| This is a study of one superintendent of nurses whose leadership style embodied empowering and working co-operatively within a network of nursing and non-nursing colleagues, and student nurses at the Toronto General Hospital. The biography of Jean I. Gunn, Superintendent of Nurses at the Toronto General Hospital from 1913 to 1941, has three purposes: to tell her life, to demonstrate that organized nursing developed professionalizing strategies to circumvent the obstructions created by government officials, hospital trustees and medical doctors, and to illuminate the relationship of nursing with feminism of the day.;A selection of nursing issues with which Gunn was involved provides the basis for understanding the development of Canadian nursing during her lifetime. These include the enrollment of nurses for military service, establishment of student government at the Toronto General Hospital, registration of nurses in Ontario, development of a nursing department at the University of Toronto, construction of a war memorial in Ottawa to the nursing sisters who died in the 1914-1918 war, a survey of nursing education in Canada, the struggle for an eight-hour work day, and involvement in the national health insurance scheme.;Numerous resources were used to locate documents and published articles: the archives and libraries of the government, federal, provincial and municipal, universities, hospitals and health organizations. At least thirty-four persons were interviewed, of which twenty-one were Gunn's students. The data was used to reconstruct her life within the context of the nursing issues between her birth in 1882 and death in 1941.;Her contribution to nursing shows that the nursing profession did achieve success despite the hierarchical, paternal and oppressive attitudes and behaviours of the hospital trustees, medical doctors and the politicians towards the nursing profession. It delineates the ambivalence which nurses had in working with other women on issues which were not related directly to nursing. It describes the respect with which Gunn was held by colleagues and her students at the General. These results provide an alternative to the traditional interpretation of nursing's history as being oppressed and under patriarchal control, striving unsuccessfully to become a profession. |
