No Man's Land by Wendy Moore

Author:Wendy Moore [MOORE, WENDY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2020-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

MURRAY AND ANDERSON were well aware of the power of “newspaper language” both in maintaining national morale and in furthering their own ideals. Murray, in particular, always welcomed reporters and photographers to Endell Street, seeing it as a way of bolstering the cause for women doctors and women in general. Her choice of the Daily Sketch to cover the post-Somme rush was significant—the tabloid’s populist appeal and wide circulation, which topped one million in 1916, made it ideal for disseminating her message to a wide audience—though she was open to newspapers of all shades and sizes.23 The press swooped on Endell Street as a convenient celebratory antidote to the horrors of war, and Murray shrewdly manipulated this interest in order to serve her feminist ambitions.

A typical column in the Tatler in July described the “noble ladies who manage the Suffragette hospital in Endell Street” as a perfect example of the “New Woman” who was being born out of the war. Its doctors, nurses, and orderlies, it said, were all representatives of “the sex that has come into its own.” Struggling to explain this new world order, the magazine exclaimed: “They are men in the best sense of that word, and yet women in the best sense of that word also.” For some observers, this very visible change in women’s lives carried a distinct sexual frisson. The Daily Star declared that of all the uniformed women in London, the “smartest and most delightfully impudent looking are those young Amazons who act as orderlies at the Endell-street Military Hospital.” Often spotted “passing busily to and fro in Oxford-street, with a stop-me-if-you-dare expression,” they maintained an air of “rather athletic independence” and looked “quite capable of catching up any unruly patient and carrying him bodily off to prison.” Their attitude made clear, the writer said, that “this is no amateur hospital, though it may be run by mere women, and without masculine interference.”24

Although the existence of a hospital run by “mere women” was still widely reported as a curiosity, gradually the work of women doctors was being taken seriously for the first time. An article in the Daily Mail in August described Endell Street as “one of the brightest havens in England.” The piece, by a female journalist who had previously visited the corps at Claridge’s in Paris, argued that Endell Street had disproved two commonly prevailing myths: it had demonstrated that surgical work was not too strenuous for women’s physical endurance, and it had shown that it did not “[harden] their hearts or [make] callous their womanly sympathies.” She even maintained, rather fancifully, that Anderson and Murray looked healthier after nearly two years as military doctors. Endell Street, she added, had “proved without doubt” that women doctors could go beyond treating women and children, as they were equal to their male counterparts in every field. The Daily Telegraph agreed. Pointing out that women were now performing numerous military jobs previously undertaken by men “short of the firing-line,” it said there was “no

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