Nurse or not? Voluntary aids and the Australian Army Medical Women’s Service during the Second World War : Organisational identity and the value of women’s work

This thesis explores the under represented cohort of Australian servicewomen who worked in historically female dominated roles – those being based in care and humanitarian related fields, such as nursing and domestic duties. Studies of Australian servicewomen have approached the cohort as a monolithic group with little regard given to their backgrounds, including their education, work experience, and their geography. This thesis forensically investigates the complexity and multi layered category that is Australian servicewomen during the Second World War – a cohort that changes dramatically over the course of the war. Using feminist, labour and women’s history as its foundations, this research analyses the identities and experiences of the women who served as Voluntary Aids (VAs) and members of the Australian Army Medical Women’s Service (AAMWS) during the Second World War.

Two key lines of enquiry are pursued in this work. The first is to trace the educational and organisational challenges the VAs/AAMWS faced, and the opportunities afforded them, including the transition of the women’s service as VAs into the paid and khaki-clad military auxiliary service – the AAMWS. The other is to uncover the relationships and tensions that existed between the auxiliary service and the trained nurses, both organisationally and as individuals. These two areas of focus are brought together to interrogate the myth that VAs/AAMWS wanted to be nurses, questioning how this myth was shaped by and for the members of the auxiliary service. The identity and role of the nursing aid during the war, and their relationship with the nursing profession is the primary focus of this research as it questions how the military, governments, and the nursing profession challenged, shaped, and progressed the work and skill of the servicewomen of the VAD/AAMWS. In doing so, this thesis offers a new understanding of the role of the VAs/AAMWS, the war’s effect on women’s work, and it illuminates a new picture of how women shaped the war and how the war shaped women.

This thesis argues that Australian women’s service during the Second World War contributed to the economy and efficiency of the nation’s effort and their work holds significance without comparison or emphasis of men’s experiences which have dominated the historical narrative. But this research also suggests that while the politics that surrounded women’s labour shifted encouragingly during the war, attitudes also took a retrograde step. This thesis shows that the professional identity of VAs/AAMWS and the value of their work was assigned to them by others. While members of the service demonstrated skill and proficiency, it was the military, governments, and trained medical and nursing professionals that determined the place, albeit constantly changing, of the VA/AAMWS. At the junction of two male-dominated spheres—the hospital system that gave power to male doctors, and the military—the understanding of VAs/AAMWS was foremost as women and only secondarily as workers. Where at once women’s work received recognition and approval by those including military doctors and nurses, there was little to separate the narratives of their service peddled by governments from gendered stereotypes historically used to characterise the nurse, the wife, and the mother.