‘A Duty to Care: The Emotional Experience of Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service Sisters during the Second World War’, Katherine Roberts (University of Manchester, UK)
Over the course of the Second World War, 12,000 nurses served with the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service (QA). The majority of these women were civilian reservists with no military experience. Most had never been overseas and few had ever encountered the kinds of traumatic injuries that would characterize their wartime work. This thesis investigates the emotional experience of QA’s working within the novel environment of active military service. Within the field of nursing history, there has been some consideration of the emotional experience of military nurses, but existing literature has focused primarily on nurses’ use of emotion work for their patients’ well-being and their response to traumatic experiences. This thesis aims to provide a more extensive examination of nurses’ emotional experiences by expanding its focus beyond those emotions felt in moments of trauma and shifting its consideration of nursing care from its emotional impact on the patient to its impact on the nurse who delivered it.
This thesis uses close textual analysis of the personal narratives composed by seven QA’s during the war in order to gain insight into these women’s emotional experiences. It also engages in analysis of wartime contemporary media in order to ascertain the feelings rules for the emotional communities within which these women worked. Based off of the results of this analysis, this thesis argues that active duty QA’s lived and worked within a strictly structured emotional community that provided them with a limited repertoire of acceptable emotions. In many ways, this emotional community pushed nurses to continually act as emotional aids for others while giving little to no consideration to the nurses’ own emotional needs.
Registration: This Seminar will be held virtually on Zoom. Please email alice.naisbitt@manchester.ac.uk – for the Zoom link
Details of seminar programme can be found here.
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