‘A man is a clumsy thing who does not know how to handle a sick person’: aspects of the history of masculinity and race in the shaping of male nursing in South Africa, 1900–1950

Abstract

The history of the emergence of male nurses in South Africa and the concomitant debates about training, employment and policy concerning male nurses, particularly black male nurses, forms the subject of this paper. The paper argues that the silence around the existence of male nurses in South Africa was produced by both white health officials and broader public discourses around appropriate masculine roles and careers, as well as by the association of ‘professional nursing’ with ‘women’ in both black and white communities. Contradictions — stretched across racial and class divides — emerged around the gendered division of nursing, and its explicit connection to womanliness. However, in times of war and industrial, particularly mining, health settings these stresses produced opportunities for the recognition of men as nurses. The paper traces the periodisation of male nurses in South Africa in these two arenas (war contexts and mining), making use of official reports, minutes of meetings, letters and autobiographical accounts as well as recorded debates, to analyse the terrain upon which men emerged as professional nurses. The article argues that first in 1928, and again in the immediate post‐Second World War era, South Africa was provided with opportunities to refigure both the racially‐based exclusions of male nurses, as well as the prevailing definitions of masculinity which constrained the profession. However, these opportunities were finally lost after 1948. Until very recently, male nurses were divided against one another according to race, and from their women nursing colleagues.