From nursing sisters to a sisterhood of nurses: German nurses and transnational professionalization, 1836-1918.

Abstract

Between the 1830s and World War I, German nurses engaged in collaborative efforts with American and British nurses for the purpose of transforming their work into a respectable profession for women. This dissertation reasserts the importance of German nurses in the development of a profession, not only because they were actively involved in the movement, but also because many transnationally-influential nursing ideologies and organizational models originated in Germany. Through archived collections of personal letters, organizational records and publications, government transcripts, and speeches by German nurses, my project brings together artificially-separated national nursing traditions at key moments in their shared history of nursing professionalization. As such, the writings and activities of these German women offer illuminating evidence of the historical intersections among professional class formation, gender relations, and organizational development as they occurred simultaneously on a local, national, and transnational scale.