Challenging Conventional Gender Roles in 1960s Canada - Essay Sample

Introduction

Often, the period between the 1950s and 1960s is considered as a period of conventionality, when both women and men observed gender roles firmly and adhered with society's anticipations. After the destruction of the Great Depression and World War II, the majority of Canadians sought a peaceful and wealthy nation. Nonetheless, even though specific gender roles and norms were socially prescribed, the 1960s was not a period of conformist as portrayed in chapters 5 and 6 of Kathryn McPherson's Bedside Matters. Although women were anticipated to assume their primary roles as mothers and wives and to disdain work outside of the house, McPherson's demonstrate that women persisted in making up a significant proportion of postwar labor force

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

McPherson uses illustrations to show literally to a reader how others viewed nurses. In chapter five, name" The Case of the Kissing Nurse," a 1958 Canadian Nurse newspaper depicts an image of an appealing and smiling white nurse with two males in bed smiling with gratitude behind her. The title reads, "The best medicine a man ever had," leaving a reader to imagining what nursing job the nurse had just accomplished.

In the 1960s, for women, the professional career established a paradox. While decency and public service were suitable pursuits, the critical role was still women's domestic domain. Nursing was a job for middle-class individuals, but a fundamentally gendered one demarcated by obedience to male doctors, caring, female virtue, sacrifice, and lower pay.

Nonetheless, according to McPherson, the 1960s and 1970s establish an opportunity for women in Canada to break their glass ceiling effect. They became heads of homes in the absence of their husbands who had gone to participate in the Second World War. The McPherson claims that she witnessed a rise in employed women. Besides, women entered military service as nurses and joined groups such as the Women's Volunteer Reserve Corps that operated in Ontario Quebec and the Maritimes, and the Canadian Auxiliary Territorial Service that was dominant in the western provinces and Ontario. This period leads to a corps of trained nurses, which was supported by the social forces of the late nineteenth century' first wave feminists. This articulate generation of women pursued a strategy of founding' a separate and legitimate scopes of endeavor through which women could gain political, social, and, economic equality

Therefore, in the entire economic and political disruption of the inter-war years, the ties of gender connected the gulf emerging between nursing leaders and the profession's rank- and- file, and supported leader's effort to maintain professional unity. Equally, like their experiences, as marginalized women had unified nurses during the early twentieth-century fights for registration legislation and suffrage, in the inter-war years, a specific sexual and social image of femininity, generated and permitted by nurses, was essential to their self-definition and public profiles as decent working women.

Moreover, McPherson Kathryn. Bedside Matters, chapter five (1997) assert that married were leaders in challenging this anticipated order, and in challenging broad concepts of working motherhood. The need for nurses under the growing welfare stated changed nursing from a job appropriate for single women to a chance for married women to forge a new uniqueness as professional working mothers and wives. In the 1960s and 1970s, women progressively prohibited their mediocre social and economic status, the dominance of motherhood and marriage, and the unacceptability of paid employment for working and middle-class married women

The desire for a social transformation at the level of social policy and practice was worrying for many who gained from women's unpaid labor in the home, and for several women who decided to remain at home. The alarm around women's refusal of traditional caregiving duties was because of post-war uncertainty regarding gender roles, especially within the middle class. Middle-class women were choosing freely to enter the paid labor force bothered gravely Canadians attempting to reconcile opposing concepts of the roles of women ought to pursue to ensure a good life for everyone. Nevertheless, the remarkable life gradually called for a second income. Chapter 6 argues that in the 1960s, the developing reality, particularly for working-class Canadians, had a restricted effect on the common perspective that working women assumed occupations that should have gone to the males head of families.

Women wanted to be viewed seriously. Women like Florence Nightingale, who d considered the situation a 'total war,' demanded supports from all Canadians. It was not until in the fifth generation when Canadian nurses establish a new vehicle for demanding enhanced wages and working conditions. In each province, unions assumed accountability for negotiating contracts licensing and education. Their effort was backed up with a liberal second-wave feminist movement, which is accredited with prompting the Royal Commission on the Status of Women (RCSW). The Movement examined the low ranking of women both in the workplace and at home. This lead to a drastic change in the health care system in Canada by addressing challenged that had plagued the health system in Canada in the 1920s and 1930s. These leading dialogue molded nurses, a reconceptualization of nurses' reactions to broader social trends supports new comprehensions of how nurse and women used to present and new sources of influence to advance, influence, and ordain more conditions that are suitable. Hence, enabled them to enjoy a more significant share in the gains of economic citizenship, whereas allowing them to attain their roles as mothers and wives.From the 1920s, Canada faced the turmoils of not only the Great Depression but also the Second World War; these conditions change the position of women, and the majority of them joined the labor market, overcoming their glass ceiling effect. Due to women struggle to enter professions like nurses, nurses as a profession attained its economic expansion and prosperity, hence it shifted from unwaged labor to waged labor. These struggles are even more admiring when considered with the setting of social opposition experienced by nurses as they not only repelled and conformed to anticipations that their chief role was as mothers and wise. Nurses discussed this puzzling political territory by outlining their responsibilities in terms of its useful necessity and gendered appropriateness as women's paid occupation.

Reference

McPherson, K. M., & Hicks, B. (1997). Bedside matters: the transformation of Canadian nursing, 1900-1990. Manitoba History, (34), 30.