Nursing

“The particular female hierarchy within nursing further restricted the nurses’ collective power. . . . But nursing, from its very beginnings, created a female hierarchy in which sisterhood was difficult to achieve when different class-based assumptions about behavior and work collided. Commonalities of the gendered experience could not become the basis for unity as long as hierarchical filial relations, not equal sisterhood, underlay nurses’ lives. . . . But nursing had neither the financial nor the cultural power to create the separate women’s institutions that provided so much of the basis for women’s reform and rights efforts. . . . Nursing remained bounded by its ideology and its material conditions” (Reverby, 200-201). . . . The tradition of obligation made it very difficult for nurses to speak about rights at all, or to articulate a vision of caring that acknowledged the need for the right to determine duty” (203).