Nursing work is women’s work. It is women’s work both in the sense that the overwhelming majority of those who do the work are women and in the sense that the skills and relations involved are those most characteristic of women’s work. Like the other work of women, nursing reflects the complex interaction of ideological, economic, and political forces that women have been shaped by, have helped shape, and have responded to in a variety of ways. In order to understand the limits and possibilities of this women’s work today, it is necessary to set it in the context of...

The work of nurses is increasingly performed in a highly technological environment. On a typical day, a nurse may record patients’ temperatures using an electronic thermometer, continuously monitor patients’ heart rates and rhythms and blood pressures from the nurses’ station, and send and receive information via computer regarding diet changes and test results. In addition, her very presence on a ward for a particular shift may be the result of calculations made using another technology: the patient classification system. These are only a few of the many and varied technologies that are commonplace today in most general hospitals.

Understanding what...

Registered nurses, trained according to Florence Nightingale’s idealized conception of the nurse as a proper “lady,” mother, and wife, have in the past been a conservative group. As recently as 1974, when 150 of 180 nurses at Northwestern General Hospital in Toronto went on “strike,” Anne Gribben, director of the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario, initially responded: “It’s a measure of my self-image as a nurse that to find some of our girls [sic] had actually done it, just walked out, was quite staggering.”¹ Staggering though it may have been to Gribben and others, the effect of the one-day walkout...