A Dilemma Between Femininity and Expertise : The Status of Licensed Nurses and the Value of Care Work during the 1960s and 70s

During the Park Chung-Hee administration, both the professionalism and femininity of nursing workers were important resources mobilized to build the modern healthcare system in South Korea. The femininity of frontline service workers was at the core of its sustainability in times of insufficient resources and systems, like other public sectors in Korean society during the 1960s and 70s. What distinguishes nursing labor from other face-to-face service occupations is, however, that it contains the components of modern knowledge and technology, as well as those of human interactions following the existing social practices. While the former element lowers the status of workers in the gender-discriminatory order, the latter element serves as leverage for maintaining their status and negotiating power in the labor market. The case of licensed nurses, where the two forces dramatically intersect, is an example in which the different elements of femininity and professionalism antagonize over one’s status. The conflict surrounding the status of nurses shows the effects the strategies of related agents surrounding this issue caused. Despite being licensed professionals yet only as employees, nurses shared the vulnerable status of female workers at that time. The discrimination against the female life cycle that nurses had to face was a basis for maintaining the public health policy under the lack of resources. On the other hand, as their expertise acted as a key variable in the health care field, nurses often performed more authority and responsibility in medical practice than their licenses allowed. Even though the government’s health care policy heavily depended on the role of nurses, their poor working conditions naturally caused the chronic shortage of nurses in the public sector. Facing this problem, the South Korean government decided to introduce lower-paying replacement workers, which became exceptionally possible in this case, unlike other professions. Considering that nurses could not open their individual practice, it is not surprising that the value of a nurse’s license was devalued after this phase, which indicates that professional skills or knowledge could be undervalued once they were intertwined with gender roles. Under these circumstances, licensed nurses tried to gain recognition for their independent expertise, yet there was a dilemma: the more they emphasized medical elements in nursing, the stronger the subordinate relationship with doctors became; the more they emphasized non-medical elements, the stronger the existing gender roles inscribed in their care work, which ultimately blurred the distinction from nursing assistants. That is, as far as the care work was fundamentally trivialized, the status of nursing work could not be stable.