'Good Women and Good Nurses' Conflicting Identities in the Victorian Nurses Strikes, 1985-86

In Victoria major industrial campaigns by nurses inflamed the political and industrial arena in 1985-6. Many participants and observers believed that consolidating professional status, and winning improved working conditions, pay increases and providing a better quality service for patients were at the'heart of the industrial campaigns.1 For some of the participants, however, the industrial campaigns represented the opposite, the demise of professional status in the rush to embrace 'blue collar or trade behaviours' and industrial unionism.2 This diversity of objectives is the point of departure of this article, raising as it does important interpretative issues about nursing in the 1980s. Professionalism in a predominantly female occupation (roughly 92 per cent of nurses were women in the late 1980s) points to wider historical and interpretative issues. Feminist theorists have argued that both the traditional professional and industrial models insert predominantly masculine conceptions and preferences into what should properly be a feminist discourse and struggle.3 This article canvasses some of the consequential questions. How do we best characterise such campaigns for major change which involved so many female workers? Are they best approached as industrial union exercises, or as efforts to achieve professional status, or as manifestations of a new form of feminist struggle, or as a mixture of all this and more? Is the drive for professional status compatible with unionism? More importantly, does either a professional or an industrial union model provide women workers with the best way of enfranchising themselves and