Gendered spaces, gendered pages: Union women in Civil War nurse narratives.

This interdisciplinary analysis joins literary and culture studies with history using Daphne Spain's theory of gendered spaces. Specifically, we examine the reconfiguration of the spaces of military medical work and of book publishing that produced popular literary representations of those medical spaces. As a social historian of nursing and a scholar of American literature and culture, we argue that the examination of Civil War narratives by or about Northern female nurses surveys a landscape in which women penetrated the masculine spaces of the military hospital and the literary spaces of the wartime narrative. In so doing, these women transformed these spaces into places acknowledging and even relying upon what had been traditionally considered male domains. Like many historiographical papers written about nurses and the impact of their practice over time, this work is relevant to those practicing nursing today, specifically those issues related to professional authority and professional autonomy.

The American nursing shortage during World War I: the debate over the use of nurses' aids.

This article explores the history of the creation of the Army and Navy Female Nurse Corps and the debate that ensued between American nursing leaders Jane Delano, director of the Red Cross Nursing Service, M. Adelaide Nutting, president of the American Federation of Nurses, and Annie Goodrich, dean of the Army School of Nursing, over the use of untrained nurses' aids to offset the nursing shortage that resulted from the United States entry into the Great War in 1917. The recruitment of minimally or untrained nurses' aids to offset the nursing shortage of the World War I era was a logical solution for American nursing leaders who had to meet the needs for nursing personnel. The exclusion of trained African American nurses, however, was a gross oversight on the part of these leaders. Whether or not this action compromised the status of nursing as a profession is still a matter of interest. Moreover, the debate about the delivery of care by unlicensed personnel continues.