Jewish Refugees and the British Nursing Profession: A Gendered Opportunity

The book explores Jewish refugees’ contribution to British nursing. In the mid-twentieth century, nursing was a highly feminised profession and one that was unpopular with British women. By the late 1930s, with war imminent, the profession’s leaders and the British Government realised they would not have enough nurses to care for the nation’s sick and injured. Jewish women, desperate to escape Nazi persecution would make ideal workers to bolster the country’s nursing workforce. Yet, as the book argues, hospitals were reluctant to employ Continental Jews. Using a range of oral and written personal testimonies the book follows the lives of a number of refugees who sought work in Britain’s hospitals as nurses. It demonstrates that despite the suspicion of ‘foreign’ Jews, many hospitals realised they needed to increase their nursing numbers and as the war progressed, more were willing to take these young women onto their staffs. In doing so they soon learnt they had cultured and intelligent nurses. At the end of the war, many refugee nurses took British citizenship and most of the women whose narratives comprise this book remained in the profession. The aim of this study is to make sense of their reasons for choosing and staying in nursing, despite the sometimes insuperable opposition they faced. Through an analysis of the early racially based animosity they faced and their later important contribution to the profession, the book hopes to create a better space for migrant nurses in the twenty-first century.