In Nursing Civil Rights, Charissa J. Threat investigates the parallel battles against occupational segregation by African American women and white men in the U.S. Army.

As Threat reveals, both groups viewed their circumstances with the Army Nurse Corps as a civil rights matter. Each conducted separate integration campaigns to end the discrimination they suffered. Yet their stories defy the narrative that civil rights struggles inevitably arced toward social justice. Threat tells how progressive elements in the campaigns did indeed break down barriers in both military and civilian nursing. At the same time, she follows conservative threads to portray how some of the women who succeeded as agents of change became defenders of exclusionary practices when men sought military nursing careers. The ironic result was a struggle that simultaneously confronted and reaffirmed the social hierarchies that nurtured discrimination.

| Cover Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction 1. The Politics of Intimate Care: Gender, Race, and Nursing Work 2. "The Negro Nurse—A Citizen Fighting for Democracy": African Americans and the Army Nurse Corps 3. Nurse or Soldier? White Male Nurses and World War II 4. An American Challenge: Defense, Democracy, and Civil Rights after World War II 5. The Quality of a Person: Race and Gender Roles Re-Imagined? Conclusion Appendix A. Facts about Negro Nurses and the War Appendix B. Male Nurse Population, 1943 Appendix C. African American Nurse Population, 1940 Appendix D. Male and African American Nurse Population, 1950 Notes Selected Bibliography Index | Lavinia L. Dock Award for Exemplary Historical Research Writing, American Association for the History of Nursing, 2017. — American Association for the History of Nursing
|Charissa J. Threat is an assistant professor of history at Spelman College.