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STRATIFICATION IN ARMY NURSING: THE IMPACT OF
EDUCATIONAL, PATRIARCHAL, MEDICAL AND MILITARY
REGULATIONS ON WORKPLACE CULTURE AND FEMALE NURSES’
RELATIONS
Leyla ŞİMŞEK‐RATHKE *
This article is based on research conducted between 2008 and 2010 in three big cities – Istanbul,
Ankara and Izmir. The study comprises several unrecorded and 45 recorded in‐depth interviews with
women who, after a four‐year course of nursing education in a military boarding school between
1972 and 1995, began work as nurses in various units of military hospitals in Turkey. Studies of
nursing as an intermediary position densely occupied by women can give clues about other femaledominated
positions in public services and help us to question the inequalities in workplace cultures
that divide people along gender, class, and age lines.
Women’s social roles in the public sphere have long been an important issue in the literature on
Turkish modernization. 1 Nursing, which can be dated back to the establishment of the first midwifery
school in 1842, was the first public service job for women. The factors that facilitated the emergence
of modern nursing in Turkey are partly similar to those in Europe and the United States. Unlike in the
Western world, dominant religious structures did not play much role in the institutionalization of
nursing in Turkey, but the same cannot be said for military institutions. “Military nursing is an
important part of the profession’s historical tradition” and “remains a central component of modern
professional nursing practice.” 2 The need for better and more systematic care for massive numbers
of sick and wounded during successive wars from the mid‐nineteenth century on provided the
conditions for the institutionalization of modern nursing as a profession for women. At a time when
nursing or any other profession exercised in public was not yet appropriate for Muslim women,
nursing as a professional category was first introduced into Ottoman‐Turkish lands by non‐Muslim
women, a precedent that is first and foremost attributed to Florence Nightingale’s organization of
sick care, with 38 nurses, in the Selimiye Barracks at Istanbul (Scutari) during the Crimean War
(1854–56). Though not the earliest nor the only one active in modern nursing reform, 3 Nightingale
later came to symbolize the advent of modern nursing, as in other parts of the world, and with the
romanticized image of “the lady with a lamp,” she became the core figure in nursing history courses
in Turkey.
Though the pioneers of modern nursing were for the most part women from the upper classes, it
seems that nursing education, especially in Turkish vocational schools, targeted children from lower
income groups, the majority of whom were new urbanites with a rural background, having migrated
to big cities from the 1950s on, during the increased “absorption of villages into the national market
economy,” 4 typically in the 1960s and 1970s. Accelerated rural migration since the 1950s facilitated
women’s entrance into labour processes and increased their visibility in urban settings as teachers,
nurses and other professionals. 5 During that process, vocational schools, including those for girls, had
a striking impact on the transformation of the rural population into “middle‐class” city dwellers. In
general, they played a significant role in Turkish modernization, not only by facilitating the
employment and mobilization of children of the newly urbanized middle‐ and lower‐income groups,
but also by providing differentiated labour for an urbanizing, industrializing and bureaucratizing
country. Families with limited resources were especially attracted by these state‐funded vocational
schools as they provided a practical way toward easy and early employment for their children.
The history of modern nursing in Turkey began at a time when there was a desperate need for the
care of veterans. While women have been systematically excluded from the political, economic, and
social as well as the medical power structures, paradoxically, the military, as “the most male‐
*
Marmara University, Sociology Department.