Au-delà de Florence Nightingale

Beyond Florence

Call for Bloggers 

In recognition of the 200th anniversary of Florence Nightingale’s birth, 2020 is the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife. Often called the mother of modern nursing, Nightingale’s contribution to the professionalization of nurse education and practice is significant, but there is more to the history of nursing than that. To focus solely on Nightingale is to create the idea that nursing did not exist before 1820, and that the profession was created by one woman – and neither of those things are true.

Now, 2020 is also the year of COVID-19, in which nurses are prominent in the media and popular imagination. They have been hailed as heroes, yet expected to go to work without adequate equipment. Many have died, and more have been fired when they dare to speak out. And as historians of medicine turn to the past to explore previous pandemics for solutions and lessons, where are the histories of nursing?

For Beyond Florence, Nursing Clio invites pitches for essays of 500–1,500 words that complicate our understanding of how nursing has evolved as a profession and a practice of care. We invite contributions that seek to complicate the intersection between race, class, and gender in caring work and that take us beyond the limitations of 200 years of white women’s nursing history. We are interested in pieces that disrupt the narrative of nurses as heroes or explore the way that people called nurses have sought to destabilize professional boundaries. We also welcome essays that demonstrate the complicated politics of caregiving and that highlight the efforts of groups or individuals to engage an ethics of social justice in their work.

Please send your pitch – a few sentences on your topic – and a CV to nursingclio@gmail.com by July 15, 2020. Essays will be due in August to be published over the fall.

Contributing

Want to contribute? We’re eager to include new voices and welcome writing on a wide range of topics. If you would like to write with us, send an email to nursingclio@gmail.com introducing yourself. Please attach a your CV/resume, and give us two article ideas — pieces you could see yourself writing and publishing on the site.

There are a variety of interesting pieces on the site, but if you think you might be interested in contributing and want to get a sense of our style and tone, we suggest you review our Style Guide and check out these examples:

What’s in your Vulva?, by Elizabeth Reis

See Sally Menstruate, by Jacqueline Antonovich

George Washington’s Bodies, by Thomas A. Foster

Punishing Pushy Women: Gender and Power in the Newsroom, by Carrie Adkins

The Paralympics, Past and Present, by Adam Turner

If the IUD is an Abortifacient, then so is Chemotherapy and Lunch Meat, by Lara Freidenfelds

A Little About Us

We’re an open access, collaborative blog project that ties historical scholarship to current political, social, and cultural issues related to gender and medicine. Bodies, sexuality, health care, medical technology, and reproductive rights play central roles in both political debate and popular culture. Our tagline — “The Personal is Historical” — emphasizes the fact that these issues don’t develop spontaneously; they represent ongoing dialogues that reach far back into the past.

Nursing Clio provides a platform for historians, students, health care workers, community activists, and the public at large to analyze, discuss, and debate these kinds of connections between the present and the past. We do publish long-form, scholarly pieces, but we also want to focus on shorter, historically-informed responses to the world around us — current events, music, film, television, sports, and anything else that intersects with gender and medicine. We want, ultimately, to create a balance between fun conversations, political debate, and serious scholarship.

We are an all-volunteer group, from our editorial team to our contributors. To learn more about Nursing Clio, see our about page or meet the NC team.