I have added a new novel to my all-time favorite reads. “The Women” by Kristin Hannah is, simply, dazzling. This is one of the best reading experiences I’ve ever had.
It’s the 1960s. Frankie lives with her affluent family in California. “Teacher. Nurse. Secretary. These were acceptable futures for a girl like her.” Frankie has picked nursing, but it’s only until she marries. “Frankie had been taught to believe that her job was to be a good housewife, to raise well-mannered children.” But when a family friend tells her “Women can be heroes,” the idea inspires her to join the army, thinking she’ll be able to be near her brother, who’s serving in Vietnam. The recruiter assures her that she’ll be in a nice, safe hospital, so won’t that be a fun adventure? Boy, has she got some fast growing-up to do.
A naive Frankie lands in Vietnam in 1967 at the age of 21. At the hospital, she’s told to prepare for “everything from leprosy to amputations to rat bites” to land mine victims. She’s warned by other nurses, “Not all soldiers are gentlemen. … You gotta be careful. Over here, the men lie and they die.” Conditions only get more dangerous, as even hospitals are bombing targets.
The brutal operating room scenes are hectic; amid the bloody chaos she questions what she’d gotten herself into. “How on earth had she thought she belonged here? That she had something to offer men who were grievously wounded?” When one soldier is dying, she’s told, “Just hold his hand. Sometimes that’s all we can do.” When she’s discouraged, a nurse tells her, “There are men going home to their families because of us. That’s about all we can hope for.” The quiet scenes can be heartbreaking, but the medical staff also finds time off for “some kick-ass parties” and too much drinking. “This war had taught her to dance while she could.” The women support each other, and will do so forever. “They were more than best friends … back in the world they might never have met each other, might never have become friends, but this war had made them sisters.”
But once she’s back home, she’s treated badly by anti-war protesters and even by her parents. She can’t settle in, has nightmares, and can’t get over the horrors of war.
The first half of the book is totally immersive. I LIVED in the book, even days after I’d finished it. I could hear the helicopters and feel the bombs hit nearby. This is certainly not a romance novel, but it’s not without its love interests. (I fell in love with at least two of the guys myself!) The second half is not as all-out action-oriented; it’s more mixed up, just as she was while trying to transition to a new normal in the civilian world.
I felt so many emotions while reading. At least twice I audibly gasped at the twists and turns, and once I said aloud, “Wait — WHAT?!” If you like historical fiction, do not miss this one! If I were handing out stars, they’d fill the sky.
Hannah admits she was inspired by “Healing Wounds,” a memoir by Diane Carlson Evans with Bob Welch, so I looked it up. Published in 2020, its subtitle is “A Vietnam War Combat Nurse’s 10-Year Fight to Win Women a Place of Honor in Washington, D.C.”
In 1968 at the age of 21, Carlson Evans landed in Vietnam. She writes, “Because we also took care of the local Vietnamese, we nurses saw things we’d never been trained to treat,” including the horror of children burned by napalm. Hospitals were always low on supplies and assistance. “I once went thirty-two hours without any sleep,” she reveals.
Nurses stuck together, but “We each fought our own war. Our own demons. … War was robbing our souls, our integrity, our humanity.” She grew bitter, and by 1969, she recalls, “I’d realized that our government was lying to us.” She came home to a country divided about the war. Suffering with PTSD, she says she was “camouflaging the chaos in my life. … Many of us carried wounds that couldn’t be seen.”
In the nation’s capital, she’s moved by the Wall, the memorial to Americans who died in Vietnam. She writes that her tears at the Wall “were tears of anger, injustice, futility,” part of her “battle for women like me to find our way home in the aftermath of war.”
Much of the book is dedicated to her uphill battle to create and install a memorial to the women who served in war zones. “About 10,000 women, more than eighty percent of them nurses, were stationed in Vietnam during the war. Meanwhile, some 265,000 military women served their country during the Vietnam War around the world.” To see photos of the final statue, look up the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project.
“Normal Women” by Philippa Gregory is a great read for those who enjoy world history. I love Gregory’s historical fiction, but this is actual history, true accounts of women in Britain since the year 1066.
In the early years, of course, there simply weren’t many sources for information on “normal” women in England. Most poor women couldn’t read or keep diaries. “What we read as a history of our nation is a history of men, as viewed by men, as recorded by men,” writes Gregory, “and they have little or no interest in women.” Normal women were “not worthy of comment.” She tells us that she wanted to write about ALL women, “even though they lived and died without a man noticing them for long enough to write down their names.”
The Norman invasion of 1066 changed everything for the women of England. The new regime “created laws enslaving women, composed religion and philosophy to denigrate women … [and] would underpay and overwork women for centuries.” Society believed “that women were ‘naturally’ inferior to men, physically, mentally and spiritually. The incoming Normans enshrined this into law.” Fortunately, the Magna Carta of 1215 “accidentally gave women new rights.”
I’ll admit there were some dry moments beleaguered by facts and numbers, but much more often her tongue-in-cheek humor made me chuckle. Here’s her take on the more modern ratio of men to women in the job market: “It seems that when there is a gender imbalance against women this is considered normal and indeed nice; when there is a gender imbalance against men this is a national emergency.” Take, for example, “the modern horror of women getting jobs, getting promotion and getting paid for the work they do. When women did low-paid, unskilled and part-time work, the workplace was apparently just fine. Apparently, when men don’t run everything and aren’t overpaid for doing so, they don’t know what to do. This is probably another national emergency.”
I can’t possibly tell you everything included in this book. It’s filled with information on almost every topic: diseases, wars, revolts, witch hunts, slavery, religion, trades, agriculture, marriage, crime, education, sports, the law, suffrage, politics, economics, bigotry, … all with a focus on how circumstances affected women and how women affected circumstances.
I also suggest for history buffs “From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World” by Marilyn French. Published in 2008, it fills four volumes and covers prehistory to the 20th century, about women from all over the world. It’s remarkable.
Happy reading!
Mary Louise Ruehr is a books columnist for The Portager. Her One for the Books column previously appeared in the Record-Courier, where she was an editor.