Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood

Burstyn, Joan N.

doi:10.4324/9781315444321

Cited by 32 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…73 It was also described as a female trait. 74 Routledge's Manual of Etiquette described the requirements of a Victorian dinnerparty hostess as: 'tact and good breeding, grace of bearing, and self-possession in no ordinary degree'. 75 In the early 20th century, the nursing elite drew on this assumption about the natural social skills of women to emphasise the specific abilities women could bring to nursing: 'Honour, commonsense, discretion and tact are generally acknowledged to be peculiar to women.'…”

Section: Original Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Before compassion: sympathy, tact and the history of the ideal nurse

Chaney

2020

Med Humanities

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The word ‘compassion’ is ubiquitous in modern healthcare. Yet few writers agree on what the term means, and what makes it an essential trait in nursing. In this article, I take a historical approach to the problem of understanding compassion. Although many modern writers have assumed that compassion is a universal and unchanging trait, my research reveals that the term is extremely new to healthcare, only becoming widely used in 2009. Of course, even if compassion is a new term in nursing, the concept could have previously existed under another name. I thus consider the emotional qualities associated with the ideal nurse during the interwar period in the UK. While compassion was not mentioned in nursing guidance in this era another term, ‘sympathy’, made frequent appearance. The interwar concept of sympathy, however, differs significantly from the modern one of compassion. Sympathy was not an isolated concept. In the interwar era, it was most often linked to the nurse’s tact or diplomacy. A closer investigation of this link highlights the emphasis laid on patient management in nursing in this period, and the way class differentials in emotion between nurse and patient were considered essential to the efficient running of hospitals. This model of sympathy is very different from the way the modern ‘compassion’ is associated with patient satisfaction or choice. Although contemporary healthcare policy assumes ‘compassion’ to be a timeless, personal characteristic rooted in the individual behaviours and choices of the nurse, this article concludes that compassionate nursing is a recent construct. Moreover, the performance of compassion relies on conditions and resources that often lie outside of the nurse’s personal control. Compassion in nursing—in theory and in practice—is inseparable from its specific contemporary contexts, just as sympathy was in the interwar period.

show abstract

Section: Original Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Before compassion: sympathy, tact and the history of the ideal nurse

Chaney

2020

Med Humanities

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…88 It is likely that "little Tom Hoey," and Janes own son John Brown Hamilton, represented future security for these women, as capacity to provide for female relatives stood as a mark of respectability and success for Victorian middle class men. 89 Suffering the loss of her son, Nena Hoey resorted to tactics of mobility to reinvent herself. Business opportunities available in colonial cities made inter-colonial relocation an attractive option.…”

Section: Colonial Widowhood and Alternate Tactics Of Mobilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

A Tale of Two Widows: Marriage, Widowhood, and Faith on Bendigo Goldfield, 1859–1869

Jones¹

2019

Journal of Religious History

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article examines how, in the context of unstable colonial circumstances and the absence of traditional support mechanisms, the religious beliefs and support of faith communities enabled two migrant women to manage changed marital circumstances and economic disaster on the Victorian goldfields. The concept of Providence provided an important rationale to understand mining failure and the untimely death of sanctioned breadwinners, and supported these women in their management of economic independence. Both women adopted tactics of mobility as a mean to reinvigorate hope, pairing faith and relocation to pursue socially mandated vocations and family livelihoods.

show abstract

“…Despite resistance by some women (Burstyn, 1980;Foley, 2005b), these new institutions of rational recreation were established primarily for men. Women were encouraged to aspire to middle class respectability via consumption.…”

Section: Rational Recreationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The art of wasting time: sociability, friendship, community and holidays

Foley

2015

Leisure Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Slow tourism is motivated by the desire for personal and communal well-being. It emerged as an antidote to the fast-paced imperatives of global capitalism that urge the entrepreneurial self to speed up and work harder to achieve and demonstrate desired social status. The entrepreneurial self can be understood in the contexts of neoliberalism and the class and gender-based histories of time-thrift and rational recreation; the entrepreneurial self uses leisure time purposively in the pursuit of status, avoids idle pursuits, and has restricted capacity to experience leisurely social relationships. In this paper it is argued that leisurely social relations can be reclaimed by letting go, even temporarily, of time-thrift and the compulsion to use leisure time purposively. Data drawn from in-depth interviews with repeat visitors at two Australian caravan parks revealed that for the period of their holiday the tourists relax, refuse to be driven by schedules, socialise with other tourists, and feel no compulsion to use time purposively. The key reasons the tourists return to the parks each year were for the friendships and the sense of community they experience as part of the holiday. Slow tourism by its very nature rejects time-thrift, however, as the movement is harnessed by global capitalism, slow tourism risks becoming a source of conspicuous consumption. The findings of this study suggest that friendship and community thrive more readily in conditions where the need to achieve and demonstrate social status is discarded along with time-thrift.

show abstract

Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood

Cited by 32 publications

References 0 publications

Before compassion: sympathy, tact and the history of the ideal nurse

Before compassion: sympathy, tact and the history of the ideal nurse

A Tale of Two Widows: Marriage, Widowhood, and Faith on Bendigo Goldfield, 1859–1869

The art of wasting time: sociability, friendship, community and holidays

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About