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  • Nursing and Empire: Gendered Labor and Migration from India to the United States by Sujani Reddy
  • Caitlin Henry
Sujani Reddy, Nursing and Empire: Gendered Labor and Migration from India to the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2015)

Sujani Reddy's Nursing and Empire traces the Anglo-American imperial origins of Indian nurse migration to the United States. Placing the US, rather than Britain, at the centre of her analysis of empire, Reddy complicates how colonialism [End Page 301] operated in India. She outlines over a century of US involvement in Indian public health and health care labour, exploring the United States' important role in the broader history of colonialism, decolonization, and global health philanthropy. She outlines how the work of American health professionals and philanthropic organizations, most significantly the Rockefeller Foundation, not only developed nursing as a profession in India, but in the process, also created a transnational Indian nurse labour market. Reddy bases her argument on archival research and life-history interviews with migrant Indian nurses working and living in New York City. She situates these migrant nurses' experiences within a broader historical political-economic context, to draw out the transnational constitution of the nursing profession.

Reddy powerfully complicates the feminization of nursing. Contrary to the case in the Anglo West, where nursing was seen as a suitable profession for white women because it relied on women's "natural" nurturing qualities, nursing in India was associated with lower classes and castes of women because of the intimate body work and cleaning involved in the everyday labour on the job. Over time, feminization brought changes, shifting it from a job of "dirty work" for lower class women into a respected profession and mode of upward mobility for many women in India – while, importantly, still dependent upon its stigmatized legacy.

The first half of Nursing and Empire pulls apart the stigmatized feminization of nursing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in India. Focusing primarily on the role of the Rockefeller Foundation, Reddy demonstrates how nursing evolved in tandem with mission work and then with the development of public health. In this process the back-and-forth of nursing labour migration between the US and India began as missionary nurses and Rockefeller Foundation nurses came to establish nursing training programs in India, and Indian nurses travelled temporarily to the US for training and experience, via Rockefeller Foundation support.

Nursing and Empire, thus, adds depth and nuance to the history of American nursing, helping to situate it as part and parcel of the global history of nursing. In the second half of the book, Reddy shows how women used nursing to assert new class positions and were active agents, not passive migrants, in the development of nursing in India as well as in the nursing workforce in the US over the 20th century. Chapters 5 through 8 draw on life-histories of nurses who immigrated to the US during the Cold War. The chapters examine how changes to immigration law and a series of nurse shortages in the US both opened the door for nurse immigration and established the distinctly foreign nurse as an integral part of the American nurse workforce.

Overall, Reddy's text is a powerful one. This book is a valuable resource for many scholars in different fields, touching on health, gender, labour, and imperialism. Given its focus on nursing labour migration, feminist scholars – and especially those with an interest in labour and care – will find Nursing and Empire to be quite useful. The book adds nuance to the broader literature on the feminization of migration and on care work with its attention to the details and influences of place, race, gender, class, and caste with a transnational lens. This is an important work contributing to an intersectional analysis of gender, migration, and care, as well as the history of nursing. The book brings a specifically global intimate lens to the study of nursing and migration, demonstrating that the global workings of the nursing profession and health philanthropy are mutually constituted with the intimacies of Kerala society and nurses' personal and work lives. [End Page 302]

Focusing on the heavy...

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