Biography

Evelyn Hutchins was born in Snohomish, Washington in 1910 and developed an independent spirit as a child. Her divorced mother was a worker and agitator for suffrage for women, her stepfather a maritime worker blacklisted on the west coast for striking. Evelyn moved to New York as a young woman to be a dancer, but wound up in sleazy burlesque clubs when the Depression forced her to accept any work.

Educated in the school of hard knocks, she demanded respect as a feminist. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, she drove trucks to collect clothing and other humanitarian aid to ship to Spain, and when the call for recruits for the American Medical Bureau went out in late 1936, she volunteered to be an ambulance driver. However, the organizers considered her unqualified for the risky work because she was a woman. Hutchins continued to agitate for the opportunity and eventually convinced them to send her to Spain. There she served courageously as a truck driver, experiencing dangerous combat conditions on many occasions. 

After the war, the Yale University sociologist Dr. John Dollard interviewed Hutchins as part of a study on the meaning of fear in battle; his published work was used by the U.S. Army for morale training during World War II. 

Dollard’s interview, conducted around 1942, is excerpted and available in ALBA's website resources.

ALB Archival Materials

Images

Evelyn Hutchins, truck driver, in Spain.

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