Say Little, Do Much

In Say Little, Do Much, Sioban Nelson offers the first extensive critical account of the role of vowed religious women (Roman Catholic and Anglican nuns and Protestant deaconesses) in the development of nursing in the West. Nelson's impressive synthesis of primary and secondary literature on religion, gender, medicine, and politics ranges across three continents and four religious traditions, opening up significant new directions for scholarship on women and work in the modern world. Organized nursing by religious women began in seventeenth-century France, but Nelson's study rightly focuses on the nineteenth century, when vowed women—particularly Roman Catholic sisters—contributed significantly to the growth of institutional health care through their work in hospitals they owned and managed. Their work has been ignored or underappreciated by most historians, and Nelson offers a persuasive analysis of the scholarly biases that have discouraged attention to religious women. It is the failure of women's history to take serious notice of vowed women that most disturbs Nelson, and her own study has much in common with early work in that field. Her burden is to recover silenced voices and establish their relevance as historical actors. Although she works within a more sophisticated critical apparatus than did early historians engaged in similar recovery projects, Nelson is hobbled by some of the same constraints. Confronted with an overabundance of stories to tell, she takes an expansive approach that forces some sacrifice of detail and analytical depth. Her five case studies highlight the work of different religious communities in North America, Britain, and Australia, suggesting, quite fairly, that the geographical reach of their work is reason enough for scholars to take a closer look at vowed women

Expansive · Notice · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Relevance (law · Scholarship · Secularization · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law