Isabel Maitland Stewart, associated with Teachers College, Columbia University from 1908 until her death in 1963, was the pre-eminent international leader in education for nurses. Her outstanding contribution was to promote open debates and consensus-building behavior among nurses with the goal of democratizing the occupation in order to move it nearer to professional status.

As a scholar of nursing history, Stewart understood that nurses had been controlled primarily by other professions, and despite Nightingale's reforms, nurses continued to function under the male hierarchical model. Because of her education, Stewart realized that nurses must learn to assume responsibility for their own affairs, if nursing was to be recognized as a true profession. She taught that nursing must embrace the goals and aspirations of many different individuals and cultures in order to move away from the authoritarian model.

The purpose of this biographical study was to examine the education of Isabel Stewart to determine the sources of her deep faith in democratic practices. Using John Dewey's definition of education, the study looks at many educative elements, including schooling. Institutional archives, government and family records were studied, as well as conducting oral history interviews. The design of the study is in two parts: Part I is a portrait of Stewart. Chapter I presents her achievements and Chapter II consists of reminiscences of ten persons who knew her in varying capacities. These are in the form of direct quotations from the taped and transcribed interviews. Part II focuses on Stewart's education and is in six chapters, each one discussing one or more sources of her education--heredity, family, and early schooling, nursing school and nursing practice, Teachers College, mentors, professional activities, and self-education. As far as feasible, each chapter in Part II is in chronological order, while the overall pattern remains topical.

The final chapter concludes that, as with other female reformers of the Progressive era, the major sources of Stewart's education were other individuals or was self-directed, rather than formal institutional learning.

Due to her particular education Isabel Stewart acquired the vision to create a new democratic paradigm for nursing.