Into the Breach, by Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider

Into the Breach: American Women Overseas in World War I, by Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider
toExcel Press, 2000
285 pages plus appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. 8 pages of photos
Library: 940.315 SC

Description
The story of the 25,000 American women who went overseas during the First World War in a variety of functions to aid the war effort and to save lives--often at the risk of their own. Vividly and entertainingly told, the account offers quotes from letters, diaries, written memoirs, novels, and interviews, all of which evoke the exuberance and the despair that these women experienced in war-torn Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The result is an immensely readable book, a living, breathing slice of Americana.

Although most of these women have vanished completely from memory, the accounts they left of themselves remain to reveal them in all their remarkable diversity. Memoirs, letters, newspaper reports, novels and diaries, from doctors, pilots, photographers,, journalists, interpreters, telephone operators and entertainers tell the story of these neglected veterans of World WAr I.

Table of Contents
Preface
1. The Entrepreneurial War
2. Common Experiences
The Participants
3. To the rescue
-The American community abroad
-Ad hoc organizations
-The American REd Cross
-The American Friends
-College Groups
4. Binding up Wounds
-The Medical Needs
-American Women in Foreign Medical Systems
-American Organizations
-American Medical Women: Who Did What
5. Aid and Comfort
-Canteening
-In Service to Womem - the YWCA
-Books for Sammies
-Trouping for the Troops
6. The Black Record
7. The Hello Girls
The REcorders
8. The Reporters
-Amateurs and Chance Observers
-Journalists on the Western Front
-Reporting the Russian Revolution
9. The Novelists
The Protesters
10. The Women's War Against the War
Conclusion
11. The Front as Frontir
Appendices
1. Numbers of American Women in Europe in war-connected activities (1914-1918)
2. World War I Chronology
Notes
Bibliography
-Fiction and poetry
-Memoirs and biographies
-Organizations
-Reference works
-Women and war
-World War I
Acknowledgments
Index

Nurses at the Front, edited by Margaret R. Higonnet

Nurses at the Front: Writing the Wounds of the Great War
, edited by Margaret R. Higonnet
Northeastern University Press, 2001
161 pages, no index, no photos
Library: 940.47573 NUR

Description
Ellen N. La Motte (1873-1961) and Mary Borden (1886-1968) are two of the best known American nurses who wrote about their experiences working in the same field hospital on the Western Front during World War I. La Motte's The Backwash of War (1916) and Borden's The Forbidden Zone (1929) present in powerful, vivid, and often haunting prose each woman's acute observations of the stark realities of battle and the severe conditions under which military medicine is practiced.

Now representative selections from these classic texts are published for the first time in one volume. Linked by parallel themes and narrative approaches, the episodes recounted by La Motte and Borden expose the intense, horrific world of the surgical wards and operating rooms. Revealing the moral dilemmas faced by those who make decisions about the lives and deaths of soldiers, they describe the ethical contradictions of saving men who will return to the trenches to kill or be killed. Written from the perspective of both observer and actor, these compelling sketches often shift from shocking realism to irony, as they invite the reader to enter the nurses' harsh world and to understand their professional and personal struggles. In addition, the depictions of men's suffering challenge institutional indifference to the human costs of war.

Table of Contents
Introduction
Glossary of French Terms

From The Backwash of War, by Ellen N. La Motte
Introduction (1916)
Heroes
Alone
A Belgian Civilian
The Interval
Women and Wives
Pour la Patrie
A Surgical Triumph
At the Telephone
A Citation

From The Forbidden Zone by Mary Borden
Preface (1929)
Belgium
The Square
Moonlight
Enfant de Malheur
Rose
Conspiracy
Paraphenalia
In the Operating Room
Blind


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