White Suits and Kangaroo Kills: Making Men's Careers in American Nursing

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores nursing as an emerging career path for men in interwar America. As women reached historic concentrations within the profession, it examines how early gradutes of the Pennsylvania Hospital School of Nursing for Men created a distinct form of gendered professionalism that allowed them to enter an otherwise female‐dominated field. Drawing on school records and oral histories, it argues that men's training simultaneously integrated the feminised aspects of caring labour while upholding strict codes of masculinity that also excluded gay men and men of colour. In contrast to the few existing studies of men in traditionally female fields throughout the twentieth century, this case thus more closely resembles histories of women in male‐dominated professions, in which participants calibrated their presentations of gender to appease both gender and professional norms.