T oday’s Covid-19 pandemic is affecting people worldwide in ways no one ever dreamed possible—creating financial, social, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual difficulties. But this is not new. History has seen it all before—from disasters, inequities, and injustices to successes and silver linings. It’s in these trying times that we can benefit from history’s lessons, which offer insights into our current situation and show us that there can be opportunities for us to transform our lives.

In the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic (February 1918 - April 1920), an estimated 50 million people died worldwide, with 675,000 of those in the United States. Combined with the Great War (World War I—July 28, 1914 to November 11, 1918), men died in larger numbers than women, thereby creating labor shortages that enabled women to take on new roles and forever redefine their place in society.

Some viewed women’s entering the work force as an attack on traditional values, which would lead to women’s moral decay. But families needed income. So women worked in munitions factories and the textile industry, and were employed as postal workers, police, firefighters, bank clerks, bus and tram conductors, railway guards and ticket collectors, and heavy machinists. And though they performed their jobs well, they were paid less than men. Of this new female workforce, a minority of the new jobs were filled by black women.

Nursing, a profession traditionally dominated by women, first opened its doors to blacks in 1918 when black Americans were routinely denied access to health services, education, and political institutions. Frances Reed Elliot Davis was the first black nurse to be accepted into the American Red Cross Nursing Service. Similarly, the Navy Nurse Corps created positions for 18 black nurses. These changes in hiring practices took place in spite of racial segregation and violence of the time and were due in part to the pandemic, netting incremental advances for black American women’s civil rights and health equity.

The American Magazine, in this artwork, was published from 1905 to 1956, and focused on social issues, human interest stories, and fiction during the Spanish Flu pandemic years.