Maternalism and Feminism in Medical Aid: The American Women’s Hospitals in the United States and in Greece, 1917–1941

Abstract

Francesca Piana argues that the American Women’s Hospitals—an American all-women medical humanitarian organization created in 1917 that particularly assisted refugees in interwar Greece—and the women physicians and nurses who worked for it promoted maternalism and feminism in medical aid, placing themselves at the crossroad of empowerment and disempowerment. American women physicians both pushed back against American men who segregated them as medical professionals and as only recently enfranchised citizens; yet they partially shared similar notions of racialized nationalism and cultural imperialism. In Greece, American female health professional assisted refugees and the many mothers and babies among them. In doing so, they both empowered refugee women by training them as nurses and teaching them elements of scientific motherhood; at the same time, they linked Greek women’ emancipation to domestic caregiving practices instead of paid labor outside the house.