- Title:
- Gender, organized women, and the politics of institution building: founding the Victorian Order of Nurses for Canada, 1893-1900.
- Creator:
- Boutilier, Beverly
- Date Created:
- 1994
- Degree Awarded:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Subjects:
- Victorian Order Of Nurses For Canada National Council Of Women Of Canada Women Societies And Clubs
- Geographical Focus:
- Canada
- Supporting Materials:
- n/a
- Description:
- The foundation of the National Council of Women of Canada (NCWC) in October of 1893 marked an important departure for the middle-class women's movement in late Victorian Canada. Most Council women in the 1890s believed that a sexual division of labour rooted in women's peculiar responstibility for mothering and homemaking engendered an authoritative female moral voice. Their construction of female authority was grounded in a non-hierarchical understanding of gender relations in which women's institutions and social responsibilities were merely different from, not subordinate to, those of men. As such, they believed that a middle-class women's “parliament" like the NCWC would enable them to transform their traditional religious responsibility for the welfare of poor women and children into a national obligation to protect, relieve, and rescue the female half of humanity. Council women were initially able to convince legislators that the NCWC represented and spoke for the women of Canada but, as the decade progressed, they found that the NCWC had no real power to effect social reforms that challenged institutionalized male prerogative or authority. This was most forcefully underscored by the NCWC's attempts to found the Victorian Order of Nurses for Canada. Originally conceived by the NCWC as a maternal welfare service for isolated prairie women, within a month of the scheme's public inauguration in February 1897 its name was changed from the
Source
- Preferred Citation:
- Boutilier, Beverly. 1994. "Gender, organized women, and the politics of institution building: founding the Victorian Order of Nurses for Canada, 1893-1900.", Department of History, Carleton University
- Link to this page:
- https://cuhistory.github.io/grads/items/hist_228.html
Rights
- Rights:
- Copyright the author, all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.