Class, status & identity in nursing topic of Oct. 14 seminar
A physics seminar on “Class, Status, and Identity in Nursing – Historical Overview” will be held Friday, October 14 from 2:30 to 3:20 p.m. in Hagen Hall 325. The speaker is Dr. Judith Roy from Century College.
From the 19th-century Nightingale ideal to 20th-century realities, nursing struggled to become a unified profession. The intersection of issues of class, race, and status created multiple goals and multiple identities for individual nurses. This talk will look at control versus independence in nurse training and in fields such as public health and midwifery. Some nurses sought employment for financial security, some claimed middle-class professional status, and others found an important and valued role in their communities. In some ways, nursing retained a more “traditional” persona and elements of the Nightingale ideal well into the 20th century, with an uneasy relationship to the Women’s Movement of the 1960s and 70s. However, more recent changes in degree levels and specialization increased both professional status and class divisions.