In Pearl James's introduction to Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture, she speaks of the ambivalent and polyvalent portrayals of the female body in World War I posters, particularly those from America. Some depict women "in new kinds of uniforms, doing new kinds of labor in new settings" while others use traditional images and "projected old-fashioned ideals to be maintained" (30). Perusing the posters in McFarlin Library Special Collections, I used James's comment about the contradictory uses of the female form to inform and guide my reading of these print images and noticed a striking element of several nursing posters that supported Vera Brittain's scathing criticisms of the profession in her memoir Testament of Youth.

I want to focus on two posters in particular. The first is one from the Red Cross, distributed to promote support--and recruit for--war nursing. The image of the larger-than-life nurse in her billowing robes dominates the composition as she cradles an injured soldier. It names this nurse "The Greatest Mother in the World." It immediately becomes apparent that this poster artist is appealing to a traditional image, and one classical artwork is uncanny in its similarity. At first glance, I did not see a war poster; I saw a retooled portrayal of Michelangelo's famous Pietá sculpture. Both feature the virginal Madonna; the injured soldier emerges as a parallel to the crucified Christ, evoking a clear religious charge for the women in the home front while also mythologizing the sacrifice of soldiers as one comparable to slain saviors. Such tactics in print images augment Brittain's claims about WWI nursing in Testament of Youth. Brittain, who served as a V.A.D., eschews this religious rhetoric in Chapter IX of her memoir where she laments that the nursing profession is "considered so holy that its organizers forget that nurses are just human beings, with human failings and human needs" and names the "'holiness' of the nursing profession" as "easily its worst handicap" (453).

Propaganda both reflected and solidified this handicap, simultaneously pushing women to take action and join a workforce outside of the domestic sphere while charging them not to forget the virginal, cloistered imagery and conduct of the past. In the War Council's Y.M.C.A. poster of a war nurse that reads "Remember the girl behind the man behind the gun," we see a clear example of traditional war nurse images in regard to their unwieldy--and outdated--uniforms. Brittain comments that despite the impracticality of their cumbersome, seven-piece nursing garb, they still had to "do our work in fancy dress" because of values that, even during the war, were "still so Victorian" (453). This waifish nurse in the poster, from her spotless, flowing dress to her little white-heeled shoes, falls within these anachronistic standards so incongruent with modern warfare. The placid face, the open palms, the milky complexion--all appeal to a Victorian image that Brittain, along with her generation, find hollow in its imaginery links between the traditional female form and its preferred and prescribed use to a nation at war.