THE REPUBLICAN NURSE: CHURCH, STATE, AND WOMEN'S WORK IN FRANCE, 1880-1922 (THIRD REPUBLIC).
Contributors: Harvard University.
Published: 1994
Number of pages: 504
Subjects: History, European.; Women's Studies.
Description: This dissertation explores the development of hospital nursing as a women's profession within the context of the most important political, cultural, and social issues of the early Third Republic: anticlericalism, the professionalization of medical care, the growing therapeutic efficacy of the hospitals, the depopulation crisis, and the rise of the organized labor movement. Drawing on French municipal, departmental, national, and hospital archives, as well as medical, nursing, and trade union journals, this study examines the distinct models for the new "republican nurse" that emerged in Paris, Lyons, and Bordeaux between 1880 and 1914, as well during World War I and the immediate post-war years.

The period from 1880 to 1922 saw the uneven transformation of nursing from a vocation dominated by religious nursing orders to a secular, skilled, women's occupation with a continually contested place in the solidifying hierarchy of the health and medical professions. The installation of a trained nursing corps in French hospitals threatened not only the authority of the religious congregations, but an entire social order in which the value of women's work was derived from its relationship to the Church or to the family. Nursing reformers' attempts to attach nursing to the State's project of protecting the nation's health meant that entrenched beliefs about the mediated relationship between women's work and the Republic had to be revised. This study argues that despite the State's interest in gaining control over the hospitals and its ongoing bid to undermine the Church's political influence, the deep-seated identification of women's work with maternal duties and religious vocation blocked the transformation of nursing into a bona fide profession in service to the State and unmediated by either Church or family.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-01, Section: A, page: 0325.

Thesis (PH.D.)--HARVARD UNIVERSITY, 1994.

School code: 0084.