Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/20

4 nation have been closely restricted by social convention to the home, and their energies limited to family life, nursing must have had almost wholly the character of a household art, growing out of the needs of the family, and closely associated with other domestic arts. It is of this phase of nursing that we know the least, although it must have been, throughout vast ages the standard, or even the only phase. Later developments of nursing, as a vocation or career, practised by more or less well-organized groups of women, could only come where women were released somewhat from the incessant round of menial duties, and allowed a certain degree of personal freedom and initiative. In tracing nursing development, we should know something of the prevailing ideas of an age as to marriage, and the duties of women; the degree of economic independence, and of freedom of women outside the family. We should then find that the fullest development of nursing was not possible without emancipation from conditions of subjection, and that women could not rise to the full demands of that calling without education and knowledge of the social conditions and needs of their day.

The development of the nursing art depends on three things. First, there must be a strong