Nursing Profession - Free Essay Examples and Topic Ideas

The women acted as a vocation to God but as time progressed, the women conflicted with the male-dominated Church personnel every time they appeared too visible because it was perceived their freedom and independence were excessive. This led them into being subjected in the direction and supervision of men.

In the course of the late nineteenth century, more non-religious women joined the vocation and this was the beginning of the secularization of the profession. Having been identified as a feminine domain of womanly skill moral authority, nurses created respect through emphasizing the virtue and ethical connotation while downplaying the skill and knowledge of nurses. This put the first mass of women professionals at a paradoxical stance of playing a crucial health care role while trivializing and sentimentalizing the essential roles they undertook. The nurses’ only legitimate claim was to couch the description of their work as altruistic, charitable, or devotional.

Over time, the nurses’ image has been depicted in various forms like the angel of mercy, the sexual stereotype portrayal in fictional works of art, and dressing in cartoon-adorned attire. In fact, Florence Nightingale portrayed nurses as inferior to physicians. These have affected the image of nursing. The face of the nursing profession – that is female-dominated – also affects the portrayal of nurses. Despite the growing number of men in the profession, there ought to be more campaigns for recruiting men into the field.

The conventional role and image of nurses has been the expression of a group of oppressed people. The dominant oppressor, the physician, has marginalized the oppressed group. This has led to the development of low-self concept and, perpetually, negative self-presentation. The image of a nurse imbued in a person’s mind is that of a caregiver, but the services nurses render to patients is very essential and can mean the difference between life and death. Nurses still suffer stereotyping and the image created in the public’s eye depends on the expression that nurses have of their profession (Finkelman and Kenner, 2013). So far, the public image fails to recognize the scientific and professional development made in the profession. Nursing ought to shift away from a virtue script identity and into a knowledge-based identity.