Counting Nurses: The Power of Historical Census Data

Since the 1960s, the perspectives of social history have invigorated the study of nursing’s own past. Its emphasis on social structures, processes, and the experiences of (admittedly unfortunately designated) “ordinary” men, women and children opened a vast terrain of scholarship we have yet to completely mine. The charge was to “tell history from below” – to make relatively invisible individuals into influential actors; to make kinship networks into powerful forces; and to make the threads of everyday life – threads woven from new concepts like race, class, and gender – into a rich tapestry of meaning. Descriptive quantification led the assault. Historians assembled hard numbers from wills, church rolls and census data. They put these numbers through statistical measures and explored what the results meant about the lives of those who rarely left documentary evidence. Sam Bass Warner (1987) used such processes to bring to life the lives of Philadelphia’s urban poor. Christopher Maggs (1983) brought them to nurses with his analysis of the records of nine British hospitals. More qualitative approaches to social history, however, quickly dominated the field. Historians turned to the stories of less heralded groups of men and women who left documentary data in their association records, letters, reports, and diaries. The history of nursing thrived with this approach, with groundbreaking work by such scholars as Susan Reverby (1987) and Darlene Clark Hine (1989) in the United States and Celia Davis (1995) and Anne Marie Rafferty (1996) in Britain. Certainly, this kind of research remains critically important. But new challenges and opportunities now present themselves. Even as scholars acknowledge the power of international research projects to ask and answer new kinds of questions, significant intellectual and methodological barriers remain. One the other hand, new kinds of digital media and resources from around the globe flood our computer screens but their potential to provide answers to questions historians might pose remains largely untapped. This paper returns to social history’s quantitative roots in examining the possibilities of one such digital data source: the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). IPUMS, based in the Minnesota Population Center, standardizes and digitalizes broad spans of United States census data collected every ten years since 1850. IPUMS digitalized data enable new kinds of questions to be posed or different kinds of answers to be retrieved about patterns of social and economic change. We used IPUMS to ask a simple question about which there is inconsistent, conflicting, and sometimes absent data: who chose to do the work of nursing in the United States between 1900 and 1950? IPUMS answers revealed not only numbers but also a much more nuanced picture of the intersection of issues gender, race, and marital status among nurses then previously acknowledged. IPUMS has recently begun a similar standardization of international census data; and similar census data also exist in other countries around the globe. We present this work, then, as the beginning steps of an international project that looks at who assumes professional responsibility for the sick, and how these choices might vary by time, place, and social context.