Nursing And The Feminist Movement

INTRODUCTION

Nursing has long had an ambivalent relationship with the women’s movement. The profession was largely unaffected by the first wave of feminism in the late 1800s to the early 20th century that ultimately granted suffrage to American women. Problems between nursing and feminism emerged with the second wave of the movement in the 1960s, when the battle for access to education, the professions, and freedom from abuse and exploitation occurred. Feminists urged bright, young women interested in health care to eschew nursing in favour of the higher status and more lucrative profession of medicine. Nursing leaders were put in the unenviable position of wanting to encourage and support women in pursuing careers and insisting on equal pay

(dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/feminism). Another meaning, feminism is a range of movements and ideologies that share a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve equal political, economic, cultural, personal, and social rights for women. This includes seeking to establish equal opportunities for women in education and employment. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism

According to Erica Dien in his Journal published on Thursday, February 28, 2008, Feminism has been misinterpreted by society to represent masculine women who hold no respect for men. Feminism, however, can be defined as: “a concern with action, political or personal, the struggle for equality; valuing the individual, respect for the individual; and having an awareness or consciousness of oppression which may be experienced by women directly or men vicariously through women’s experiences” (Allan, 1993). According to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, the true goal of feminism is not for women to have more power than men, but to eliminate sexism and for society to express equality for everyone (Haslanger & Tuana, 2004). Earlier, feminism and nursing were not interrelated; however, the integration of the ideals of feminism into nursing could change the

At first most nurses were men, but this gender dominance gradually changed to the opposite, because of this change, more women become nurses, thus, nursing was not viewed as a profession, instead it was oftentimes and still is, viewed as “women’s work” (Sullivan, 2002). As lack of funding posed a problem for nursing education, apathy directed toward the oppression of nurses by male doctors, by the 1930s, nurses had been reduced to acting as aides to men (Groups & Roberts, 2001). feminismnursing.blogspot.com (accessed 7th June