The Female Imperial Agent and the Intricacies of Power

Abstract

British women have hitherto been almost absent from the history of British colonialism in the Middle East, and particularly in Mandate Palestine (1918–48). By using an individual tale of a British nurse as a vantage point, the article explores the personal and professional experiences of British nurses in Mandate Palestine and scrutinizes their contested status. As women, as British, as medical practitioners, and specifically as nurses, British nurses present a singular type of local-level imperial agent who confronted multiple challenges to their identities. Empowered as imperial agents of health, biomedicine, and hygiene, they had exercised professional, cultural, and racial authority over indigenous people. At the same time, their gender, vocation, and marital status have limited their scope of influence within a male-dominated medical hierarchy, as well as locate them at the lower strata of British colonial society. Nurses’ tales thus offer a unique perspective for investigating colonial power relations and the intersections of medicine, gender, race, and class.

Introduction: Medical Mobilities in the Modern Middle East and North Africa

“…Its case studies include American nurses in Iran, who helped shape nurse training in Iran for decades to come; Chinese doctors in North Africa, whose professional training and childbirth ideologies clashed with their patients'; and British nurses in Palestine, who found it difficult to adjust to their status as peers of nurses and subordinates of local doctors. 14 The articles in this section also demonstrate that race is crucial to our understanding of medical mobilities in the Middle East. Scholars who studied intersections of mobility and race examined in particular how racial categories affected who could move and to where.…”