Religion and Reconciliation: The Lives of the 1919 Graduates of the Latter Day Saints Hospital Training School

This research explores the interconnected sacred and professional lives of seventeen graduates of the Latter Day Saints Nurses Training School Class of 1919. Life history data provide a rare collective biography that shows how the co-mingling of the sacred and the professional worked over six decades of these women’s lives. These stories, enriched by genealogical data from the LDS Family History Library and with life stories of other graduates, place the experiences of these women at the nexus of ideas of women, work, family, and religion, and considers work and worship that took place not just within hospitals but also within families, and families’ patterns of wage work and unremunerated housework, care work, and that on farms or small businesses. Graduates, either by choice or by circumstances, moved back and forth between domestic and market economies: their paid nursing work was integrated into, not separate from, their work as wives, mothers, and religious women. They actively embraced the gendered meaning of nursing for how it privileged both their professional work and their commitment to Mormon traditions. They did so as Mormon women, deeply embedded in a hierarchical and patriarchal religious tradition that privileged motherhood and women’s domestic responsibilities over that of paid work.
These women shared their church’s position on the value of their roles as women, wives and mothers. They participated in the construction of a fluid domestic space that responded well to negotiations among a religion’s dictates, an individual’s desires, a child’s needs, the value of a husband’s work, and the unpredictability of economic and social realities both at particular moments and over the course of a lifetime. The choice of nursing work was an effective strategy for Mormon women who sought to reconcile conflicting desires, demands, and expectations in their personal, sacred, and professional lives.