Frances gillam holden and the children's hospital dispute, 1887: woman's sphere, feminism and nursing

Abstract

This paper examines the confrontations of a late nineteenth-century ‘lady superintendent’ with men and masculinity. It analyses the problematical links between femininity, feminism and ‘reformed’ nursing, in a period when the latter two were emerging from the first. A central focus is the extent to which the discourse of ‘woman's sphere’ was meaningful for such single, employed, middle-class women as the subject of this paper, Frances Gillam Holden, in the specific context of hospitals and professional health care. This paper argues that such a discourse informed her challenges to male/medical professional power and her bids for authority and recognition in her workplace. Ultimately this challenge failed, in that male/medical power was vigorously reasserted. However, such attempts suggest the gradual shifts in late nineteenth-century constructions of femininity and domesticity towards the possibility of feminism, not only in the familiar suffrage struggles, but also in such obscure locations as the Children's Hospital in Sydney