Oregon's Doctor to the World by Kimberly Jensen

Author:Kimberly Jensen [Jensen, Kimberly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Women, History, United States, State & Local, Pacific Northwest (OR; WA), Social Science, Gender Studies, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies)
ISBN: 9780295804408
Google: PE16zGGhlXQC
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2012-12-01T05:30:18+00:00

Pregnant women were inducted into a “terrible motherhood,” Lovejoy recalled. “Three-quarters of the crowd were women and children, and never have I seen so many women carrying children,” she said. “It seemed that every other woman was an expectant mother.” And “there were many premature maternity cases” because of the “crushing and rushing” at the pier. Lovejoy estimated that over a hundred women were in labor across the five days of the evacuation week. British and US sailors, now with permission from Turkish authorities to assist the movement of the refugees to the ships, got to know Lovejoy and put her in contact with maternity cases. She assisted with many of the births. One woman, “who had been in the crush at the first gate for hours, finally staggered through holding her just-born child in her hands.”21 Some women delivered their children “while standing. Some of the infants died within an hour from exposure, but the mothers clung piteously to the bodies.”22 Here were the themes of The House of the Good Neighbor in a new location and a new conflict, with the same consequences for women.

Lovejoy also recognized a broader context in the history of the conflict, which for her meant an indictment of all militarism and war. During the First World War, while Turkey was fighting on the side of the Central Powers, the “Christian population within her borders, encouraged to believe that the success of the Allies would mean a religious and national freedom for them, probably aided and abetted these forces whenever they got the chance.”23 On a speaking tour of the United States, Lovejoy spoke of a “travesty of national and international responsibility. The Christian nations,” she said, “by their actions and reactions, created conditions that made this holocaust inevitable.” She noted that they provided munitions to the Turkish forces and wrote treaties that were mere “scraps of paper.” The “Turkish soldiers moved in and the Greek soldiers marched out, and then the Christian nations responsible for the whole wicked business held up their hands and maintained neutrality while the Turks wrecked their vengeance on the non-combative peoples of Smyrna, most of whom were women and children.”24 Lovejoy's “faith in Christianity” had been shaken. “The nations should have found a way to have stood together for humanity's sake.”25

In her study of Lovejoy's and Dr. Ruth Parmalee's medical work for the AWH in Greece, historian Virginia Metaxas makes the important point that medical women working in relief organizations in this period “shaped a narrative of motherhood to be shared with the American public in which childbirth and maternal responsibilities were described as relentless, even in the face of disaster, thus justifying their presence as helpers in sometimes horrific situations.” By combining “Christian imagery or language” that had been used in previous missionary endeavors in the region “with the universal experience of motherhood and childhood,” AWH personnel rendered “‘exotic’ Greek and Armenian children” to be more like the Americans they hoped would then donate to the cause.26

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.