Emily Johnson, Doctoral Student, Yale University
Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania
Time: 12:15 p.m.
Place: 2U Conference Room, Room 2019, Claire Fagin Hall
University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing
Abstract: Examining nursing imagery in the period after the Second World War, scholars have concluded that nurses were generally portrayed as threatening, oversexed, and pitiful characters, representing contemporary opposition to women's labor force participation. Johnson's analysis of advertisements in mass-market magazines challenges this interpretation by demonstrating that nurses regularly appeared as trustworthy advisers and that they were depicted performing skilled work including dispensing medicine and assisting in surgery. Acknowledging a complicated relationship between the nurse in postwar advertising and contemporary domestic ideology, Johnson argues that these images are critical to understanding the full range of nurses' representation in postwar mass culture.