Nurses Challenging Subordination: Gender, Class and Religion in Britain's Crimean War

Beginning in October, 1854, middle-class female volunteers, paid nurses, and members of Anglican and Roman Catholic women's religious orders left Britain and Ireland to work as military nurses in the Crimean War. Florence Nightingale has received thorough scholarly and popular analysis, but the rest of the contingent is understudied. The Crimean War was the first conflict in which British women worked as military nurses. In this dissertation, the author analyzes the nurses' work through the perspectives of gender, class and religion, using their correspondence, journals, contemporary letters, news articles and documents. The author argues that military nursing provided women with a unique opportunity which they seized to widen their "sphere." This service allowed them to contravene the usual strictures on genteel female behavior and work against anti-Catholic bias.