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  • Nursing and Women’s Labour in the Nineteenth Century: The Quest for Independence by Sue Hawkins
  • Linda Shields (bio)
Nursing and Women’s Labour in the Nineteenth Century: The Quest for Independence, by Sue Hawkins ; pp. xi + 228. London and New York: Routledge, 2010, £85.00, £28.00 paper, $140.00.

There is little for me to criticize in Sue Hawkins’s Nursing and Women’s Labour in the Nineteenth Century: The Quest for Independence. Firstly, it is a really good read: Hawkins’s style is intelligent and well crafted, and her approach is logical, as are the layout of the book, the sequence of chapters, and the conclusions drawn. Secondly (and more importantly), her methods of analysis are well chosen, well explained, and well used to give the reader a picture of nursing in Victorian England and to explain how the profession of nursing developed at that time. This is all set in what could be described as a history of St George’s Hospital in London in the late nineteenth century.

Histories of hospitals are common and many are well researched and written. Some are by amateur historians (valuable in their own right), while some are chronological descriptions of the life of the particular institution. It is rarer to find an institutional history that looks at one particular aspect of the life of a hospital, and that uses a rigorous historiographical research methodology, but such is this book. Indeed, this study is not meant to be solely a history of St George’s Hospital, but through its thoroughness also offers to the reader an examination of nursing there over the period.

Hawkins sets the scene with an invaluable chapter about the role of women in Victorian society. It is only through an appreciation of what life was like for women then that we can understand why they went into nursing in the first place, what their lives were like in comparison to the lives of their contemporaries, and why they found nursing a satisfying way of life. Through this, Hawkins’s work gives valuable insight to the history of the development of the profession itself.

The book contains an extensive literature review of the history of nursing, as well as an explanation of how it developed within the history of St George’s Hospital. Florence Nightingale is mentioned, but the review is much more nuanced and detailed than the usual histories which give Nightingale pride of place. It is pleasing to see a nursing history that examines many other aspects of its evolution—particularly important is the inclusion of writers such as Christopher J. Maggs and Carol Helmstadter, who present critical, alternative, and less Nightingale-centric studies.

The case studies used throughout the book are invaluable. They provide illustrative snapshots of the women who came to St George’s Hospital to become nurses. Such stories not only make the work eminently readable, but also give the reader a depth of understanding that can often be hard to find in drier historical writing. A particularly valuable part of the work is its myth-busting. Through sound arguments, backed up by historical evidence, Hawkins debunks the myths that women became nurses to find husbands, that nurses could not be married women, and that nursing ruined women’s health. The detail in the book is particularly helpful. Hawkins differentiates the statistics and figures used between nurse probationers and trained nurses, showing how nurses were trained and the effects on their lives of this training.

Hawkins studies not those who led nursing at St George’s Hospital (though of course they are included); rather, she examines the ordinary nurses, their everyday lives, and how they worked. I often had periods of déjà vu, because my own training (long before the very welcome transition of nursing to universities) had many elements [End Page 520] of what Hawkins describes from the nineteenth century. This is surely an indication of the necessity of university education for both the profession and patient safety—it was high time the old-fashioned thinking from the Victorian Era was relegated to history. In these times of uncertainty in the United Kingdom about the fate of university...

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