Wounds: Militarized nursing, feminist curiosity, and unending war
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117819865999 |
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
| Author | Cynthia Enloe |
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117819865999
International Relations
2019, Vol. 33(3) 393 –412
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117819865999
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Wounds: Militarized nursing,
feminist curiosity, and
unending war
Cynthia Enloe
Clark University, USA
Abstract
Taking wartime nurses – and post-war nursing – seriously makes one think more politically about
the wounds endured in wartime and what counts as a wartime ‘wound’. Thinking about wounds
and the wounded, in turn, reveals how war-waging officials, and militarizers more generally,
have tried in the past, and today still try, to shrink citizens’ awareness of militarism’s negative
consequences. Nursing, nurses, wounds, and the wounded each continues to be gendered,
influencing the workings of both masculinities and femininities in past and current wartimes and
post-war politics. Feminist analysts have expanded the ‘political’ and multiplied ‘political thinkers’.
Failing to absorb these feminist theoretical insights fosters the trivialization of nurses and other
caretakers of the wartime wounded and their diverse political thinking. It is a failing with serious
implications. Overlooking nurses and others who provide wartime care, combined with a lack of
curiosity about wounds, perpetuates militarization and war.
Keywords
masculinities, militarization, nurses, post-war, war, women, wounds
Nurses think
Before Agatha Christie was ‘Agatha Christie’, she was Agatha Miller. When the Great
War broke out in 1914, Agatha Miller was 24, unmarried, though affianced. Thus far, she
had lived a rather unconventional, if protected and feminized life.1 With Britain’s
entrance into the war, Agatha Miller volunteered to become a nurse, working in a hospi-
tal (the converted Town Hall) in her hometown, Torquay, a favored destination for pre-
war respectable seaside vacationers. Now it would become a destination for Britain’s war
wounded.
Corresponding author:
Cynthia Enloe, Department of IDCE, Clark University, Worcester, MA, 02140, USA.
Email: CEnloe@clarku.edu
865999IRE0010.1177/0047117819865999International RelationsEnloe
research-article2019
Article
394 International Relations 33(3)
Agatha, though trained only in first aid, became a ‘VAD’ (Voluntary Aid Detachment
member). She discovered during the war that she liked nursing, liked being of genuine
use. She recalled later that, had she not gotten married (to a young Flying Corps airman,
who later left her), she might have trained to become a professional nurse, what Britons
at the time called a ‘nursing sister’.
During the Great War, Agatha Miller learned to accept her position within the British
1900s hospital world’s hierarchy: doctors (mostly male) at the top, to be ‘worshipped’;
sisters (female) – fully trained professional nurses – occupying the next rung on the steep
ladder, exercising authority over (and often disdainful of) the VAD nurses; the VADs,
such as Agatha Miller (all female), many daughters from middle class families, the next
rung down, working under the supervision of nursing sisters; on the lower rungs of the
wartime British hospital’s gendered and pyramided ladder were those women working as
ward cleaners or kitchen staff, as well as the male orderlies, who performed demanding
jobs such as carrying stretchers heavy with wounded men.2
Initially, Agatha Miller was assigned such bloodless hospital tasks as de-lousing the
soldiers arriving by boat and train directly from the muddy trenches in Belgium and
France. She was shocked when she first saw a man’s head full of lice, a sight for which
her middle class sheltered upbringing had not prepared her.3
As the battlefront violence escalated on the Continent, increasing numbers of severely
injured British male soldiers were evacuated across the Channel for intensive care in
makeshift hospitals such as that in Torquay’s converted town hall. As her hospital became
crowded with incoming wounded men, many younger than Agatha, her duties expanded.
Soon she was training nursing volunteers even more novice than she. One of their assign-
ments was to assist male surgeons with amputations. Specifically, Agatha was instructed
by the nursing sisters to pick up soldiers’ freshly amputated limbs and carry them down
to the cellar. There, she would feed the men’s severed arms and legs into the hospital
furnace.
At the start of her nursing work, upon seeing blood in the operating theater, Agatha
almost fainted. Soon, however, faced with maimed men on the operating tables, she
pulled herself together and got on with her gruesome wartime tasks:
I remember a young probationer who had been assisting in the theater and had been left behind
to clear up, and I had helped her take an amputated leg down to throw into the furnace. It was
almost too much for the child. Then we cleared up all the mess and the blood together. She was,
I think, too young and too new to it to have been given that task to do alone so soon.4
One of the notable features of Agatha (Miller) Christie’s many mystery novels (she
drafted her first in 1916, in the midst of the war) is the limits she imposes on portrayals
of violence. There in the Torquay wartime hospital, her nursing duties accustomed her to
daily encounters with excruciating wounds inflicted on humans by war-wagers on all
sides. But in her fiction, there would be puzzling murders. There would be the exposure
of murderers. From her wartime nursing experiences, Agatha Miller Christie seems to
have developed her own ideas about what should be widely and graphically shared about
wounds and wounding. Bloodiness was not to be turned into mere entertainment.
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