Nursing and Empire: Gendered Labor and Migration from India to the United States

Abstract

In her interdisciplinary study of contemporary Indian nurse migration to the United States, Sujani Reddy contextualizes their migration within a longer history of a U.S. global presence in India as well as a U.S. domestic history of racial segregation and gendered separate spheres. Her study builds upon the critical insights of the historiographies of nursing, Filipino American studies, and African American studies that have explored the impact of U.S. colonialism on Filipino nurse migration and that have shown how the professionalization of U.S. nursing furthered the racial segregation of health workers. This exciting global history documents the nineteenth- and twentieth-century development of the nursing profession in India, charts the Indian nurse diaspora in the second half of the twentieth century, and contemplates the opportunities and limitations of their mobility in the United States. Reddy argues that increasing U.S. religious and medical influence in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shaped the development of the nursing profession in India. While white American women Protestant missionaries and health care workers migrated to India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by the mid-twentieth century, fellowship opportunities offered by American organizations—most notably, the Rockefeller Foundation—reversed these routes and facilitated migrations of Indian nurses to the United States. U.S. educational exchange programs and new immigration policies furthered this phenomenon, which Reddy calls a “diaspora of decolonization” and a “forced exile from the full promise of a definition of decolonization” (p. 11).