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Flight Nurses

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Imagine that it is 1941. The country is running out of manpower, or more specifically, it is running out of men. America is busy fighting in a war on two sides of the world. Husbands, sons, and fathers, most of them will never come back. As people at home mourn America’s fallen heroes, we also encounter another problem. America has just joined the global battle, and it is far from being over. What will we do when we can’t take any more men out of our neighborhoods, or even worse, when we run out of men to send away? Now, in 2016, the answer is obvious: women. In 1941, even suggesting such a thing was almost laughable. In 1941, we explored countless other options, none of which were even reasonable. In 1941, America had been overlooking a fighting …show more content…

Women had been nurses for a long time, and nurses had always helped in the military. World War II brought about a big change in nursing, though, with the creation of flight nurses. Flight nurses were trained at the U.S. Army Air Force School of Air Evacuations, which was the first school of its kind, and was established in Louisville, Kentucky in 1942. It trained nurses in the practice of air evacuation, which is simply the act of transporting wounded soldiers off of the battlefield in a plane and caring for them during the flight. One of these nurses was Jean Tierney. She became a flight nurse when she graduated from the school in 1943.. Jean was the ideal woman for this job; she was already a registered nurse, and she was an orphan. With no family to hold her back, Jean felt that being a nurse promised adventure, and something different than her average lifestyle in the midwest. “Adventure” might not be the best word to describe it, though, because it was very dangerous since the planes had no protection from enemy fire. The cabins were like metal cans: uninsulated, and not pressurized. They carried supplies to the battlefield, then dropped off the supplies and exchanged them for the injured soldiers that flew back onboard. Typically, a plane carrying the injured could wear a red cross, to avoid encounters with enemy fire. But, the planes carried supplies, so they could not have a cross, and the planes were unprotected. There …show more content…

They were like live-in maids, or nannies. In early-1900s America, they were taught things that would be necessary for keeping a house, cooking, and raising children while the men got jobs and made the money. While universities such as Harvard and Yale had been operating in the United States since the seventeenth century, these schools were typically only open to men. Some schools did allow women to attend, but only the wealthy. It wasn’t until around 1980 that women were reported as receiving higher education to the same extent as men. Science and mathematics were thought to be “too hard” for women to do, so those subjects were left for the men to study. Often times, women were denied degrees that they had rightfully studied for and earned. It was even said that women would have too hard of a time trying to cope with the vigorous studying routines that came with a college education. Meanwhile, men earned degrees, and attending a university was viewed as a very honorable path to take. This is not to say that women didn’t go to school at all. Most went to grammar school when they were young, but stopped when they became teenagers to help at home and prepare for adult life. Some schools, however, were entirely devoted to making girls into “proper ladies,” such as the Long Lane School for Girls, in Middletown Connecticut. “About two months is spent in the central laundry,” the 1936 Long Lane Farm Report

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