Wooster Women Lend Their Support

Mrs. R.J. Smith of Wooster organized the local campaign to create “comfort bags” for departing soldiers.

This 1917 advertisement for the Wooster Electric Company suggests that using electric lights in the home will provide women more time to act as “the mothers of a nation.”

Mrs. Sweeney was Superintendent of the Red Cross Surgical Dressings Department and the Chairman of the Public Square “Conservation Market.”   

This advertisement from the Wooster Daily Republican asks the men and women of Wayne County who have not pledged a donation to the Red Cross, “Can you sleep tonight?”

According to this Wooster Daily Republican article, six men and women in Wooster died of Spanish influenza in one day in October 1918.

This 1918 Wooster Daily Republican article commends the bravery of the women who volunteered to care for influenza patients. 

Women’s role in the First World War involved more than just cooking with substitute flour. The war provided many women an opportunity to expand their work outside of the home. With the young men gone, farms and factories increasingly relied on women’s labor to keep up wartime production. Women also organized and led most wartime charities. Mrs. R.J. Smith of the Wooster Women’s Christian Temperance Union organized a campaign to create “comfort bags” to send overseas within days of President Wilson’s declaration of war. Each bag included a Bible, a book on health and illness prevention in the trenches, antiseptic cotton, soap and a wash cloth, a candle, a handkerchief, a sewing kit, and a “mother’s letter.” Wooster women also worked tirelessly for the Red Cross, organizing three “Women’s Divisions” – Knitting, Sewing, and Surgical Dressing – as well as a “Home Division” to take care of the families of men serving abroad.¹

Women’s relief work did not end when armistice came. Spanish influenza swept through the country in the fall of 1918, killing an estimated 675,000 people in America alone. When cases of the flu began cropping up in Wooster, the Home Division of the Wooster Red Cross became the Influenza committee. These women braved the quarantined homes of those stricken with the flu to provide healthcare and offered aid to bereaved families.²  During the influenza pandemic as well as the war, the nurturing roles that women previously held within their own homes became not only a domestic expectation, but a public responsibility.