Holden Zimmerman

Holden Zimmerman is a Ph.D. candidate (May 2026 graduation) in International History, whose research stretches across Japan, the United States, and Europe. Her work focuses on the history of the Red Cross movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a focus on the intersection of international diplomacy, humanitarianism, and gender. Her dissertation is tentatively titled: “The Red Cross, Women, and Humanitarian Diplomacy: Nation, Empire, and Nurses.”

 

Holden’s groundbreaking dissertation connects the histories of humanitarianism, gender, and diplomacy on a global scale by investigating the pivotal yet underexplored role of women in the international Red Cross movement. Her multilingual and deeply archival research spans three continents and examines the crucial, yet hitherto underexplored, role of women involved with the Red Cross movement, including women from Japan, the United States, Great Britain, and Thailand, among others. For example, to foreign observers between the 1890s and 1930s, the Japanese Red Cross Society’s (JRCS) wartime relief system was a global model for military medical advancement and citizen mobilization, primarily due to its training and utilization of female nurses. Holden’s work highlights women’s active participation in wartime relief operations during the Russo-Japanese War, World War I, as well as interwar international nursing training programs. Far from acting merely as symbols of proper feminine dedication to national and humanitarian principles, volunteer and trained nurses alike organized, labored, and provided policy suggestions to male politicians, military officials, and Red Cross organizers. These contributions had profound implications for the medical systems, diplomatic strategies, and domestic gender politics of their states. Women like Anita Newcomb McGee, Theresa Richardson, Tomonari Tomi, and Inoue Natsuye utilized the international networks of the Red Cross to enable their global movement and bolster their authority in the realm of military nursing during an era in which most women struggled for access to higher education, let alone travelled globally to conduct their work as trained medical professionals. 

 

Holden’s utilization of English, French, German, and Japanese historical sources that she has collected and analyzed from public and private archives from across the world sheds new light on women’s roles in humanitarian projects. Her research goes far beyond simply highlighting the labor they provided to domestic hospitals or battlefield relief stations. She effectively brings Japan into the international historical debate surrounding humanitarianism and diplomacy, which has only recently received more scholarly attention. Like many Western states and empires of the era, Japan sought to bring women into its nation-building project by expanding women’s traditional roles as caregivers in the home to include nursing the nation’s army. To achieve this, politicians, military officials, and bureaucrats looked both abroad and at home for women leaders to structure, advise, represent, and critique this endeavor. While universal male conscription, in theory, mobilized all men for the nation-state as soldiers, JRCS female nurses emerged as a symbol of state-sanctioned femininity, with a woman’s duties tied now to her husband and children in the home islands as well as the country’s wounded soldiers in the wider empire. Yet these women were not passive participants in this domestic and international project, and both elite volunteer ladies and working-class trained nurses worked to actively shape the system in turn. Holden’s dissertation not only spotlights the significant contributions of women to humanitarian efforts but also reshapes our understanding of their roles in international diplomacy and state-building endeavors.

 

To support her scholarship, Holden has received generous research grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the Japan Foundation, the Nippon Foundation, the Toshiba International Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), FLAS, the MacMillan Center for International and Regional Studies, and the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale, among others.