Become a nurse, your country needs you is a 1942 poster of the Federal Security Agency and U.S. Public Health Service, distributed as OWI Poster No. 22. Two hands in star-and-stripe sleeves set a nurse's cap on a smiling young woman, and readers are told to write to the Nursing Information Bureau in New York (NAID 513583).
What the sheet prints
A young woman smiles straight out of the sheet as a nurse's cap is lowered onto her head. The hands doing it belong to no visible body. Their sleeves are striped and starred like the flag. The picture turns a professional ceremony, the capping of a nursing student, into a national one.
Federal Security Agency
U. S. PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE
become a Nurse
YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU
Write Nursing Information Bureau, 1790 Broadway, New York City
OWI Poster No. 22. Additional copies may be obtained upon request from the Division of Public Inquiries, Office of War Information, Washington, D.C.
Who issued it
Two offices share the sheet. The sponsor named at the top is the U.S. Public Health Service, then part of the Federal Security Agency. The distributor at the bottom is the Office of War Information, which numbered the poster 22 and offered extra copies on request. The reply address is a Nursing Information Bureau in New York. The artist is not named.
The sheet shows three parties in one campaign: an agency with a need, a central office that numbered and distributed the poster, and a bureau to answer the letters. The OWI domestic branch study describes the office.
How to read it
Of the recruiting posters in this set, this one asks for the least and offers the most. Nursing is a skill a person keeps after any war ends, and the sheet asks only that the reader write for information. Nothing in it is coercive.
The flag sleeves do borrow authority. The cap is given by the country, not by a hospital school, and "your country needs you" makes the career a duty. That is the standard move of wartime recruiting, and here it is used for work that would plainly help people whether or not the war went well. The poster does not say what training cost, how long it took, or who paid for it, and the FRAME record does not either.
For military recruiting of the same year, see Men of 18 and 19. For women's industrial work, see Women in the War. The Office of War Information index lists other numbered OWI posters. For the war government around the Public Health Service, see the essay on the Roosevelt administration.
Sources
- FRAME object record, Become a nurse, your country needs you, 1942. Federal Security Agency, U.S. Public Health Service (OWI Poster No. 22). Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, 44-PA-135, NAID 513583, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026.
