They suggest, on a very concrete level, that the contradictions faced by nurses were neither unnegotiable nor insurmountable. They suggest that rather than being passively defined by socially constructed stereotypes, women actively embrace the gendered meaning on nursing for the ease with which it allowed then to create work identities that remained connected to their personal identities, despite their formal relationship to the world of productive work. Nurses created the boundaries that were, often simultaneously, both a source of their strength and a dam around their ambition. Still, women's commitment to the idea, if not always the reality, of nursing, stirred within them the possibility of using a particularly constructed gendered identity to step out of or, perhaps more importantly, step up from the traditional conventions of their particular stating place. Thus, the challenge ahead, I would argue, lies in thinking about nursing's history in such a way as to reposition identity rather than work at the center of our analyses.
Identity is, and has been, a critical, albeit ambiguous, variable in nursing.
Still, this notion does have historical grounding. In early twentieth century America, for example, we can catch a glimpse of its quite pragmatic role. And, in early twentieth century Britain, we can see its more affective workings. There, the experiences shared by volunteer nurses during World War I gave new meaning and satisfaction to their live then, and for many, for decades afterwards. These studies do begin to disentangle the relationship between work and identity.