Read the passage below and check your comprehension by answering the following questions. Then “submit” your work.
It might be strange to think that just a few decades ago, professional women with college degrees were expected to show up for work wearing nipped-waist dresses, frilly aprons, and white linen caps. For more than one hundred years, variations on this theme signified a woman trained in the medical profession. “The nurse’s cap” was clearly and widely associated with the nursing profession. Well into the twentieth century, nurses’ uniforms separated the nurses from the doctors (and in those years, the women from the men) in the health care field. But they also served as important signifiers. Prior to the opening of the first nurses’ colleges in the 1830s, nursing was left largely to religious orders and untrained mothers, wives, and sisters. The adoption of a uniform—however odd it may seem today—served to provide status to these educated young women (Bates, 2012).
Such ensembles today are limited, for the most part, to Halloween costumes; however, most nurses still wear a uniform of sorts: usually a simple pair of hospital scrubs in any of a number of colors or prints. In contrast to the nurses’ uniforms of yore, these simple and practical ensembles are mostly part gender-neutral. But even these seemingly nondescript items convey meaning. Research shows that the choice of color or print of scrubs can have an impact on patients’ perceptions about a nurse’s competence. Adults associate white scrubs with higher levels of professionalism, attentiveness, reliability, and empathy than colored or print scrubs (Albert, Wocial, Meyer, Na, & Trochelman, 2008).
Of course, uniforms are not limited to the nursing profession. Police officers, sports teams, military and paramilitary organizations, and many schools have dress requirements that are much more strict than those that govern what today’s nurses wear to work. By dressing in uniform, members of these groups convey messages about who they are, what their role is, and to which group they belong.