Dear John,
As the country pauses for Memorial Day this coming Monday, I’m thinking about my mother. She was a nurse in World War II, stationed at the army’s field hospital in Cirencester, a small town in Gloucestershire, England, 80 miles west of London. The oldest of seven children growing up on a farm in Oklahoma, she had to move in with an aunt in a nearby town so she could finish high school, and then managed to work her way through nursing school before joining the army.
At some 23 years of age, she arrived at the army’s 188th general hospital—a collection of Quonset huts—just two months before the invasion of Normandy on D-Day. The hospital’s first patients, all D-Day casualties, were admitted on June 14, 1944. The doctors and nurses of the 188th would go on to care for a total of more than 11,000 patients before the end of the war. A little over 50 years later, I was able to travel with my mother to Cirencester, where we made our way to the open field on the outskirts of town where the hospital once stood. There were a few Quonset huts still remaining. In the town, which had officially “adopted” the 188th during the war, we visited the small museum created in its honor, complete with old photographs, medical implements and documents. On the army’s website, she is listed with the other nurses, as “Second Lieutenant, Hughes, Edna M., ANC, N-776510.”
My mother never talked much about the war or the horrors she witnessed, but it profoundly affected the course of her life. She said that it was the suffering of those gravely injured in the war as they endured operations under the crude anesthesia techniques available at the time, that spurred her to decide to become a physician, an anesthesiologist. She would spend her life advocating for more women in medicine, and speaking up for nurses when the mostly male ranks of doctors would discount their critical role in patient care.
Ms. has reported over the years on women in the military—and the challenges they face. In the June 1984 issue of Ms., Myra MacPherson recalled the toll that the Vietnam war took on nurses, many of whom had to grapple with the long-term impacts of emotional trauma in the wake of a war known for its unique and devastating brutality. “So little is known about the nurses of Vietnam that there are not even accurate statistics on how many were there,” MacPherson writes. “Official guesstimates ranged anywhere from 7,500 to 55,000. So, it is not surprising that as vets, they often feel invisible… Nurses often suffered a more severe emotional mauling than soldiers who had respites from combat. They saw waves of mutilated fresh from the battlefield, who in previous wars would never have been saved that long.”
Year-over-year, the numbers of women in the U.S. military has grown—now accounting for almost 18 percent of the active-duty force. As the military inches towards gender parity, Ms. continues to follow the uniquely gendered challenges faced by women in the service—which include a lack of access to abortion and reproductive healthcare, rampant sexual harassment and assault with little recourse for survivors, and more.
And we’ve reported on the hard-fought efforts by feminists in Congress -- like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Rep. Jackie Speier—who have pushed for reforms, especially in how the military handles sexual assault. Why is seeking equality in the armed forces important? As Michele Onello writes in Ms., the military’s male-dominated culture harms more than just women: “failing to ensure women’s meaningful participation impedes operational capacity, geopolitical partnerships and prospects for lasting and legitimate peace.”
And finally, although Memorial Day is an American observance, we’re not forgetting the women on the frontlines of armed conflicts around the globe -- including Ukraine.
For equality and peace,
