Women Can Be Heroes! Proven in Kristin Hannah's Novel, The Women
Heroism at a cost...
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Sixty years after...
It seems to me that in the last ten or fifteen years, World War II historical fiction novels have proliferated. My theory is that an event has to be far enough in the past to gain perspective on what it really meant. Hence, eighty years after our fight against Nazi Germany and the Japanese forces who bombed Pearl Harbor, authors and historians can grapple with the stories, their impact, and their true historical import. We have a wider lens through which to view the events than we did ten years after they occurred.
I think that Kristin Hannah's novel, The Women, published in 2024, is at the forefront of a wave of Vietnam War-era stories that will be coming in the next decade. It's important to note, however, that it is NOT the first. Below are several books about the Vietnam War and its effects, and one of them won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016:
Kristin Hannah's Novel, The Women
Frankie McGrath is a twenty-year-old woman from a moneyed family with a history of military service. After her beloved older brother, Finley, goes to serve in the Vietnam War, Frankie decides that she, too, wants to make a difference and joins the Army Nurse Corps. Young and idealistic, she yearns for her parents' approval and has no idea what it truly means to be a nurse close to the battlefront.
Frankie has a lot to learn, and her nursing experiences strengthen, harden, and damage her for years to come.
Kristin Hannah tells the fictional story of Frankie McGrath, an Army Nurse in Vietnam. She chronicles Frankie's journey through love, loneliness, loss, grief, pain, stress, and exhaustion. Hideous wounds. Crying soldiers. Buddies who try to save their friends. Under dangerous and difficult situations, Frankie matures into a great emergency trauma nurse, helping perform surgeries on, and then care for, critically injured, sometimes badly burned soldiers. She and her two fellow nurses, Barb and Ethel, visit nearby villages, giving vaccinations and medical care to the Vietnamese people and playing with the orphans and children. In telling Frankie's story, Kristin Hannah illuminates the stories of thousands of other Vietnam War Nurses who have largely been overlooked by history.
It is not a happy story. The Women highlights not only the brutality of war, but also the political unrest of a country that didn't fully agree on the fight to begin with and protested the War, often disrespecting the soldiers who served. Frankie does NOT receive the recognition she expected to earn when she returned from the war. Not even her own parents recognize the sacrifices and service that she gave.
The 1960s, particularly the latter half of the decade, are remembered as an era of free love, hippies, counterculture, and widespread social and political protests - often against the war and the American government and military. Frankie, like so many other Vietnam Veterans, returns home to a country that offered no help or support, and certainly no praise or recognition. Her emotional struggles and dependency on alcohol and drugs mirrored the experience of other returning vets. Post-traumatic stress disorder wasn't officially recognized as a psychiatric diagnosis until 1980.
A great read for today's women
I was absolutely thrilled that a young adult woman in my Historical Fiction Book Club at Silk and Spine, the bookstore and boutique where I work, asked to read The Women. She is excited to read this book about the role of women in a war she knows little about.
That is exactly why I love book clubs! They are an opportunity to share our history with new audiences! The Women teaches the younger generations about events they weren't alive for, and an unpopular war that we don't talk about much. Anyone reading this novel, regardless of age, will understand more about the turmoil of war and its tragic aftereffects.
Hannah at her best, and her not-so-wonderful
Kristin Hannah's breakthrough book was The Nightingale, about two sisters dealing with the German Occupation during World War II. Like The Women, The Nightingale demonstrates that war is not specifically a male-dominated activity. Females have been integral to war efforts since the beginning of time!
The Women was a good read, filled with cultural allusions to the 1960s and early 1970s. I applaud the research and the details of wartime surgeries and emergency medical procedures in a jungle hospital.
What I didn't like, and what I struggle with in each of the Hannah books I've read, is the melodrama and the unnecessary romantic plots that feel like they're thrown in. In the case of The Women, I question so many sudden losses and the dubious choices of the heroine, no matter how brave she is.
I can't be too specific about what I felt was not Hannah's best writing because I don't want to give the plot away. But the plot twists that I questioned did not diminish the overall impact of the book.
"There were no women in Vietnam!"
Read this compelling novel, but prepare to be sickened by the atrocities, the loss, and the oblivious arrogance of men at many institutions who frequently claimed, "There were no women in Vietnam!" even though between 10,000 and 11,000 women in uniform served in Vietnam, most of them as nurses. In addition, thousands of civilian women served as clerks, secretaries, intelligence personnel, physicians, air traffic controllers, USO workers, journalists, and humanitarian workers.
Aptly titled, The Women clearly shows that there were, indeed, women in Vietnam. Dedicated. Life-Saving. Self-sacrificing. Women who deserve to be known.
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