Speaker: Nancy Rosoff, PhD
Associate Dean for Administration and Academic Program Development
Rutgers University-Camden

Title: “I can’t think of anything more useful than nursing’: Nursing, Home, and Female Identity in British and American Career Novels, 1940-1960”

Abstract: This paper draws upon a larger project that I am working on with Dr. Stephanie Spencer of the Faculty of Education, Health, and Social Care at the University of Winchester. Our project seeks to identify transnational femininities in particular subgenres of fiction written for teenage girls in the fir4st half of the twentieth century. After a brief discussion of how we are developing our transnational methodology, I will then explain how the increasing significance of a degree of economic activity contributed to a construction of a female identity in search of equilibrium between home and work. This paper reflects upon two key aspects of the nursing novels: the decision to become a nurse and subsequent entry into nursing laid out in the early chapters of each novel, and a discussion of the inevitable romance that was, and is, essential in any fictional depiction of hospital life. In this paper I use the notion of equilibrium between work and home to explore how a transnational analysis demonstrates the way that the performance of ideal femininity served simultaneously to confirm women’s significance within the rebuilding of the nation and to reveal how a universal womanhood, drawing on the apparently natural characteristics of duty, caring, nurturing, and obedience, could transcend national boundaries, moving toward an ideal of global gendered citizenship

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