Is citizenship earned or inherent? Did women need to prove they _deserved_ the vote?

Once the US entered WWI, women were eager to be of service--especially women with something to prove.

Warthread.

Over the next days we’ll meet two groups of women who served: white doctors like Mabel Seagrave & Black YWCA leaders like Addie Hunton.

First, the heroic and infuriatingly unknown story of women doctors serving at the front. @Kate_c_lemay tells this chapter of suffrage history

in Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence - another reason to get this gorgeous book. https://twitter.com/i/status/1168228035931365377

When the war began, fewer than 3% of medical graduates were women, and they were routinely denied access to internships and hospital positions.

The war was an unmissable opportunity to train and serve, and women doctors eagerly volunteered.

There was only one problem: the US War Department refused to enlist women doctors. The Red Cross wouldn’t take them either.

NAWSA, which had embraced the war effort as a chance to prove women’s patriotism, stepped into the breach. https://twitter.com/DailySuffragist/status/1297718764952260609?s=20

The Natl Amer. Woman Suffrage Assoc. raised $200,000 and sent a fully-supported, all-female unit to France: the Women’s Oversea Hospital Unit.

The first group to arrive in France included 6 doctors & 1 dentist, plus a female master plumber, electrician, mechanic, and carpenter.

In just a few months they built a hospital near Bourdeaux from scratch - barracks, operating rooms, the incinerator, all the mechanicals. To be clear, they built thisentire hospital themselves. The only men involved were German POWs who did the framing under their supervision.

Within a month the hospital was serving 10,000 refugees.

As more teams arrived in France, they set up mobile units to treat victims of mustard gas, moving as the front moved. A 600-bed unit treated as many as 20,000 men.

They operated on soldiers under aerial bombardment by Germany. Wrote Dr. Mary Edward: “May the 28th [1918], operated 5-8pm, then 9-3am. Wounded were arriving...Bombs shook the operating room theatre and the barracks.”

NAWSA's unit weren’t the only women doctors in the war: Smith College organized a unit, and JPMorgan’s daughter Anne and her lover, a doctor, funded and ran a hospital in France.

But only NAWSA was explicitly trying to prove women’s worth as citizens.

NAWSA required all members of the unit be suffragists, though it decided not to put “suffrage” in the hospital’s name. The whole team attended suffrage lectures while in France, and understood they were supposed to represent the cause for the folks at home.

When the war ended, the unit had money left over, so the remaining funds raised by NAWSA went to support the American Hospital in Rheims. Dr. Marie Lefort, from Newark, NJ, had founded the hospital; she stayed and ran it until 1935. https://nyti.ms/1LEqaxG 

France was deeply grateful for the women’s service. Even before the war ended, they awarded four of the NAWSA team their highest medal of valor, and made them First Lieutenants in the French army.

The US, by contrast, continued to exclude women from the army medical corps. They refused women commissions even as the war raged and male doctors were felled by the 1918 flu pandemic.

Neither did the US government recognize women’s service after the war ended.

As @kate_c_lemay writes, “More than 100 American women were decorated by foreign governments for their military service in WWI…[yet] not a single female physician or nurse described in this essay has ever been recognized for valorous service by the American military.”

France was more appreciative of the women’s service, but NAWSA’s underlying message was lost in translation. French women could not vote until 1945.

#suffrage100 #19thAmendment #CenturyofStruggle