Gendered spaces, gendered pages: Union women in Civil War nurse narratives

Abstract

This interdisciplinary analysis joins literary and culture studies with history using Daphne Spain's theory of gendered spaces. Specifically, we examine the reconfiguration of the spaces of military medical work and of book publishing that produced popular literary representations of those medical spaces. As a social historian of nursing and a scholar of American literature and culture, we argue that the examination of Civil War narratives by or about Northern female nurses surveys a landscape in which women penetrated the masculine spaces of the military hospital and the literary spaces of the wartime narrative. In so doing, these women transformed these spaces into places acknowledging and even relying upon what had been traditionally considered male domains. Like many historiographical papers written about nurses and the impact of their practice over time, this work is relevant to those practicing nursing today, specifically those issues related to professional authority and professional autonomy.