Jewish refugees and the British nursing profession: A gendered opportunity [Hardcover]

This book follows the lives of female Jewish refugees who fled Nazi persecution and became nurses. Nursing was nominally a profession but with its poor pay and harsh discipline, it was unpopular with British women. In the years preceding the Second World War, hospitals in Britain suffered chronic nurse staffing crises. As the country faced inevitable war, the Government and the professions elite courted refugees as an antidote to the shortages, but many hospitals refused to employ Continental Jews.
The book explores the changes in the refugees status and lives from the war years to the foundation of the National Health Service and to the latter decades of the twentieth century. It places the refugees at the forefront of manoeuvres in nursing practice, education and research at a time of social upheaval and alterations in the position of women.

This book follows the lives of female Jewish refugees who fled Nazi persecution and became nurses. In the mid twentieth-century, nursing was nominally a profession but with poor pay and harsh discipline. It was unpopular with British women, and in the years preceding the Second World War, hospitals in Britain suffered chronic nurse staffing crises. Despite the opportunities war-work offered women, the highly gendered world of mid-twentieth century Britain meant most women remained in feminised occupations. Nursing was promoted as a critical mode of employment.
Using a range of personal testimony, this book exposes the value that refugees placed on the nursing profession as a means for escape and financial independence. Following the uneven trajectory of female Jewish refugees lives, the volume moves from the war years to the latter decades of the twentieth century when changes in tlƒe