Elaine Marieb College of Nursing at UMass Amherst
Race, Racism, and Reproduction in Public Health Nursing, 1900-1940
Public health nursing and eugenics in the United States both reached their height in the years 1900-1930. While nurses have often been presented as the enforcement mechanism in systems developed by physicians, public health nurses had the distinction of being fairly autonomous, particularly in underserved communities. This project will explore how nurses understood and operationalized categories of racialized difference, and how they actively adjusted those categories in the context of increased immigration as well as the U.S. Great Migration. It will focus on nurses’ work in sexual and reproductive health to highlight intersections of racialization with gender and disability.