Abstract
Objectives: This article explores religious beliefs, practices, and representations of the Alexian Brothers, a religious order of Catholic nursing brothers, and the role of gender in this discourse.
Background: Nursing in the United States developed within a cultural framework of caring as part of women's roles in families and communities. Yet, a study of the Alexian Brothers challenges the dominance of the "female" in most gender analyses of nursing.
Methods: Historical methodology is used to evaluate and interpret data within the broader framework of historiographical literature on gender, religion, and nursing. In analyzing nursing, religion, and gender, attention has been paid to representations, mainly of women, through photographs and written literature. In this article, the same sources are used for men.
Results: The story of the Alexian Brothers and the men they educated is a testament to the power of gender and religion in nursing history. These men carved out a system of caring that recognized it as a responsibility not only of women but also of men. As they asserted that their paid work was a Christian calling, they renegotiated dominant notions of masculinity. In doing so, male nurses navigated among an array of representations, from nurse, to school administrator, to military soldier, to religious person, to professional practitioner of scientific medicine. These self-representations in the masculine spaces of the hospital and nursing school were designed to debunk stereotypes of feminine men, and they challenged traditional spatial boundaries.