Abstract
The development of nursing’s ethics is intimately tied to the social location of women in the founding years of modern nursing with effects that continue to this day. This claim necessitates attention to the early history of nursing to examine how the influence of the social location of nurses-as-women shaped and informed the development of nursing ethics. The received explanation for the genesis of the Nursing Code of Ethics and its supporting literature is that the primary impetus for the first American nursing code of ethics was to reinforce nursing’s claim to being a profession and to mimic medicine. Yet this explanation is not entirely adequate to explain the extensive and extraordinary body of ethical literature found in the first 100 years of American nursing, from the mid-1800s to 1965. The leaders of early modern nursing were, indeed, concerned to establish nursing as a profession, but the content and development of nursing ethics were not tied to an attempt to parallel medicine or law as recognized professions.
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Fowler, M.D. (2020). The Influence of the Social Location of Nurses-as-Women on the Early Development of Nursing Ethics. In: Kohlen, H., McCarthy, J. (eds) Nursing Ethics: Feminist Perspectives. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49104-8_1
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