Since the turn of the century nursing organizations sought power and authority in the working world based on nurses' education and training; nurses wanted to be accepted and treated as professionals in the medical hierarchy. Yet repeatedly their ambitions were constrained by essentialist gender expectations. Responding to their lack of prestige, nursing leaders adopted professionalization as a means of overcoming their subordinate status. Although two good studies of professionalization in nursing exist, historians have neglected the link between professionalization and the experience of nurses who entered the male domain of the armed forces. Nurses admission into the military reveals the contradictions embedded in employing a strategy of professionalization to combat gender disadvantage. Essentialist assumptions about women served to open the military's door to nurses, yet at the same time they acted to circumscribe women's power within the medical and military hierarchies. The civilian nursing leaders worked closely with the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) to gain professional recognition for all nurses. The Army kept women segregated in every possible way and both civilian and military nurses had to fight the Army's gender based discrimination.

Professionalizers argued that to carry out their medical duties nurses needed to possess the autonomy and authority granted other professionals in the Army's Medical Department. In its desire to obtain the best qualified nurses during the wartime crisis, the Army acceded, at least in part, to nurses' demands for more equitable treatment. In combating the Army's discrimination, nurses, both inside and outside the military, meticulously avoided raising gender issues, preferring to rely on professionalism as a means to acquire the standing which eluded them as women. But no matter how studiously nurses attempted to ignore gender as a factor in their subordination, the issue simply could not be disregarded. With male nurses seeking admission to the ANC and a draft proposed to remedy the nurse shortage, gender issues collided with professionalization. And in that collision military nurses demonstrated that professionalization alone would not free nurses from their subordinate status.