The Courageous Women of WWI
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I love to learn about the past via historical fiction and Miss Morgan’s Book Brigade opened the door on a group known as CARDS that existed during WWI. The group’s English name was the American Committee for Devastated France. Its French name was Le Comite Americain Pour les Regions Devastees, from which the acronym was formed.
A famous member of this group was its Vice President, Anne Morgan, daughter of millionaire J.P. Morgan. She was one of 350 women from the US, Canada, and Great Britain who worked less than forty miles from the front, helping those whose lives had been devastated by the war.
Like Anne Morgan, many CARDS were wealthy volunteers who paid their own expenses. But there were some volunteers who drew a salary from the group instead. Such a member was Jessie “Kit” Carson who was “on loan” from the New York Public Library. She had signed on for a two-year commitment to the group.
The book is told in two voices. Some chapters are set in France starting in 1918 and are told from Kit’s point of view. Others are set in New York in 1987. These are told from Wendy Peterson’s point of view.
Wendy works in the Remembrance Department of the New York Public Library. Its mission is to save the past for posterity. Her job is to go through archive boxes. She pulls a document from one of them, photographs it, turns it upside down, then repeats with the next document.
In this manner, Wendy comes upon a newsletter whose masthead has French and American flags. It is called “Under Two Flags” and it is the weekly bulletin from CARDS, a group she has never heard about but becomes enthralled with. She learns that this group existed between 1917 and 1924 and among other things, sowed 7500 acres of land and replanted 7300 fruit trees. They also distributed goats, chickens, rabbits, along with clothing, linens, and furniture.
It was in 1918, that they brought in Jessie Kit Carson to establish France’s first ever libraries for children. Kit is the CARD who interests Wendy the most. But it is hard to find information about her beyond infrequent mentions in “Under Two Flags.”
As the author tells us, “The rich – even long dead – leave behind traces of their lives. Portraits of their fore-fathers hang in museums. Photographers document marriages and other mergers. In newspapers and magazines, articles about these prominent citizens abound…The poor fade into obscurity without a trace.”
To learn about Kit, Wendy has to do some detective work – as did the author in creating this book – and the reader gets to follow along.
As the book unfolds, we watch Kit and Wendy in their lives. Each woman has self-doubts, and a negative, disapproving supervisor. For Kit it is the Director of the New York Public Library whom she left behind to come to France. For Wendy, it is the creative writing teacher she deals with at night school. Each woman also finds a social network for herself in the course of her chapters, not to mention, a love interest.
Through their chapters, the reader gets to know the love interests: Tom and Roberto. There are also lots of women friends to enjoy, particularly in Kit’s chapters: Lewis, Cookie, Breckie, Sidonie, and Marcelle. And readers get to boo and hiss at the bad guys, Professor Hill and Winnifred Smythe, Kit’s former boss at the NYPL.
All of these chapters are very interesting as is this chapter of history. And as if we did not learn enough about the CARDS through the novel, there are extensive author’s notes at the end. From them we learn that Kit actually stayed in France until 1924 and in that time, she helped to create five libraries and fifty circulating libraries in the North. And then in Paris, she created a library in Belleville, in a working-class neighborhood. That library celebrated its centennial in 2022.
Jessie “Kit” Carson – quite an amazing woman! I recommend reading all about her!
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