19 Apr 2018

Ohioana 2018

by | posted in: Publicity | 0

What fun! 

I got to hear my table mate, Gary Buettner, make his pitch for a middle grade book about a girl caring for Dracula’s kitty.  I made my own passionate case for a book about a foot race from L.A. to N.Y. in 1928.  Happily, the details of the story came flooding back, as if I had written it yesterday.  (Well, not exactly.  Several facts had passed into fuzziness, and I had to plead uncertainty.)  It was rewarding to pique the interest of at least a large handful of the browsers.

I sat on a panel with C. F. Payne, Julie Rubini, and Mary Kay Carson.  Afterward, I asked questions of Margaret Peterson Haddix.  I was intrigued by her latest book which takes place in Madrid.  She signed a copy for me to give to my niece, a native of the Spanish capital.  Julie Rubini introduced me to Michelle Houts, whom I spoke to about Ohio University Press’s Biographies for Young Readers.  I was delighted to browse her web page after I returned home.  Julie has written for this series, too, and I am exploring her books, as well as her long-running book festival, Claire’s Day.

5:00 pm!  I was exhausted.  I drove up to Ohio State’s campus to pick up my son, a freshman there.  I took him back to the Statehouse and we both enjoyed the evening reception: good food, good company, interesting tour of the capitol.

8 Apr 2018

Born to Lead

by | posted in: WWI Nurses | 0

“To whom much is given, from him much is expected.”  Or her.

Much was given to Julia Stimson (born to privilege in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1881) and much was expected.  (Hers was a family whose history of public service extended back at least two centuries.)  Her grandfather had been president of Dartmouth College; her father was the minister of the local Congregational Church.  Her cousin would grow up to become secretary of state of the United States–for two different presidents!

Perhaps, occasionally, the pressure grew too great.  Stimson ran away from home more than once as a teenager.  In the end, she persevered and graduated from Brearly School in New York City and from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie.  She had planned to go on to medical school, but her family steered her away from becoming a doctor.  Stimson complied.  By temperament and upbringing, she was a “traditionalist.”  She accepted the limitation that custom had erected in front of her and followed a more traditional path into nursing.  (The path was only relatively more traditional.  Professional nursing as a career had been available to middle-class women for only a generation, since the 1870s.)

Stimson graduated from New York Hospital Training School for Nurses and was quickly hired as Chief Nurse at Harlem Hospital.  Three years later, she relocated to St. Louis (where she had spent much of her youth) and headed up the nursing staff at Barnes Hospital, Washington University.  During the Ohio River flood of 1913 she volunteered as a reserve nurse with the Red Cross.  When St. Louis’s Base Hospital No. 21 was organized in preparation for impending war, Stimson was the obvious choice to lead its team of nurses.

In June, 1917, Base Hospital No. 21 took control of British General Hospital No. 12 in Rouen, France.  Stimson supervised as many as a hundred nurses and aides, leading by example, firm directive, and a cautiously inclusive management style.  She aimed, as she professed, to “appeal to the best” in her charges, rather than to “insist on discipline for discipline’s sake.”  She maintained an appropriate psychological distance from her subordinates, yet kept her door open to individual nurses who might need a sounding board or just a shoulder to lean on.  She was “a commanding presence” but also “approachable.”

Stimson used her commanding presence to enforce Army regulations, even when they applied a double standard to Army women.  In this, their first official war, Nurse Corps nurses existed in a legal No Man’s Land.  Regulation 1421½ determined that they would be officers–but without rank.  This meant that they could–and were expected to–give orders to enlisted men, but they had no recourse if those orders were not followed.  Nurses could dine with medical officers–doctors–but they could not be assured of their mutual respect.  They could neither fraternize with enlisted men nor meet alone with doctors.  Good soldier that she was, Stimson enforced all these rules without question.

Indeed, she went further.  She asked her nurses to pledge not to smoke or drink when off duty.  These low class habits could only lead to more trouble.  Stimson was intent to hold her nurses to a high moral standard.  Some of them came, she wrote, from “individual background[s]” (the upper end of middle-class?) that had given them self-discipline.  Others’ backgrounds (the lower end?) meant they required “careful supervision and regulation” on her part.  Stimson wore her social conservatism in a broad swath upon her sleeve.

Stimson served as chief nurse for Base Hospital No. 21 for ten months before being tapped to direct Red Cross and then Army nursing services from Paris.  After demobilization, she was–inevitably–promoted to Superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps.

In her new post, Stimson advocated full rank for nurses, a departure from her earlier position.  During the war, her natural conservatism prevented her from pressing for change.  With the immediate crisis over, she changed her stance, and, belated or not, her advocacy helped make the difference.  In 1920, the Army revoked Regulation 1421½ and awarded nurses (continuing to split hairs!) relative rank.  Absolute rank–with equal pay and full right of command–would wait another twenty-seven years, until after the end of World War II.  Stimson lived long enough–barely–to witness the change.

She retired from the Army in 1937, then served as president of the American Nursing Association from 1938 to 1944.  During the next world war, she agreed to come out of retirement to help recruit for the Army Nurse Corps.  She attained a rank of full colonel after the war.  More important, she finally achieved three years of peace to herself.  The woman of privilege, born to service, finally stepped back and let others lead in her place.

She died at her home in Briarcliff, New York, in September, 1948.

Sources:

6 Apr 2018

100 Years Ago Today: Steadying Them

by | posted in: WWI Nurses | 0

The German spring offensives were picking up steam.  American troops were not yet in the field (or in the trenches), but their sisters in the medical department were facing a heavy onslaught on the so-called “second battlefield.”  Chief Nurse Julia Stimson, of Base Hospital No. 21 in Rouen, France, requested additional staff to handle the surge: fifteen nurses and more than thirty corpsmen as orderlies.  When the nurses arrived, they seemed awfully green, awfully young.

Stimson’s existing staff had already had nine months to adapt to war nursing.  They had arrived in mid-June, 1917, among the first members of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) to see action. They took control of an existing British hospital and cared for wounded British soldiers long before any American troops arrived.  The shock of war nursing had been almost too much to bear in those first weeks.  Stimson herself, a mature hospital administrator, had almost broken down more than once.  She explained in a letter to her parents, “Naturally I cannot do any weeping here, since I have to be wept on, but there are times when it would be such a comfort to be braced myself.”

In time, the nurses of Base Hospital No. 21 steadied themselves.  By the end of summer, Stimson could report, in the lingo of the time, “Everyone has been a brick.”

Now, in March 1918, all were thoroughly battle-tested, but they needed all their grit to meet the rising tide of casualties that washed across their wards.  In one twenty-four hour period, almost a thousand patients had been delivered to their doors.  “We have long since ceased to attempt to change sheets between patients,” Stimson wrote.  “A good many patients have been in beds without sheets at all, but that is a minor matter.”  Meanwhile, her nurses were working around the clock, refusing to go off duty when their shifts ended. “No one has had a minute ‘off duty’ for five days now and they are beginning to show it.”

Hence, the call for reinforcements.

The new recruits seemed awfully green, awfully young.  Most had come from Kentucky and were as young as twenty-one-years-old.  (The War Department had recently lowered the minimum age from twenty-five.)  Stimson addressed the group before the arrival of their first ambulance convoy, but nothing she said could prepare them for the reality that was to come: the cries of pain and spurts of blood, the festering chest wounds and oozing pus, the stench of gangrene and iodoform.  “Such a baptism of fire they got that first afternoon!”

At the first lull, Stimson convened the group of rookie nurses and praised their initial efforts.  She told them that the nursing would never again be so emotionally hard.  Then she asked if, despite the horrors, they were not glad to be there.  Their strong affirmative gave Stimson confidence.  A few days later, Stimson wrote to her parents, the new nurses were “going about as chipper and happy as monkeys.  But oh, the poor little dears, they will never forget that first day.”

 

Source: Stimson, Julia C.  Finding Themselves: The Letters of an American Chief Nurse in a British Hospital in France.  NY: MacMillan Co., 1918.

29 Mar 2018

Nonfiction In a New Gear

by | posted in: Good Reads: Nonfiction | 0

Nonfiction has become hot–or, at least, very warm. For now, publishers are eager for nonfiction, especially of the narrative variety. They understand that young readers (like more mature ones) are engaged by a story. Science, history, sports, art: they all have stories embedded in them, like fossils, waiting to be excavated, dusted off, and properly reassembled. Does that leave expository nonfiction hopelessly passé and unpublishable? Not so fast.

Sue Macy and National Geographic have teamed up to publish a pair of books that combine the best of both narrative and expository nonfiction. Wheels of Change (2011) and Motor Girls (2017) recount the rise of two different modes of transportation and the socio-cultural changes they provoked. The first book takes place mostly the 1890s; the second in the two decades between 1900 and 1920. Together, they tell an important story of women’s emancipation, with as much to be learned from the abundant graphics as from the text.

Wheels of Change begins with Colonel Albert Pope’s introduction to the high-wheeler bicycle at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. It was, Macy explains, “the first step in a chain of events that ultimately led to the rise of the bicycle, the fall of the horse, the paving of America’s roadways, the dawn of modern advertising, and the development of the automobile.” If that weren’t enough, “it helped American women gain increased independence, better health, and freedom from restrictive clothing, and eventually, the right to vote.” From that auspicious beginning, Macy fills out chapters on the invention and development of the bicycle, social changes and the fears they engendered, women’s cycling fashions, racing, and the new freedoms the bicycle made possible.

Between chapters, Macy inserts two-page spreads on specialized topics: celebrity cyclists, cycling slang, cycling songs, cycling magazines, cycling advertising. Throughout the book are insets with excerpts from primary source documents (I counted ten), miscellaneous sidebars (just two), and featured cyclists (four). Macy and National Geographic have curated a book that allows young readers to “do history” (in a controlled way) while reading a compelling story.

“The smell of gasolene is to me as battle smoke to the soldier, and salt sea air to the sailor.” So wrote Minna Irving in 1909. Motor Girls is chock full of women motorists who find the automobile a source of liberation and, yes, adventure. The book is laid out in five chapters, roughly equivalent to those in Wheels of Change, with spreads on laws, etiquette, clothing, road signs, milestones, and an appendix of fascinating data. Macy has immersed herself in the extensive contemporary automobile literature. She cites throughout from Motor, Motor Way, and Automobile magazines. It takes a lot of work (and luck?) to find the first state to require a minimum driving age (Pennsylvania, 18, in 1908/09), and other such arcane data.

Macy encounters a limitation to the wealth of contemporary cycling and motoring magazines: They focus almost exclusively on middleclass white men and women. Macy does not apologize for this fact, but she does acknowledge it and makes an effort to include some images and stories that broaden the view, all to her credit. I was especially pleased to see Macy use contemporary fiction and film as both sources of evidence and content for discussion. After summarizing a short story titled “A Fin de Cycle Incident,” Macy ends, saying, “These and other uplifting stories reinforced the notion that the bicycle made women better partners and better citizens.” Convincing? Definitely. Enlightening? Absolutely.

Within her broader narrative, Macy tells many stories of individual cyclists and motorists. In Wheels of Change, we meet racing champions Louise Armaindo and Elsa von Blumen, and, later, endurance record-setters Jane Yatman and Jane Lindsay. In Motor Girls, we read Jennie Davis speaking out against women drivers, as well as Mrs. A. Sherman Hitchcock writing passionately in their favor. We follow Alice Ramsey, with friend, Hermine Jahns, and two chaperoning aunts, as they become the first women to cross the continent by motor car. We accompany Sara Bard, driver Maria Kindberg, and mechanic Ingeborg Kindstedt, as they carry a suffrage petition of half a million signatures from San Francisco to Washington DC. The racing exploits of Joan Newton Cuneo and France’s Camille du Gast thrill; the ambulance driving of Mary Dexter in World War I inspires. Macy regularly zooms in her camera to tell the individual stories within the wider sweep.

Just as often, she widens her lens to relate the broader developments and give young readers the context they need. Admittedly, this shifting out can sometimes feel distracting. Yes, it makes sense to explain the United States’ entry into World War I, but does one need to read about the Zimmermann Telegram to understand women ambulance and motor car volunteers? This feels like a quibble, but it does point to a constant challenge for all nonfiction writers, especially those in the juvenile market.

Overall, Macy handles the challenge adeptly and with grace. Wheels of Change and Motor Girls provide the best of both narrative and expository nonfiction. They contain an abundance of surprising particulars, showing (or reminding) young readers that truth is often stranger than fiction. More, they explain how two subjects children can relate to–bikes and cars–effected the advancement of women’s social and legal liberation more than a hundred years ago. What could be more satisfying than that?

 

Post Script Query: Have I been accurate in my terminology?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Used without permission from School Library Journal.)