| The Voluntary Aid Detachment (V.A.D.) program, run under the auspices of the Red Cross, was initially intended to supplement the medical corps of the Territorial Forces, Britain's reserve army, in case of enemy invasion. When the First World War began, the War Office was reluctant to accept the help of the amateur, civilian V.A.D. workers. However, once the V.A.D.s mobilized themselves and opened auxiliary war hospitals, the military saw their value. By early 1915, the War Office asked individual V.A.D. members to work full-time as probationer nurses in military hospitals for the remainder of the war. To meet the military's need for more and more V.A.D. nurses, Katherine Furse, the Commandant-in-Chief of the Women's V.A.D.s, transformed the V.A.D. program from a simple, locally-controlled scheme into one with a complex, centralized administration.;Most V.A.D. workers were middle and upper-class women. Patriotism and duty motivated them to volunteer, but they soon wanted recognition in the form of money and status. While V.A.D. leaders could and did negotiate with the War Office to obtain better terms of service, they could not get trained nurses to accept V.A.D. nurses as colleagues. While V.A.D. nurses began the war as novices, they quickly acquired nursing skills the same way nursing students did: through on-the-job experience. Despite this, trained nurses insisted that V.A.D. nurses were only amateurs. To protect their profession, nurse leaders founded the College of Nursing, to define who was a trained nurse and to continue the struggle, started before the war, to obtain the state registration of nurses. The combination of increased opportunities for women outside nursing, and the trained nurses' refusal to recognize wartime service as professional training, meant that the Red Cross had trouble recruiting enough V.A.D. nurses by the end of the war. After the war, the need for amateur nurses vanished and the V.A.D. program dwindled in size.;V.A.D. nurses served their country and challenged the definition of "professional." The experiences of the V.A.D.s highlight the early twentieth-century debates over women's role during wartime and the training and professional standing of nurses. |
