Transnational Feminist Practices and the History of Nursing

Abstract

Joan Lynaugh, and the institutions, ways of thinking, and practicing nursing history she was so masterful at creating are of feminist prac- tices. That is what Women's Studies' scholars Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan have defined as forms of alliances, subversion and complicity within which asymmetries and inequalities can be critiqued.1 For no one was better at alli- ances and subversions-and even complicities with both leadership and rebels- across boundaries of practice fields and nation than Joan Lynaugh, I would argue that Joan created transnational feminist practices within nursing history.What then do I mean by this? It starts with the complexities that Joan and her colleagues were attempting to explore. Much of the new Women's Studies scholarship over the last decades has sought to understand in concrete terms what intersectionality-the infelicitous term used to describe analyses that link race, gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and religion together-means.2 The new nursing history that Joan was so instrumental in writing, encouraging, and supporting was always about intersectionality. Coming of age in conversation with Women's Studies and History scholars at the same time, this new nursing history could hardly have avoided such linkages. However, whether Women's Studies scholars were always able to create this with all the categories together, and mostly we failed, the effort to think in these terms was very much there. This failure was also one of theoretical concepts. We just did have the terms yet to explore women's relationships to one another across time, space, nation, and institutions, and the very murkiness of the term made it hard to use.3In many ways, Women's Studies itself would have gained from reading the nursing history being developed in the 1980s. For it was within this field that the tensions just between and doctors, but between differing groups of nurses, was becoming central to the historical analysis. Nursing historians also began to understand that as seeming subaltern subjects could be oppressed and powerful at the same moments in time. The very concreteness of the studies in nursing history would actually been helpful then to Women's Studies scholars if there had been more reading from Women's Studies in the nursing history literature.4 Joan certainly tried to make this possible as her warmth, institutional building skills, and knowledge made those of us who not now nor have never been nurses welcomed into the historical tent she was spreading.Secondly, Joan saw beyond the borders: of what nursing could do when she began her work in developing nurse practitioners and then in what nurs- ing history could make possible. She did this through her own form of trans- national feminist practices. She made alliances across academic borders and traveled back and forth bringing ideas, articles, and individuals with her. …