The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 17 (2006)

Ellen N. LaMotte, 1873–1961: Genderand Race in Nursing

Keiko SUGIYAMA*INTRODUCTION
Reviewing recent scholarship on gender and women’s history, Nancy
F. Cott and Drew Gilpin Faust have noted the way in which the conceptof gender has extended the scope of women’s history to all areas of historical study, from family relationships to political history and even toforeign relations. The initial intent in women’s history was to makewomen visible. It was to correct the omission of women as historicalagents. This endeavor has broadened the study of socially constructed
gender identity. Through the prism of gender, as Cott and Faust contend,
the narrative of mainstream American history has taken on different anddeeper perspectives.1 In this paper I hope to contribute to the ongoingstudy of gender and women’s history by focusing on the life and workof Ellen N. LaMotte, a nurse. LaMotte has been marginalized and forgotten in the mainstream of nursing history partly because there are noarchival collections of her papers. The only known unpublished papers
by LaMotte, on opium, are held by her great niece and have not been
made available for research. On the basis of her published works alone,
however, it is possible to restore LaMotte’s life to the mainstream of
history, thereby illuminating and deepening our understanding of the
Copyright © 2006 Keiko Sugiyama. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
*Professor, Keisen University

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social construction of gender and race surrounding white women in turnof-the century America.
LaMotte stood at a crossroads in the histories of women, of professionalism, of nationalism and imperialism. Her career as a nurse at home
and in Europe and later as a journalist and author in Europe and “theOrient,” exempliﬁes the opportunities opening up for women at thiscrossroads. She is representative of those women from her generation
who somehow were able to seek out these opportunities and to carve out
new gender roles for themselves. In a certain sense all of these women
were exceptional, since as female professionals they were a tiny minority in their time. Nonetheless, even within that minority LaMotte, as we
will see, expressed an exceptional nonconforming voice.
Nursing in turn-of-the-century America was not simply the ﬁeld of
caring, nor was its practice conﬁned to the hospital ward. Nursing wasa ﬁeld committed to protecting the health of the entire nation as it faced
an inﬂux of immigrants. It was also the arena in which for the ﬁrst timea woman, albeit mostly women from privileged families, could establish
her own identity as a woman, a white woman, as a nurse and as a citizenof the nation that was emerging as a world power.
Nurses, working daily in the streets and neighborhoods of immigrants,
were trying to establish their own professional role. They came to deﬁne
this role as that of “community mother” protecting the nation’s health.
Their new identity clustered around the idea of “home care” in which
the responsibilities of motherhood were central. They regarded themselves as best equipped to Americanize the country’s huge immigrant
population.2
Nurses thus were busy establishing their own gender-speciﬁc identityand at the same time readying themselves to spread its ideal beyond
national boundaries.3 During this period the popular deﬁnition of manliness was expanding to incorporate support of the new nationalism in
the United States. Expansion overseas was legitimized as an expressionof the nation’s “manliness.” No one exempliﬁed this sentiment more than
Theodore Roosevelt.4 Nursing, in other words, was at the forefront of
the nation’s search for its new identity.
We will witness LaMotte’s struggle to deﬁne her new identity as anurse and her ultimate rejection of its gender-speciﬁc role. Yet we cometo see that her status as a nurse was crucial throughout her career. It
enabled her to challenge taboos dealing with the physical body and withsex. It also gave her the strength to openly question and attack the man-

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liness of soldiers and to reject the concept of the white man’s and thewhite woman’s burden. Her criticism of imperialism, although exceptional for her time, did not go beyond her notion of white racial superiority. I hope to show that this nonconforming white woman from theUnited States gave us a far more complex picture than her contemporaries did of the role of white women at home and in “the Orient,” herﬁnal destination.
TUBERCULOSIS NURSE
Ellen N. LaMotte was born in 1873 into a comfortable family inLouisville, Kentucky. She died in 1961. In 1902, she graduated from theTraining School of Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the three leading
schools in the United States based on the Nightingale method of training and the center of professionalization of nursing. Upon graduation she
became a member of the Instructive Visiting Nurse Association of
Baltimore. Visiting Nursing was one of the most promising branches ofnursing at that time. It gave nurses independence through freedom fromdoctors’ constant supervision. LaMotte organized the Public HealthNursing Staff of Baltimore and served as superintendent of the Tuberculosis Division of the Health Department from 1910–1913. Clearly, sheclimbed to the top of the career ladder available to a nurse.5
LaMotte was the ﬁrst to grasp the importance of segregating tuberculosis patients. This meant placing and treating them in hospitals occupied only by those with the disease. She advocated this measure strongly
and unequivocally. The Tuberculosis Nurse: Her Function and Her
Qualiﬁcations: A Handbook for Practical Workers in the Tuberculosis
Campaign, based on her work in those years, was published in 1914.
Her most signiﬁcant contribution to nursing from today’s point ofview was her strong support for an independent nurse who could survey,
inspect, supervise and decide on a course of action. Because the fear of
tuberculosis was so great and doctors were so scarce, the public healthnurse was respected as the professional caregiver who could personally
examine patients in their homes to determine their needs. She could justiﬁably proclaim her power to protect the community. LaMotte’s strong
position as a nurse and a woman professional was praised by some othernurses, including Lavinia Dock, who was most prominent in their struggle against doctors’ control.6
LaMotte’s advocacy of isolating tuberculosis patients caused her to132

KEIKO SUGIYAMA

oppose treating them in either their homes or in sanatoriums. Convincedthat tuberculosis was much more serious than people wanted to believe,
she insisted that patients should be sent immediately after diagnosis to asegregated hospital. She wrote, “In no other branch of nursing is there
so much misunderstanding, so much placing of the cart before the horse,and so much emphasis on the wrong thing.”7 By “wrong thing” she meant
treatment and attempts to cure through home care. The sanatorium wasequally a target. It was nothing but an “accessory,”8 appealing only tothe sentimentalism of the public who fervently wanted to believe thattuberculosis could be cured. She criticized camps in the country foryoung patients by the same reasoning.9 LaMotte also was critical of educating tuberculosis patients about the disease as a preventive strategy. It
was “barren of results,” she said.10 Since most patients were immigrants,
she even went on to say that they were “unteachable.”11
LaMotte’s conviction concerning segregated hospitals for tuberculosis patients, controversial in itself, came with her equally strong advocacy of local control for managing these hospitals. In her Handbook she
proposed segregated hospitals under local control as the sole answer tothe spread and control of tuberculosis.12 Since doctors were also on their
way to professionalization at that time and were eager to enjoy their individual private practices, her proposal demanding local control received
little support from them.
LaMotte also had an enemy within her own camp. Institutionalization,
which she consistently advocated, threatened the autonomy of her own
profession. Nurses were eager to establish their own sphere of activity
in advocating “home care” as the best preventive medicine. The Public
Health Nurse Association was founded in 1912 precisely on that principle. These nurses marched “into the homes, minds, and lives of thepoor.”13 By calling home care inadequate LaMotte was challenging thevery idea that had compelled nurses to consolidate and ﬁght for theirautonomy. In addition, the Tuberculosis Association, another large organization ﬁghting the disease, was advocating a campaign of education
as a main strategy for prevention.14 LaMotte’s strong position against thecore strategies of two leading groups made her uncomfortable with theirmembers. It is not surprising that in a debate about tuberculosis in 1908
her strong position of advocating segregation of patients was not wellreceived.15
LaMotte put hospital segregation above home care, city above country, and local control above education. She was challenging the very

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133

ideals that nineteenth-century America cherished. And nothing separated her more from other nurses than her response to the outbreak of theFirst World War. LaMotte, who may have felt the tie between her family and its French origins, became a volunteer nurse in the battleﬁeld
before the United States entered the war. In contrast to her direct involvement, leading nurses like Lillian Wald, head of the Public Health Nurse
Association, and Lavinia Dock, Secretary of the International Nurses
Organization, who once had praised LaMotte, were setting up the Peace
Party with other prominent nurses and Jane Addams, the prominentsocial worker, in January, 1915.16
VOLUNTEER NURSE
It was as if LaMotte were running from her minority status in thecontroversies about the treatment of tuberculosis. She separated herself
from mainstream nursing and seized the opportunity of war to venture
into a new career opening up for women, journalism. It was a call from
Gertrude Stein in Paris that made LaMotte decide to join her in Europe
when the war broke out. LaMotte had met Gertrude Stain when Stein
had graduated from Radcliffe and was studying medicine. In the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, LaMotte was portrayed as “gun shy.”17 She
did not seem to have left a strong impression on Stein. LaMotte, however, was determined to work as a nurse. She ﬁrst went to the American
Hospital at Neuilly only to ﬁnd that it already had more than enough volunteers. She then was introduced to Mary Borden, the daughter of a
wealthy American businessman and wife of an English merchant, who
was running a ﬁeld hospital in Belgium.18 LaMotte joined her and served
as a nurse with the French Army from 1915 to 1916.
LaMotte’s wartime experience launched her career as a journalist andwriter. As a nurse, she was able to go near the front, where journalists
were not allowed. Her war sketches found immediate publication in the
Atlantic Monthly and she became a regular contributor afterwards. Her
writings were collected and published in the autumn of 1916 under thetitle The Backwash of War: The Human Wreckage of the Battleﬁeld as
Witnessed by an American Hospital Nurse. Her book penetrated thesuperﬁcial glamour of war and challenged wartime taboos, revealing thehideous cataclysm into which the world had been plunged. The U. S.
entered the war in April 1917; in the summer of 1918, the government
banned her book.19

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Among all the memoirs of the First World War, many admit that hers
was considered the most depressing, and the most controversial in its
frankness.20 For example, in “Heroes,” she called a soldier who killed
himself, holding his gun in his mouth, a hero.21 Nursing care would havebeen useless, she wrote. He had run away from the battleﬁeld and so,even if his wounds had been treated successfully, he would have been
shot as a deserter. She depicted the decaying bodies of soldiers with theirsmells and described the moans, sobs and cries of the survivors. In “A
Surgical Triumph” she wrote about soldiers who had artiﬁcial noses andarms surgically attached. She related how one young maimed and desperate soldier begged his father to kill him. The father was not allowed
to, because he was “civilized,” she wrote critically.22
Just as she had walked through the streets of immigrants at home,
LaMotte walked at night in the army hospital, as if she were Nightingale.
Holding a lamp in her hand, she stopped at every bedside, not to heal but
to reveal the reality of the war. “How pitiful they were, these little soldiers, asleep. How irritating they were, these little soldiers, awake. Yet
how sternly they contrasted with the man who had attempted suicide.
Yet did they contrast, after all? Were they ﬁner, nobler, than he? The
night nurse, given to reﬂection, continued her rounds,” wrote LaMotte.23
Another taboo she was challenging was the presence of prostitutes. In“Women and Wives,” she mocked the wives waiting at home. They were
fragile, innocent and did not know what was happening to their husbands
at the front.24 Their cherished value of “home” was nothing but an illusion. She sounded as if she were ridiculing the very idea that these wives
were protecting the core of their husbands’ identity and the nation’s wellbeing. Since prostitution was believed to pose both a moral and physical threat to the health of soldiers, disclosing its presence again sheddevastating light on the picture of soldiers ﬁghting the war.
LaMotte’s frankness included accusations of doctors who were taking advantage of the war. In “Citation,” doctors were eager to prolong
the lives and sufferings of their patients in order to enhance their own
reputations and also that of the ﬁeld hospital.25
Throughout her wartime service, LaMotte was the same nurse who
had written the book on tuberculosis, insisting on her professional ability to survey, manage, control and make independent judgments. It was
her business to sort out the nearly dying from the dying. This was not
the nurse from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. She was not a healer.
Rather, she was an independent, self-directed professional. Despite thisELLEN N. LAMOTTE, 1873–1961: GENDER AND RACE IN NURSING

135

autonomy, in the end she left the ﬁeld of nursing. In her words, nursing
at the battleﬁeld was nothing but a dead-end job.26 The war was an international avenue to heroism for nurses but her experiences had shatteredher.
Her more personal accounts of the war, however, add a different perspective to her reactions. She once expressed the feeling of being “bored”
when there was no bombing.27 In the same vein, she related in anotheressay that when soldiers brought her to the war zone, she could not hide
her excitement. She wrote that she drew laughter from the soldiers when
she innocently insisted on taking a lamb with her; it was abandoned in
the debris after an explosion. The title of that essay was appropriately—or inappropriately—named, “A Joy Ride.”28 Her excitement in entering
the forbidden zone is reminiscent of a comment made by Barbara Hardyin her introduction to “Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War,” a book written by a volunteer nurse. Hardy wrote that even painful war experienceswere a temporary liberation for women from the dangerous shelter ofwealth and gentility.29 There is no denying that this aspect was present
in LaMotte’s writings.
Frustrated, disillusioned, saturated, or searching for another setting of“tragic raw materials,”30 LaMotte chose to go to China with her fellow
nurse, Emily Chadbourne.
NURSE IN THE ORIENT
China was LaMotte’s base for two years. During those years she
traveled to Japan, French Indo-China, Siam and the Straits Settlements.
Her experiences produced six books altogether. They included Peking
Dust (1919), sketches of everyday life in the form of letters sent to afriend in the United States; Civilization: Tales of the Orient (1919); andSnuffs and Butters (1925). Three books focused on the opium trade in
China, which became her new concern: Opium Monopoly (1920), Ethicsof Opium (1922), and Opium in Geneva: Or How the Opium Problem is
Handled by the League of Nations (1929). Much has been written on
travelers’ accounts in “the Orient,”31 in particular on the question of how
they consistently served to reinforce colonial rule. LaMotte’s writings
were full of stereotyped characters, but taken altogether her depictions
were very different from most other accounts of the age. Unusually, she
was very critical of the Western foreigners who came to rule, reform andhelp “uplift” the natives.

136

KEIKO SUGIYAMALaMotte’s principal characters were white men and women who werereformers, missionaries, and government ofﬁcials displaced fromBritain, France, and the United States. The most typical were white men
whom she described as marginalized reformers in their own countries,
seeking unsuccessfully to make up for previous career failures at home.
Their home life was also a failure. In many cases their wives were thecause of their unhappy lives. Reminiscent of her ridicule of “home” inher earlier writings, she now portrays wives as sickly, ignorant, anddependent. In her narrative about “the Orient, she adds that while thewives are not sexually attracted to their husbands, they are aroused at thesight of the naked bodies of Chinese men.
She concluded that these Western couples were unable to establish
stable relationships. Some of the negative consequences of this inability
are described in two of her books. In the 1910 publication, “Civilization,”
LaMotte presents a white man who was excused from conscription
because his wife is pregnant. He is grateful. Subsequently he learns thatthe father of his wife’s child is Chinese.32 In “The Yellow Streak” anadult of mixed blood looks for his Western father, seeking his love andacceptance. The father rejects the son, who is then driven to kill his
father.33
LaMotte decried the hypocrisy of Western men and women, who,
under the banner of civilization and Christianity, were taking advantageof the natives and victimizing them. In the only work she wrote about
Japan, “Cholera,” she observed that the ﬁrst people to ﬂee the cities whencholera broke out were Christian missionaries from Europe and theUnited States.34 In “Snuffs and Butters,” a Chinese boy is recommended
by a missionary for study abroad. When the youth arrives in London, theexpected help does not appear. To survive, he becomes a servant andeventually falls seriously ill. His father leaves China to rescue his son,taking along a package of opium as a ready source of cash in an emergency. He did not know that it was illegal to bring opium into Englandand so is arrested and detained upon arrival. Consequently, and tragically, he could not be with his son when the youth died.35
In these two books LaMotte drew attention to deep ﬂaws in Western
society. Yet she conventionally juxtaposed an uncivilized East with acivilized West, as many Western travelers’ accounts did at that time.36
She was also in the traditional mainstream with her prejudiced viewpointof miscegenation. In spite of her sympathy toward native people, shenever presented a mixed marriage as any kind of a solution.37 Her books

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137

depicted the white male as weak, maladjusted, and immoral, indeed
almost pathological in these respects. She concluded that miscegenation
was a consequence of the weakness in character of white men, chieﬂy,
but also of white women. The same weakness of the white male in otherstories results in opium addiction. Her accusation of white males in thispeculiar way assumes an intrinsic relationship between the phenomenonof opium addiction and the existence of the yellow race. This raises thestrong possibility that her ﬁght against opium trafﬁc was inﬂuenced andreinforced by her latent fear of miscegenation.
No other story depicts this fear more directly than the story “TheMalay Girl,” which deals with a Malay girl who was the possession ofa white businessman. When he fell in love with a white woman from
Europe, he left the Malay girl. She then tried to kill him by giving him
opium as an act of revenge. The writer showed no sympathy toward thegirl nor was there any hint of a gender bond felt with native womendeceived by males. In depicting the Malay girl as the ugly symbol ofopium seduction,38 LaMotte presents miscegenation as a major cause ofwhite male opium addiction.
Fueled by the fears bred by her conclusions, LaMotte walked throughPeking’s streets observing the many opium dens and their users just as
she had walked through the streets of Baltimore in her young days,
searching for victims of tuberculosis. Now she saw many opium users,
both men and women, who were white. Deeply disturbed by these conditions, she became a ﬁghter in supporting nations that were struggling
to extricate themselves from the vicious net of opium trafﬁc. She accused
Great Britain of monopolizing opium supplies and beneﬁting from theirsale, and thus gravely victimizing the native populations. She sounded
like those advocating independence from England centuries ago. She
urged the United Sates to take a leadership role and “not to be afraid toendanger the feeling between two countries—The time has now come tospeak.”39 The method of control that she advocated, demanding opiumfree areas, even sounded similar to her method of segregating tuberculosis patients.
LaMotte must have been disappointed that she was not received seriously at home, but she persevered and succeeded in bringing the issue
to the attention of the League of Nations. This was her last effort to solvea problem with such extreme negative effects on society.40 Her trust in
the League of Nations was unusual at a time of growing nationalism.
Seeking an international body to deal with the issue symbolized the way

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she lived, the cause she chose, and her gradual shift in scale from local
to national and to international arenas.
CONCLUSION
LaMotte’s life’s work was signiﬁcant both in its direct impact on
public health nursing and more broadly in the way it challenged andcriticized certain nationally-held values and traditional practices. Her
accomplishments as a nurse and the recognition her journalism and writing received were representative of her generation’s new opportunities
and their fulﬁllment. Many of the view she expressed, however, were
contrary to those traditionally held and commonly unchallenged. In thisway her voice was exceptional and that, perhaps, has contributed to her
marginalization in the narrative of women’s history.
LaMotte started out as a nurse trying to protect a local community
against the spread of tuberculosis by surveying and supervising theattempts to control the disease. Then, when she became a ﬁghter against
opium use, she used the same methods. She was impressively persistentin her search for the best strategies of control and in exercising her newlygained power. It resulted in a steady progression in the scale of her work,from local community sites to the national stage and from there on tointernational spheres. She criticized the world of Christian white men
and women at home and abroad. While most saw missionary work andnursing as benevolent, she saw it as hypocritical. To her, the work of thereligious missionaries and nurses was nothing more than domesticity
moved to a slightly more elevated status. Her unconventional attitude
toward the role of sex in the marital relations of white couples made herstand out almost as an aberration.
LaMotte was outgoing and adventurous, ready to explore beyond herboundaries. Through this exploration she found a new channel to express
herself. Her pursuit of every possible opportunity, no matter how unpleasant or even dangerous, and her urge to be heard were phenomenaof that era’s generation of women. Her work and her independent voice
were expressions of the opportunities given to women of her time. Yet
her voice was exceptional by choice. And precisely in being exceptional,
LaMotte helps deepen our understanding of the era. She never praised
motherhood and home care, as her colleagues did. Nor did she worshipthe seeming manliness represented by territorial expansion at a time
when many women were playing supporting roles in colonizing activi-

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139

ties. She was an avowed anti-imperialist. Her attack on manliness was
exceptional. And in raising the question of miscegenation, avoided inmainstream coverage, she was exceptional. Yet she never accepted miscegenation and never went beyond her prejudices in her concept of race.
Her life demands a closer and more nuanced reading of her written
accounts. They will help us realize the diversity that existed among white
women of that period as they searched for their own and their nation’s
identity. Her unconventional criticism of motherhood, her ﬁrm antiimperialism, her perception and harsh criticism of Christian hypocrisy,
her strategy of preventive segregation, and her deep-rooted fear of miscegenation—these key elements in her thinking help us comprehend thecomplexity of American society at the time when the United States was
emerging as an international power at the beginning of the twentieth century.
NOTES
1Nancy F. Cott and Drew Gilpin Faust, “Recent Directions in Gender and Women’s
History,” Magazine of History: Organization of American Historians 19 (March 2005):
4–5.
2
C.E. Winslow coined the phrase “community mother” in “The training of nurses for
Public Health Inspection,” Public Health Nurse Quarterly 5 (April 1913): 43–49. The
best spokesperson for the idea of “home care” by nurses was Lillian D. Wald, the headof Nurses’ Settlement. See Lillian D. Wald, The House on Henry Street (New York:
Dover, 1970; repr. New York: Henry Hold and Co., 1915) and Lillian D. Wald, Windows
on Henry Street (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1934). See Karen Buhler-Wilkerson,
No Place Like Home: A History of American Nursing and Home Care in the UnitedStates (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); and Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: the Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). Critical works on nurses helping immigrants are Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes and “Immigrant Menace”(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); and Matthew Frye Jacobson,
Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad,
1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).
3
Barbara L. Brush and Joan E. Lynaugh, Nurses of All Nations: A History of theInternational Council of Nurses, 1889–1999 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1999); andCatherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American
History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
4
The most notable work is Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural
History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995).
5
Her brief biography is found in M. R. Pennock, Makers of Nursing History (NewYork: Lakeside Press, 1940), 136–137. On the history of visiting nursing, see Barbara
Melosh, The Physician’s Hand: Work, Culture, and Conﬂict in American Nursing(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); and Karen Buhler-Wilkerson, “False

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Dawn: The Rise and Decline of Public Health Nursing 1900–1930,” in Nursing History:
New Perspectives, New Possibilities, ed. Ellen Condlilfe Langemann (New York:
Teachers College Press, 1981), 89–106. On visiting nursing in Maryland, Jane Eliot
Sewell, Medicine in Maryland: The Practice and the Profession, 1799–1999 (Baltimore
and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
6
Ellen N. LaMotte, The Tuberculosis Nurse: Her Function and Her Qualiﬁcations:
A Handbook for Practical Workers in the Tuberculosis Campaign (New York: G.P.
Putman’s Sons, 1915); LaMotte, “Tuberculosis Work of the Instructive Visiting Nurse
Association of Baltimore,” American Journal of Nursing 6 (1905–1906): 141–148;
LaMotte, “The American Tuberculosis Exhibition,” American Journal of Nursing 6(1905–1906): 305–311; and LaMotte, “Some Phases of the Tuberculosis Question,”
American Journal of Nursing 8 (1907–1908): 430–434. Lavinia Dock on LaMotte see“International Congress on Tuberculosis in Washington,” American Journal of Nursing
9 (November 1908): 97. General works on tuberculosis during this period are Barbara
Bates, Bargaining for Life: A Social History of Tuberculosis, 1876–1938 (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); and Georgina D. Feldberg, Disease and Class:
Tuberculosis and the Shaping of Modern North American Society (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1995).
7
Tuberculosis Nurse, 117; and LaMotte, quoted in Elsie M. Courrier, “Some Aspectsof the Tuberculosis Problem: Report of the Twelfth Annual Convention,” American
Journal of Nursing 9 (September 1909): 931.
8
LaMotte, “Municipal Care of Tuberculosis,” American Journal of Nursing (1912):
935–943.
9Tuberculosis Nurse, 165–167.
10
LaMotte, quoted in “Some Aspects of the Tuberculosis Problem,” 931.
11
LaMotte, “Some Phases of the Tuberculosis Question,” 431.
12
Tuberculosis Nurse, Chapter 17 passim.
13
Bates, Bargaining for Life, Chapter 13, 231–249.
14Michael E. Teller, The Tuberculosis Movement: A Public Health Campaign in the
Progressive Era (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988); and Bates, 243–249.
15
Jessica M. Robbins, “ ‘Barren of Results?’ The Tuberculosis Nurses’ Debate, 1908–
1914,” Nursing History Review 9 (2001): 35–50.
16
Kathryn Kish Sklar ed., Social Justice Feminists: a Dialogue in Documents,
1885–1933 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); and Nitza Berkovitch, From Motherhood to Citizenship: Women’s Rights and International Organizations (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
17
Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Harcourt, Brace andCo.1933: repr. New York: Vintage, 1970), 170.
18
“Introduction,” in Margaret R. Higonnet ed., Nurses at the Front: Writing theWounds of the Great War (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001), vii–xxxviii.
General works on women at war during this period are Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider,
Into the Breach: American Women Overseas in World War I (Lincoln: toExcel Press
1991), which introduces LaMotte under “the Reporter” and “the Novelist”; Jean
Gallagher, The World Wars through the Female Gaze (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1998); and Judith S. Graham ed. “Out Here at the Front” The WorldWar I Letters of Nora Saltonstall (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004).
19
Schneider, Into the Breach, 198; and Charles V. Genthe, American War Narratives,
1917–1918 (New York: D. Lewis, 1969). The other book banned was War, Peace andthe Future: A Consideration of the Relation of Women to War by Ellen Key.
20
Genthe, American War Narratives, 101.

ELLEN N. LAMOTTE, 1873–1961: GENDER AND RACE IN NURSING141

LaMotte, “Heroes,” in The Backwash of War: The Human Wreckage of the Battleﬁeld as Witnessed by an American Hospital Nurse (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons
1916), 3–13. This was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly 118 (Oct.1916):
482–490.
22
LaMotte, “A Surgical Triumph,” in The Backwash of War, 155.
23
LaMotte, “Heroes,” in The Backwash of War, 8.
24
LaMotte, “Women and Wives,” in The Backwash of War, 95–111.
25
LaMotte, “Citation,” in The Backwash of War, 167–178.
26
LaMotte, “Heroes,” in The Backwash of War, 7.
27
LaMotte, “Under Shell-Fire at Dunkirk,” Atlantic Monthly 116 (Nov. 1915): 694.
28
LaMotte, “A Joy Ride,” Atlantic Monthly 118 (Oct. 1916): 481–490.
29
Barbara Hardy, “Introduction” in Not So Quiet: Stepdaughter of War (1930) by
Evadne Price (Helen Zenna Smith) (London: Virago Press, 1988), 12.
30
Ibid.
31
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1978); Lisa Lowe,
Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1991); Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing
and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991); and Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret
Strobel eds. Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Urbana:
Indiana University Press, 1992).
32
LaMotte, “Civilization,” in Civilization: Tales of the Orient (New York: Books for
Libraries Press.1919): 93–117.
33
LaMotte, “The Yellow Streak,” in Civilization, 11–29.
34
LaMotte, “Cholera,” in Civilization, 235–244.
35
LaMotte, “Snuffs and Butters” in Snuffs and Butters and Other Stories (New York:The Century Co., 1925): 3–29.
36
LaMotte, “Misunderstanding,” in Civilization, 121–137; and “The Middle-ClassMind” in Snuffs and Butters, 87–118.
37
LaMotte, “Prisoners,” in Civilization, 141–173; “The Middle-Class Mind,” in Snuffs
and Butters; and “Homesick,” in Civilization, 65–90. For general discussion on intermarriage and miscegenation see Werner Sollors ed. Interracialism: Black and WhiteIntermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (Oxford University Press,
2000).
38“The Malay Girl,” in Snuffs and Butters, 33–53.
39
LaMotte, The Opium Monopoly (New York: The MacMillan Co., 1920), xiv–xvii.
40
LaMotte, “America and the Opium Trade,” Atlantic Monthly 129 (June 1922):
732–739; “Opium and England,” Nation 119 (September 3, 1924): 232–234; “Deadlock
at Geneva,” Nation 120 (February 4, 1925): 113–114; and “Manchuko and the Opium
trade,” Nation 138 (February 28, 1934): 246–247.
21