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The Nursing Clio Editorial Collective, "The Nursing Clio Reader: Histories of Sex, Reproduction, and Justice" (Rutgers UP, 2025)
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- [00:01]
Laura Ansley
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- [00:23]
Sarah Hanley Cousins
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Laura Ansley
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- [00:59]
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Aya Nuruddin
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Podcast Host/Announcer
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:34]
Aya Nuruddin
Hi.
- [01:35]
Leah Cargan
Welcome back to the New Books Network. My name is Leah Cargan. I'm the podcast coordinator on the editorial staff of the Journal of Women's History. I'm excited to be joined today by three scholars to discuss the nursing histories of sex, reproduction, and justice from Rutgers University Press. Up this year, 2025 my first guest, Sarah Hanley Cousins is assistant teaching professor of history at the University of Buffalo. She is the author of Bodies in Disability in the Civil War north from the University of Georgia Press in 2019, co author of Spiritualism's Reformers, Seekers and Seances in Lilydale, New York, from Three Hills Press, which is an imprint of Cornell University Press and was published in October 2024. She is executive editor of Nursing Cleo, a producer of Digg, a history podcast, and co editor of the Nursing Clio Reader. Next Laura Ansley is the director of Publications at the American historical association. Since 2016, she has served Nursing Cleo at various Times as a writer, an editor, social media manager, and managing editor. She also served on the committee that edited the Nursing Clio Reader. Aya Nuruddin is Assistant professor in the History of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine. She is a historian of medicine and biology with particular interests in the histories of eugenics, racial science, scientific racism, reproduction, and human subjects research. Neridian is currently at work on her first book, tentatively entitled Seed and Black Eugenic thought in the 19th and 20th centuries. It examines how African Americans navigated questions of racial science, eugenics, and hereditarianism in relation to struggles for racial justice in the 19th and 20th centuries. Sarah and Laura and Aya, thank you so much for being here. I'm excited to chat more about the Nursing Cleo reader. My first question, which for a lot of our readers, this is a new subject. What is Nursing Clio? Can you just introduce us in general to what Nursing Clio is there?
- [03:51]
Sarah Hanley Cousins
Oh, I was hoping Laura would jump in. I feel like she's she's more articulate about what, what Nursing Clio is. But I guess.
- [04:00]
But since I'm, I guess I'm the executive editor of Nursing Cleo, I will take the first stab at it. Nursing Cleo, I like to call a digital publication. We started our life as a blog, but I think as we've grown and we've become more established in the field, I like to think of us as doing the same kind of work but in a different way that you establishment journals do for their fields. So we're a digital publication that accepts essays on sort of the intersection of gender, health, and medicine.
- [04:34]
From a wide variety of writers. And we are also an intentional feminist community in the way that we work with each other, the way that we work with our authors, the way that we edit our essays. So we are certainly a publication, but we're also, we like to think of ourselves as a, as a feminist community.
- [04:54]
Laura Ansley
And Nursing Cleo has been around since 2012, so we're about 13 years old. And so we had lots of content and writers to pull on when we came to the book project a couple years ago.
- [05:05]
Aya Nuruddin
I want to. There's a couple. Oh, go ahead, jump on Sarah's point about it being a feminist community. I feel like that's such an important part of the work that we don't talk about as much when we're talking about scholarship are the sort of communities that we do the work in. And Nursing Cleo is a really important space, I think, especially for junior scholars to sort of get their feet wet in the world of public scholarship in ways that are hospitable and welcoming because it is a feminist community. And I think that makes a huge difference compared to maybe how we would look at other kinds of online or digital publications. The community focus, I think, is really important.
- [05:46]
Sarah Hanley Cousins
Yeah, Aya.
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Laura Ansley
I think that was one of the great things for all of us. I think we started writing for editing for Nurse and Cleo as graduate students. Sarah, were you still a graduate student when you started? Yes.
- [05:55]
Leah Cargan
Yes.
- [05:55]
Laura Ansley
Yeah. And so we were all super junior scholars who just got involved in this community as writers, then for two of us as editors and eventually running the blog for Sarah and me. And so it's. And we would get such wonderful feedback from all kinds of readers, which, as a junior scholar, is so incredible that you're like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe so and so read this piece and commented on it or whatever. So that was always, for me, one of the great things about Nursing Cleo is that it has gotten to the point where pretty much most people in the history of medicine are at least familiar with it, and many people are regular readers and have even been contributors like Aya. So it does feel like a community at this point.
- [06:41]
Leah Cargan
Yeah. I want to pull some quotes just from the preface of the book that I felt were impactful. And one is that it's living collective scholarship, which I thought was really profound. And another quote is a digital epicenter for public scholarship that is at once intellectually rigorous and inescapably personal, which really summarizes what you all just said. Yeah. I'll share quick my story of how I learned about Nursing Cleo, which was in 2019.
- [07:10]
I was living in Omaha, Nebraska, and I had a friend, and she ended up publishing an article on Nursing Cleo. And at that point, we were really. We just weren't quite sure. But it ended up being a really.
- [07:24]
Rewarding experience for her. She said she felt immediately welcomed in by whoever managing editor she was working with. It was a fun article. It was about bullet bras.
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Laura Ansley
Oh, remind me of her name.
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Leah Cargan
Emily o'. Donnell.
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Laura Ansley
Okay. Yes, I remember that one. I would have been managing editor at that point. So.
- [07:42]
Leah Cargan
Yeah. And just such, like a warm, welcoming publishing process experience, especially for someone who, like, you're saying you all started as grad students, and this is welcoming for other grad students. So I want to hear more from each of you, how exactly you got involved in Nursing Clio. We kind of hinted at it a little, but I want to. I'm going to dive in. Can we start? Can we start with Laura.
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Sarah Hanley Cousins
Sure.
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Laura Ansley
So I was a graduate student and I attended a women's health History of Women's Health conference where I met Lauren McIver Thompson. This was in 2015. And she said, oh, you know, your work really fits with what we do at Nurse and Cleo. You should pitch us a piece. And I of course, was like, oh my gosh, that would be so great. I would love to do that. And then I didn't because it always takes time for people to actually do the pitch. And so the next year, she and I and Jackie Antonovich, who is the blog's founder, co creator and original executive editor, we were all on a panel together at the association, the American association for the History of Medicine. And so that was in spring of 2020, sorry, 2016. And they again were like, oh my gosh, you should really pitch Nursing Cleo. And so it took me a year, but I finally did. I sent in my first piece that weekend because I was having insomnia at the conference. And so I sat on my hotel bathroom floor and wrote up the first piece I'd been thinking about writing, which was about the television show Crazy Ex Girlfriend, which I still think is a fantastic show. And I'm sitting on the bathroom cause my partner was with me. Like, I was like trying to like keep busy and not wake him up. So I sent in my first piece and I got a great response from the team. And I was like, oh, this is really great people to work with. And I started writing regularly for them. And pretty soon Jackie said, you know, you promote your stuff on social media pretty well. And I've been wanting to hand over social media to like a social media manager. Would you like to join the team? And so I joined first as a social media manager. We do all of our kind of organizing on Slack, at least we did then. And so I would see all the messages going back and forth about editing essays. And there were times where people were really busy and I said, do you want me to pop in and help with editing too, if needed? And at that time, we only had two or three editors versus now we have so many more. And so they needed help and I started doing that. And then the next spring, in 2017, I became managing editor for five years. So it was really organic of feeling like I was being welcomed in and I had these ideas and people were excited about those ideas. And then it really became these are now some of my close friends and best history colleagues. So it was really a very nice experience because at the same time, as this was going on. I was also leaving graduate school without finishing my degree. So it gave me a new community to join around the time that I was feeling kind of at loose ends. Sarah, you were probably next in the. In the story.
- [10:44]
Sarah Hanley Cousins
Sure, yeah. So I. I love that Laura just said that it was like an organic process of being sort of like just sort of welcomed, absorbed in. And that was very much the experience that I had as well. Nursing Cleo was. Was founded in 2012, as Laura said earlier. And I came to the project not all that long after. I want to say it was within the first year or so or sometime in 2013.
- [11:14]
And I was at work. I'd had just a very rocky sort of experience in graduate school. I just felt like I was struggling a lot with a lot of aspects of the coursework and the exams and all those things. And I had finally gotten to the prospectus phase and was suddenly feeling like, oh, I'm so. This is why I wanted to do this. I'm so in love with my project. I'm so in love with this work that I get to do. And at the same time, I had just had an experience of writing for the public for the first time. That was. The sesquicentennial of the American Civil War was happening at that time. And I had. The New York Times was running a series called Disunion that was about the Civil War, the anniversary, sort of reflecting on the war. And I had written for that a couple of times and just loved it and was really sort of thinking about how much I loved the experience of writing about this stuff that I was fascinated by and interested in for public audiences? And how do we translate what we do in the academy to the people around us who are never going to come into that academy, right? Who are never going to be in the classrooms necessarily, or reading the scholarly monographs. How do we. How do we get this information to them? And I became really passionate about that. And so a colleague from UB had recently graduated and I think had written a couple of pieces or something along those lines, was involved very early on in nursing clio. And she sent me a message and said, hey, I know that you're working on stuff that's kind of related to gender and health and medicine. We. Would you be interested in writing a piece for us? We're, like, desperate for essays because this was very early on. And I was like, sure. So I wrote an essay about the pension system and sort of connected that to modern issues about concerns about fraud in public support systems like welfare that sort of thing. And immediately was like, oh, this is very cool. I really enjoyed this process. I loved working with everybody. I got like Laura said, I got a lot of traction from that essay. People reached out to me, people, you know, people that I didn't expect would ever be interested in my writing, were interested in it. And I thought, oh man, I gotta get more of this. And so I became a regular writer, which is, you know, someone that would usually would write once every three months or so and wrote about all sorts of things, you know, important things and also extremely silly things. I think I wrote an entire essay about, like, Laura mentioned crazy ex girlfriend. I wrote about one of my favorite shows at the time, which was Nashville, which was a hot mess, you know, and so. But it was like we have all these gendery scholarly thoughts and we apply them to the things that we are seeing out in the world, including silly, trashy television shows. Right. Laura and I famously, I think famously have a semi regular series of like, complaining about the show Virgin river nursing Cleo. So, like, you know what I mean? We can't turn off this part of our brain. And this is a venue for that. So I became a regular writer. And then around 2015, I want to say there was a big revamping of the blog. Our previous layout editor was going to redo the whole website. And as part of that, the whole project stopped for a few months as he did that work. And it gave the existing editors, which were not very many, to think about, how do we want to do this work going forward? And they reached out to me and to Lauren McIver Thompson at the same time, I think, because we were writing very regularly and, and had gotten, and were, you know, got along well with the team and asked if we would come on as editors. And I immediately said, yes, I'd be thrilled to do that. And so came on as an editor, I think, in 2015. And then like Laura said also, you know, it's always the kind of project that needed lots of people to do lots of different things at the same time. So I also ran some social media for a while, just kind of doing the things that the, that the project needed and, and, and never left really. And in 2021, when Jackie decided that it was time for her to step down as executive editor, I actually did not consider becoming the executive editor until our current layout editor, Avril Earls, sent me a message on our slack and said, you have to be the next executive editor. And I was like, are you on drugs? Like, of course I can't do this, you know, like I'm Sarah Hanley. I'm not capable of this. And she said absolutely, you need to throw your hat out there. So I I did and I have been the executive editor since 2021 and doing it beautifully. Oh well thank you. I appreciate it.
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Aya Nuruddin
I can sure.
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Sarah Hanley Cousins
I haven't run the project into the ground, although every once in a while the website disappears. I promise that's not my fault.
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We've gotten it back so far.
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Podcast Host/Announcer
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- [17:32]
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- [18:04]
Aya Nuruddin
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Laura Ansley
Yeah, sure, yeah. So when did you. When was your first piece for. For Nursing Cleo?
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Aya Nuruddin
My first piece was 2017. Okay.
- [18:45]
So I, the, the first time I think I, I think I had vaguely heard of Nursing Cleo sort of before and I don't think I had a good grasp on until I met Jackie Antonovich at.
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I think it was Jasmed, the Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Medicine both of us were presenting and she was like this, your work would be great for Nursing Cleo. And I was like, tell me about that. And you know, I kind of marinated for a while and then I think, I think ahm, 2016 is when I think I met the rest of the team and I was like, okay, this is, this is the squad. Cause I think that's when I met Laura. I think that's when I met Sarah. I think that's also when I met Lauren McIver Thompson. And like I think I met like the whole, I think it was like a cluster.
- [19:32]
Laura Ansley
And I remember Lizzie, Lizzie Reese was there.
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Aya Nuruddin
Lizzy Reese was there.
- [19:36]
Laura Ansley
Yeah, yeah.
- [19:36]
Aya Nuruddin
And we had like, I was looking for it just now. Like there was a picture of all of us like together at this ahm. And I don't know, I think it's just, you know, got ate up by Facebook. But it exists. It's somewhere in the deep caverns of the Internet. And so I think it was after meeting everybody that I was like, okay, this is the kind of place I want to put my work. And so my first piece came out in 2017. I think Lauren was the one who edited it or I remember her putting comments in the Google Doc. I do remember this and I always tell people like Nursing Cleo launched my academic career because that piece and the feedback and the sort of engagement with it I think is what put me on the map, so to speak. And there are people who still only know anything about me because of that post. Like this many years later, they're like, oh, I read your post on Nursing Cleo.
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Laura Ansley
Is that the same essay that ends up in the book?
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Aya Nuruddin
That's the same essay that's in the book, yeah.
- [20:34]
Laura Ansley
The Black Politics of Eugenics, which is one of the best essays we've ever published. So it's in the book.
- [20:40]
Leah Cargan
Full Circle Moment. Wow.
- [20:41]
Aya Nuruddin
Like I think but seriously, because I think what ha. Like, because also back then I was still on. On the Twitter and I got so much engagement on social media with that post from like, like you guys were saying, like, folks that I didn't expect to read my work. Folks that I didn't expect to be interested in my work. I remember one of my mentors shared it on his Facebook page, Nathan Connelly, who's like, urban historian, black studies, one of my favorite human beings on the Internet, on. In the. On Earth, really had shared it on his Facebook. And I remember seeing all of these because he's friends with all the cool people and just seeing all of these, like, incredible scholars in, like, black studies and like, US History, reading my work and being like, oh, well, this is really interesting. And this makes us rethink about this other stuff. And it broke my brain that people of that caliber would. Would read my little post. And so I think, like, this is one of the reasons I always encourage, like, junior scholars. Like, having Nursing Cleo as, like, one of your first publications is a game changer because people, like, read the work and take it seriously. Right? It's not even just like, oh, we're just doing this. This is a fun little activity on the Internet. Like, we're doing serious scholarly work, but we're engaging with audiences that we. That are wider than, you know, the typical academic publications.
- [22:00]
And I think, yeah, this is always one of the things I say that, like, Nursing Cleo launched my career because of the traction I got on that post.
- [22:09]
And also because, again, returning to this, the importance of, like, the community, the fact that now when I go to different conferences, it's like, all. We all, like, the nursing CLIO folks are all like, you know, we can find each other. Right? And, oh, I read your post and I saw this and I told someone so to reach out to you. And so we built like, it builds this ecosystem that I think is such an important part of. Of why I was really excited to get involved too. Like, it wasn't just the publishing piece, it was the community piece.
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Leah Cargan
Yeah, that's a theme so far. Community has been impactful for all three of you. I kind of want to build on what you're talking about because this is your chapter contribution, your essay. I want to talk about some of the challenges. Again, we've hinted at it, but I want to talk about some of the challenges of distilling your research down in this way. And Laura and Sarah, you might also have insights, but I wanted to talk about Aya first because of her contribution to the reader. Is your, is your, your blog post, Is it any different than what's in the reader? Or so how, how has it changed from the blog to the reader? And what are some of the challenges that you had even in creating a blog that was for this type of audience?
- [23:26]
Aya Nuruddin
I think when I wrote the initial post, I was still, I was still a tender baby grad student and I wasn't as far along in the research. And so it was less distilling, but more sort of, okay, what are the, what are the key pieces of the work? What are the things that need to be in here to, to make this make sense? And so coming from that direction, it wasn't as hard to sort of say, okay, well, these are the key pieces of what I'm trying to do. These are the main arguments. And having a couple examples that sort of explain the argument and sort of doing that at the early end of the research was actually a really helpful thing. So it wasn't like I took a massive document and tried to crunch it down into a blog post, but it was sort of that, okay, if I have this whole ecosystem of my work.
- [24:16]
What are the key things and how do I make those key things legible? I think revising the piece for the book was a little bit harder because I've done way more research since 2017. Like the dissertation is written, I'm working on the book manuscript. And so it was a little bit more challenging because now I have way more to say than I did as like a third year graduate student about the work. And so trying to flesh out some of the things I said, nuance some of the claims, but still have it be sort of a short, digestible piece of writing was a little bit more challenging, I think, second time around.
- [24:53]
Laura Ansley
You're not the only one who struggled with that from the authors because we've got the way the book is. I guess we haven't introduced what the book is doing is that it's a reader that includes previously published pieces from the blog which have been revised and expanded since they were written. So Aya's piece is a great example. She published it originally in 2017. She revised it for this book project. I guess that would have been in 2023 or 2024, since it just came out in September. And so for the blog, our general rule of thumb is about 1500 words. So they're quite short compared to say, an academic journal article. And then for the book, I think we expanded it to give people space for was it 1800-2000 words. Sarah. Somewhere around there, so that we could include new, fresh content. Because especially for folks like Aya, where it had been a while and their research had developed, we wanted there to be more information. But then there were also pieces that were contemporary issues where people needed to be able to update it. If they were talking about threats to Roe v. Wade in 2018, obviously they need to update that essay to be able to talk about what's going on since roe fell in 2022.
- [26:05]
And I should also mention that because these pieces are so short, that means we could include a lot of them in the book. So there's eight sections, each with four to seven essays. I might be slightly off on that, but we're talking about 50 some authors being able to contribute pieces to this book. And so it's really meant to be very teachable for classroom use, very digestible for general readers, that you've got these little chunks of fantastic scholarship where you can learn a lot, but you can read it in a short sitting rather than dedicating a couple hours to it. You can read little pieces at a time.
- [26:43]
Leah Cargan
Yeah, yeah. And I actually really.
- [26:47]
I didn't know what I was expecting to see, but I like that there were. There's discussion questions, there's guiding questions, there's. And so it sparked some questions for me about who are your anticipated readers? Because you have readers from the blog and then you have readers, which seems like there's a classroom audience that we're trying to tap into, but there seems like there's also more. So can we talk about who is the demographic for this book and how are you trying to expand that demographic from the website to. To the book?
- [27:21]
Sarah Hanley Cousins
That's a great question.
- [27:24]
I think that the. We have always thought about.
- [27:30]
Our essays being accessible to lots of different audiences, lots of different kinds of people. And when we were going to put the book together, we certainly had the vision that this would be used in classrooms. And I'm glad that you mentioned the discussion questions. I think a lot of the discussion questions are connected to the images. And if I recall correctly, Avril Earls, our layout editor, was one of the people that kind of pushed for that inclusion. And partly it's, you know, her role at the. On the blog is curating images. Like that's one of her jobs is to find the right image to put into an essay. And I think that it's a really. I think that those discussion questions sort of capture something that I really appreciate about that I think that we are really good at, is that yeah. The discussion questions are there for students.
- [28:27]
Laura Ansley
Yeah.
- [28:28]
Aya Nuruddin
Like that.
- [28:28]
Sarah Hanley Cousins
We were hoping that. That someone teaching a reproductive health class, a reproductive health history class, women's history class, might just assign the entire book. Right. And that those discussion questions might facilitate a conversation with students about an image. But I also think about them as perhaps being chewed on, maybe not having a discussion in a. In a classroom, but like helping someone who does not work inside of academia to look at an image that is connected to the ideas that this book raises and to chew on that image. Right. To unpack that image, to think about what is going on here.
- [29:13]
What is this depicting rather than the images just simply being decorative.
- [29:19]
Leah Cargan
Right.
- [29:20]
Sarah Hanley Cousins
It's encouraging, whoever that reader is, to critically engage with that material in the same way that hopefully they would critically engage with the written material. Right. So I certainly think that's. That's part of it in terms of, you know, who. Who our audience is and how that has changed over time. I think maybe when this first started.
- [29:45]
You know, we wanted it to be a public audience, but, like, who that public was, I think sometimes changed for us. Right. That, like, sometimes when we said we're writing for public audiences, that maybe what we actually meant was, like, we're kind of trying to find a way, as we've all sort of articulated, we were. We were young, we were new. We were trying to break into this. This world, which is very difficult, notoriously, very difficult to have a career in. Right. And trying to find ways to speak to each other and to other scholars about what we were doing and. And get people to. To care about our scholarship. And then I think we've also, in some of these, as the project developed and we started to add essays about, I don't know, Virgin river or Nashville or crazy ex girlfriend or whatever the. Whatever the thing was that we've also tried to find ways to speak to people outside of our. Our bubble, right. About, you know, here's this. Here's this thing that's happening in the news, or here's this, you know, piece of media that's getting a lot of attention right now. Let's use that as a gateway to, like, ex. To. To help you to understand these forces that are at work, whether they're historical forces or cultural forces or political forces or forces of power. Right. We can use this, like, accessible, interesting thing, Nashville. I actually don't know that I do this really well in this Nashville essay. I probably shouldn't be, like, really harping on this one, but we could use this thing, right, to expand and to ask people to think critically about the media that they're seeing in their everyday lives in the same way that the book is asking people to think critically about those images.
- [31:33]
Laura Ansley
I think one of the other things that's important in the book is the way we decided to structure it. There were a lot of conversations when, after we had, you know, been approached by the press and we were deciding to put together a book proposal for them about, you know, we've covered so much on the blog. So, like, should this be a book about.
- [31:56]
Women and gender? Very narrowly, should it be a book about, you know, like, we've got a series actually about nursing history called Beyond Florence. Is that something we would want to go into? Nursing is not the primary thing we do. It's a confusing title for the project. We know. But when we sat down and fleshed out this idea about. Okay, well, our bread and butter on the blog has often been reproductive histories, because we are all, as Sarah said from the beginning, this is a feminist project. We are pro choice. We publish things about the history of abortion and contraception and, and these often unfortunately controversial topics and how these two have a history that, you know, the, the abortion debate doesn't only start with, you know, evangelical Christians in the mid 20th century. And so when we sat down and thought about this, this, we came up with this idea of kind of the arc of reproduction that it goes, the book itself goes from sex to contraception to pregnancy through abortion and loss times when pregnancy does not result in a child to a section on childbirth. And then the two final sections diverge a little bit from that kind of reproductive chronology to talk about violence and about justice, because those are two areas where we wanted to make sure that we had some scholarly, critical engagement. So thinking about audience, you know, many, many public audiences are used to kind of a chronological history or, or a book that focuses on one place. And I'll say, like most of the essays in the book are US History, though in each section we tried to include at least one from a different place in the world. So, you know, it's. It. It was a way to think about women's bodies and, and women's history and medical history without being so narrowly confined by some of those usual.
- [33:56]
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- [34:28]
Aya Nuruddin
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Laura Ansley
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Aya Nuruddin
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Laura Ansley
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Aya Nuruddin
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- [35:00]
Sarah Hanley Cousins
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Aya Nuruddin
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Leah Cargan
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Laura Ansley
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Aya Nuruddin
Of you must quest to the Sea of Monsters. Let's go do the impossible.
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Sarah Hanley Cousins
Percy Percy Jackson and the Olympians new.
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Leah Cargan
Season two episode premiere December 10th on Disney and Hulu. Learn more@disneyplus.com what's on? And another question about now that we're talking about the structure, why can we talk about why the decision to have a collective editorial board? Does that come from the history of of this, this blog developed as a community, or is this a very intentional reason? I'm I'd like to hear a little bit about that.
- [35:52]
Sarah Hanley Cousins
You want me to tackle that, Laura?
- [35:53]
Laura Ansley
Sure. Go for it.
- [35:54]
Aya Nuruddin
Yeah.
- [35:56]
Sarah Hanley Cousins
Thank you for that question. I I this is one of the things that I am the most proud of in this project and in my time at Nursing Cleo.
- [36:05]
You know, in many ways we have always, we may not have always called ourselves an editorial collective from the beginning, right. But the ways that we operated were certainly like that, right. That everyone has always had an equal say in everything that we do. Any, any editor can, can reject an essay if they, you know, if it comes from an area of their expertise and they say, I don't like the way this is framed, or I don't think that they're interpreting something correctly. Like any editor has the equal say on our editorial board, right? To say, I really like this essay, let's go with it, or I don't think that this essay is ready. We have always made all of our decisions together regarding the direction that the blog was going to go or things that we were going to take on or new series that we were going to do, or even something like bringing on new editors. Those are all decisions that everyone makes together. It is not something that comes from the executive director or, excuse me, the executive editor alone. Right? And so when it came to writing a book, I think this was one of the first challenges that we had to think through was who gets credit for this book. Right. Because there are certain things that you have to do when you're. When you're publishing a book, like sign contracts, Right. So Jackie, Laura, and I signed the contracts for this book. But we also were not the only people that worked very long and hard. Right. We have all the authors, like Aya, and we have all these editors who maybe did not write a word in this book, but put huge amount of work into shaping what it would look like, shaping every single essay line, editing every single essay. It's so funny. I was talking to students about this yesterday, actually. I visited a class to talk about the project, and I said, you know, to them, I was telling them the story that when my husband saw the book, when it arrived at the house, he picked it up and he was like, but your name isn't on it anywhere. I was like, yeah, that. That was intentional. Like, it's not supposed to be on it because this is not my book. This is the Nursing Cleo Editorial Collective's book, Right?
- [38:22]
Laura Ansley
Yeah.
- [38:23]
Sarah Hanley Cousins
And then the name itself, the Editorial Collective, I think, was kind of an offhanded statement that one of our editors, Ari Fulton, made, and they just kind of. In the. I think, the proposal phase, we weren't sure what to call ourselves. And Ari just kind of threw this in there and it stuck, because I think that it really does speak to how our. How our community works, that it is a collective and it is intentional. And it took some legwork to make that actually come to fruition, because Nursing Cleo had to be an entity in order for us to have this be credited to all of us rather than to one person or to a handful of editors. Right. So we had to become a nonprofit so that we were like an actual corporate entity in order for this to work. So it is something that I think is at the core of who we are and what we do at Nursing Cleo.
- [39:16]
Laura Ansley
And we do list the names of the book committee, I think, is how we name it in the acknowledgments. So our names are in there. They're just not on the COVID or the title page. And I'll also say while there were, I think, 10 or 11 people who worked together on the book project, on the editorial committee, you also have to think about all of those other editors who edited these essays for the blog. So not every editor is still on the team. People cycle in and out as time passes. Because, as we said, this is a 13 year project at this point. And so I know I would feel bad if we had, you know, this was edited by Jackie, Sarah and Laura, let's say. Cause we're the ones who signed the contract when There were probably 15 or more people over the years who have touched these essays in various forms. Not each essay individually, but across the mass of the essays. You know, if those people's work isn't acknowledged, that's, to me, a big issue. And something Jackie's been saying about the book that I really love is that we also are somewhat inspired by things like the Boston Women's Health Collective, that in an Our Bodies, Ourselves way, like this is something that we published as a group that has a lot of people's fingers in it, but it's not necessarily the responsibility of one or two, two or three of us. And I also hope, too, that, like, there will be revised editions or other opportunities to publish other Nursing Cleo readers where we can follow this model again, because we have so many topics and different things that while sex, reproduction and justice is the thing we have the most of on the site, if we're looking at one topic, there are plenty of other topics that if this goes well, maybe there could be other Nursing Clear readers on other fun topics like this in the future.
- [41:06]
Aya Nuruddin
I want to just add to this also, because I think this decision, because I remember at different phases, the sort of conversation around whether or not we could have this sort of edited by the collective and what does that mean. But I think that, I think speaks to the politics and the ethics of Nursing Cleo.
- [41:24]
Sarah Hanley Cousins
Right.
- [41:24]
Aya Nuruddin
That it's about rethinking some of the traditional ways we think about certain things in academia. Right. We're really, you know, in other areas of academic publication, we're really invested in who's the author, who's the first author. Right. Like, all of those things matter a lot and don't always reflect.
- [41:44]
All the different labor that goes into this, into academic production. And I think doing it this way was an important political and ethical decision about, like, the politics of citation. I think it's also especially important because we have data about women not getting excited as much as men. And I think that this is one way to sort of answer those problems that keep coming up in sort of more traditional forms of academic publishing to think more expansively about what are all the forms of labor that go into producing scholarship.
- [42:19]
Sarah Hanley Cousins
Right.
- [42:20]
Aya Nuruddin
It's not just the author, it's not just the editor. It's all of these people in between. Right. Like, for me, I know I had multiple people before it was even submitted to nurse. And Cleo, who had, you know, had read my essay before I'd even made it, you know, to Lauren's Google Doc. Right. That more than one person in nursing Cleo read it before it went online. That Jackie helped me to put the images in.
- [42:42]
Sarah Hanley Cousins
Right.
- [42:42]
Aya Nuruddin
Like, there's a lot of pieces to this, and I think this decision is a great way to acknowledge that in a way that we don't often do.
- [42:53]
Laura Ansley
I should also acknowledge that the press was totally on board with this. So the press is Rutgers University Press. Our editor, Peter Micklis, when we brought this idea of, you know, we'd like to publish it as a collective and we would like for any sort of royalties or profits to go to the nonprofit, the nursing Cleo nonprofit, not to individuals who have signed this contract.
- [43:14]
Sarah Hanley Cousins
He.
- [43:14]
Laura Ansley
He was like, okay, I'll look into it. And he, he and his team figured out how to make it work. So speaking of the invisible labor, the press was 100% on board with this and supported it throughout the process. And Peter and his team were just fantastic all the way through.
- [43:30]
Aya Nuruddin
Love it.
- [43:30]
Sarah Hanley Cousins
Yeah, absolutely.
- [43:32]
Leah Cargan
The more I hear you all talk about this project, the more special it feels. The blog has already felt special in years past. It seems like it's doing something new, so community based, but, but now just, I don't know, just hearing the three of you talk about how.
- [43:52]
Strong and supportive this community is and welcoming each, each of you has your has. Has given your own story about how you personally were welcomed in to this, this community. And I, I. It's really beautiful, but I want to just ask, how can other people get, like, what would you say to somebody who's listening right now and says, okay, I want to be part of this beautiful community too? What should I do? What is the next step?
- [44:20]
Aya Nuruddin
Pitch an essay.
- [44:21]
Sarah Hanley Cousins
Yeah, absolutely.
- [44:22]
Leah Cargan
Pitch an essay. Join us. Okay.
- [44:24]
Sarah Hanley Cousins
Yes, absolutely. So we are always open to people pitching us essays, like, literally always. Please, I'm begging you. If you have a kernel of a thought in your mind about something that you think could work, pitch us. Even if it is in the early stages, pitch us. And we will work with you. Right. Like, occasionally we'll get a pitch that, you know, needs more work and we'll say, hey, think more about this and come back to us. But we really do try to work with authors to develop an essay. So there's a, there's information on the website about how you can pitch us.
- [45:02]
And, and start that way. Right. Like, learn what, what we are about by Working with us as an author and, and, you know, us helping you develop your ideas. And then we also are often, like, probably, I would say once every year or every other year, we do a call for editors or we invite editors to join us. We've done it both ways. And.
- [45:30]
You know, you don't have to edit for your entire life. You can come on for a couple of years, right, and then step away. But I really do think that writing for us, editing for us, and then once, once you sort of are in, you kind of never leave. You might stop actually doing the editing work. Right. I will say we have a slack that has become sort of like the heart of our. Of our community. And like, we have our managing editor, our original managing editor, who, like, has not actually done any of the labor of nursing Cleo for many years, is still on our slack. And part of the conversation, like, we really do think of ourselves as a community. And like, we will be there to support you. We want to chat with you, we want to complain to you about things that are happening in the news cycle. Right? So please pitch us, get involved somehow, and we will bring you into our little cult.
- [46:28]
Laura Ansley
And we're quite expansive on the ways we think about the intersections of gender and medicine. So even if you don't consider yourself a medical historian, maybe you work on disability, maybe not through a specific medical lens. But, you know, we publish a lot on gender and medicine, but also sexuality, disability, race. And then we end up having special series sometimes that bring in even more different people. So, say in 2016, we did a series in which we tried to write an essay. We tried to publish an essay about every woman who's run for president for obvious reasons in 2016. And so that brought in a lot of people who aren't necessarily medical historians. We've done series on the body on, as I said before, nursing. So if you have an idea that feels like it would fit with nursing, Cleo, bring it. Don't self select out. If you say, oh, well, I'm not a medical historian or I'm not technically a gender historian, because we might be interested. And the other thing I'll say is we've mentioned a couple of other types of topics. We do a lot of different things. It's not all hardcore. This is a blog post about my dissertation or book research. We do things that are related to popular culture that are related to politics. So if you're really excited about an upcoming film that you want to read through a disability lens or a race lens or something like that, Pitch us. We also want to hear about TV and movies and the things that.
- [48:07]
People are enjoying or not enjoying to get them through the year.
- [48:11]
Aya Nuruddin
I want to just also add too that engaging, engaging with nursing Cleo on social media is also a big part of the conversation as well. And I know just from my own social media engagement, like how important that was for how my post sort of traveled in the world, but also in sort of responding to and engaging with other folks in this, you know, the nerd coven that we're, you know, that social media is also a place where you can engage with other folks who are interested in these same kinds of questions. And I think like one example of this that I think is really important. I think after Roe fell, I think I was following. I think I was. I commented something on nursing glio social media, which then led to me emailing Laura and Sarah about possibly doing like the. An abortion syllabus for folks who are interested in the history of abortion after Roe fell. And then that syllabus went live. Right. And it's been. I didn't do a formal pitch. I was kind of like, you know, what would be good right now is maybe if we did this. And it's like it sort of germinated on social media and then became something. And I think there's lot opportunities for that kind of thing that sort of organically happens when people talk on the Internet.
- [49:22]
Laura Ansley
And you know, we're also still in those traditional academic spaces. So if you're at a conference that one of our editors is at, introduce yourself because that's the best way to get a feel for. Is this a, is this a project I want to get involved in? They can talk to you about your, you know, even if you have the slightest kernel of an idea of. Well, you know, I really liked this TV show Virgin river, but it's got weird gender politics. And then we'll be like, we think so too.
- [49:51]
So, you know, like the best way, like I think all of us were talking about, you know, we met a person at a conference. For Aya and me, it was both Lauren, it sounds like, honestly, and. And that ended up eventually bringing us in. So in person interactions, you know, just come up and introduce yourself. I always love meeting people who are readers and want to talk about gender history or.
- [50:15]
Sarah Hanley Cousins
Absolutely. I was just going to add. And also don't be surprised if you are at a conference where there's a nursing clio person that they come out up to you after your panel or something and they try to pull you in Right. It may not be that you have to track us down sometimes. We will also track you down.
- [50:32]
Aya Nuruddin
That's literally what happened to me. That's what Jackie Diggs, after my panel, she's like, hey, you should write something.
- [50:38]
Sarah Hanley Cousins
And I was like, exactly.
- [50:40]
Aya Nuruddin
Okay. And now I'm here.
- [50:42]
Laura Ansley
Here you are.
- [50:44]
Leah Cargan
Well, this is great. Stories about how this community developed. I'm literally so jazzed to have had this conversation, but we're coming up on time.
- [50:53]
Laura Ansley
I.
- [50:54]
Leah Cargan
You don't even have to convince me.
- [50:58]
I'm on my way to, like, all the adjectives. The cult, the coven, the organic feminist community. I'm. I'm convinced I am in. But I just want to say thank you, everybody, for being here today. I appreciate you taking your time out of your day.
- [51:13]
Laura Ansley
And.
- [51:15]
Leah Cargan
I'm glad we got to talk more about the nursing Cleo reader, because it is a piece, a new addition to the academic spaces, which I think is, well, needed. A little bit of.
- [51:30]
I'm missing a word right now. A little bit of a palette cleanser. Like a new. A new era of how to maybe do some things, which I really, really appreciate it. But just thank you all for joining me. I really appreciate it.
- [51:43]
Sarah Hanley Cousins
Thank you.
- [51:43]
Aya Nuruddin
Thank you for having us.
- [51:44]
Laura Ansley
Yeah, this was great. Thanks, Le.
- [52:00]
Sarah Hanley Cousins
And Doug.
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Laura Ansley
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Leah Cargan
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Laura Ansley
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Leah Cargan
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Sarah Hanley Cousins
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Laura Ansley
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