Reforming Women's Reformatories: Elizabeth Fry, Penal Reform, and the State, 1950-1970

Sangster, Joan

doi:10.3138/chr.85.2.227

Cited by 3 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…Before Nightingale's tenure, Kaiserswerth was founded as a refuge for formerly‐incarcerated women, a transitional space to facilitate reentry to life outside prison (Robb, 2017). Nightingale (1851) herself wrote about Kaiserswerth, noting that the institution was, by her time there, ‘so well known that the history of its rise, will perhaps be interesting’ (p. 11), a throwaway remark but one that almost anticipates the centrality Nightingale herself would assume in the discipline of nursing, entangled as she is in the historical ontology of the profession.…”

Section: A Different Frame: a Sidelong Look At Kaiserswerthmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Kaiserswerth was the first institution of its kind in Germany, founded by Theodor and Fredericka Fliedner (Nutting & Dock, 1907). At the advanced age of 22, Lutheran minister Theodor Fliedner established a parish in Kaiserswerth on the Rhine, a German textile manufacturing town teetering on the edge of precarity in 1821 (Nightingale, 1851; Robb, 2017). Not long after Fliedner's pastoral tenure began, the manufactory failed.…”

Section: A Different Frame: a Sidelong Look At Kaiserswerthmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In her 1912 treatise on nursing ethics, Isabel Hampton Robb wrote of Fliedner's efforts, ‘he set about founding an asylum for discharged women prisoners and appealed to Christian womanhood to support him in his work. In 1833, the first prisoner, who later became the first deaconess, arrived in Kaiserwerth [ sic ]’ (Robb, 1912/2017). In this telling, nurse educator, theorist and leader Robb suggested that the first deaconess was drawn from the ranks of the previously incarcerated women Fliedner set out to save.…”

Section: Shifting the Framementioning

confidence: 99%

“…And while Robb repeated this (possibly tall) tale regarding the first deaconess of Kaiserswerth, elsewhere she comments at length on the atrocities of the early hospital and the fitness of those who staffed them, writing

The hospitals stood for all that was bad; they were lazar‐houses not only of physical horrors, but also of moral iniquity; the nursing was relegated to those among women who were not considered of sufficient respect to be entrusted with the most menial of domestic work, and whose moral turpitude was equalled only by their incompetence (Robb, 2017, p. 23).…”

Section: Shifting the Framementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The hospitals stood for all that was bad; they were lazar‐houses not only of physical horrors, but also of moral iniquity; the nursing was relegated to those among women who were not considered of sufficient respect to be entrusted with the most menial of domestic work, and whose moral turpitude was equalled only by their incompetence (Robb, 2017, p. 23).…”

Section: Shifting the Framementioning

confidence: 99%

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Telling a different story: Historiography, ethics, and possibility for nursing

Dillard‐Wright

2023

Nursing Philosophy

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With this paper, I will interrogate some of the implications of nursing's dominant historiography, the history written by and about nursing, and its implications for nursing ethics as a praxis, invoking feminist philosopher Donna Haraway's mantra that ‘it matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.’ First, I will describe what I have come to understand as the nursing imaginary, a shared consciousness constructed both by nurses from within and by those outside the discipline from without. This imaginary is fashioned in part by the histories nursing produces about the discipline, our historical ontology, which is demonstrative of our disciplinary values and the ethics we practice today. I assert that how we choose to constitute ourselves as a discipline is itself an ethical endeavour, bound up with how we choose to be and what we allow as knowledge in nursing. To animate this discussion, I will outline the received historiography of nursing and dwell in the possibilities of thinking about Kaiserswerth, the training school that prepared Nightingale for her exploits in Crimea and beyond. I will briefly consider the normative values that arise from this received history and consider the possibilities that these normative values foreclose upon. I then shift the frame and ask what might be possible if we centred Kaiserswerth's contested legacy as a training school for formerly incarcerated women, letting go of the sanitary and sanitised visions of nursing as Victorian angels in the hospital. Much energy over the past 250 years has been invested in the professionalisation and legitimation of nursing, predicated (at least in our shared imaginary) on the interventions of Florence Nightingale, but this is one possibility of many. I conclude with a speculative dream of the terrain opens up for nursing if we shed this politics and ethos of respectability and professionalism and instead embrace community, abolition and mutual aid as organising values for the discipline.

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Section: A Different Frame: a Sidelong Look At Kaiserswerthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Different Frame: a Sidelong Look At Kaiserswerthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Shifting the Framementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Shifting the Framementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Shifting the Framementioning

confidence: 99%

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Telling a different story: Historiography, ethics, and possibility for nursing

Dillard‐Wright

2023

Nursing Philosophy

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Historical Perspectives: Bibliography

2017

Canadian Historical Review

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Prison Activism on Trial: Canadian Feminists Mobilize against the Carceral State during the 1970s

Sangster

2024

Canadian Journal of Women and the Law

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This article uses the 1978–79 trial of Vancouver prison activists and feminists Betsy Wood and Gay Hoon as a means of exploring the changing nature of feminist prison activism in Canada during the 1970s. The trial is placed in its historical context, with a focus on contemporary discussions about reform, abolition, and the carceral state, particularly in the feminist press and feminist organizations. The Wood/Hoon trial is explored through an analysis of both media accounts and archival records, including the very few records of the trial that survived. Discussion surrounding the trial shows the changing nature of feminist thinking about prisons: older feminist traditions of “helping” reform were challenged with new, left-wing, more radical perspectives that argued that all incarceration sustained and perpetuated forms of gender, race, and class social control.

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Reforming Women's Reformatories: Elizabeth Fry, Penal Reform, and the State, 1950-1970

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Telling a different story: Historiography, ethics, and possibility for nursing

Telling a different story: Historiography, ethics, and possibility for nursing

Historical Perspectives: Bibliography

Prison Activism on Trial: Canadian Feminists Mobilize against the Carceral State during the 1970s

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