Reprinted from The Conversation, November 11, 2016 11.39pm AEDT PhD researcher, Northumbria University, Newcastle Disclosure statement Christina Dodds is a member of the Royal British Legion and is a member of the Queen Alexandra Royal Army Nursing Corps…
Tag: nursing
I ought to have died, but I don’t do the things that I ought, Mabel Stobart 1916.
Zvezdana Popovic has followed up her information about the exhibition and service held at St Sava Church to honour British women in medical missions in Serbia and on related fronts during the Great War. Popovic spoke about the suffragists and…
Blue Plaques: But How Many for Women?
Well deserved, but badly neglected. Women’s absence from the Blue Plaques that adorn buildings and, at times, road or pathways, is again being questioned. Some women, such as Julie Harper, are choosing their own method of giving women of note…
Splints, Spasm and Medical Science The Nurse who Challenged it All
Patricia Kulberg Sister Elizabeth Kenny, New York 1950 (photo courtesy of New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper) She rose up out of the Australian outback before women got the vote and overturned the entire system of understanding and treating…
‘A Call to Arms’ … The Crimea to The Blitz – Ministering Angels
Mrs Rebecca Strong, one of Mrs Deeble’s ladies at Netley, wrote: ‘There was normally an orderly attached to each ward, but they were often taken away for relief work such as coal carrying, etc. Each sister had from six to eight of these wards under her charge, and speedily found that the nursing must be done by herself … A special orderly could be had in emergencies, but the nursing was nil.’
Margaret Sanger – Fighting for Reproductive Rights
Margaret Sanger treated many women who had illegal and dangerous abortion procedures. She fought for birth control information and contraception to be made available, and found it essential to women’s health for this information to be legal … It was very dangerous for Sanger to provide her services and information and she often risked jail time in order to help women.
In 1914, Sanger started The Woman Rebel, a feminist publication. She wanted to provide women with information about contraception. Sanger openly challenged the state and federal Comstock Act, which criminalized contraceptives (“American Experience: Margaret Sanger”). In 1916, Sanger was arrested for opening the first birth control clinic in the country. She worked toward better forms of contraception other than the diaphragm, which was expensive. Sanger helped with the creation of Enovid, the first oral contraceptive …
Molly Hadfield – A Radical Warrior Woman Remembered
… when Molly Hadfield was 10, she was told that nursing was not for her – ‘you can’t do the exams’ – but she would be welcome to work in the nurses’ dining room. She took the job. Under the rules lunches were set out on tables for nurses, but sisters and matrons’ meals were kept in the oven. Sisters and matrons sat down to piping hot fare. Cold and cooling meals waited until nurses finished their shifts. The unfairness of the hierarchical system struck Molly Hadfield then and stuck with her, as did the distinction made between kitchen and nursing staff which prevented her from meeting on the premises with cousins and friends who were nurses.
Women of True Grit – Scottish Women’s Hospitals
It was during a visit to Belgrade, Serbia that I was first made aware of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and the work they did during the First World War. What saddened me was that the women involved are known about…
The Women ‘who never cry’: British Women Released by Germany
The women were more fortunate than the 150 white men, who were taken back to Prisoner of War camps in Germany. And that privileging of women was a common pattern in WW2 .
After that Betsy and Geraldine’s group endured two weeks of what one newspaper described as ‘a rollicking Robinson Crusoe adventure’ on Emirau (‘Squally’) Island. It was not.
Then on Christmas Day an Australian naval initiative rescued them and took them safely to the Antipodes.