Nursing Civil Rights: Gender and Race in the Army Nurse Corps by Charissa J. Threat (review)

Charissa J. Threat offers a thought provoking investigation into the integration of black women and white men into the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) over the twentieth century. From the onset of professional nursing in the military black women and men nurses of all races struggled for entry into a system that considered nursing skill as an element of biological sex and race. This history of civil rights activism includes an unusual pairing, but Threat demonstrates the commonalities and differences in these two groups’ struggles for acceptance in a professional setting dominated by white women.

The book is organized in a chronological fashion, and Threat begins with a brief summary of the early history of trained nursing in the United States. Threat chronicles the formation of the ANC from its roots in the Spanish-American War when nurses served as short-term contract workers in the Army, and details changes in the organization through the 1960s. She highlights the unique differences encountered by each black women and white men nurses separately, then in concert as the century draws to a close. Throughout her book Threat documents the keen awareness of both civil rights activists and (white) nursing leaders’ understanding of health and health care as fundamental elements of equality and democracy.

Threat frames black nurses’ activism within the nursing profession within the larger civil rights movement. The ANC, which admitted only eighteen black nurses during World War I in a reserve capacity, slowly added black nurses though with strict quotas and was officially integrated in 1948. Threat attends to the close connection between black nurses and the larger civil rights movement, detailing the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN) leadership coordination with the NAACP and the ANA. The civil rights community was so attentive to the integration of nursing at the national level that in 1955, when the NACGN joined the ANA, Langston Hughes offered a celebratory poem. Integration did not mean full acceptance, however, and Threat notes the difficulty black nurses had in civilian communities when they left base.

The language that established the ANC in 1903 codified nursing as a profession of women. Male nurses who joined the Army had no guarantee that their professional skill would be utilized even as corpsmen. The women leaders of the ANC saw men as potentially introducing conflict within the corps itself, as men were eligible for higher pay, and more institutional support than women. Other arguments for and against men in civilian nursing upheld the same gender stereotypes that kept them out of the ANC. For example, during the military conflicts of the twentieth century advocates for men in nursing relied on gender stereotypes to argue that male nurses could be stationed in dangerous combat zones, thereby protecting the female nurses. By the later conflict in Vietnam commanders argued that the presence of women in combat zones offered much-needed morale to wounded soldiers. Unlike the case for black women in the ANC, there was no coexisting advocacy movement to support men in nursing, and this lack, coupled with their relatively smaller numbers, delayed the integration of the ANC along gender lines. Men gained access to ANC as reservists only in 1955 and were not fully admitted into the ANC until 1966. Men’s activism within nursing is relatively unknown, and one of the strengths of Threat’s work is her attention to this story.

She uses an impressive array of nursing, military, governmental, public, and personal sources to weave together the incremental steps toward integration. Although her inclusion of historical statistical information of black women and men in nursing is interesting, her work would benefit from an accompanying analysis. The complexity of this story, and the truly incremental nature of progress, would benefit this history as a much-needed supplement to the text.

Threat’s work demonstrates the powerful social status of nursing, in creating a...