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with different educational backgrounds, for example, seeing a university education, or a diploma
from Gülhane, Kızılay, or Hacettepe, or membership in a later generation of graduates from the same
institution as being a merit in itself, might claim more legitimacy and more authority over other
colleagues who are in fact responsible for the same tasks at work.
Although there is “virtually no worker mobility” in nursing, 11 nurses in military and other hospitals
have such varied educational backgrounds that it has made possible different salaries and conditions
for the same task within the profession, and in this way, the working class has been divided into
“warring camps along gender lines,” 12 disadvantaging some groups among nurses more than others.
Nurses in administrative roles may tend to ignore the difficulties faced by those who usually have a
lower status within the same profession and are thus compelled to work more and to do the less
desirable tasks, like the night shift or care work, sometimes for 24 hours at a stretch.
Some tend to mark the start of the history of nursing in Turkey with the beginning of universitylevel
nursing education in 1955. 13 In fact, more than 150 years after the original discussion began in
Europe, there is still no agreement in Turkey over who should qualify as a nurse and what the
requisites and responsibilities of the job should be. 14
Since the highly publicized and highly mythologized voyage of Florence Nightingale to
the Crimea, there had been a great debate over who should nurse, what nursing should
be, and how to define the role of the nurse in the hospital and in medical care. The gender
ramifications of the effort were complicated, as women attempted to stake out a purview
of female power within the male‐dominated medical hierarchy. 15
Though there have long been efforts to stabilize, standardize and improve nursing education,
there have always been counter‐forces hindering those efforts, partly because of changing health
policies that demand cheaper health care labour. There are other reasons that prevent the
standardization of nursing education, one being that it has never been provided by a single unified
authority, but by many different institutions and at different levels according to the changing needs
and dynamics of those institutions. Moreover, there is a widely held perception that long‐term
investment in nursing education is unnecessary since nursing is seen as an innate capacity of women.
In June 2001, for example, the Minister of Health claimed, despite the strong disagreement of
nursing organisations and individual nurses practicing in various hospitals, that nursing is service
work that requires malleability at an early age. The Minister furthermore advocated the perpetuation
of vocational high school nursing education, which in the 1990s had been slated to be replaced by
university‐level nursing institutions. 16 These remarks were seen by many as a set‐back as well as an
obstacle to the professional development of nursing.
Young girls have been motivated to pursue a nursing career by their families and especially their
parents who believe their children could thereby more easily be employed. At least until the early
twenty‐first century, the army in Turkey had a pretty good reputation in society, and according to the
results of questionnaire‐type surveys, it was considered the most reliable institution; military schools
used to be preferable to other vocational schools because they met the student’s every need and
provided employment with a relatively good salary immediately after graduation. In this way, as it
was commonly expressed by parents, their children would be able to “stand on their own two feet at
an early age,” but even though this was highly important, it was obvious to me that for many of the
informants who agreed to be interviewed for this research, nursing was not a very liberating or
fulfilling experience, aside from the fact that they were earning their own living. A majority of my
informants pointed out the negative effects of their training on their identity, and the subjugation
they subsequently experienced, especially during the first ten years of work, by medical
administrative authorities as well as by senior and superior nurses. They reported that the
oppressive, punitive and strictly disciplined training they received in school prepared them for a
submissive role, and being employed at a rather early age made them vulnerable to abuse and
exploitation at work. Some said that they would not even consider sending their children to similar
schools or giving them similar responsibilities. Almost all of the nurses interviewed reported that