Editor’s Note

My opening gambit for this second volume is to thank everyone involved in Nursing History Review, for their hard work over the year. I hope you will agree that for this year’s NHR we are returning the journal to its former preeminence in the discipline, with a range of fascinating original research articles, papers from the AAHN Virtual Speakers Series, and a wealth of book and media reviews. So, my thanks to all our authors, the editorial team, and Pennsylvania State University Press for an excellent year’s work.As you will see from the front pages, we have broadened our editorial board in-line with the journal’s earlier board-membership numbers. I am grateful to all the excellent scholars from around the Anglophone world who have agreed to join us. The new extended board encompasses the broad range of the discipline and its diversity in many of its forms. I acknowledge that we need to extend beyond the West and hope that as the discipline extends its global reach, our board also can develop to encompass colleagues from a wider range of continents.And it is that diversity of the human experience that I wish to focus on in this second editorial. We are all only too aware of the struggles that people who do not conform face as the world lurches to the Right. We may not be surprised that in countries with hard-right leaders, such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary, there are very real attempts to ban events like Pride. However, it is not only in such countries that people’s differences are now being shunned and denied. From President Trump’s wish to ban trans people from the military to the recent United Kingdom’s Supreme Court ruling that “woman” refers to biological sex assigned at birth, living with difference is no longer something to be heralded. The ramifications of the change in UK law are wide-ranging, perhaps most especially as the United Kingdom has long held itself as a bastion of liberal democracy. While it is probably ahistorical to suggest that the world feels like the 1930s, the rise in antisemitism, Islamophobia, and racial hatred, stories of book burning, people being denied rights of access, and the increasing prohibitions on peaceful protest do sometimes appear reminiscent of those dark years.The questions of where nurses should stand on these issues and what historians of nursing should say about the loss of freedoms is too huge a subject for this editor’s note. However, that does not mean that we should not raise the specter of the burdens people face when we are able, and we should certainly embrace the full diversity of the world in which we live. To that end, I hope that this volume demonstrates the rich tapestry of our profession’s history, whether that be positive or something on which we need to reflect to accept historical culpability.The four original articles in this volume, therefore, give a voice to the agency of nurses and address questions of the profession’s narrative as white, single, heterosexual women. Cessato and Yearwood’s, and Wytenbroek and Phan’s papers both offer challenging essays on the blatant racism of hospital training programs before the 1960s. Even as the civil rights movement took hold, Black and people of color continued to face “othering” from both their white nurse and hospital leaders and their peer group. Tesseyman’s article on group nursing develops the narrative that far from nurses being passive recipients of their hospital’s expectations, they worked to improve their conditions from within, making career decisions based on their economic and social requirements. Our final original article is Dillard-Wright’s fascinating work on the Gay Nurses Alliance, organized in 1973, and CASSANDRA Radical Feminist Nurses Network, a lesbian separatist collective that formed in 1982. As with the two articles that discuss racism in nursing, the responses of the “established” world of heteronormative nursing speaks volumes to my consideration of our need to consider our culpability as a profession.The three articles in from the AAHN Virtual Speakers Series again reflect the diversity of the nursing experience across the centuries. Both Spinney and Tomkins explore the world of the prereform nurse. In an era when women—especially poor working women—were treated with suspicion, the nurses in their essays, are women with agency, social circles, and responsibility. This reframing of the prereform nurse is vital if we are to reevaluate the impact of Nightingale reforms and the development of the self-sacrificing angel trope in the profession. My own essay on Jewish nursing in Nazi concentration camps reasserts the importance of nursing as work and as a profession for those who undertake it. It speaks to the migrant nurse, who in regaining their right to registration reestablishes themselves as a professional. It also speaks to the personal challenges that nurses face when they work within totalitarian regimes.Finally, my thoughts go to the media and book reviews. The range of material that is now available on the history of nursing continues to grow and develops a critical space for nurses across the globe and their world of work. It is a great honor to be able to demonstrate this diversity in the reviews that NHR is publishing. My thanks therefore to colleagues whose meticulous analyses of these reviews enables us to reflect on the diversity of the nursing experience.