New Books: The Overlooked American Women of World War I Elizabeth Foxwell

The Overlooked American Women of World War I

Elizabeth Foxwell

The new film Testament of Youth, an adaptation of Vera Brittain’s wrenching account of

love and loss in World War I, has received enthusiastic reviews. Brittain’s autobiography

has never been out of print, but those seeking a work with equivalent impact by an

American woman in the war would be hard pressed to find one.

Accounts do exist, but tend to be lacking the status of T of Y. I enjoyed Joyce Marlow’s

anthology The Virago Book of Women and the Great War, with its primarily British

contributors. But when I looked for a similar U.S. collection, I could not find one. Why

this state of affairs, when American women did serve in the war, as documentation such

as books, diaries, and letters attests? Did their published accounts have a short shelf

life, given the relatively brief period of official U.S. involvement in the war compared to

that of European nations? Were they affected by official and familial constraints

regarding the roles they could play and discuss during the war? Did they feel that

recording their experiences would be self-aggrandizement when they viewed their

service as their patriotic duty, and the men were the ones doing the fighting and the

dying? Did their roles mean that they could not discuss their activities (such as serving

in the armed forces)?

Irritated by the absence of a resource that captured these women’s varied experiences

in their own particular voices, I set out to collect first-person accounts of U.S. women

that dated from the war period, wanting the immediacy and the “I was there” point of

view. I would attempt to find women who pursued diverse work in relief, medical,

journalistic, military, entertainment, and other positions; served in different theaters of

the war; and represented various faith traditions. I would annotate their narratives so

that the casual reader could understand references that time might have made cryptic,

and I would find biographical material that would provide details on backgrounds and

often astonishing postwar activities. Wherever possible, I would try to locate photos that

could put faces to accounts.

The process was gratifying, frustrating, and even disturbing. Some amazing stories

surfaced, such as that of Marie S. Dahm Shapiro, the naval fingerprint expert turned

Ziegfield Follies showgirl turned fashion designer. The postwar trails of women could

grow faint due to marriage, family, work, and other demands, but the greater availability

of online genealogical and archival information assisted in this task. Promising lines of

inquiry often resulted in dead ends. For example, no personal story emerged by Pauline

Jordan Rankin (1892?–1976), a nurse imprisoned by the Germans (in World War I) and

the Japanese (in World War II) and founder of the first school for the blind in Armenia.

The suicides of poet Gladys Cromwell and her sister, Dorothea, en route from France

appears attributable to PTSD, and the letter to the editor from “A Yeomanette” shows

men’s fear of women’s encroachment into the previously male-only territory of military

service.

I hope that readers will find the collection enlightening and interesting, perhaps leading

them to read further and see the many parallels between now and then. My blog,

American Women in World War I, provides links to WWI resources and details on

women for whom I could not find a first-person account.

Elizabeth Foxwell is editor of In Their Own Words: American Women in World War I, staff editor

of the Catholic Historical Review, managing editor of Clues: A Journal of Detection, and editor of

the McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction series.