Nursing, Authority, and Power: Women, Medicine, and State Building in World War II China

China’s military and civil society faced an acute shortage of medical personnel during World War II. The ability to cure and to care for the wounded and traumatized became a symbol of the modern state despite its political and military weakness. The war-torn state used a language of patriotism to continue to drive a shared imagination for modern China blending citizenship, medicine and nationalism. Moden medicine therefore loomed large in the state building project against a backdrop of the global World War II.

Using oral history materials, wartime dispatches, newspaper reports, memoirs, and archive collections from mainland China, Taiwan and North America, this paper explores the roles of leading Chinese nurses and their wartime efforts in blending the development of nursing with China’s patriotic war against Japanese invasion. It traces the continuing development of military and civilian nursing by focusing on the career tracks of the prewar cohorts of the nursing graduates from the Nursing School of the Peking Union Medical College. Not only were they the first cohorts of Chinese women who started to replace missionary nurses as China’s nursing leaders, but also appeared in domestic and international stages as highly professional women who claimed authority and power to their professions. In making a profession for women in both the military and civilian sectors, they interpreted the meaning of power, authority and citizenship.