From Cabin 'Boys' to Captains by Jo Stanley

Author:Jo Stanley [Stanley, Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750968775
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2016-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

By this point ship’s nurse was being seen as an enviable job.

Four years later when the Second World War began it offered hardly any informal opportunities for doughty independent women doctors and nurses to sail off and start up auxiliary hospitals in wild locations, as in the First World War. Early in 1939 the Admiralty decided that sisters should not be afloat on the RN’s hospital ships because it would mean that what was politely called ‘living spaces and sanitary annexes in these ships’ (sex-segregated cabins and bathrooms) didn’t have to be fitted. But shortly before war’s outbreak the policy was ditched: ‘female nursing staffs must be carried in the interests of patients.’ Sisters improved male morale, not least because men felt obliged to appear courageous when females were around, so as not to show themselves up. Also men thought that if there was a woman (meaning member of that species usually kept far from danger) there then maybe the situation wasn’t so bad.45

In this war personnel were far more under the control of bureaucratic regimes in each of the armed forces, not least on the sixty-odd hospital ships. Depending on the hospital ship’s size, usually four to eight (but in some cases up to twenty) sisters and female nurses from the Army and RN and its reserves were aboard. Between 960 and 4,800 served over all.46 Other women medics were on troopships going to postings overseas, where women worked closer to the front line than ever before. Such women even eventually began wearing khaki slacks for modesty (particularly when stepping over male patients lying on deck) and to enable fast action and safety. Of the 1,341 naval sisters, Kate Gribble on the Aguila was the only one who died at sea through enemy action.

Images of be-trousered women medics breaking through into war work sounds like progress. But that belies the truth once again: women were only being allowed in briefly and in certain safer places. Debates about how close they should be to danger waged on. Women were accepted because there weren’t enough men and because nursing was seen as women’s work. However, war did offer some women exceptional windows of opportunity. At least one women doctor was on a merchant ship as its MO (medical officer): Dr Nancy Miller.

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