With Their Bravery During World War I, These Daring American Women Doctors Proved Their Might to Folks Back Home

As their right to vote was debated in the States, a remarkable group of 74 physicians and support staff sailed to war-torn Europe to help those in need

Amy Sohn

July/August 2025

Get our newsletter!

Get our newsletter!

In late March 1918, the German Army began pursuing the spring offensive in France, its most ambitious advance since the First World War began four years earlier. Back in the United States, an enterprising group of suffragists was mounting an ambitious advance of its own: The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was lobbying to get women doctors into the trenches. Though their own government tried to deter them, NAWSA succeeded, sending a pioneering group of 74 doctors and support staff to some of the most dangerous areas of wartime France. The heroic service of this group, known as the Women’s Oversea Hospitals, or WOH, would be the most professionally demanding undertaking in the lives of these doctors, who would prove to the world the competency and courage of women physicians. Archives, memoirs and personal letters passed down to the doctors’ descendants reveal a thrilling, politically relevant chapter in women’s, medical and World War I history that has been largely unknown—until now.

By the spring of 1918, New York and 11 other states had given women the right to vote; the House had passed a federal suffrage amendment, and voting rights advocates were lobbying the Senate to do the same. Many members of NAWSA hoped that President Woodrow Wilson would be more likely to support women’s right to vote if they contributed to the war effort in visible, dramatic ways. As Carrie Chapman Catt, the group’s president, wrote in a letter to several of the WOH doctors that spring: “We have staked our reputation on the maintenance of a hospital unit which will win laurels for womankind.” 

In 1910, women made up only 6 percent of all American doctors, many of them practicing in traditionally feminine fields like obstetrics and public health, while facing limited opportunities for faculty appointments. Surgery in battle, on the other hand, was “of the greatest educational value, and an opportunity all surgeons must covet,” in the words of Mabel Seagrave, a WOH doctor from Seattle. 

In April 1917, when the U.S. entered the war, Caroline Finley was 42 and director of obstetrics at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. The infirmary’s Woman’s Medical College, founded in 1868 by doctors and sisters Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, had been the first American medical institution run by and for women. Now, in addition to their patriotic feelings, Finley and a group of her colleagues were concerned about the suffering of women and children in war-torn regions of Europe, and particularly about rape, neglected prenatal care and malnutrition—and they wanted to help firsthand.

Seeking an official sponsor, the doctors went to the Red Cross and then to the U.S. Army, both of which promptly rejected them. Secretary of War Newton Baker declared that he did not believe commissioning women would help win the war. With their own country turning its back, the infirmary group applied to the French.

At the outset of the war in 1914, the French government had not allowed women physicians to serve in any capacity, including as nurses. By now, though, they were desperate. After a meeting in the fall of 1917 with the French high commissioner in Washington, Finley received a cable from Premier Alexandre Ribot: “Send Doctoress Finley and her associates at once.” The French decree allowed WOH doctors to provide civilian care, but stipulated that those services could only extend to the wounded in the French military “upon request,” if the need arose.

In November 1917, days after New York became the first Eastern state to grant women the right to vote, Finley went to Paris to place the first unit. Thirty-one other WOH medical and support staff, including plumbers and chauffeurs—all women—arrived in Bordeaux in February 1918 on the ocean liner Espagne. Docking at six in the morning, the group looked, as Anna von Sholly of Queens, an infirmary doctor and WOH treasurer, wrote to NAWSA headquarters, “like a traveling circus.” After several delays (one hospital site was destroyed in a bombing raid, and another was deemed too dangerous), about half the group, led by Finley, was indeed called to a military hospital in Oise, north of Paris. 

Finley’s group, known as Unit 1, traveled by truck to Château Ognon, a stately home that a week before had been turned into an evacuation hospital a few miles north of Senlis on the road to Compiègne, the eventual site of the Armistice. The group emerged into the courtyard of the beautiful Beaux-Arts chateau. The salon where the women slept rivaled the splendor of the palace at Versailles, with ceiling cupids and velvet tapestries. Finley marveled at her surroundings in a letter to her mother, rhapsodizing about the “old statues with wonderful walks bordered by old trees,” and the flowers, “violets, narcissi, and little pink and white ones.” 

But there wasn’t much time to smell the flowers. In the central portion of the chateau, beneath the stately portraits hung on the walls, mostly empty hospital cots filled the hallways. The only medical staff were two French military doctors and a few nurses. The men initially refused to give orders to the “dames américaines.” Soon, though, they had no choice. Following a major offensive nearby, ambulances rushed in, bringing 300 patients in 20 hours. At first, Finley and the other WOH doctors served as nurses, assisting the men with lifesaving amputations, while French priests, serving as orderlies, held lanterns. When morphine and anesthetics ran out, the French doctors operated on conscious patients. The soldiers, Finley wrote to her mother, “have arms and legs hanging by a shred. Many have horrible chest and head wounds.” The limited medical supplies included a potbellied stove, a pail of water for sterilization, sheets torn into strips to be boiled in the pail, anti-tetanus serum and bandages. 

At daybreak, chloroform and ether arrived from Paris, along with further staff, including the male chief surgeon, Dr. Couvelaire. The women worked 16-hour days, gaining confidence. By early May the chateau was home to 500 beds. 

The women’s friendships quickly deepened. The French doctors were not so kind. When Finley asked Couvelaire for permission to treat septic shock cases, he said no, but allowed that perhaps the Unit 1 doctors “could be given more important work” once they’d proved themselves. A week after Finley’s request, Couvelaire got too desperate to be sexist, and he gave her control of an entire septic shock ward. “I think to have been given the only thing I have asked for after a week’s proof of the kind of work we do is a very good augury for the future,” she reported in a letter to NAWSA. Soon she was performing major operations, such as amputations and deep dissections, assisted by a French doctor. She had never done an amputation until she went to France but quickly became an expert. 

The WOH team found that the work took a toll. “The other day I was terribly depressed,” Finley wrote in a letter. “It was necessary to hurt the men so in dressing their wounds that sometimes I can hardly stand it.” One soldier had been groaning and crying. When she finished operating, “he patted my arm and said, ‘Pauvre Madame.’” As debilitating as war surgery could be, Finley took pride in her new skills. “Lately I have been operating a good deal and have had very interesting work,” she wrote her mother. “I did eight secondary operations without a doctor to assist me. My arms ached when finished.” 

To the chateau’s misfortune, it sat along the course that German warplanes followed on their nightly raids to Paris. The evening of June 17 was calm and clear. But close to daybreak, a German warplane bombed the chateau, leaving a crater in the earth and a trail of carnage. By the time Finley, fellow WOH doctor Mary Lee Edward and the rest had picked through the debris, they’d tallied 18 orderlies and stretcher-bearers killed and 12 wounded—all men they had come to know. The house was bombed two more times, but, perhaps remarkably, no women from Unit 1 died. 

Among the most prolific healers, according to French military record at the time, the women never seemed to slow for anything. During the final German offensive of the war, in July 1918, Château Ognon’s medical staff performed 3,000 operations in 18 days.  

On September 3, officers from the French government honored Finley, Edward and von Sholly with the prestigious Croix de Guerre. Their onetime adversary Couvelaire wrote a commendation that cited their “bravery under fire.” The women were commissioned as lieutenants in the French Army, complete with insignias for their uniforms. 

There was clear evidence that the WOH was swaying hearts and minds back home, too: The same month that the women received the Croix de Guerre, President Wilson gave a speech to the Senate calling for the passage of suffrage nationwide: “We have made partners of the women in this war. … Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?” 

On November 11, 1918, the women celebrated the Armistice at Ognon—but their work was nowhere near done. They moved around France treating German prisoners of war and British soldiers alike who had pneumonia and flu, which would go on to kill more than 50 million people worldwide that year, more than three times all the deaths in World War I.

In mobile hospitals, in various French villages, more than 1,000 refugees and repatriates were arriving each day, with conditions from uterine fibroids to sties. The city of Cambrai was in ruins, houses destroyed and deceased inhabitants still underneath the ruins after months. “We are used to the odor of dead people now,” Finley wrote her mother.

About a year after the infirmary team returned to the United States, the 19th Amendment became law, enfranchising 27 million women, the largest expansion of voting rights in American history.

Returning reluctantly to Manhattan and to civilian life, Finley divided her time between private practice and her role as director at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, where she made bold moves to reduce obstetric morbidity and mortality. Von Sholly became an attending physician at Bellevue Hospital and would serve as a bacteriologist for the New York City Board of Health until 1934, helping improve public health during a significant period for the development of vaccines. Seagrave, the Seattle doctor, become chief of staff of Seattle General Hospital.

Though the WOH women had won the right to vote, their fight for equality was hardly over. By the time of Pearl Harbor, two decades later, the Army was still denying commissions to women doctors. It wasn’t until April 1943 that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Sparkman-Johnson Act into law, allowing the first woman doctor, an OB-GYN named Margaret D. Craighill, to be commissioned into the Army Medical Reserve Corps. 

Reflecting on her wartime experiences in 1937, von Sholly told a reporter that World War I had changed attitudes about women, both in medicine and in society overall: “Women seized the opportunities, showed what they could do and have continued to do it ever since.”

Amy Sohn | Read More

Amy Sohn is the author of The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age.