Picturing the Periphery of War: Red Cross Workers’ and Nurses’ Cold War Snapshots in the Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project

• In Event: War & Peace Studies Caucus: Militarizing the Domestic/Domesticating the Military: Home/Not Home in American Military Cultures

Abstract

In 1946, Ruth White and a fellow Red Cross worker posed in front of “Club Doo Little” the troop recreational club she ran just outside Okinawa, Japan during the immediate post-war period. In 1951, at the height of the Korean War, a friend and fellow member of the Army Nursing Corps snapped a photograph of Nurse Frances Turner as she bent to wash her hair in a bowl outside the 2nd Army Surgical Hospital in Korea. This paper examines these images and others taken by American nurses and Red Cross Workers serving overseas immediately after World War II and during the early years of the Cold War. Held at the Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project, these photographs prompt questions about the role of the archive in framing our understanding of images of conflict. The snapshots in this collection show young women posing with one another, goofing off for the camera, or pausing from their work nursing the bodies and boosting the morale of American service men. In their photographs, scrapbooks, diaries, and oral histories, these women documented their daily experiences living and working on the periphery of the warzone.

Nurses and Red Cross Workers may not have had direct experience with combat, but they spent their time working and living near spaces of conflict and engaging with the more violent aspects of the Cold War period. Their photographs and scrapbooks from these peripheral spaces of war make visible the hot zones of the Cold War and reveal the ways in which conflict is not contained within those combat zones. These images can be read for evidence of the trauma of war but also show us the range of affective experiences of war including pride, guilt, disgust, awe, sentimentality, and nostalgia. Moreover, these snapshots show women nursing men back to physical health and creating leisure spaces for tending to soldiers’ mental health in ways that muddle the distinction between the military and the domestic, between the warzone and the home front. These photographs of caregivers and leisure workers make visible the domestic labor that bolsters the bodies and the morale of the American military. Drawing on affect studies, archival theory, and work on the visual culture of war, I explore how these women’s snapshots might reframe our understanding of vernacular photography, intimacy, and the daily experience of conflict.

Author

• Andrea Gustavson, University of Texas, Austin (TX)