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WORK TITLE: Nursing Civil Rights
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Charissa Joy Threat
BIRTHDATE: 1976
WEBSITE:
CITY:
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http://www.spelman.edu/academics/majors-and-programs/history/faculty/charissa-threat * http://www.spelman.edu/docs/faculty_cv/faculty_charissathreatcv.pdf?sfvrsn=0
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1976.
EDUCATION:University of California, Santa Barbara, B.A., 1998; University of Louisiana, Lafayette, M.A., 2001; University of Iowa, Ph.D., 2008.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Historian, educator, and writer. University of Iowa, Iowa City, Jonathan Walton Fellow; Northeastern University, Boston, MA, Humanities Center Fellow, 2008-11, assistant professor, 2008-13; Spelman College, Atlanta, GA, assistant professor of history, 2013—.
WRITINGS
Contributor of chapters to various academic books. Contributor of articles to Gender and History and Clio’s Quill; contributor of reviews to Nursing History Review, Minerva Journal of Women and War, Internet Review of Books, and H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online.
SIDELIGHTS
Charissa J. Threat is an academic and historian. After earning degrees from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, Threat completed a Ph.D. at the University of Iowa in 2008, where she served as a Jonathan Walton Fellow. Threat worked as an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University from 2008 until 2013, when she became an assistant professor of history at Atlanta’s Spelman College. Threat has published articles in Gender and History and Clio’s Quill; reviews in Nursing History Review, Minerva Journal of Women and War, Internet Review of Books, and H-Net: Humanities ands Social Sciences Online; and also chapters in various academic books. Her academic research interests cover twentieth-century U.S. cultural and social history with a focus on African Americans, civil rights, social justice, gender issues, and civil-military relations.
Threat published her first book, Nursing Civil Rights: Gender and Race in the Army Nurse Corps, in 2015. Drawing largely from archival research, Threat looks into the history of the Army Nurse Corps between 1940 and 1966 to illustrate the challenges faced by white men and black women in their efforts to fully integrate themselves within the organization and achieve gender and racial equality. Threat argues that it was not women’s rights activism that led the charge for greater equality, as in some cases women attempted to prevent male nurses from acquiring equal status within the field after achieving it themselves. Threat places her argument in the larger context of a series of civil rights movements where concern for gender, race, economic, and labor inequalities were intermingled.
Writing in the Women’s Review of Books, Jane E. Schultz commented: “Threat makes it a point to call nursing an ‘occupation’ rather than a ‘profession.’ She bases this distinction on both military policy and the ANC’s demographic gatekeeping until the second half of the twentieth century, when first African American women and then white men were finally admitted to its ranks. She argues that until then, nurses had not professionalized to the same extent as doctors: doctors were still expected to supervise them. However, during the early twentieth century, nurses were being licensed and nursing procedures established, making Threat’s claim somewhat unpersuasive.” Schultz conceded that “Threat more convincingly demonstrates that white women’s privilege was linked to their claim that intimate body work should be left to them—an argument founded on racist and essentialist assumptions as much as on historical precedent.”
In a review in the Journal of Southern History, Judy Barrett Litoff observed that “throughout this book, Threat claims more than she actually accomplishes,” adding that the author “equivocates and overgeneralizes.” Litoff concluded that “Nursing Civil Rights would have made an excellent scholarly article. Unfortunately, it does not meet the standards of a book-length study.” In a review in Choice, however, M. Linehan “highly recommended” Nursing Civil Rights, noting that “good charts at the end of the book contain demographic data about African American and male nurses.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, May, 2016, M. Linehan, review of Nursing Civil Rights: Gender and Race in the Army Nurse Corps, p. 1385.
Journal of Southern History, August, 2016, Judy Barrett Litoff, review of Nursing Civil Rights, p. 729.
Women’s Review of Books, July-August, 2016, Jane E. Schultz, review of Nursing Civil Rights, p. 14.
ONLINE
Spelman College Web site, http://www.spelman.edu/ (February 21, 2017), author profile.
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1Charissa Joy ThreatAddress: 350 Spelman Lane, SW, Box 823 Department of History, Spelman College Atlanta, GA 30314-4399 Office Phone: (404) 270-5517 Email: cthreat@spelman.eduEMPLOYMENTAssistant Professer, Spelman College, Department of History, 2013- current Assistant Professer, Northeastern University, Department of History, 2008-2013 EDUCATIONPH. D University of Iowa, Jonathan Walton Fellow20th Century U. S. Social and Cultural History, 2008 Dissertation: Re-Imagining Civil Rights: The Campaign to Integrate the Army NurseCorps, 1940-1966M.A University of Louisiana, Lafayette20th Century United States Social and Public History, May 2001 Thesis: Years of Triumph, Years of Doubt: U.S. Army Nurses in theKorean and Vietnam Wars.B.A. University of California, Santa Barbara20th Century United States History and Foreign Relations, June 1998 HONORS AND AWARDSHumanities Center Fellow, Northeastern University, 2008-2011 Visiting Dissertation Scholar-in-Residence, Northeastern University, 2007-2008 Center of Military History Dissertation Fellowship, 2007-2008, (declined) Laurence Lafore Dissertation Research Fellowship, University of Iowa, 2006 Jonathan Walton Fellow, University of Iowa, 2001-2006 Recipient of a Smithsonian Minority Fellowship/Internship, Smithsonian Institute, Summer 2001 Educational Internship, Smithsonian Institute, American History Museum, Summer 2000 Member, Phi Beta Delta: Honor Society for International Scholars, University of Louisiana, 2001 Recipient of the Charles B. Allen Award for Contributions to Phi Alpha Theta, University of Louisiana, Lafayette, 2001 Recipient of the Theresa Allen Award for Public History, University of Louisiana, Lafayette, 2001 Recipient of the Theresa Allen Award for Public History, University of Louisiana, Lafayette, 2000 GRANTSSpelman College Faculty Small Grant, 2014.
2Mellon Planning Grant for Digital Diasporic Spaces Project between R1 and Liberal Arts Colleges, 2014, Invited Participant. PUBLICATIONSBooks:Nursing Civil Rights: Gender, Race, and the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, 1939-1969 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015) Articles and Book Chapters:“’The hands that might save them’: Gender, race, and the politics of nursing during World War II,” Gender and History (August 2012): 456-474. “Out From Behind the Shadows of Men: SLI Women Go To War, 1939-1945,”Clio’s Quill, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2001. “Does the Sex of the Practitioner Matter? Nursing, Civil Rights, and Discrimination in the Army Nurse Corps, 1947-1952” in Integrating the U.S. Military: African Americans, Women, and Gays Since World War II (forthcoming, Johns Hopkins University Press, April 2017). “‘Patriotism is Neither Masculine nor Feminine’: Gender and the Work of War,” in Routledge Handbook of Gender, War and the US Military, Kara Dixon Vuic, ed. (forthcoming, Routledge). In progress:“Searching for Colored Pin-Up Girls: Race, Gender and Sexuality during World War II,” (work in progress). “Illustrating Racial Protest: Melvin Tapley and the Editorial Cartoons of the New York AmsterdamNew, 1941-1945,” (work in progress). “Urban Civil Rights and the Rise of Black Power.” (commissioned work in progress for the Journal ofUrban History) Reviews:Review: Jane Brooks and Christine E. Hallett, eds. One Hundred Years of Wartime Nursing Practices, 1854-1853 (Manchester University Press, 2015). Nursing History Review 25 (2017): 178-180. Review: Mary Sarnecky. A Contemporary History of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps (Washington, D.C.: Borden Institute, 2010). Minerva Journal of Women and War (Fall 2010). Review: Christine E. Hallett. Containing Trauma: Nursing work in the First World War (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009). www.h-net.org~minerva/ September 2010.
Charissa Threat, Ph.D. Back to List
Charissa Threat
Assistant Professor
History
Faculty member since 2013
350 Spelman Lane
Atlanta, Georgia 30314
Email: cthreat@spelman.edu
Phone: 404-270-5517
Office Location: The Camille Olivia Hanks Cosby, Ed.D. Academic Center 410
EDUCATION
Ph.D., University of Iowa
M.A., University of Louisiana-Lafayette
B.A., University of California-Santa Barbara
COURSES TAUGHT
HIST 201: Introduction to History
HIST 211 Survey of American History, before 1875
HIST 212 Survey of American History, since 1875 (Lecture Course)
HIST 221 Survey of African American History, before 1875
HIST 222 Survey of African American History, since 1875
HIST 303 Making of the Modern World
HIST 314 Women in the USA
HIST 315 African American Women’s History
HIST 318 The Cold War
HIST 401 Race, War, and Civil Rights
HIST 421 Black Women’s Biography
HIST 424 Race and Gender Frontiers: U.S. Encounters with Empire
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Dr. Threat's research interests include: twentieth century U.S. social and cultural history with a particular emphasis on African Americans, women and gender issues, civil rights and social justice, and civil-military relations.
SELECT PUBLICATIONS
Books
Nursing Civil Rights: Gender, Race, and the U.S. Army Nurse Corps (University of Illinois Press) 2015.
Articles and Book Chapters
“’The hands that might save them’: Gender, race, and the politics of nursing during World War II,” Gender and History (August 2012): 456-474.
“Does the Sex of the Practitioner Matter? Nursing, Civil Rights, and Discrimination in the Army Nurse Corps, 1947-1952” in Integrating the U.S. Military: African Americans, Women, and Gays Since World War II (forthcoming, Johns Hopkins University Press, April 2017).
“‘Patriotism is Neither Masculine nor Feminine’: Gender and the Work of War,” in Routledge Handbook of Gender, War and the US Military, Kara Dixon Vuic, ed. (forthcoming, Routledge).
Racism, sexism, and nursing
Jane E. Schultz
The Women's Review of Books. 33.4 (July-August 2016): p14.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Old City Publishing, Inc.
http://www.wcwonline.org/womensreview
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Nursing Civil Rights: Gender and Race in the Army Nurse Corps
By Charissa J. Threat
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015, 198 pp., $25.00, paperback
Charissa Threat's Nursing Civil Rights provides a welcome--if shameful--amendment to the history of nursing in the United States. Readers may not be surprised that Threat's examination of nursing's organizational evolution yields new insights about the racial politics of alliance and division, given the segregation of many professions, nursing included, well into the twentieth century. What one does not expect, however, is the extent to which military nursing became a beachhead for the exclusion of men. Once white nursing leaders had founded a space apart from the exclusive and fraternal provinces of medicine--a kind of "separate-but-equal" professional turf--they were loath to turn over their hard-won autonomy to anyone else. Despite the professional subordination military nurses themselves had experienced, they did not apply inclusive standards to their own membership practices.
From the end of the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century, some wartime hospital workers had attempted to create a government-sanctioned military nurse corps. But groups such as the ExNurse's Association of the District of Columbia, founded by Dorothea Dix in 1881, and the National Association of Army Nurses, which grew out of Dix's organization, set their sights elsewhere. Their primary goal was to gain pensions for former hospital workers. Secondarily, they supported the development and expansion of military nurse-training programs. The looming Spanish-American War in the 1890s reanimated women's nursing ambitions, and they served in the Philippines, Hawaii, and the Caribbean. Finally, in 1901, under the supervision of Anita Newcomb Magee, a noted gynecologist, the army established the Army Nurse Corps (ANC)--the main focus of Threat's study.
Threat makes it a point to call nursing an "occupation" rather than a "profession." She bases this distinction on both military policy and the ANC's demographic gatekeeping until the second half of the twentieth century, when first African American women and then white men were finally admitted to its ranks. She argues that until then, nurses had not professionalized to the same extent as doctors: doctors were still expected to supervise them. However, during the early twentieth century, nurses were being licensed and nursing procedures established, making Threat's claim somewhat unpersuasive. Despite nurses' growing scientific and technological acumen, physicians worked hard to keep them subordinate. They were as determined as the nurses to maintain race and gender boundaries. Threat more convincingly demonstrates that white women's privilege was linked to their claim that intimate body work should be left to them--an argument founded on racist and essentialist assumptions as much as on historical precedent.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Excluded from white nursing organizations, black nurses established the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN) in 1908. Despite a critical nursing shortage during World War I, they failed to gain a foothold in the ANC--although eighteen black nurses were appointed to care for male soldiers during the 1918 flu pandemic. African American nurses "constantly struggled between searching for economic opportunity and professional recognition on one hand, and challenging discrimination and racism on the other," writes Threat.
Not until World War II, and then only in segregated units, were black nurses finally allowed into the ANC. On the eve of US involvement in World War II, Mabel K. Staupers, a Barbadian immigrant and graduate of Freedmen's Hospital Nursing School in Washington, DC, who had already compiled an impressive record in tuberculosis nursing and had served as secretary of the NACGN, appealed to President Franklin Roosevelt to admit black women into the ANC. In response, in 1942, the Army Medical Department and Surgeon General's Office established a quota to appoint 65 black nurses to tend to black soldiers under the corp's auspices. These women became official ANC members, but the limits on their numbers kept hundreds of willing participants out of the service. Even though, by 1944, 700,000 African American men were serving in the military, quotas dictated that only 330 nurses, less than one percent of the available black nurses, were tending to their needs--an obvious undersupply that "adversely affected the healthcare of the entire fighting force," writes Threat. As the supply of white nurses dwindled, military leaders discussed drafting more white nurses into the ANC--enraging Staupers and others who knew that if the military accepted black nurses that would more than make up for the shortage. In the end, out of more than 8,000 black RNs available nationally, less than three percent would find their way to the Pacific or European fronts. Such incendiary developments lit the indignation of the growing civil rights movement, and black nurses, who had invested so much in fighting institutional prejudice, were among its most seasoned plaintiffs.
As late as the Korean War, black ANC nurses such as Captain Margaret Bailey were feeling the sting of discrimination. Thrilled finally to garner an appointment overseas, Bailey was not allowed to live with her white peers at their Munich base hospital. Even when black and white nurses cohabited, local restrictions usually barred them from dining or shopping together.
Men had served as military nurses as far back as the crusades of the eleventh-century, and male-only nursing schools were established in the US during the early twentieth century for white and black men, yet the ANC did not admit men to its ranks until 1955, when a Reserve Officers' Corps was established expressly for men to authorize their Korean War service. Threat posits that the same gender prescriptions that assigned the care of strangers' bodies to women stalled this development. And even with the establishment of the Officer's Corps, men's motives for choosing nursing were called into question: how, during wartime, could the nation afford to have men doing nursing rather than the manly work of soldiering? Male nurses were suspected of being malingerers or homosexuals. Thus, not only racial and gender barriers but also cold-war homophobic panic stood in the way of men's quest to become military nurses. These intersectional dynamics are unusual, a rare example of a case in which men failed to profit from their social privilege.
The same kinds of military policies that had limited the use of black nurses during both world wars, despite nursing shortages, penalized thousands of available male nurses, who were cordoned off into "gender-appropriate" roles such as workplace or psychiatric nursing. Common sense might have dictated that men would make excellent military nurses for whom few warfront accommodations would need to be made, but women's years-long struggle to gain a place in military nursing, and indeed their reluctance to let go of their hard-won professional status, only inverted this logic. Nursing leaders raised questions about housing men alongside women in nursing barracks. Could the same restrictions that prevented women from marrying while in service be applied to men? When women had superior military rank, would male nurses obey them? The military's decades-long support of women as the sole proprietors of military nursing compounded levels of discrimination--until men made the protectionist case that women were vulnerable to assault in military settings.
Not until 1964, and the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act, were men, both white and black, integrated into nursing without quotas. However, the legal opening of nursing to all comers did not assure tolerance or inclusiveness. The ANC had accepted African Americans into its ranks during a time when the notion of black women nursing white military bodies was shocking to many. It had grudgingly admitted men, despite worries that they would rise in the profession and ultimately dominate women. Ironies abound in this story of military nursing along the coordinates of the civil rights movement. Threat demonstrates that the ANC was dilatory in its application of social justice and that, despite the Army's insistence that it was not "an instrument of social reform," it became more progressive, through its gradual exercise of integration, than the army nurses who wanted a club of their own.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Jane E. Schultz is professor of English and Medical Humanities at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis and co-editor of the University of Manchester (UK) book series, Nursing History and Humanities. The PBS drama Mercy Street made use of her expertise on Civil War-period nursing and hospital work.
Nursing Civil Rights: Gender and Race in the Army Nurse Corps
Judy Barrett Litoff
Journal of Southern History. 82.3 (Aug. 2016): p729.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
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Nursing Civil Rights: Gender and Race in the Army Nurse Corps. By Charissa J. Threat. Women in American History. (Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Pp. [xii], 198. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-0-252-08077-7; cloth, $85.00, ISBN 978-0-0252-03920-1.)
Nursing Civil Rights: Gender and Race in the Army Nurse Corps by Charissa J. Threat is a slim volume that looks at issues confronting African American women and white men as they campaigned to enter the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) on an equal footing with white women. The discrimination faced by African American female nurses that Threat examines is well known. In particular, discussions of the work of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, under the leadership of Mabel K. Staupers during the first half of the twentieth century, are a standard feature of many nursing histories. Threat acknowledges these nursing sources, but she also presents the history of the prejudice and discrimination encountered by African Americans in a way that suggests she has uncovered their story. While the history of white male nurses is not as well known as that of African American female nurses, it is nonetheless a history that has also been explored. Threat, however, misleadingly suggests that her study presents a new perspective on male nursing history and the campaigns of both white male nurses and African American female nurses to achieve parity in the ANC.
Throughout this book, Threat claims more than she actually accomplishes. In her introduction, she states, "This study links the story of the Army Nurse Corps to critical events in the United States between World War II and the Vietnam War" (p. 3). But she devotes fewer than fifty pages to this complicated topic. Moreover, she diverts her attention from the ANC to focus on larger social issues such as the nursing profession's efforts to become "part of the 'frontline' in maintaining America's strength against the disease of communism" (p. 79). Similarly, her discussion of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s in this reviewer's opinion loses sight of race and gender challenges encountered by the ANC.
Throughout this work, Threat equivocates and overgeneralizes. For example, she states that the Harry S. Truman administration's "policy of nondiscrimination in the armed forces as a means to strengthen the U.S. image abroad and reduce domestic civil rights tensions had mixed results as neither a complete failure nor a complete success" (p. 106). Yet she neglects to explore the significance of how integrated military bases in otherwise segregated southern towns and cities had a positive impact on race relations in the South. Likewise, in her brief concluding chapter, she argues that "[t]he history of the ANC suggests ... the civil rights movement of the twentieth century [was] ... at times progressive and conservative" (p. 129). In addition, key events in the history of the Army Nurse Corps, African American female nurses, and white male nurses remain largely submerged in broader discussions that are often repetitive. Nursing Civil Rights would have made an excellent scholarly article. Unfortunately, it is does not meet the standards of a book-length study.
JUDY BARRETT LITOFF
Bryant University
Litoff, Judy Barrett
Threat, Charissa J.: Nursing civil rights: gender and race in the Army Nurse Corps
M. Linehan
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.9 (May 2016): p1385.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Threat, Charissa J. Nursing civil rights: gender and race in the Army NurseCorps. Illinois,2015. 198p bibl index afp ISBN 9780252039201 cloth, $95.00; ISBN 9780252080777 pbk, $25.00
(cc) 53-4102
UH493
CIP
From extensive archival research, historian Threat (Spelman College) relates the complex campaigns of black women and white men who integrated the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) between 1940 and 1966. A precursor to Susan Malka's Daring to Care (CH, Apr'08, 45-4415) and with more focus on the internals of the ANC than Barbara Tomblin's G.I. Nightingales (1996), this book links nurses' struggles to broader drives for racial and gender justice. Threat challenges the convention that activism always leads in the direction of progressive social justice. She finds that some of the women who fought most strenuously for the inclusion and professional recognition of black women turned decidedly conservative and contrived to keep men out of the ANC. Threat recognizes that people must view the larger cause of civil rights as "several overlapping movements that were at times progressive and conservative, whose actors were concerned with not only race discrimination but gender inequality, sex discrimination, and economic and labor equity." Good charts at the end of the book contain demographic data about African American and male nurses. It would have been even more useful if these charts indicated the proportion of each group in the total population of military nurses. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. General and undergraduate collections.--M. Linehan, University of Texas at Tyler