From angels to handmaidens: changing constructions of nursing's public image in post-war Britain

The public image of nursing is an important barometer of how the profession is valued in society. Recent research into images of nurses tends to use content analysis to substantiate claims that the mass media misrepresent the profession, perpetuating outmoded conceptions of nursing work. Such a strategy treats the nature of nursing itself as unproblematic, an object to be more or less accurately 'represented'. But these are assumptions that need to be questioned. The systems of belief and value that produce representations of nursing both reveal and constitute the institutional practices that regulate nursing as a profession, which in turn shape the material form and substance of representational constructs. Drawing on fictional and factual popular and official representations of nursing and nursing work on film, television and in recruitment literature, it is argued that although nursing was consistently constructed as 'women's work' for much of the 20th century, a noticeable shift is perceivable in the status of nursing's public image between the late 1930s and early 1970s.