Daring to Care: American Nursing and Second-Wave Feminism

Beginning in the 1960s, second-wave feminism inspired and influenced dramatic changes in the nursing profession. Susan Gelfand Malka argues that feminism helped end nursing's subordination to medicine and provided nurses with greater autonomy and professional status. She discusses two distinct eras in nursing history. The first extended from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, when feminism seemed to belittle the occupation in its analysis of gender subordination but also fueled nursing leaders...