Guest Editor's Note In April 2008, the members of the Sigerist Circle invited a group of historians of nursing to present their ideas about nursing and at its annual meeting, held in conjunction with that of the American Association for the History of Medicine. were all challenged with writing about what activism meant, and as Patricia D'Antonio wrote in 2009 editorial of Nursing History Review , We tried to unpack the trope of by wondering about the ways in which more ordinary nurses we studied thought about the social and political implications of their own actions. 1 One of the questions I asked, as the panel's commentator, was: Is a religion? Are those who worked actively for social change in health care akin to evangelicals, religiously focused and tenacious until the goal is met? For example, Margaret Sanger, the early twentieth-century nurse and fervent birth control activist, was jailed for illegal activity promoting and providing birth control, calling it her religion. 2 I asked also: Are there distinctions to be made between radicalism and reformism, between revolutionaries and activists? Is this even important? Many of the nurses in the following articles would have been called radicals and revolutionaries because they worked with marginalized and vulnerable populations and individuals. Indeed, in a recent Canadian textbook on community health nursing, becoming an activist with and for stigmatized, vulnerable people at risk for health problems is seen as a key nursing role. 3 Whether one calls it social action, political intervention, or activism, this is the same role that nurses undertook in the early to late twentieth century in their communities. In Cynthia Connolly's article, 'I am a Trained Nurse': The Nursing Identity of Anarchist and Radical Emma we similarly see that the very act of public health nursing was radical on the Lower East Side of New York City for Emma Goldman and Lillian Wald in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Connolly quotes Emma Goldman, who wrote that coming to face [as a nurse] with the living conditions of workers in their squalid surroundings made realize how much the anticapitalist movement needed to change social conditions. Nursing seemed almost clandestine. Goldman even used a pseudonym when she took private-duty nursing cases because she had been imprisoned for anarchism and was well known in New York. The act of nursing was also a cause for them, a religion even. For example, in the early twentieth century, Goldman visited Wald at Henry Street and described Wald and nurses as having consecrated themselves to their cause. Although Wald did not see herself as a radical, believing herself to be more a reformer, Connolly questions the difference between the two terms because Wald was able to agitate for social change inside the system with powerful network. Goldman was outside, but Wald still supported financially and emotionally. In Barbra Mann Wall's Conflict and Compromise: Catholic and Public Hospital Partnerships, Daughters of Charity nuns, many of whom nurses, risked their religious careers in taking over the administration of a Protestant city hospital in Austin, Texas, that cared for the indigent, especially women and children. …