Whether as ‘Angels of Mercy’ or ‘Ministering Angels’, from
1914 women joined local Red Cross branches and their affiliates in the towns
and villages across the state and the country. They sewed, knitted and
cooked, ran stalls and raffles, and received considerable community support
through cash donations from individuals and community organisations for
patriotic Red Cross activities.
The Red Cross was national federation of state-based
divisions, with a place-based branch network that attracted women as volunteers.
Under the enlightened leadership of founder Lady Helen Munro Ferguson, local
branches across the country harnessed and thrived using parochialism and
localism for national patriotic purposes. The society re-enforced this with an
iconography that presented the organisation as mothers and guardian angels to
wounded soldiers on the battlefield. The Red Cross encouraged women
to immerse themselves in the mythology and serve ‘their boys’ by
volunteering at branch sewing circles and fundraisers, and as voluntary aids at
military, civilian and Red Cross hospitals.
Edwardian women provided leadership at a local, state and
national level. These women were intelligent, wealthy and powerful with
extensive transnational networks between country towns, provincial Sydney and
metropolitan London. Their families provided their fathers, sons and brothers
for Australia’s overseas military excursions from the time of the Boer War, and
local women worked to support ‘their boys’. The leadership group created ground-breaking
opportunities that empowered women and allowed them to exercise their agency by
undertaking patriotic activities for the first time.
In their wake the women created the most important
homefront voluntary organisation of the war, a small part of the narrative of
the Australian Red Cross, arguably the country’s most important not-for-profit
organisation. Their stories were the essence of place, and the success of the
local branches meant that over time
homefront volunteering became synonymous with the Red Cross. Local Red Cross
volunteering in war and peace provides a small window into the national and
transnational perspectives of one of the world’s most important welfare
organisations.
