ABSTRACT
Lured by the call of duty or the promise of adventure, and apparently undeterred by the region’s reputation for dangerous Arabs, dirt, dust, heat and disease, Allied women from Britain and the Dominions provided medical care in the Middle East under some of the most challenging circumstances of the First World War. The Middle East presented women with an unreliable landscape: both deeply alien and disconcertingly familiar. The ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia; Biblical sites such as Babylon, the Garden of Eden, or the Holy Land, and the Oriental mystique of a region so associated with the Arabian Nights stories in the Western imagination, combined to offer a plethora of mythologies on which to draw. In Britain, and throughout the British Empire, recruitment posters depicted women and girls seemingly in need of protection and carried slogans such as “WOMEN OF BRITAIN SAY GO!” or images of mothers holding infants with the words “45,000 AUSTRALIAN FATHERS ARE FIGHTING! WILL YOU HELP?” While these constructions of gender were being used to shame or persuade men into military service, Allied commanders were preventing women’s physical presence on, or close to, the front line, to the detriment of the medical care provided for serving men. Despite this reluctance to have much needed, medically trained women near the battlefields, many women eventually made their way to the Middle East, with nurses reaching Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) in 1916. Drawing on published and unpublished life writing and interviews held in British archives, this chapter examines the war service of Allied nurses in the Middle East.
