Bodies and Souls: Politics and the Professionalization of Nursing in France, 1880-1922 (review)

This meticulously researched book eschews a Whiggish approach to the professionalization of nursing in France in favor of a multi-layered and comparative study of the various ways government officials, public health authorities, municipalities, hospital administrators, doctors and nurses tried to modernize nursing in France. To be sure, Bodies and Souls begins with early efforts to “laicize” nursing in Paris, follows the founding of the first public nurse-training programs in several cities, and concludes with the introduction of the first national diploma for nursing in 1922. However, Schultheiss is as interested in the opposition to the new initiatives, not only from physicians anxious to assure their authority over nurses, but also from anticlerical republican politicians and administrators who resisted any king of nursing “that rejected the corporate form of organizing women workers, advocated the acquisition of sophisticated expertise . . . and denied the primacy of the family in the hierarchy of women’s social obligations” (p.13). In a similarly iconoclastic manner, Schultheiss identifies Protestant surgeons who defended the nursing sisters on the grounds that nursing did not suit laywomen’s lives.

Although Schultheiss includes brief public biographies of “heroic” promoters of more professional kinds of nursing like Anna-Emilie Hamilton in Bordeaux (often regarded as the Florence Nightingale of France) and of influential proponents of the laicization of nursing, she also traces the more bureaucratic and more successful initiatives of the General Administrative Council (GAC) of the Civil Hospitals of Lyon to retain their nursing “sisters,” women who took no vows but made a commitment to serve the sick and poor, and who remained under the authority of the secular administration, i.e., the GAC. She also profiles a few famous nurses and, whenever possible, secular nursing students and graduates. Bodies and Souls disputes the familiar argument that the First World War elevated the status of nursing, an argument based on the contemporary popularity of the Red Cross volunteer nurses, on the grounds that the war obscured the distinction between trained nurses and the “natural” nurturing qualities of genteel, patriotic women. Schultheiss also queries the notion of the “victory” of professionalization in 1922, because volunteers continued to function as visiting nurses in the new social hygiene services and to confuse the boundary between professional nursing and charitable duty. She treats the apparent valorization of nursing during and after the First World War as “mixed blessings” (pp. 159 and 188).

The book offers two productive explanations for the failure of reformers to make nationwide changes in French nursing. One explanation invokes the reformers’ internal disagreements about goals. For instance, there was no common ground between Hamilton and her supporters, who sought to raise the status of the occupation by recruiting middle-class women and redefining the hospital nurse as the doctor’s collaborator and nurses associations and unions that aimed to preserve nursing for working-class men and women. The second explanation invokes the gender politics of the Third Republic. Here she builds upon the new scholarship on the emphasis on maternal duties in a regime anxious about a declining birth rate and about the health of its citizens. If the state had to assume responsibility for the health of its citizens, as many republicans claimed, it would have either to train and employ large numbers of lay women or define social services as masculine or neutral. While most republicans were committed to the notion that nursing required feminine attributes, and many supported feminization of an occupation that employed many working-class men, they differed on whether nurses should be lay women with their experience of motherhood and domesticity, or nuns, who would not be distracted by—or from—maternal and domestic duties in the home. Ironically, advocates of professional nursing based their claims on women&#8217...