World War I is an episode that illuminates the long-term change in definitions of women's authority from the nineteenth-century hegemonic concept of female moral authority to a latter-twentieth-century at least partial acceptance of women's professional and official authority on the basis of competence and rights. Historians of women have not examined often how gender has operated in the construction of authority in specific historical contexts, how gendered definitions of authority have changed, or how women have understood authority they have exercised. For middle-class women seeking to prove their abilities and further their career possibilities, their relationships with working-class women formed an important basis for their self-justification. Studied together, these three expanding careers demonstrate women's blending of older and newer bases for their authority. While YWCA social workers increasingly introduced qualifications and methods of secular professionalism into an evangelical enterprise, women police and welfare supervisors drew upon older, religiously-based definitions of women's special nature to stake their claims in masculinist organizations. (Graf, Mercedes (2002)
Modern nursing began in the mid-19th century with the advent of the Nightingale training schools for nurses. In the United States, the Spanish-American War and, later, World War I established the need for more nurses in both military and civilian life. As a result, nursing schools increased their enrollments, and several new programs were developed. In 1920 a study funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and known as the Gold mark Report recommended that schools of nursing be independent of hospitals and that students no longer be exploited as cheap labor. Following the publication of this report, several university schools of nursing were opened. During the depression of the 1930s, many nurses were unemployed, and the number of schools declined.
There are many examples of women's resistance to a hostile military workplace environment and many examples of women in other occupations who have challenged gender-based discrimination in the workplace...................
