As We See Ourselves: Jewish Women in Nursing (review)

While doctors have traditionally been venerated in the American Jewish community, the same respect has not generally been accorded to nurses. Over the years, explains Evelyn Benson, many Jewish women have been told that nursing was somehow "Christian" and therefore an inappropriate career choice. Despite this, Jewish women have become nurses, and some, like public health pioneer Lillian Wald, have made extraordinary social contributions. The author, a nurse-historian, offers a synthesis of wide-ranging material: she weaves Jewish history with women's history, describes the historical development of nursing as a profession, and then focuses on the experiences and achievements of Jewish women in nursing in both Europe and the United States.

With the development of nonsectarian nursing services in the late nineteenth century, the way was cleared for Jewish women to enter the field without having to abandon their religious loyalties. The Jewish press, says Benson, soon began "to promote nursing as a career for young immigrant Jewish women" (p. 45). An 1895 article in the American Jewess, for example, recommended nursing as "the most womanly of all womanly occupations" (p. 25). While many Jewish women had already offered nursing care as volunteers or members of benevolent societies, some young women now felt encouraged to seek professional training. Wald, for example, although often mistakenly described as a social worker, was a trained nurse and the creator of modern public health nursing. In 1895 she established the Henry Street Settlement House to serve the mostly Jewish immigrant community of New York's Lower East Side slums. In an era when most poor people could not afford medical care, Wald sent nurses to tend to the sick in their homes and provide both affordable health care and health education.

Many Jewish women were inspired by Wald to become nurses, and many more were influenced by her work. Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah, decided that the organization's first project would be to set up a Nurse's Settlement in Jerusalem modelled on Wald's system of visiting nurses. Hadassah sent two Jewish nurses, Rachel Landy and Rose Kaplan, to Palestine in 1913. Through the efforts of many dedicated Jewish nurses Hadassah gradually expanded its health work in Palestine and laid the groundwork for the health and social welfare systems of the future Jewish state.

Alongside thoughtful discussions of well-known women, like Wald and the early Hadassah nurses, Benson tells us the stories of other women, less well known, who also made significant contributions to both nursing and public health. We learn, for example, about Naomi Deutsch, who was appointed director of public health nursing for the U.S. Children's Bureau in 1935 and who later helped to develop public health programs in the Caribbean and Central America; Esther Silverstein Blanc, who was one of many Jewish nurses who volunteered to serve with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War; and Mathilda Scheur, a Southern- born nurse, who, as president of the American Nurses' Association, fought against racial discrimination in the organization.

Also included here are the results of a 1990 survey conducted by Benson which garnered written responses from two hundred registered Jewish nurses across the United States. The women were asked to talk about their lives as nurses, to describe how their families had reacted to their decision to become nurses, how they had been treated by their non-Jewish colleagues, and whether they had encountered "anti-nurse" sentiments in the Jewish community. The answers to these questions are offered in narrative form, and the experiences recounted cover the better part of the twentieth century. One woman recalled her parents' objections to her choice of career: "My father felt all nurses were loose women and all they did was empty bedpans. My mother firmly said she would not want me to pursue nursing because it was a Christian job—no decent Jewish girl became...