Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890-1950

by Darlene Clark Hine

Genres: History, Research, Nonfiction, Medical

Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Bblacksin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book should be required reading for every nurse and allies. It discusses the struggle for professional integration in education and employment during the period of 1890 to 1950. Hine, an historian, provides a readable narrative describing/analyzing a fascinating period in nursing history. Those interested in the issue of structural racism can learn much from this history of nursing. Nursing leaders during the period were unsung heroes and brilliant organizers. Highly recommended.

[Sasha (bahareads) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Darlene Clark Hine is looking at the rise of Black professional Nursing and the development of institutional infrastructure of Black nursing. The central unifying focus of this book is the efforts of Afro-American healthcare professionals to assemble an institutional and organisational arsenal with which to combat racism inside the healthcare establishment. Clark Hine writes about the history of Black women nurses to probe questions of the relationship between class and race. She seeks to explain precisely how they acquired agency, and the power and resources to bring down the wall of racial exclusion, segregation, and discrimination.

Clark Hine's book is a study of the successes and failures of Black nurses from the 1890s-1950. She says that the history of Black nursing is a microcosm of the history of Afro-Americans. It is a "complex, and often contradictory, history of conflict and cooperation." Clark Hine says nurses were supposed to deal with the patient as part of the broader social system. It was to embrace the entire community. The dependence was mutual.

This book is very very old. Clark Hine's narrative is very dry. In tracing institutions there were just so many organizations, names, and dates that it made it a tad boring. This book is so important to the foundation of this type of history, but I longed for something more readable. I did really enjoy seeing how Black nurses did not let institutional obstacles stop them. They made their own organizations when White orgs like the AMA excluded them.

The development of black nursing training in the North was inseparable from the fortunes of hospitals and the development of political disputes between doctors and admin overseers. Nursing training in the South was offered at only FEW black hospitals. This should be unsurprising but the most vexing medical problem in the Black community is the high Black infant and maternal mortality rate (and it's still so so stink now).

Nurses had to home a dual consciousness of themselves as Black professionals. Within Black orgs Black nurses got agency and became forces of social change Read this book if you want to see the plight of what Black nurses had to go through, and how they helped pave the way.