The Women

The Women History Erased

When Frankie McGrath enlists as an Army nurse and ships out to Vietnam in 1966, she is acting on the same impulse that drove her brother and thousands of other Americans: she wants to serve. What she finds in Vietnam — the intensity of surgical wards under fire, the bonds forged in extremity, the specific landscape of wartime nursing — is not what she expected. Neither is what she finds when she comes home.

Kristin Hannah’s The Women is, in the most direct sense, an act of historical recovery. The women who served in Vietnam — Army Nurse Corps, Red Cross Donut Dollies, civilian medical workers — have been largely absent from the canonical Vietnam War narrative. Hannah spent years researching their experiences, and the book is dedicated explicitly to filling that absence.

The Nursing Experience

The medical sequences in The Women are among Hannah’s finest writing. She renders the specific reality of wartime surgery — the volume of casualties, the impossible decisions, the way nurses absorbed both physical and emotional damage while maintaining the professional composure required to keep patients alive — with a specificity that comes from genuine research and genuine empathy.

The friendships between Frankie and her colleagues — particularly Barb and Ethel — carry the novel’s emotional center. These are relationships forged in circumstances that civilian life cannot replicate, and Hannah captures both their intensity and their specific post-war difficulty.

The Return

The homecoming sections are the book’s most devastating. Vietnam veterans returned to an America that had turned against the war and that expressed that opposition through treatment of the people who had served. The specific experience of women returning — not even formally acknowledged as veterans for years after the war ended, unable to access the VA services that male veterans could claim — is documented by Hannah with particular attention.

Frankie’s PTSD is depicted with clinical accuracy and emotional precision: the intrusive memories, the sleep disruption, the difficulty re-inhabiting ordinary life after the heightened clarity of wartime.

Hannah’s Historical Mission

Kristin Hannah has made a project of recovering women from historical narratives that erased them — The Nightingale did it for the French Resistance, The Women does it for Vietnam. The project is both literary and political, and it’s conducted with sufficient craft that the political commitment never overrides the emotional experience of reading.

Our rating: 4.6/5 — Hannah’s most ambitious novel to date — a historically important, emotionally devastating account of the women who served in Vietnam and came home to a country that didn’t want to know.

Reading Guides

• 15 Books Like The Women by Kristin Hannah
• Books Like Lessons in Chemistry: 11 Novels of Wit, Ambition, and Women Who Refuse to Be Underestimated
• Books Like The Nightingale: 11 Powerful WWII Novels You Need to Read
• 15 Books Like The Housemaid to Read Next
• Kristin Hannah Books in Order: Complete Reading Guide (2026)
• 25 Best Books for Women: Fiction, Memoir, and Non-Fiction

The Historical Record of Women in Vietnam

Approximately 265,000 women served in the United States military in connection with the Vietnam War, including approximately 11,000 in Vietnam itself, the vast majority as nurses in the Army Nurse Corps, Navy Nurse Corps, and Air Force Nurse Corps. An additional number served as civilian medical personnel, Red Cross workers, and in other capacities. Until 1993, women veterans of Vietnam were not formally recognized in official ceremonies; the Vietnam Women’s Memorial in Washington, D.C., was dedicated that year, decades after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial opened in 1982.

Hannah spent years researching the experiences of female Vietnam veterans before writing The Women, and the novel reflects that research in its medical sequences, in the specificity of base life and evacuation hospital conditions, and in the homecoming experience she depicts. The dedication — “To the women who served” — is paired with a note on the historical record that makes the novel’s act of recovery explicit.

The Medical Sequences

Hannah’s rendering of the medical work in The Women is among her most technically accomplished writing. She depicts the specific reality of wartime surgery — MASH units and evacuation hospitals operating under fire, the volume of casualties that surgical teams dealt with daily, the triage decisions that required nurses to make judgments about who could be saved and who could not — with the specificity of genuine research.

The emotional cost of this work — absorbed by nurses who maintained professional composure through their shifts and then had nowhere to put what they had witnessed — is depicted with equal care. Frankie’s PTSD is grounded in specific experiences: the sounds, the smells, the particular faces, the moments where the decision made or not made left a permanent mark. This is not generic trauma but the specific neurological and psychological aftermath of specific events.

The Homecoming

The homecoming sequences in The Women are among the most devastating Hannah has written. Vietnam veterans returned to an America that had not merely turned against the war but that expressed that opposition in part through contempt for those who had served. The specific experience of female veterans — who were not even formally classified as veterans for decades after the war ended, who could not access VA healthcare or benefits in the same way their male counterparts could, whose service was systemically unacknowledged — receives particular attention.

Hannah depicts Frankie’s post-Vietnam period not as a dramatic crisis but as a slow erosion of the identity she had built in service — the daily difficulty of living in a civilian world that could not understand the intensity of what she had done and survived, and that offered no language for a woman’s military experience.

Companion to The Nightingale

The Women is most productively read as a companion to The Nightingale rather than simply a successor: both novels execute the same project — recovering women’s military contributions from narratives that overlooked them — in different historical theatres. Hannah’s consistency of purpose across two decades and multiple books constitutes a coherent literary mission, and The Women (2024) is its most recent and most ambitious expression.