Edith Shain was a New York psychiatric nurse who spent the last thirty years of her life as the public face of the most famous photograph of the end of the Second World War. Whether she was actually in it is another matter, and the evidence now points away from her.
V-J Day in Times Square, photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt for LIFE, August 14, 1945.
The nurse
Edith Shain was born in Tarrytown, New York on July 29, 1918. She trained in the New York University nursing program and was working as a psychiatric nurse at Doctors Hospital in Manhattan when Japan surrendered on August 14, 1945. She and a friend heard the announcement and went down to Times Square to join the celebration. That much has never been disputed, and it is the part of the story that belongs to nursing: the hospitals of New York emptied their off-duty staff into the street that afternoon, and women in white uniforms are all over the photographs taken that day.
Shain later moved to Los Angeles, where she lived for the rest of her life. She died there of cancer on June 20, 2010, at the age of 91.
The claim
Alfred Eisenstaedt photographed a sailor seizing a woman in a white uniform and kissing her, and never got either name. LIFE ran the picture without identifying anyone, and for three decades nobody knew who they were.
Around 1979, Shain wrote in to say the woman was her. Eisenstaedt flew to California to see her. Asked afterwards whether he had confirmed it, Shain said of the sailor's identity, "I just can't say he is" — she could not get a definitive answer out of the encounter, and Eisenstaedt never publicly certified the identification. LIFE never resolved it either. More than a dozen men separately claimed to be the sailor.
What Shain did have was willingness. From the 1980s until her death she appeared at veterans' events, Memorial Day parades and anniversary commemorations as the woman in the photograph, and the press generally introduced her that way.
What later research found
Two lines of work have since undermined the claim.
The first is the identification of the actual couple. Lawrence Verria and George Galdorisi, in The Kissing Sailor (2012), used facial comparison and a forensic reconstruction of the scene to argue that the sailor was George Mendonsa and the woman Greta Zimmer Friedman. Friedman had come forward years earlier and described her hairdo, her build and what she wore that day. Astronomers at Texas State University separately dated the photograph to roughly 5:51 in the afternoon from the shadows falling across Times Square, which fits Mendonsa's account of his movements and not the rival claimants'.
The second objection is simpler. Shain stood 4 feet 10 inches. Measured against the sailor and against the storefronts behind her, the woman in the photograph is a good deal taller than that.
There is one further correction the picture's caption has needed for eighty years. Greta Zimmer Friedman was not a nurse. She was a dental assistant, and the white uniform that made everyone read her as one was simply her work clothes. The image nursing has claimed as its own most likely shows a different profession altogether.
None of this touches Shain's own record. She was a trained psychiatric nurse who was in Times Square that afternoon, and the reason her claim went unchallenged for so long is that it was entirely plausible.
Related
Sources
- Edith Shain, Who Said Famous Kiss Came Her Way, Dies at 91. The New York Times, June 24, 2010. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Edith Shain, nurse kissing Navy man in Eisenstaedt's WWII photo, dies at 91. The Washington Post, June 23, 2010. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- The Kissing Sailor: The Mystery Behind the Photo that Ended World War II, Lawrence Verria and George Galdorisi. Naval Institute Press, 2012. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Greta Zimmer Friedman, her account of the photograph and her work as a dental assistant. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Astronomers analyze Eisenstaedt's V-J Day photo. CBS News, on the Texas State University shadow analysis. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- LIFE — V-J Day, 1945: A Nation Lets Loose. Accessed September 9, 2026.