1873

Opening of first Nightingale-inspired nurse training schools (2-3 years) in NY, Boston, and New Haven. One group established by NY socialite Louisa Lee Schuyler and made up of women who had nursed for the Union, set in motion plans for the Bellevue Hospital Training School (Schultz, 389). “As both service and mill work became the domain of the immigrant, nursing was one of the few occupations that could promise white native-born parents that their daughters would receive both a moral and an occupational apprenticeship (Reverby, 48). “. . . love of humanity in a dignified and controlled manner was to transform drudge work into almost consecrated labor [49]. . . . In practice, however, loyalty and deference to the physician, rather than independence were stressed. . . . Drill and discipline, as well as character, became the hallmarks of training [51[. . . . Alongside the analogy between nursing and army life lay the insistence that the nursing student in the hospital was joining a family” [52]. . . . the crucial lessons of training focused on behavior. . . it was precisely behavior as an index of the student’s character that so concerned nursing and hospital authorities. . . . In general, behavior that suggested the student nurses had qualities associated with the untrained nurse was seen as a serious transgression. These were defined variously as crudeness in manner, displays of sexual interest or activity, and any real show of comradeship with the ‘help’” [55]. . . . Nursing thus became, for some women, a less elite equivalent of an education in womanly virtue and female solidarity afforded their richer sisters in the women’s colleges. But for many, as nursing historian Dorothy Sheahan noted, the training school ‘was a place where . . . women learned to be girls.’ Training narrowed, not widened, the range of permissible behaviors for respectable women. And unlike students in the women’s colleges, nurses were strongly discouraged from developing either independent thinking or autonomy” [58].