Daring to Care
American Nursing and Second-Wave Feminism
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10017096 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Laura E Ettinger (Clarkson University, corresponding author), Susan Gelfand Malka |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 96 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 282-282 |
| Publication date | 2009-06-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/27694862 |
| OpenAlex | W2024949767 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
This excellent study analyzes the impact of feminism on nursing since 1945. Susan Gelfand Malka argues convincingly that second-wave feminism helped change nurses from obedient daughters in nurse-physician relationships to often-outspoken women (and sometimes men) who valued autonomy, professionalism, and caring. Using nursing journals and books, records from nursing schools and hospitals, interviews with nurses and physicians, and occasionally the author's experiences as a nurse decades ago, Daring to Care fills an important gap in the history of both nursing and feminism. “Nightingale's Victorian paradigm,” as Malka terms it, dominated from the late nineteenth century to well into the twentieth century (p. 5). Florence Nightingale equated good nursing with proper, white, middle-class womanhood, claiming that good women/nurses should be submissive, dependent, and self-sacrificing. Well into the 1940s and 1950s, most nurses attended hospital diploma schools where they showed proper deference to physicians, provided free labor, and submitted to tight control of their lives by nursing superintendents. Upon graduation, they continued to work in those subservient roles in hospitals. Yet in the postwar era, the seeds of the destruction of the Nightingale paradigm were already being sown
Autonomy · Deference · Feminism · Graduation (instrument · History of nursing · Nurse education · Political science · Sociology · White (mutation · Gender Studies · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law · Medicine · Nursing · Nursing Education, Practice, and Leadership
| Citations per year | 0.42 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2014 - 2020 (7) |
| Highly cited | No |