Abstract

This article explores the interconnected personal and professional lives of all seventeen graduates of the Latter-day Saints Nurses Training School class of 1919 over almost six decades of their lives. It places the experiences of these women at the nexus of ideas about women, work, family, and religion, and considers work that took place not just within hospitals and health care agencies but also within families, and families' particular patterns of wage work and unremunerated housework, care work, and that on farms or small businesses. These graduates actually moved rather easily and intermittently back and forth between domestic and market economies; their paid nursing work was integrated into, rather than separate from, their work as wives and mothers. Their life stories show how these women actively embraced the gendered meaning of nursing for how it privileged both their professional work and their commitment to Mormon traditions.

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