Both a College Woman and a Professional Nurse: College Educated Women Who Became Professional Nurses, 1890-1920
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University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2015 Both a College Woman and a Professional Nurse: College Educated Women who Became Professional Nurses, 1890-1920 Katharine Therese Smith University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the History Commons, Nursing Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Smith, Katharine Therese, "Both a College Woman and a Professional Nurse: College Educated Women who Became Professional Nurses, 1890-1920" (2015). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1139. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1139 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1139 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Both a College Woman and a Professional Nurse: College Educated Women who Became Professional Nurses, 1890-1920 Abstract Within the context of the rapidly changing society of Progressive Era America, educated women were looking for new occupations which would allow them to exercise their skills as independent thinkers, autonomous workers and group leaders. In such a search, some women found their way to professional nursing and entered hospital-based nurse training programs after their college graduations. This study is a history of these college women who became professional nurses between 1890 and 1920 - a period when both institutions for womenâ??s higher education and professional nurse training were at a transition point. Historians of womenâ??s higher education and historians of nursing alike have yet to focus on this population in their analyses of educated and professional women. However questions about what professional nursing had to offer college women elucidate in new ways the meaning of work to women, female empowerment and the unique opportunities afforded to women through higher education and professional nursing. This dissertation traces the efforts of college women as they looked to nursing as a potential profession through which they could affect social reform and meaningfully engage in the public realm. At the same time, nursing leaders attempted to recruit college women into the field in order to gain professional esteem. Overall the story of college women who became professional nurses from 1890 to 1920 is one of intersection and tension as the leaders of both institutions developed differing and irreconcilable visions of the future of professional nursing. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Nursing First Advisor Patricia D'Antonio Keywords Higher Education, History of Medicine, Nursing, Women's History Subject Categories History | Nursing | Women's Studies This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1139 BOTH A COLLEGE WOMAN AND A PROFESIONAL NURSE: COLLEGE EDUCATED WOMEN WHO BECAME PROFESSIONAL NURSES, 1890-1920 Katharine Therese Smith, MS, CRNP A DISSERTATION in Nursing Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2015 Supervisor of Dissertation ______________________ Patricia D’Antonio, PhD, RN, FAAN Killebrew-Censits Endowed Term Chair in Undergraduate Education in Nursing Graduate Group Chairperson _______________________ Connie M. Ulrich, PhD, RN, FAAN Associate Professor of Nursing and Associate Professor of Bioethics Dissertation Committee Joan Lynaugh, PhD, FAAN Professor Emerita of Nursing Beth Linker, PhD Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science, Director Health and Societies Program Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Abstract iv Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2: “The Greatest Potential Force for Reform:” The Vassar Training Camp for Nurses 29 Chapter 3: “If We College Women can Work Together:” The Search for Suitable Occupations 58 Chapter 4: “We Find her in the Hospital Wards Content:” The Recruitment of College Women 93 Chapter 5: “I Had it All My Own Way:” College Women, Control and Nursing 123 Conclusion 158 Bibliography 170 ii Acknowledgements i I would like to express my special appreciation to my advisor and mentor, Dr. Patricia D’Antonio, for her continued guidance and support over the past five years. It was originally her research that sparked in me an understanding that through history I could ask the questions which I felt were most valuable to our understandings of our work as nurses. And it was thanks to her personal encouragement and interest in my ideas that I made my way across the country to the PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania. I would also like to thank my committee members, Dr. Joan Lynaugh and Dr. Beth Linker whose expert knowledge both contributed to the development of my ideas as well as challenged me to raise the level of my work. I am continually appreciative of the faculty and staff in the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of Nursing History who together as a family raised me and my classmates as historians of nursing. To my classmates, Brianna Ralston, Kathleen Nishida, Linda Maldonado and Amanda Mahoney, without your friendship, critical feedback and emotional support, I don’t think any of us would have been able to do this – me especially. I would like to thank the archivists at Mount Holyoke, Smith, Vassar, Wellesley and Bryn Mawr Colleges as well as Tiffany Collier at the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing for always being accommodating and helpful in making their collections available to me. Specifically I would like to mention Leslie Fields and Nanci Young at the Mount Holyoke and Smith College archives, respectively. They showed special interest in my topic and often took extra strides to help me get my hands on documents even when I was off site. i Thanks to Dr. Alan Goldberg for keeping me literally and figuratively sane v throughout this process. I would also like to thank Sophia Marie whose constant presence during long writing sessions brought me comfort and warmth. My eternal gratitude goes to Cameron O’Mara, my best friend, partner and soon to be husband. It was he who reassured me from the beginning, “everything will be okay,” and on a daily basis reminded me of what is most valuable in this world. And finally I would like to express my deep gratitude to “my dear old Mount Holyoke” for teaching me, like the thousands of women before me, that I have a duty not just to develop an informed opinion about the world around me, but to stand up and say it with clarity and conviction. v ABSTRACT BOTH A COLLEGE WOMAN AND A PROFESSIONAL NURSE: COLLEGE EDUCATED WOMEN WHO BECAME PROFESSIONAL NURSES, 1890-1920 Katharine Therese Smith, MSN, CRNP Patricia D’Antonio, PhD, RN, FAAN Within the context of the rapidly changing society of Progressive Era America, educated women were looking for new occupations, which would allow them to exercise their skills as independent thinkers, autonomous workers and group leaders. In such a search, some women found their way to professional nursing and entered hospital-based nurse training programs after their college graduations. This study is a history of these college women who became professional nurses between 1890 and 1920 - a period when both institutions for women’s higher education and professional nurse training were at a transition point. Historians of women’s higher education and historians of nursing alike have yet to focus on this population in their analyses of educated and professional women. However questions about what professional nursing had to offer college women elucidate in new ways the meaning of work to women, female empowerment and the unique opportunities afforded to women through higher education and professional nursing. This dissertation traces the efforts of college women as they looked to nursing as a potential profession through which they could affect social reform and meaningfully engage in the public realm. At the same time, nursing leaders attempted to recruit college women into the field in order to gain professional esteem. Overall the story of college v women who became professional nurses from 1890 to 1920 is one of intersection and i tension as the leaders of both institutions developed differing and irreconcilable visions of the future of professional nursing. 1 Chapter 1: Introduction In the 1830s Mary Lyon, the founder of the one of the first institutions dedicated to a liberal education for women in the United States, wrote notes concerning the necessity of such an education. “Females (are) narrow souled sometimes…All can have enlarged souls. (Female education) aspires to this.” She argued such an education would provide “a knowledge of the physical system…of the mind…of human nature – of the passions of society – of succinctly philosophical, clear discriminating minds – (and the) ability to tell others by truth and great motives.”1 Her notes described her resolution that higher education was a necessity for women if they were to realize their full potential as individuals. Her Mount Holyoke Seminary, established in 1837, would serve as the model after which the women’s colleges of the later nineteenth century would be designed. The most elite of these institutions - Vassar, Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe and Barnard Colleges - were those most closely linked to the mission and design of Mary Lyon and are known today as the Seven Sister’s Colleges. Close to fifty years following Mary Lyon’s notes, Florence Nightingale, the mother of modern nursing, wrote, “why have women passion, intellect, moral activity – these three – and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?...Give us back our suffering, we cry to heaven in our hearts – suffering rather than indifferentism; 1 Mary Lyon, Notes on Female Education, Unknown date, Mary Lyon Collection, Mount 2 for out of nothing comes nothing.”2 To Nightingale professional nursing offered women a space and profession through which they could exercise their abilities to the fullest.