The Coming of Age of Feminist Research in Canadian Nursing

Abstract

The most significant issue facing nursing scholars and practitioners alike in the 1990s is related to feminist research, theory and epistemology. Schools of nursing and health care institutions are slowly beginning to embrace feminism, with all it's diversity, appeal and promises of hope for a conflict-ridden profession. We are at the forefront of a movement in nursing that has been slow in coming; in fact, it has taken us over twenty years to align ourselves with the second wave women's movement. Nonetheless, we are slowly beginning to call ourselves feminists. Some schools are changing their curricula to reflect this new mood, while in others, individual faculty who have been feminists for many years and others who have newly arrived at feminist views are slowly beginning to bring about a courtship between nursing and feminism. Researchers are beginning to find that their old traditional methods are no longer acceptable means for investigating questions related to practice and the profession itself. Theorists have begun to question the relevance of the nursing theories that were developed without a feminist perspective to guide them. Many practitioners have been exposed to new ways of viewing the world and, like the theorists and researchers, will no longer be silent. As yet however, little is being written about this trend; instead the rumblings are just beginning to be heard softly like thunder in the distance. What does all this mean to the profession? How will practice be changed forever? How are we to identify with both the theoretical and the practical issues that will emerge? The answers to these and other questions are merely speculative to this point, coming, as we have, to feminism at a point in history when schematic divisions have resulted in clashes in both feminist thought and action. Rather than attempt to cogitate about these issues, I