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excluded. Subsequently, women became associated with the more
mundane and ‗passive role‘ of providing hygiene management which
Versluysen (ibid) argued was identified with caring and mothering; later to
become nursing. This largely fell on working class women. Therefore she
proposed the sex divisions evident in the family were transferred into the
workplace and served to keep women subordinate to their male
counterparts. She questioned:
―We should not forget that throughout the ages women have
willingly cared for the helpless, infirm, and socially dependent, but
that the reward for this has too often been indifference, scorn, or the
status of a servant class. We do not know why this has happened
with such consistency, nor why women‘s caring has been so
devalued in our society‖ (Versuysen 1980 p.197).
It is beyond the scope of this inquiry to answer why caring has been so
devalued though I suggest it is in part due to gendered views on femininity,
class distinctions, and professional vying for status and power. It can be
seen that the medical staff prospered while the status and image of
nursing struggled. I think this is still relevant to nursing today and impacts
on how caring and nurses are currently viewed in society. I turn now to
how hospitals emerged to see what light this may shed on the status and
system of hospital nursing.
According to Abel-Smith (1960) it was around the turn of the 19 th century
that the poorer classes started to move out of the home and into a form of
hospital based care. The choice at this time was either the workhouses or
voluntary hospitals where the focus was on predominantly social rather
than medical care. The workhouses were for ‗paupers‘ and were seen as
places to die; they were not designed for nursing the sick (Abel-Smith
1960). In the workhouses the nurses were untrained, unpaid and lived and
worked on the wards in awful conditions. They usually had been patients
themselves i.e. ‗paupers‘, supposedly more ‗able bodied‘ than those
requiring ‗nursing‘, nevertheless, their skills were limited (Abel-Smith
1960). Part of their rations included porter or gin in order to cope with the
stench and putrid conditions (Maggs 1983, Abel-Smith 1960). Prostitution
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