“Eminently appalling suffering”: Irish Women in World War I Medical Services, Citizenship, and Remembrance in the Irish Free State During the 1920s

Irish women served in World War I medical services as nurses, Voluntary Aid Detachments, doctors, ambulance drivers, and x-ray technicians. In doing so, they endured the traumas of war, yet were ignored in postwar commemorations in the newly independent Irish Free State. War and battle were viewed as bastions of masculinity. Though these women were praised for their work during the war, afterwards that praise disappeared as the level of independence that accompanied their wartime service was viewed as transgressive and threatening to efforts to reassert traditional gender norms. Great War nurses and female doctors were expected to return to civilian life in the 1920s rather than pursue careers or even commemorative activities. Women were often ignored in postwar commemoration across combatant nations, and while Ireland was not necessarily unique in this, it does provide a useful lens through which to examine gender, war memory, national identity, citizenship, and post-colonialism. In Ireland, a nation at war against the British Empire from 1919 to 1921 and then consumed by civil war until 1923, lack of interest in the experiences of these medical women was connected to gendered perceptions of citizenship and national identity. Irish women in the medical services not only experienced the trauma of the Great War but were also relegated to an inferior position in Great War remembrance and the state due to enduring concepts of national identity and citizenship that lasted into the Irish Free State in the 1920s.