World War I Women’s Service and Liverpool Nursing Recognition Certificate, 1918

World War I. Women in Nursing

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Liverpool Education Committee, Holt School nursing award certificate, 1918, honors women’s World War I service through an elaborate visual program centered on a Red Cross nurse. The certificate places nursing within a wider field of women’s wartime labor, showing smaller portraits of women working in traditionally male occupations around the central nurse figure. Its imagery and Tennyson quotation connect female service to national duty, civic recognition, and arguments for women’s public importance during the final year of the war.

Holt School. Nursing award certificate. Liverpool: Liverpool Education Committee, 1918. Printed and hand-colored certificate. 12 x 17 inches. Blank verso. The design features an 8.5 x 8.5 inch medallion with a Red Cross nurse at center, framed by a tree whose branches contain portraits of women at work, all enclosed by a bright floral border. Beneath the image appears the Tennyson quotation: “The woman’s cause is man’s: they rise or sink together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free. Yoked in all exercise of noble end.” The text states that it was “the fourth certificate awarded by the Liverpool Education Comittee in place of a prize during the great war.”

The certificate belongs to wartime educational culture that publicly acknowledged women’s labor while the war accelerated debates over citizenship, work, and social recognition. Small half-inch tear at margin not affecting text or image; illustration bright and detailed; very good. An attractive World War I certificate preserving how British schools commemorated women’s nursing and war work in 1918.

Item #17903

Price: $425.00