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Abstract
A nurse and an officer! A woman and a soldier! This project explores the gendered meanings of soldiering and waging of war through the analysis of the visual representation of female soldiers during and after the Vietnam War.
I focus on the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) as a case study to illuminate how ANC recruitment policies articulated gender in general and in the advertisements in particular. I examine ANC and Congressional records pertaining to the recruitment policies and their implementation and I analyze the thirty-one ANC ads published in the American Journal of Nursing between the years of 1962–1973. In addition, I discuss the ways in which the Vietnam Women's Memorial Project negotiated the process (1983–1993) of establishing the women's memorial. I view the ads and the memorial project as two parts of a national process of defining the gendered meaning of military service.
Army nurses and nursing were constructed primarily in the ANC ads according to a white, heterosexual, feminine model of nursing and caring. These ads recruited nurses to ‘do gender’ rather than to function as officers with a particular nursing specialization. This portrayal disguised the reality of the diverse professional spaces that nurses both female and male occupied in the ANC and Vietnam War nursing.
In the aftermath of the War, the Vietnam Women's Memorial Project's effort to gain recognition for the wartime service of all U.S. servicewomen reflected that complexity. The Memorial is a bronze statue with four figures—a white servicewoman holding a white wounded male soldier, a Black servicewoman standing and looking up to the sky, and a white servicewoman kneeling while holding a helmet in her hand.
The statue has become synonymous with military nursing. This misconception is a natural outgrowth of the gendered construction of Army nursing as portrayed in the Army Nurse Corps recruitment ads and the gendered depiction of the Memorial. The memorial's depiction encapsulates the contentious process of scripting women's and men's military service by culturally constructed gender norms.
