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The article reviews the book, "Hospital Strike: Women, Unions and Public Sector Conflict," by Jerry White.
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This article reviews the book, "'The Physician's Hand': Work Culture and Conflict in American Nursing", by Barbara Melosh.
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Nursing embodies the seemingly timeless characteristics of feminine healing, caring, and nurturing, yet this archetypally female vocation also boasts a distinctive and complex history. Bedside Matters traces four generations of Canadian nurses to explore changes in who became nurses, what work they performed, and how they organized to defend their occupational interests. Whether in the apprenticeship method of the early twentieth century or in the present day restructuring of hospital work, the position of nurses within the health-care system has been structured by class, gender, and ethnic and racial relations. Located between the doctors and untrained or subsidiary patient-care attendants, nurses have struggled to define the boundaries of their occupation vis à vis other members of the health-care hierarchy, even as tensions between bedside and administrative nurses created divisions within nursing itself. Focusing on the daily labours of 'ordinary nurses', McPherson argues that the persisting sex-typing of nursing as women's work has meant that gender consistently complicated nursing's easy categorization as either professional or proletariat. Combining archival records and oral histories, the author shows how nurses, in their work, activities, and social and sexual attitudes, sought recognition as skilled workers in the health-care system. --Publisher's description
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This thesis examines the experiences, attitudes and actions of the women who trained and worked as graduate nurses during the 1920-1939 years--of the third generation of hospital-trained Canadian nurses. The 1920s and 1930s were decades of crisis for Canadian nursing, and the occupation's majority, working in the private duty sector, was most severely affected by the problems of oversupply and underemployment. The economic crisis was national in scope, and endemic to the health care system, and was therefore exacerbated rather than created by the depression of the 1930s. In order to analyze the structure and content of the occupation during these years of crisis, a wide variety of national sources were consulted, supplemented by a detailed case study of nursing in the prairie metropolis of Winnipeg, Manitoba. This research on Canadian nursing during the 1920s and 1930s adds another chapter to the growing scholarly literature on Canadian women and work. It also contributes to the secondary literature on the social history of medicine and of labour in two particular ways. First, as the largest health care workforce, the actions of graduate nurses during the 1920s and 1930s, their agency, served as a critical, force within the development of the Canadian health care system, a force frequently overlooked within medical history. Secondly, the third generation of Canadian nurses borrowed from the organizational strategies of both professionals and trade unions, but neither concept fully captured the reality of nurses' occupational identity as women and as workers. This thesis argues that the third generation of Canadian nurses was recruited from sex-segregated female labour market. The many rituals and routines which constituted nursing technique were based on a theoretical understanding and practical application of the germ theory. As such, nursing practice during the interwar years must be defined as scientific. Nurses' scientific skills permitted practioners to integrate caring and curing, and thereby to create their own definition to what constituted skilled service. Out of this self-definition came a specific occupational identity which was reflected in the many associations designed to reflect nurses' interests. As the interwar decades progressed, conflict developed within nursing organizations as to appropriate solutions to the economic crisis. The compromise solution, hospital employment of graduate nurses, initiated the demise of both the apprenticeship system of hospital staffing, and private duty nursing. This solution successfully prevented the fracturing of nursing organizations in the 1920s and 1930s, but also facilitated the transformation of hospital staffing which would occur in the World War II years. This research suggests that the scholarly literature on professionalism, and on labour organizations, must more fully account for gender as a historical determinant. In suggesting a historical periodization for Canadian nursing history, and in focussing on the third generation of Canadian nurses who struggled through the economic crisis of the interwar decades, this thesis contributes to the growing body of scholarly literature dedicated to placing nursing history in history.
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It is commonplace today to suggest that gender is socially constructed, that the roles women and men fulfill in their daily lives have been created and defined for them by society and social institutions. But how have men and women negotiated and navigated the gender roles that have been thrust upon them? With Gendered Pasts, Kathryn McPherson, Cecilia Morgan, and Nancy M. Forestell have collected eleven engaging essays that seek to answer this question in a wide-ranging exploration of specific gendered dimensions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canadian history.The contributors cover all manner of topics related to gender and history across Canada, including: female vagrancy; gambling, drinking, and sex; the role of the miner's wife; the portrayal of gay men; and the sharply defined role of nurses. Unusual in its breadth, Gendered Pasts is essential to the understanding of the various threads and themes in Canadian gender history. Previously published by Oxford University Press, . --Publisher's description
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Presents seven papers from the workshop: "Feminist Reflections on the Writing of Canadian Working Class History in the 1980s" by Kathryn McPherson, "Peculiarities of British Columbians" by James R. Conley, "The British Columbia Working Class: New Perspectives on Ethnicity/Race and Gender" by Gillian Creese, "Teaching Working Class History in B.C." by Peter Seixas, "Labour Programmes: A Challenging Partnership" by Elaine Bernard, "Labour Historians and Unions: Assessing the Interaction" by Michael J. Piva, and "The New Brunswick Experience" by Raymond Leger.
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