“Among Many Chinese Nightingales”: Healthcare, Gender, and Popular Print in Wartime China, 1937-1945

Abstract This article examines women’s own narratives and representational works of female nursing in the gendered context of wartime healthcare during the War of Resistance against Japan (1937-1945). While the Nationalist state deployed a unique wartime gender politics to mobilize women as gentle caretakers with essentialist feminine qualities, women themselves demonstrated varying degrees of agency and autonomy in subverting these state-prescribed gender roles. Through an analysis of an array of representative visual, journalistic, and literary texts on female nursing produced in the wartime Chinese print media, this article contends that women asserted themselves as actors of war participation and vocal critics, rather than mere objects, of state-approved gender politics and propaganda. The gendered writings and representations reveal not only the creative ways in which women themselves modified, negotiated, or even defied the perceived connection between women and wartime healthcare, but also a shared gender ideology in the division of wartime labor, upheld by both the Nationalist state and the Communist Party. This article further demonstrates that the Communist Party in wartime Yan’an also subtly propagated a gender ideology that portrayed women as ideal wartime health caretakers through strategic propaganda efforts.