From patient to consumer; from apprentice to professional practitioner

Women as patients as well as providers within the health care area may yet benefit from the transformations taking place within the medical industry. The evolution from patient to consumer during this past century was fraught with reactions to overzealous paternalism and the misguided notion of separatism as a route to equality. Women's work was confined to her separate sphere and was limited to the privacy of the home or within certain circumscribed work roles "for women only," whereas the work of men involved functioning publicly in the world at large. Historically this situation relates to a key disability of nursing, that is, its dependent relationship to organized medicine which served to limit its advancement. For even though nurses could enter the public male environment of the hospital, they could do so only with the expectation that they were there to serve the physician. All women were limited by the Victorian mentality that prescribed unequal status for them in society. The active optimism which finally resulted in suffrage for women in 1920 offered promise of integration in educational and professional opportunities which remained unfulfilled decades later. In the last half of this century, the resurgence of social reforms dealing with civil rights, consumerism, and born-again feminism has once again stimulated great expectations. The ultimate solution must lie somewhere in the middle ground, where competence determines the provider and an informed compassion meets the needs for health care.