Nursing Civil Rights

Abstract

This book investigates the parallel battles against occupational segregation by African American women and white men in the U.S. Army, using the microcosm of military nursing. As the book reveals, both groups viewed their circumstances with the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) as a civil rights matter. Each conducted separate integration campaigns to end the discrimination they suffered. Yet their stories defy the narrative that civil rights struggles inevitably arced toward social justice. The book examines the battles over race and gender discrimination and social justice by linking the civil rights story of the ANC to critical events in the United States between World War II and the Vietnam War. It tells how progressive elements in the integration campaigns did indeed break down barriers in both military and civilian nursing. At the same time, it follows conservative threads to portray how some of the women who succeeded as agents of change became defenders of exclusionary practices when men sought military nursing careers. The ironic result was a struggle that simultaneously confronted and reaffirmed the social hierarchies that nurtured discrimination.