The National Women’s History Alliance organizes Women’s History Month each March. This year, the theme, “Celebrating Women Who Tell Our Stories,” was picked to draw attention to  “women in every community who have devoted their lives and talents to producing art, pursuing truth, and reflecting the human condition decade after decade.” To this end, the organization has been highlighting such literary notables as Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Gloria Steinem, and Willa Cather, among others.

For Women’s History Month in March 2015, I wrote an editorial in AJN discussing the importance of knowing nursing history and pointing out that as a female-majority profession, nursing’s history is closely entwined with women’s history. Nurses have made significant contributions to developing the health system of this country—indeed, community health services, school health, and public health were built through the efforts of nurses.

Archival voices from nurse pioneers.

In that editorial, I drew attention to several of the more widely known nurses and their contributions. But in AJN’s archives, which date from the first issue in 1900, one can find reports of nurses’ contributions, big and small, written by those who lived them. For example, Lina Rogers, the first nurse sent by Lillian Wald as a school-based nurse, writes (to read this and the following article, click on the PDF version in the upper left of the destination page) in 1903 about her experiences during her first year; Anne Colon, a district nurse in northern Michigan, describes her foray into the deep woods to a logging camp to provide care to loggers during the 1918 influenza epidemic. And there are so many others who are unknown to most of us.

Making our work visible.

As someone who has spent over 15 years encouraging nurses to tell their “stories”—whether in scholarly reports of research and practice innovations, accounts of community health projects they’ve initiated, thought-provoking opinion pieces, and heartfelt and personal reflections—I applaud this year’s theme. As nurses, we need to ensure that our work is made visible and that our contributions are recognized. Good work and innovative projects and practice need to be shared. We need to document nursing’s legacy of contributions.

And we need to share the “other” stories, too: the ones that live in our memory of a patient who was unforgettable or of a colleague who provided support at a critical time, the ones “reflecting the human condition decade after decade.”