Philippe Pétain, the French army’s commander-in-chief, arranged for the committee to establish headquarters in the seventeenth-century Château de Blérancourt — less than forty miles from the front. The women lived in barracks, worked long hours, and enjoyed intense camaraderie. “How Father would have hated these modern independent young women,” wrote one volunteer, Marian Bartol, in a letter on view in the exhibition.
American Medical Women in the Field
Many of the women physicians in the United States (six thousand at the time of the First World War) were eager to contribute their professional expertise but were barred from officer status in the military medical corps. Margaret Ethel Fraser, a Denver gynecologist, joined the American Women’s Hospitals (AWH), which was formed in 1917 to provide a venue for wartime service. The AWH formed a productive alliance with the American Committee for Devastated France, setting up a range of medical services in the hardest hit regions.
When writer Alexander Woollcott visited France in 1920, he was impressed by “a sunny, competent looking woman from Denver” who emerged from a “neat little shack” in the devastated regions. An affiliate of the American Women’s Hospitals, dentist Edna Ward provided cleanings, fillings, extractions, and instruction in basic dental hygiene. “It is amusing,” wrote Woollcott, “to watch . . . children scamper away down the lane of ruins, each right hand bristling with a brand-new toothbrush.”
Mary Breckinridge (1881–1965), a pioneer in the practice of nurse-midwifery in America, was one of the committee’s most distinguished volunteers. She organized children’s health services, collaborated with the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing in Bordeaux, and studied midwifery and public health before returning home to Kentucky. There, drawing on her experience in post-war Europe, she created the Kentucky Committee for Mothers and Babies (now the Frontier Nursing Service) that sent nurses on horseback to women in the rural mountains.
The Children of Devastated France
French children were particularly scarred by the ravages of war. The youngest had spent their entire lives as refugees; many had never known their fathers. When the American Committee commissioned these photographs of the devastated regions to publicize the people’s plight, the beautiful faces of French children — some posed in shabby clothing, others neatly dressed as they engaged in volunteer-sponsored activities — were featured prominently.
The American volunteers addressed the children’s immediate needs for wholesome food, clothing, and Mary Breckinridge’s infant clinic medical care but quickly turned their attention from emergency aid to long-term support in the form of schools, libraries, and socialization, leaving an enduring legacy in the region.
Bookmobiles and public libraries were an outgrowth of a major educational initiative that constituted one of the American Committee’s most profound legacies. Partnering with Jessie Carson, a librarian at the New York Public Library and chair of the businesswomen’s unit of the National League for Women’s Service, the committee founded a network of public lending libraries in the region that eventually served as a national model. The committee’s public libraries, housed in spacious barracks, included children’s sections — a novelty in France — with recreational activities such as a story hour.
Anne Morgan's Legacy
Anne Morgan purchased the seventeenth-century château that had served as the base of operations for the American Committee for Devastated France and donated the property to the town of Blérancourt. She founded a museum there to document the history of French-American cooperation, from French contributions to the American Revolution to American service in France during the Great War. Now a French national museum, the château and its splendid grounds are scheduled to reopen in 2012 after a major renovation by architect Yves Lion.
In 1948, after a visit to Blérancourt, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote of her thoughts as she passed through its monumental gate. “You can still imagine how grand the old château must have been rising beyond it,” she wrote. “But you also are forced to wonder all over again, as you drive in, whether we human beings are bound to go on destroying each other and our possessions forever.”
About Anne Morgan
Anne Morgan was the youngest of the four children of Pierpont Morgan and his second wife, Fanny. Anne and her brother, Jack, would both play key roles during the First World War. While Anne founded a major civilian relief organization, Jack led the firm J. P. Morgan & Co., which heavily financed the Western Allies even as the United States remained officially neutral.
When the Second World War again brought devastation to northeastern France — including Anne Morgan’s beloved Blérancourt — she took action a second time. Joining with veterans of her World War I committee and their sons and daughters, she formed the American Friends of France and the Comité Americain de Secours Civil, its French counterpart.
In 1924 Marshal Pétain honored the two Annes who had done so much to revitalize devastated France — by making them officers of the French Legion of Honor in a ceremony at Blérancourt. In 1932 (after Dike’s death), Morgan was elevated to the rank of Commander, which was held at the time by only one other woman, the Countess de Noailles. Morgan was the first American woman to receive the French honor.
After her death at the age of seventy-eight in 1952, she became the first American — and the first woman — to be honored with a marble plaque in the Court of Honor at the Hôtel des Invalides, near Napoleon’s tomb in Paris.
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