The Most-Needed Women
In honor of Memorial Day, celebrated here in the United States on the last Monday in May, I wanted to do something different and write about a group of women who unselfishly gave a lot of f*cks to serve their country. This week’s article looks at the US Navy Nurse Corps and the women who started it: the Sacred Twenty. This is the 6th article in my series Ask Her About Her Zero F*cks.
This article is lovingly dedicated to my late uncle Major Philip Reilly, USA, Retired, whose extensive personal library fostered my interest in military history.
Why Nursing
The role of women in the military has evolved leaps and bounds, especially in the last 20 years with the changing nature of combat in the War on Terror. But the seeds of modern women’s military service were planted in the same occupation that moved thousands of women into the civilian public sphere: nursing. Military nurses are the allegorical figures of “woman’s place” in armed conflict for a reason. The cap and cape became tickets for entry into a world otherwise forbidden to women.
In the 19th century, American women were not *supposed* to work outside of the home, especially middle-class women. But nursing was “women’s work” that could be done in public. In fact, American women religious were the OG public-sphere nurses before secular healthcare embraced the lady nurse. By the early 1900s, there were over 400 hospital-based nurse training programs in the US that admitted women. The military, however, was a different story.
Twenty Pioneers
In 1908, the United States Congress authorized the creation of the modern Navy Nurse Corps. Women had served on the Union hospital ship Red Rover during the Civil War, and in naval hospitals ashore during the Spanish-American War, but there was no formal place for them in the Army or Navy. Nearly a century after the earliest recommendation for female nurses to work in naval hospitals, the Navy was finally ready to recruit and train them. Better late than never! Enter the Sacred Twenty.
The Navy tapped the US Army Nurse Corps (ANC) for an experienced nurse, Esther Voorhees Hasson, to be the Corps’ first Superintendent. Esther had served aboard the hospital ship Relief, in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War, and in Panama. She and 19 other women, selected from nursing graduate programs across the country, set up shop in the Naval Hospital in Washington DC. Of course, the Navy did not make it easy for them. Candidates had to be unmarried US citizens between 22 and 44. They also apparently had to be white based on the picture above, but of course they did because 1908. The first Black Navy nurse was not sworn in until 1945 (more about her in the Who section).
The trainees also had to pay for their own meals and accommodations, so they banded together and rented their own house as a dormitory. Twenty member Beatrice Bowman later wrote that she and her nurse squad were “no more welcome to most of the personnel of the Navy than women are when invading what a man calls his domain.” Civilian nursing was mostly pink-collar, but military nursing was very much not.
The Twenty’s training course lasted almost a year, after which they were assigned to naval hospitals in Washington DC, New York City, Annapolis MD, and Portsmouth VA. Each team dispatched to these had one Chief Nurse, who had additional responsibilities and was compensated more than her subordinate nurses. The nurses in the Sacred Twenty maybe made $20 USD a week. Not the worst salary for the time, but they were paid less than civilian male nurses. Word must have spread about the low compensation and personal expenses associated with the initial training program, because by 1910 applications had declined drastically. The fate of the first Navy Nurse Corps was now in question.
Oh hell no, said Lenah Sutcliffe Higbee, who was the Chief Nurse at the naval hospital in Norfolk VA. She and her Sacred Twenty comrades had worked too hard, paid too much, and endured too much BS from prejudiced doctors and surgeons for the program to fold. Women Navy nurses were here to stay.
Lenah’s arrival at Naval Hospital Norfolk in 1909 was not without controversy; the commanding officer was astounded that the Navy had responded to his request for additional staff by sending women, ugh. He did not want female nurses in a hospital with no female patients. Lenah dispelled his fears with her competence and leadership abilities — her lady nurses didn’t play. She became the second Superintendent of the NNC in 1911 and advocated for better pay and housing arrangements for the NNC, whose membership had grown to 86. NNC nurses were now in Guam and the Philippines in addition to stateside naval hospitals. Lenah also championed expanded healthcare services for military dependents, and the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery did obtain funding for this thanks to her efforts.
The First Big Test: World War I, 1914 –1918
The NNC’s first shipboard nurses served on the transport ships USS Mayflower and USS Dolphin in 1913, at Lenah’s behest. In 1914, two NNC nurses received a temporary discharge to join the Red Cross wartime response in Europe. When they returned to the US, they re-entered the NNC and shared their valuable new skills and experience with their comrades. Other NNC nurses did the same upon returning from Red Cross service at the US-Mexico border. Lenah also managed her nurses’ humanitarian outreach programs on Caribbean and Pacific islands, where NNC personnel trained local women to become nurses. By 1916, she knew that American involvement in the Great War was not an if, but a when, and worked to ensure that the NNC was ready to meet the unique challenges of trench warfare nursing.
WWI had a profound impact on combat and trauma medicine. The astronomical casualty counts in this war resulted in large part from developments in weapons technology, especially machine guns, tanks, high-powered hand grenades, land and sea mines, and poison gas. The NNC nurses encountered what has been described as “nurses’ hell” in the field hospitals: poor sanitation, overcrowding, dismissive medical officers, supply shortages, and blast and chemical injuries novel in their severity. Then came the 1918 influenza pandemic. Half of the NNC’s wartime casualties died of flu. Three of these were awarded the Navy Cross: Marie Hidell, Lillian Murphy, and Edna Place.
By the Armistice declaration in November of 1918, 1,550 Navy nurses had served in hospitals in the US, the United Kingdom, and France. For perspective, the NNC only had 160 members before WWI. In 1920, Lenah Higbee was awarded the Navy Cross for her leadership of the NNC during the war. Her nurses, along with the ANC and Red Cross, had demonstrated the expertise, ingenuity, and bravery of American women nurses in combat and there was no going back now.
Not Giving Up the Ship: the NNC from World War II to Today
The Navy Nurse Corps continued to grow throughout the interwar period, though I think it’s worth mentioning that Navy nurses did not receive relative or formal rank until World War II. Navy nurses have served admirably in dangerous conditions in every major 20th century conflict. 77 Army and Navy nurses were held as prisoners of war in Bataan during WWII. During the Korean War, NNC Reservists with WWII experience were recalled to the forward area to serve in hospitals ashore and aboard Haven-class hospital ships. The Vietnam War era saw 4 Navy nurses establish a hospital in an abandoned Saigon apartment and the first male nurse commissioned into the NNC in 1965. Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs opened to women in 1970.
In the 21st century, Navy nurses served in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom in Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively. They are currently deployed all over the globe afloat and ashore. Civilians and Navy medical personnel serve together on the USNS Mercy and USNS Comfort hospital ships, which have assisted in disaster response to hurricanes, typhoons, earthquakes, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic.
Phew! That was a lot of history for one article, but that’s the point. The opportunities available to today’s Navy nurses and their peers in the other service branches are beyond the wildest dreams of the Sacred Twenty (and their naysayers). Considering what they faced when they started out, I don’t think the Twenty would have it any differently.
You’ve come a long way, Navy!
Who:
- African American Army Nurses in WWI (can we call them the Sacred Eighteen?)
- Phyllis Mae Dailey, the first Black Navy nurse
- More on Lenah Sutcliffe Higbee at Coffee or Die
- Sara Matilda Cox, a member of the Sacred Twenty who is buried at Arlington National Cemetery
Where (lots of museums closed for COVID reasons, stay tuned):
- Museum of Nursing History in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri
- Military Women’s Memorial in Arlington, Virginia
- National Museum of the US Navy in Washington Navy Yard, DC
- National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Maryland
- US Army Medical Department (AMEDD) Museum in San Antonio, Texas
Read:
- There are a lot of books about military women, which is awesome, so let’s highlight some that will hopefully lead readers down the rabbit hole:
- Serving Proudly: A History of Women in the US Navy. Susan H. Godson, Naval Institute Press 2001.
- The Navy’s First Enlisted Women: Patriotic Pioneers. Regina Akers, Amazon Digital Services LLC — KDP Print US 2019. (This is about the Yeomen (F), who enlisted in the US Navy Reserve during WWI and were separate from the NNC)
- Western Front: American Nurses of the Great War and the Birth of Modern Nursing Practice. Paul E. Stepansky, McFarland Inc. Publishers 2019.
- No Time for Fear: Voices of American Military Nurses in World War II. Diane Burke Fessler, Michigan State University Press 1997.
- Women at War: The Story of Fifty Military Nurses who Served in Vietnam. Elizabeth Norman, University of Pennsylvania Press 2010.
