Modernity, gender, and the negotiation of science in Australian nursing, 1880-1910

This article analyzes the ways in which the process of modernization in the early twentieth century was gendered by examining the work and subjectivities of Australian nurses and the writings of two feminists, Frances Gillam Holden and Rose Scott. Located firmly in the institutional and cultural field of medicine--a field that emphasized modern, rational, and scientific values--nurses negotiated many of the changes modernizing culture brought. Bashford examines the implications for nurses of the shift from morally defined interpretations of health and illness to biological understandings, and the related change from a philanthropic, charitable model of health care to one more scientific, professional, and state based. Historians generally have concluded that a scientific, professional paradigm displaced a moral, charitable one. But the historical picture was far more complicated. Both modes were problematic for nurses, as women, and explicit discussions proliferated about the place of science in nursing knowledge and practice. The cultural institution of 'domestic science' offered one way in which nurses could reconceptualize their work as modern and scientific, while retaining its basis in the feminine world of domesticity.