fund, captivated an American millionaire, obtained a ship, [and] equipped it as a hospital with a full staff of nurses and every comfort." ¹ The ship in question was the hospital ship Maine, and quite by chance Winston’s brother Jack was one of its first patients. ²

After several years of negotiations, conferences, letters, and raids, war broke out between the Boers and the British Empire on 11 October 1899. Two weeks later, Lady Churchill, an American, met with a small group of American women living in London and organized The American Hospital Ship Maine Fund. ³ The story of the Maine involves more than British and American foreign policy and imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century. It is the story of a group of influential and capable American women in control of a British military hospital ship in wartime, surely a highly unusual circumstance. These women selected five female and eleven male nurses for the first voyage that left Southampton for Africa 23 December 1899 and returned 23 April 1900. On the second voyage, however, which left Southampton ten days later on May 3, the same committee of American women chose not to have any female nurses aboard.

Throughout the twentieth century the work of nursing has been strongly associated with the female sex. Nursing remains one of the most sex-segregated professions, with men comprising less than 10 percent of registered nurses. ⁴ But in the field of military nursing, it is less clear which gender dominates. Female nurses have fought to get into battle while males struggled to get into the nursing profession. ⁵ The little-known voyages of the Hospital Ship Maine can be used to illustrate some of the gender tensions facing its elite female benefactors and the nurses, both male and female, through an exploration of the choice to exclude female nurses from the ship’s second voyage.

The Maine’s American "lady benefactors" and the female and male nurses were functioning in the male-dominated world of the British military establishment. By April 1900, the Boer War, which many in the British Empire initially thought would be "over by teatime," had dragged on six months and was not going well. That month Sir Alfred Milner, High Commissioner in Southern Africa and Governor of the Cape Colony, wrote: "there is a most fearful bother here with lady visitors . . . What between the stupidity of our Generals and the frivollings of the fashionable females, I often feel ashamed of my country." ⁶ The "fashionable" women rather than the "stupid" generals were probably easier public targets for a government dismayed over the conduct and results of the war. During the month preceding the Maine’s return to Great Britain from its first voyage, a series of letters and cables led to newspaper articles strongly opposed to women going to Africa. These negative articles reached a crescendo just as the Maine returned to England. British professional nurses, unhappy about being bypassed by the military, applauded the criticism of the lady volunteers by Chamberlain, Queen Victoria, and others. A British nursing journal, for example, described the volunteers as "idle society women . . . who are nurses in name only." ⁷ The professional nurses claimed they should have been consulted and given administrative control over the nurses and other female volunteers in Africa.

The Maine’s staff included Nightingale-trained female and male nurses, but a very visable...