ABSTRACT
After the Armistice, the figure that was set up most frequently as the female equivalent to the combatant male in discourses of commemoration in all of the belligerent nations was that of the middle- or upper-class volunteer nurse, whose activities could be most straightforwardly mapped onto the well-established model of nineteenth-century charitable work among elite women, and who did not present any competition to demobilized men in the employment market. 1 The contribution of trained nurses was also generally positively represented postwar, although their war service was not always praised as highly or as frequently as that of untrained nurses, something that irked many professional and military nurses. A 1919 letter published in The Times, for example, demanded to know why “a regular Matron of the official Army Nursing Service, who has served throughout the war, may lay no claim to the war medal which is awarded to any VAD … not technically in the army at all, with possibly only a few weeks of service to her credit, during which she may have done little or no actual nursing.” 2 That said, in terms of general postwar attitudes toward women’s war work, in both Britain and France the nurse remained the most acceptable model of patriotic female war service.
