Becoming a nurse in Vancouver and Calgary: women, work, motherhood, 1958 to 1976

[...]of my familiarity with members of nursing communities in both of these cities, I was able to use personal and professional relationships to induce people to participate in my study. Both cities had similar hospital-based programs - both religious and secular - although by 1919 Vancouver had est...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:BC studies 2017-06 (194), p.91
Main Author: Scaia, Margaret
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Behavior Standards
Boarding schools
Careers
Community Relations
Economic aspects
Economic Change
Education
Employed Women
Employment
Employment Opportunities
Females
Feminism
Higher Education
Historiography
Hospitals
Interviews
Labor
Males
Marital Status
Middle Class
Morality
Mothers
Nurses
Nursing Education
Nursing schools
Practice
Professional relationships
Public health
Residential Programs
Rural areas
Social aspects
Social norms
Social Status
Teacher recruitment
Teacher Selection
Wages
Women
Women's studies
Working mothers
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Summary:[...]of my familiarity with members of nursing communities in both of these cities, I was able to use personal and professional relationships to induce people to participate in my study. Both cities had similar hospital-based programs - both religious and secular - although by 1919 Vancouver had established a school of nursing at the University of British Columbia. [...]the late 1960S, the University of Alberta, located in Edmonton, offered Alberta s only degree program in nursing, and this meant that its distance from Calgary created barriers for Calgarians wishing to earn a baccalaureate in nursing. The stories told by the women in my study - stories relating to what drew them to nursing, how they experienced nursing school, the employment opportunities presented, and their experience of becoming wage earners at a time that did not favour marriage, motherhood, and paid employment - challenge the prevailing view that nursing education in the residential hospital-based diploma schools was a site of unusual moral regulation, that nursing was a career of low social status, and that nurses did not fight for better wages, working conditions, and benefits. [...]due to the high demand for nurses in the burgeoning public health care sector, barriers against married women and women with children increasingly fell by the wayside. CONSTRUCTING THE WOMAN/NURSE Canadian historians of women's labour, including Joy Parr, Mona Gleason, Nancy Christie, Annis May Timpson, and Veronica Strong - Boag,2 explain that womens social roles are constructed in relation to dominant norms regarding appropriate feminine and...
ISSN:0005-2949