[Images in Venus' mirror: woman, nursing and modern times].

This paper discusses the process of nursing professional identity construction in modernity. We utilize the ideas of category gender (Lobo, 1991) and modern person (Duarte, 1986). The modernity as a historical process establishes the emergence of work as a central category in the public X private relationship. Understanding the profession as form of construction and public presentation of the modern person, we discuss the nursing professional identity process in relation to its female basis. Working on nursing ethnographic bibliography, we identify a picture that gives to the female basis of the profession the greater cause of dilemmas such as: technical competence, vocation and identity.