Florence Aby Blanchfield was a United States Army Colonel. She was superintendent of the Army Nursing Corps from 1943 to 1947.
Background
Florence Blanchfield was born on April 1, 18882, in the Shenandoah Valley of northern Virginia, United States, the daughter of Joseph Plunkett Blanchfield, a stonemason and railroad employee, and Mary Louvenia Anderson, a practical nurse. She consistently listed her birthplace as Sheperdstown, West Virginia, United States, and the year as 1884, although birth records show that she was actually born in Warren County, Virginia, in 1882. Blanchfield presumably adjusted these data during World War I to allow an older sister to appear younger than she was, so that both women could meet the age requirements of the Army Nurse Corps.
Education
Blanchfield was educated in the public schools of Walnut Springs, Virginia (1889 - 1898), and at a private boarding school in Oranda, Virginia (1898 - 1899). After nursing her terminally ill brother, Blanchfield moved to Pittsburgh, where her mother's family lived, and enrolled at South Side Hospital Training School for Nurses, from which she graduated in 1906. The following year, she did postgraduate work at Dr. Howard Kelly's Sanitorium in Baltimore and at the Johns Hopkins University Hospital. From 1915 to 1933, Blanchfield studied various nonnursing subjects at the Martin School of Business in Pittsburgh, the University of California, and, by correspondence, Columbia University. While stationed at Fort McPherson, Georgia, in 1928, she studied chemistry.
Career
Blanchfield had a lengthy career as a civilian nurse prior to her military experience, holding supervisory positions at Montefiore Hospital in Pittsburgh, Suburban General Hospital in Bellevue, Pennsylvania, and the United States Steel Corporation in Bessemer, Pennsylvania. She also worked as a civil service employee at Ancon Hospital in Panama in 1913, during the construction of the canal.
Blanchfield enlisted in the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) when the United States entered World War I. She served briefly at an Ellis Island hospital before going on to three hospitals in France (1917 - 1919). A lieutenant in the relative rank that the army assigned to the Nurse Corps, which held women to lower rank and benefit levels, she was briefly deactivated at the war's end and nursed again in Pittsburgh before returning to the ANC in January 1920.
Blanchfield moved through more than a dozen assignments prior to World War II, serving at army posts in eight states, the Philippines, and China; in 1925, she did special-duty nursing for the secretary of war. In July 1935, she was assigned to the Office of the Superintendent of the ANC, which was within the Office of the Surgeon General. In 1939, after more than two decades of service, she was promoted to the relative rank of captain. From then until 1943, Blanchfield served as chief assistant to Julia Flikke, who headed the ANC at the war's beginning. Flikke was increasingly ill, however, and much of the responsibility fell to Blanchfield even prior to Flikke's retirement in May 1943. Promoted to the relative rank of colonel in June 1943, Blanchfield headed a corps of some fifty-seven thousand women by the end of the war; male colonels sometimes commanded as few as five hundred. Both she and Flikke received pay that was one rank lower than the one they ostensibly held.
Rank was only one of the ways in which the ANC was treated differently from other army corps. Perhaps most bothersome was the marital status of nurses. Unlike the women of the WAC, WAVES, and other new branches, and unlike men of any service, nurses who married were discharged. Blanchfield probably expended more energy on recruitment of nurses than on any other task. To do this, she also had to cope with a traditional requirement to work closely with the Red Cross and other civilian bodies not subject to her command. In 1940, there were only seven hundred nurses in the ANC. By April 1941, it was taking in nearly that many in a single month. After Pearl Harbor, the growth was exponential, and by the end of the war, Blanchfield commanded women from Alaska to Australia and hundreds of points between - a situation unparalleled by any male of her limited rank.
She made a number of inspection tours overseas. Among Blanchfield's wartime accomplishments was the establishment of basic training schools in the nine continental service commands and in all overseas theaters; nurses in these schools learned survival techniques that included crawling through an obstacle course while under fire. She also modernized uniforms, implemented combat-line surgical teams, began programs in airevacuation and psychiatric nursing, launched publication of The Army Nurse, and inaugurated a publicity program to acquaint the public with the achievements of wartime nurses. Blanchfield soon developed a reputation for effective administration, great energy, and diplomatic skill. These characteristics served her well when Congress almost drafted nurses late in 1945. She privately opposed the move, believing that there was no genuine shortage, but her superiors thought differently. The surgeon general testified in favor of the draft in the congressional hearings that were held after President Roosevelt proposed drafting nurses in his 1945 State of the Union speech. With the secretary of war also supporting the bill, it passed the House in March and was reported favorably by the Senate Military Affairs Committee in April. With victory in Europe in early May, however, Blanchfield's view that it was unnecessary prevailed.
After demobilization, Blanchfield's highest priority became the regularization of nurses within the army's structure. With her close congressional ally, Frances Payne Bolton, she worked for comparable rank and other benefits. The Army-Navy Nurse Act, passed on July 18, 1947, ended the practice of relative rank; the next day, General Dwight D. Eisenhower gave Blanchfield her commission, the first for a woman in the regular army. She was honored with the service number of N1 but was demoted from full colonel to lieutenant colonel. She later won retroactive compensation through special legislation.
Although considered a paragon of executive ability, Blanchfield can perhaps be faulted for an excessive modesty that limited her value as a role model. She also insisted that the records of nurses dismissed for pregnancy not reveal the real reason for their leaving the service. Moreover, in military tradition, she was protective of her bureaucratic turf, which made her less than supportive of the new women's military units. Her records reflect more interaction with civilian nurses than with her military colleagues; in more than one thousand pages of the ANC histories that she wrote, there is virtually no mention of the Navy Nurse Corps. Finally, Blanchfield must bear some of the criticism for the ANC's slow rate of racial integration. While the Women's Army Corps made a point of including blacks from the beginning, the ANC did not accept significant numbers until pressured to do so by civil rights organizations and Congress. Indeed, Congress forced acceptance not only of blacks but also of married women, male nurses, and female physicians.
When demobilization began in July 1945, there were only 512 black nurses in the ANC, less than 1 percent of the total. Blanchfield retired in September 1947, after almost thirty years of service, but continued to devote herself to the ANC by writing two unpublished histories of it. In retirement she spent her time on hobbies that ranged from dressmaking to auto mechanics. She died in Washington, D. C. , and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. In 1982, when the Defense Department named its first medical facility for a woman, a Fort Campbell, Kentucky, hospital was dedicated to Florence Blanchfield.
Achievements
Florence Blanchfield was one of the most influential nurses in military history, who championed women's rights within the military. During World War II, Blanchfield supervised close to 60, 000 nurses at home and abroad. She toured military medical facilities around the world and in 1944, went to Congress and succeeded in getting equal rights, pay and privileges for Army women nurses. On June 14, 1945, she was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for exceptional executive ability that contributed materially to the brilliant record achieved by the Army Nurse Corps during the war.
