Women Doctors in War

Epilogue

EPILOGUE T his book has dealt with the progress of women doctors in war, delving back into eras in which military medicine resisted the very idea of women physicians in uniform. In many ways the military’s attitude has been a simple reflection of the society it served, a society in which women physicians were viewed with suspicion and distrust. In August 1865, for example , Dr. Ann Preston, dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania , wrote to Mary E. Walker about conferring an honorary degree on her: “As far as I know you are the only medical woman in the army who was recognized as such although several . . . worked hard and faithfully in subordinate positions (as nurses, for instance), forced to do so by the distrust and prejudice of professional men.” Women physicians in the Spanish-American War devoted themselves to a variety of tasks other than purely medical ones because they had to volunteer as nurses on contract. This apparent contradiction between their training and their activities during wartime was rooted in the fact that society continued to have defined sex-role expectations that impacted the roles and choices of female physicians. Irene Toland was thirty-seven before she graduated from medical school because she could not make her own career choices earlier while she had an invalid mother to tend. Isabel Eliot Cowan admitted that even after acquiring her degree, she quit practicing medicine twice to care for one parent and then the other, even remaining as “housekeeper” until her father’s death in 1922. Certainly such expectations were not placed on the male physicians of that day. Women doctors, who courageously and persistently battled prejudice and obstructionism to obtain a medical education and earn a living practicing medicine, were also required to face and overcome a formidable set of prejudices and regulations when they offered to contribute their skills and abilities in defense of the nation. Indeed, the military medical community may have been even more hesitant than civilian medicine to accept women or even to acknowledge their service. Forced by dire need to send Dr. Edith Haines to France during World War I because a male physician with her skills in anes- Epilogue 201 thesia could not be quickly located, the army utilized her services for sixteen months but refused to pay her veterans benefits because she had served under contract rather than as a commissioned officer or enlisted soldier. In March 1943, Dr. Ruth E. Ewing, speaking on the issue of women doctors in World War II, stated: “We wish to serve as doctors, caring for sick and wounded, male or female.” The following month, her dream became reality when commissions to the army medical reserves finally became available to females, largely due to the American Medical Women’s Association’s successful campaign to gain women’s admission. Yet the majority of female doctors were assigned to care for the WACs, a huge disappointment for those women who expected to have more challenging medical assignments or, at the very least, hoped for overseas duty. By war’s end, however, most women practitioners “soon lost interest in directly challenging the gender norms governing American society and the medical profession.” Time and time again, women physicians proved their skills, strengths, and abilities to military commanders who were certain that they would not be able to handle discipline, primitive and dangerous field conditions, and horrific battlefield wounds. Serving first as nurses, then as contract surgeons, and next on a temporary, emergency basis, women physicians proved themselves essential on both the home front and the battlefront, until they finally received the right to serve permanently as commissioned officers in the armed forces in 1953. Yet despite these gains, the culture of postwar America in the 1950s “was deeply ambivalent toward women in medicine and other professions. Murmurs that women professionals had been used during the war only as a last resort demonstrated the stubborn persistence of old prejudices.” In 1953, former navy physician Hulda Thelander published her prescient survey of women physicians, which identified a set of family- and careerrelated conflicts that would haunt women physicians well into the next century . Married female physicians, Thelander explained, really had two jobs, as a physician and as a homemaker. Physician mothers, she continued, faced even further demands on their time, and these demands, many of which were emotional in nature, required “enormous reserves of energy.” Thelander noticed that women physicians faced with the conflicting demands of home and practice...