商品簡介
This original interpretation of the history of nursing in the United States captures the many ways women reframed the most traditional of all gender expectations---that of caring for the sick---to create new possibilities for themselves, to renegotiate the terms of their life experiences, and to reshape their own sense of worth and power.
For much of modern U.S. history, nursing was informal, often uncompensated, and almost wholly the province of female family and community members. This began to change at the end of the nineteenth century when the prospect of formal training opened doors for women which previously had been closed. Nurses became respected professionals, and being a formally trained nurse granted a woman new social choices and opportunities that eventually translated into economic mobility and stability.
Patricia D'Antonio looks closely at nursing's history using a fresh analytic framework and a rich trove of archival sources. There she finds complex, multiple meanings in the individual choices of women who elected a nursing career. Narrating the experiences of nurses, D'Antonio captures the possibilities, power, and problems inherent in the different ways women defined their work and lived their lives. Scholars in the history of medicine, nursing, and public policy, those interested in the intersections of identity, work, gender, education, and race---and all nurses---will find this a provocative book.
作者簡介
Patricia D'Antonio is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and the associate director of the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is a Senior Fellow with the Leonard Davis Institute. She is an honorary senior lecturer at the University of Manchester's School of Nursing, Midwifery, and Social Work; a coeditor of Nurses' Work: Issues across Time and Place and Enduring Issues in American Nursing; and the author of Founding Friends: Families, Staff, and Patients at the Friends Asylum in Early Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia.
"Patricia D'Antonio's argument will upend many of the standard beliefs about nursing and its history. She stays sensitive to the psychological and cultural tropes and debates while demonstrating a wildly sophisticated historical imagination and scholarly apparatus. This will become the book on the history of nursing."---Susan M. Reverby. Wellesley College
