ABSTRACT
The shifting contemporary narratives of nursing under our seemingly endless pandemic times indicate that now is the time to interrogate what it means to be a nurse, who is allowed to be a nurse, and how people understand nursing from within and beyond disciplinary boundaries. In order to excavate these ideas, I turn to the mythologies, hagiographies, and historiographies that constitute—at least in part—nursing's historical ontology. Rather than remote, past, or dead, nursing's histories are alive and well in the nursing imaginary, the shared consciousness that shapes nursing from within and the public's understanding of nursing from without. Drawing on the work of CASSANDRA Radical Feminist Nurses Network, a little known but powerful nursing collective, I trace the connections between CASSANDRA's efforts in the 1980s to the Victorian origins of nursing and nursing's established historiography. This provides a point of entry for thinking about the normative whiteness, compulsory heterosexuality, and construction of gender within the discipline, which is rooted in the respectability afforded to nursing through Florence Nightingale's intervention. After briefly outlining the origins of these ideas in nursing, I then examine the ways in which CASSANDRA, a radical outlier in some respects, challenged these constructs in nursing and how, in other ways, it reinforced oppressive norms. Thinking about the radical politics of nursing's past gives way to thinking about alternate understandings of nursing's values and expansive possibility for nursing's futures.
