Gender: A useful category of analysis for the history of nursing

Abstract

This chapter explores the evolving implications of nursing as a gendered profession rooted in conventional and normative ideologies about womanhood and women's work, and how gender secured and impeded its professional standing. As an analytic category, gender wielded social and political power and purpose for women nurses seeking individual authority, knowledge, and economic independence within their families and communities. Yet, gender norms also positioned nursing in opposition to patriarchal medical institutions, and excluded Black women and men from entering the profession or segregated them in training and employment. Using two case studies, the nurse practitioner movement and the Mercy-Douglass Nurse Training School, we will show why an examination of nursing history must extend beyond a gender analysis and take into consideration intersectionality along racial, gender, and class lines. The advent of workforce shortages, shifting social ideas about race and gender, and conflicts with the masculine medical profession produced a reshaping of nursing's identity as a white middle class woman's profession.