War work · the women's half of two home fronts

1917 – 1919 · 1941 – 1945 — consolidated, with cross-references

The campaigns were financed and staffed by organized women: in the First World War the women's organization ran parallel to the men's, and the record names its officers. Alice Foster McCulloch of Fort Wayne was Indiana's woman's chairman for the Liberty Loans — the state's whole women's campaign directed from this city — serving as state chairman for the second, third and fourth loan campaigns; Allen County's woman's chairman for the Third Loan was Mrs. Margaret B. Crankshaw. The Fort Wayne chapter of the Red Cross, chartered 22 January 1917, ran its workrooms, canteen and drives substantially through women's teams: in the roll-call campaign after the armistice the women's teams netted 85 percent of the $26,399.25 subscribed, and the chapter's own history, Isabelle H. Taylor's War Work of the Fort Wayne Chapter (1919), was written by a woman — the official roster this record relies on. The canning campaign that put up the war gardens' produce ran from 25 June 1917 under Mrs. J. G. Schwarz of the Woman's Club League and Miss Alma Garvin of Purdue. Fort Wayne's hospital unit, Unit M, took twenty-one graduate nurses overseas under Miss Elizabeth E. Springer; the chapter's nurses who did not come home are carried in the Wars chapter, and Grace Glenn Buell, a Red Cross nurse who died of pneumonia on 8 October 1918 at Base Hospital No. 33 in Portsmouth, England, is named there. Inside the factories, the war made women dispatchers, telegraphers and engine wipers and put them through GE's Vestibule Training School at men's pay during training — the industrial entry above carries that record. The money, the drives and the unit rosters belong to the WWI Home Front and Wars chapters and are not retold here; this entry exists to keep the women's command of them visible in one place. In the Second World War the pattern repeated at larger scale: the YWCA ran liaison work for servicemen's wives (Charities chapter), women staffed the war plants whose production record is in the Wars and Industrial Revolution chapters, and Irene Byron — the Anti-Tuberculosis League's visiting nurse from 1913, whose sanatorium campaign is in the Epidemics chapter — stands as the era's Fort Wayne example of a woman who built a public institution out of nursing work.

Sources: the WWI Home Front chapter of this record (Greenough, The War Purse of Indiana, 1922 — McCulloch and Crankshaw; Taylor, War Work of the Fort Wayne Chapter, 1919 — the roll-call figure; Griswold, 1917, ch. L — Unit M and the canning demonstrations); the Wars chapter (the nurses' roll, Grace Glenn Buell); the Charities chapter (the YWCA's wartime liaison); the Epidemics chapter (Irene Byron).