RESOLUTE ENTHUSIASTS: THE EFFORT TO PROFESSIONALIZE AMERICAN NURSING, 1880-1915 (WOMEN, PROGRESSIVE (ERA)).
Contributors: University of Missouri--Columbia.
Published: 1983
Number of pages: 675
Subjects: History, United States.
Description: In the 1890s, two decades after the founding of the first American training schools for nurses, some of their graduates began to organize in the hope of making nursing a profession, as medicine was. Their movement, led by heads of hospital-based training schools, relied on selective recruitment and better education to win the status and autonomy that nurses identified as the hallmarks of a profession. It had very limited success.

Other accounts of the movement, many by nurses committed to it, aim to weigh its successes and failures. This study explores its relation to late-nineteenth-century American society and culture, particularly women's assignment to nurturant roles, middle and upper-class women's flight from domesticity, and contemporaneous efforts to professionalize other kinds of work.

Professionalizing nurses reacted against an image of nursing derived from midcentury ideals of womanhood and popular among the mass of nurses. It was outsiders and dissenters from their movement who glorified nurses' personal, womanly service to individuals. Such dissenters influenced the movement by criticizing leaders' snobbishness and helping to precipitate the campaign for legal registration of nurses.

Professionalizers participated in the flight from sheltered domesticity and pious submission. The yearnings for experience and activity which brought others to women's clubs, social settlements, and the suffrage movement led them to enter a new and relatively undefined occupation. Identifying with their work, they sought for nursing as a collectivity the status and autonomy they had craved as individuals.

Yet nurse leaders' choice of professionalism as a path to individual freedom kept their movement from offering liberation to the mass of nurses. The leaders, like their contemporaries in other professionalizing campaigns, belonged to an occupational elite bent on restricting entry into their field. Desires to distinguish nursing from domestic service and women's unpaid household labor reinforced such elitism and made them distrust nurses who gave bedside care. Thus they devalued the personal, physical work most nurses did, ignored such nurses' economic needs, and blocked grassroots organizing efforts.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 45-02, Section: A, page: 0607.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI - COLUMBIA, 1983.

School code: 0133.