It’s Here! The Nursing Clio Reader Is Available Now!
Today, Nursing Clio publishes its first book, The Nursing Clio Reader: Histories of Sex, Reproduction, and Justice, with Rutgers University Press. Below we are sharing the preface for the book, which was written by Jacqueline Antonovich, the creator, co-founder, and executive editor emerita of Nursing Clio. We hope that you will find this book a useful resource both for your own research and to share with students. During a moment when histories of gender, reproduction, and justice are under attack, we think this book is more important than ever. Thank you for your support over the last 13 years and for helping make Nursing Clio what it is.
In 2012, during my second semester as a PhD student at the University of Michigan, I enrolled in a public humanities seminar taught by historian Matthew Countryman. The goal of the course was to encourage students to think deeply about the importance of the humanities beyond academia and to explore the potential of collaborative, public-facing scholarship that engaged in the coproduction of knowledge with their surrounding communities—a notably ambitious goal for a group of brand new graduate students.
For my final project, I conceptualized a peer-reviewed blog dedicated to the histories of gender, health, and medicine. A simple enough idea—but context is key. In 2012, a presidential election year, politicians and pundits dominated the media landscape with debates over abortion, “legitimate rape,” and the morality of birth control. As the so-called war on women gained momentum, I saw my scholarly interests appearing in the news every day in a contemporary context, yet very few people were making connections between the past and the present moment. As I initially conceived it, the blog could offer historians, especially those who identify as women, a place to contemplate how our history shapes our lives—a space that could allow us to highlight the aspects of the histories of gender, sexuality, and medicine that seem to resonate most powerfully in the world around us.
I gathered a team of colleagues from across the country and set about building what would become Nursing Clio. We crafted a mission statement that emphasized the goal of connecting historical scholarship to contemporary issues, and we came up with a tagline—“The Personal Is Historical”—which added a new dimension to the groundbreaking feminist claim that “the personal is political.”
In the twelve years since its founding, Nursing Clio has become a key venue for community-minded scholarship on topics surrounding reproductive health in American history, from sex and conception to birth control, abortion, and their alternatives: childbirth and parenthood. What began as a class project has become a digital epicenter for public scholarship that is at once intellectually rigorous and inescapably personal. Scholars, students, healthcare workers, patients, and community activists writing for Nursing Clio have built a living collective scholarship on issues of gender, medicine, race, sexuality, and disability as they intersect with current events, pop culture, and contemporary life. With more than 2,000 essays from nearly 600 writers and over one million unique visits to the website, Nursing Clio has been linked, quoted, and cited in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Vogue, The Lancet, Smithsonian Magazine, Vox, Slate, Buzzfeed, and Jezebel—not to mention on CNN, PBS, and WBUR: Boston Public Radio. Our essays are in use in more than 142 college and university classrooms in six countries worldwide.
We, the Editorial Collective of Nursing Clio, are proud of what we have accomplished, yet we also recognize the necessity of continuing this work. Nursing Clio was established initially to shed light on historical aspects related to the reproductive rights that were safeguarded by the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling. However, shifts in cultural attitudes and political power have led us into a new historical era: one in which the right to safe legal abortion is not protected for all people in the United States. On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that the Constitution does not protect the right to an abortion. In so doing, the Court overturned both Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) and turned the power to regulate abortion over to individual states.
With the fall of Roe comes a renewed urgency for teaching, learning, discussing, and understanding the personal as historical. The histories of reproduction, reproductive rights, and reproductive justice have always been important to and underrepresented in both public and academic discourse, yet their politics inform and often dictate our most personal life circumstances. To that end, The Nursing Clio Reader interweaves essays that represent the best of Nursing Clio’s compelling, intimate scholarship and new writing from leading scholars in the field of reproductive health history to create a timely volume designed to connect college classrooms and individual readers with these essential histories. The reader is organized into eight thematic sections—sex, contraception, pregnancy, abortion, loss, childbirth, violence, and justice—each of which is introduced by a specialist in the field. The Nursing Clio Reader embodies the essential principles of our editing collective: an accessible text written for an audience of specialists and nonspecialists alike who approach history with both authority and generous curiosity.
Embodying our familiar ethos—the personal is historical—many of the essays approach the history of reproduction in a deeply personal way, whether from an anecdote of the author’s own experience, through the lens of pop culture or an archival source, or simply through a more informal, more individual voice than is found in most scholarly articles or book chapters. As such, the essays in The Nursing Clio Reader represent the wide range of the ways that we do history, experience history, and tell history.
Excerpted from The Nursing Clio Reader: Histories of Sex, Reproduction, and Justice, edited by The Nursing Clio Collective. Copyright © 2025 by Rutgers University Press. Reprinted by permission of Rutgers University Press.
The Nursing Clio Reader can be purchased from Rutgers University Press, Bookshop.org (using the NC affiliate link will benefit us!), or wherever you order books.
Featured image caption: The Nursing Clio Reader is available now!
Jacqueline Antonovich is the creator and co-founder of Nursing Clio and served as executive editor from 2012 to 2021. She is an Assistant Professor of History at Muhlenberg College. Her current research focuses on women physicians, race, gender, and medical imperialism in the American West. Jacqueline received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2018.
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