Nursing & Empire Gendered Labor and Migration from India to the United States

Nursing and Empire draws on archival research and life history interviews to focus on the migration and settlement of the Indian nurses who formed the first female dominated migration pattern from India to the United States during the Cold War. Reddy argues that this movement must be understood as part of the shifts within Anglo-American capitalist imperialism that have tied the development of nursing labor in India to processes of U.S. social formation since the nineteenth century. The book thus begins with the movement of US based single female Protestant medical missionaries to India in the nineteenth century and then details the remaking of the colonial medical mission through the Jim Crow segregation and “open door imperialism” of the Rockefeller Foundation between World Wars I and II. Framed within this context, Reddy positions Indian nurse immigration as one outcome of shifts within the international division of nursing labor at the onset of the American Century. Throughout this historical sweep, Nursing and Empire also contains a detailed analysis of the shifting stigmatization and rising status of Indian nursing labor through hierarchies of race, class, caste, gender, sexuality, and religion. The result is an immigration study that examines the position of Indian nurses within labor markets as well as inside and outside of kinship networks and variously constructed communities.