week4

Who cares?: nursing and the evolution of gender norms

Topic: In the twentieth century, nursing, including military nursing, came to appear a female field of professional endeavour: more than a job, a quintessentially feminine vocation. (By 1930, only 1% of civilian nurses in the US were men.) According to this gendered logic, women were especially suited to 'binding the wounds of war' as tender nurturers, carers, and suppliers of emotional balm for troubled psyches as well as wounded bodies. But entrenched though such ideas came to be, they were not timeless or unchanging and uncontested. In the nineteenth century, many men (and some women) thought it unseemly for women to come into intimate proximity with men's bodies, arguing that both soldiers and women would be best served by male nurses taking on these duties of care. Debates about whether women should serve in this capacity, and about the division of labour between male doctors and orderlies and female nurses, persisted well into the twentieth century. So, too, did racialised anxieties about bodily contact between Black and white Americans.

In this seminar, we'll analyse the evolution of gendered norms about who should tend to wounded soldiers; what variety of responsibilities the role of nurse entailed (focusing primarily on the two world wars); whether women nurses should receive military rank; and why issues of sex and sexuality-- and race-- have been so entangled in controversies over military nursing.

Seminar questions:

What symbolic associations does the figure of the nurse conjure? How did Americans envision who this person was and how far did the archetypal 'nurse' evolve from the 1860s to the 1940s?
What variety of forms of labour were nurses expected to perform? Did these expectations change significantly over time?
What does Jensen's essay reveal about the gendered dimensions of nursing in World War I?
if white male nurses were waging a civil rights struggle for recognition in WWII, what other civil rights struggles were being/had been waged by nurses?

Seminar slidesLink opens in a new window

Required reading:

Primary source: LeRoy N Craig, 'Opportunities for Men Nurses,' American Journal of Nursing 40, 6 (June 1940), pp. 666-70 [JSTOR]

Kimberly Jensen, '"A Base Hospital is Not a Coney Island Dance Hall: American Nurses, Hostile Work Environment, and Military Rank in the First World War,' Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies 26, 2 (2005), pp. 206-35

Charissa Threat, Nursing Civil Rights: Gender and Race in the Army Nurse Corps (2015), ch. 3, 'Nurse or Soldier? White Male Nurses and World War II,' pp. 53-78, e-book

Supplementary reading:

Diane Burke, No Time for Fear: Voices of American Military Nurses in World War II (1996) e-book

Cynthia Connolly and Naomi Rogers, 'Who Is the Nurse? Rethinking the History of Gender and Medicine,' OAH Magazine of History 19, 5 (Sept. 2005), pp. 45-49

Libra R Hilde, Worth a Dozen Men: Women and Nursing in the Civil War South (2012) e-book

Ellen N La Motte, The Backwash of War: An Extraordinary American Nurse in World War I (2019) e-book

Bernard D Rostker, Providing for the Casualties of War: The American Experience Through World War II (2013) e-book

Jane E Schultz, 'The Inhospitable Hospital: Gender and Professionalism in Civil War Medicine,' Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17, 2 (1992), pp. 363-92

Jane E Schultz, Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America (2004)

Susie King Taylor, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops (1902) e-bookLink opens in a new window

Cheryl A Wells, 'Battle Time: Gender, Modernity, and Confederate Hospitals,' Journal of Social History 35, 2 (Winter 2001), pp. 409-428

Ann Douglas Wood, 'The War Within a War: Women Nurses in the Union Army,' Civil War History 18, 3 (Sept. 1972), pp. 197-212