Waitresses, sex workers, mothers, child care workers....all are included in the welcoming arms of a feminist ethos that values the work of women in society. Women in historically male occupations such as lawyers, physicians, business managers, and such are allowed entry, too.
But not nurses. Why?
Misogynistic stereotypes of dumb nurse-sexpots abound in Halloween costumes , television , and even in public service announcements for lung cancer . It's pretty plain that the profession takes its hits for being female-dominated (93% of nurses are women), intimate, and, in many ways, downright unpleasant . The work of nurses is the traditional work of women: personal, caring, and intellectual simultaneously, without a great deal of prestige or recognition. Nursing embodies precisely the sort of roles that should fire up feminists' advocacy engines.
Yet feminist media do not feature articles about support and empowerment of nurses, the largest group of health care providers. A search of feministing.com, for one, revealed a smattering of articles, mostly about lay midwives (who are not nurses) and breastfeeding. My subscriptions to Bitch and Ms. do nothing to make me feel included in feminism as a professional. As an artist, a woman, a wife, a sexual being, and a daughter - yes. But nothing about life as a nurse.
Nurses' workplace horrors rival those of the most mistreated workers anywhere. We face high rates of work-related injury, suboptimal staffing and mandatory overtime (in addition to the less-avoidable weekend, night and holiday shifts and exposure to hazardous body fluids and chemicals). If feminists supported the 2.6 million registered nurses in the United States, would it remain a dirty secret that 69 - 85% of nurses report having experienced sexual harrassment (mostly by physicians) on the job? (see Valente, 2004).
Nurses are, in many ways, the solution to health care reform. Why aren't feminist organizations telling the public that, for example, better funding for educating advanced practice nurses (APRN) to provide primary care would save health care dollars? APRN students in Seattle undertook a media campaign when the University of Washington increased their tuition to equal that of medical students, but feminist magazines and websites missed the story entirely. No matter that nurses pay our own way through graduate school because of lack of federal funding. No matter that medical residencies receive 375 federal dollars for every 1 dollar spent on nursing residencies (despite the much greater numbers of nurses needed in health care and the 27% rate of one-year turnover among new nursing graduates.)
Even the willingly ignorant cannot help but hearing of the critical nursing shortage . Much of the shortage is attributed to nursing faculty shortages caused by persistently low faculty salaries. A graduate education in nursing does not bring with it proportional increases in compensation. Most nurses remain educated in 2-year community college programs because there is a lack of drive for better-educated professional nurses, even though research shows better patient and organizational outcomes when nurses have more education. Nursing' recent emphasis on doctoral education for advanced practice nurses was met with opposition from the medical community, who apparently consider highly educated nurses a threat.
So, in nursing we have an underfunded, under-appreciated caring profession that gets little recognition and encounters active opposition to efforts to advance our status. Ninety-three percent of us are women. We place ourselves in both physical and psychological danger to nurse. We swim upstream to advance our educations. We work strange hours, skipping meals and breaks because employers do not staff adequately. We are customarily called by our first names, but we call our physician colleagues "doctor." Resistance in the hierarchical systems that exist in health care settings is met by firings, harrassment, and legal action for nurses.
What about this makes the nursing profession worth ignoring to feminists? Are feminists, too, buying into the stereotype of nurse as feckless doctor-servant? Is the whole nursing mess so hard to manage intellectually and emotionally that even the brave and smart are afraid to enter? Or are nurses viewed as so complicit in our own oppression that feminism can hardly be bothered?
Whichever, it's time feminism started paying attention.
Valente, S. M., Bullough, V. (2004). Sexual harassment of nurses in the workplace, Journal of Nursing Care Quality, 19(3), 234-241.
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Rated,
A.
Thanks, everyone, for your kind comments.
When I was an art student, I had no idea that nurses had brains. I sat down one day and began leafing through my roommate's textbooks, and I was surprised. This stuff was science! That was 30 years ago.
Great post. Great points.
I guess the imago just stuck.
cmulder002, actually, in the middle ages, men were often nurses. In wartime hospitals (such as during the Crusades, when hospitals came into being), the staff were almost exclusively male. Presumably women could not withstand the rigors of war.
As a feminist and a nurse, I think that feminist thinking has helped women in the nursing professions by supporting the rights of women to respect and equal pay. If we have not achieved that yet, remember that the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.
I guess the imago just stuck.
cmulder002
Actually the first nurses were men in the middle ages, and then the prostitutes in the Puritan era not in the middle ages as nurses had to handle bodies and a women of gentle breeding would not be able to do that and later nuns were nurses as well. I think that was a low class comment and I am highly paid for my skills and I keep my clothes on and also save lives. Imagine that in 2010.
One would think, in an age in which there's 10%(plus) unemployment, and there's been a nursing shortage for many many years, employers would jump at the chance to hire RN's with 25 or 30 years in the trenches. Job getting has just gotten more difficult for most of us. I heard that an "experienced" nurse takes at least 6 months of applying before finding a job. Woe be to any of us who've had to take off time for illness or caring for relatives! To the employer that looks like we're slackers. If we haven't worked in a hospital in the past 1 to 3 years, we're branded "inexperienced" and become "resident" nurses who get paid far less than those who are just starting out. Unfair? You bet! And people wonder why nurses are leaving the profession in droves.
I began to learn, the hard way, of the viciousness, cliquishness, and backstabbing of nursing culture, which permeates the highest level of its teaching and professional organizations. I envied the medical students - they were actually learning to use their intellective functions, develop authority and self-confidence in their decision making, and the women really stuck together, and who did not have to write idiotic care plans, which was all my instructors cared about. They were coming up with differential diagnoses and actual treatment plans.
I wanted to be a nurse midwife which was why I was in nursing school to begin with - I was on AFDC with two small girls and this seemed to be my only option to support them. I met with prejudice and hostility from my OB instructor and complete lack of support which devastated me. I realized my hopes of mentoring were just plain silly. I became so discouraged I gave up on my goals, and just hoped to graduate so I could support my family.
Nursing is the quintessential female "profession," or more accurately, "semi-profession." It is a practice profession, despite what nurse theorists like to say. Feminism wanted to open male-dominated professions up to women, such as medicine and law. Nursing characterized the worst cultural stereotypes of the self-sacrificing "mother" who worked for emotional rewards, which was promoted by nursing leadership until not too long ago; the thrust was not for nurses to learn to play hard ball to get a high salary and to become a real power player in the health care arena. How could medicine, or others, take nursing intellectually seriously with its wacky theorists like Rogers, promotion of Reiki and Therapeutic Touch, its ghettoization from ideas and theories in mainstream academia? When critical analysis of power structures in health care (i.e. Foucault, Marx) would be of obvious benefit to nursing, and embracing of the labor union movement 100 years ago, could have shaken up the profession and unmoor it from the mentality of "if we're 'nice girls' or 'good girls' the Big Boys will 'let' us play with them?"
Nursing did not and does not see fit to develop and promote anyone like me, coming at it from the outside, with a background in philosophy and liberal arts. It needs to constructively support people like me as a thinker and writer. Instead I got the absolute opposite reaction, which was exacerbated by nurse managers, who played "big bad momma I'm going to fire you" to control staff, and reacted badly to my educational background, which surpassed theirs. The nastiness of nurses can drive off the best and the brightest, or just render us numb and playing dumb just to get by and earn a paycheck. Nursing needs to change its attitude towards its members who need mentorship and who have original, creative imaginations, the leadership needs to stop playing junior high level popularity games and get back in the trenches and support the development and empowerment of all nurses, not just their "favorites". Supporting strong labor unions would be a good start.
I also blame the graduate nursing schools for having ageism. They really, really love the young (20s - 30s) students, esp. the non-nursing direct entry students. We older experienced RNs are seen as problems, and unable to change (absolutely not true), and seen as having a short career ahead of us, so why mentor us or help us become writers or researchers? I am finally back in an MSN program in my field, after a couple of false starts, and it really, really hurt to find the ageism rampant among nursing faculty. I realize I am too old to get a PhD and probably should not even be trying for am MSN, but I have too much student loan debt by now to stop trying and need that NHSC gov't job to pay back my loans, get health insurance, and to have hopes of a retirement stipend when I retire when I'm 80
Let's not discount the role the government has played in artificially creating a nursing shortage by inadequately funding nursing education (from the perspective of both the schools and the students) in order to create the "need" to import nurses from abroad to lower the prevailing wage and keep working conditions from improving.
Let's not discount the role the government has played in artificially creating a nursing shortage by inadequately funding nursing education (from the perspective of both the schools and the students) in order to create the "need" to import nurses from abroad to lower the prevailing wage and keep working conditions from improving.
I was a corpsman there.
I've been in VA hospitals stateside.
If anyone knows how absolutely wonderful nurses are, it would be us.
The ignorant ones who only know stereotypes need to talk with one of us or visit a VA hospital.
for more about what is wrong with hospitals
http://open.salon.com/blog/dr_evan_levine/2010/03/04/how_hospitals_make_money_raw_hide
I'm a social worker myself and I see the same thing in my field. Social workers are probably 80%-90% female but I don't recall ever reading a feminist article on working conditions for social workers. Right now, the trend is to hire social workers on a contract basis rather than hire than as salaried workers with benefits. This means to loss of access to health care for millions of women, but the feminist movement just isn't that interested.
I think that the feminist movement focuses on women getting access to more traditionally male fields such as law or business, and in the process traditionally female jobs are devalued and overlooked. The irony!
nolalibrarian, I think the new nurses t.v. series are pretty good. They are getting the idea, anyway. You might like my post about Nurse Jackie.
spectral_ev - I love that MLK quote. Nice to meet yet another nurse here.
CherylAnneNY, an old friend once said the most powerful protest nurses could stage would be to refuse to carry out non-nursing tasks for a day. No emptying of linen hampers, no cleaning, no bed-making. I think she's right, but have never been courageous enough to try and organize it. I doubt the nurses' organizations would be supportive, anyway.
tomreedtoon, wrong. If you'd followed the links, you would see that there is indeed both a Bitch and a Ms. magazine, and who told you there are no dirty jokes anymore? I recently read a blog by a woman who was raped. It was about men telling rape "jokes," even men who knew what had happened to her. This sh*t goes on, make no mistake.
frkywoman, I agree to a point. I do not believe it's nurses who are ageist, I believe it 's employers who consider nurses expendable (and expensive.) Nursing care is THE reason people are admitted to hospitals, but the American Hospital Association is not about to admit that. Nurses who get injured are blamed for not using "good body mechanics," which is known to make NO difference. I once read somewhere that nurses lift, on average, something like 2 tons every shift. At age 51, I find myself darn tired after 12.5 hours in the ICU. Things have to change, no doubt.
Nurse Jane Doe, good points about nursing culture. The twisted norms you describe are displayed plainly in academia, where I spend most of my time now. I have to say that I do not see this on the ICU where I practice, however. Or at least to a lesser extent. So there is hope. But I don't agree about medicine as nirvana. Medical students are overworked, underappreciated, and mistreated by their physicians overlords, and as a physician moves up in the heirarchy, it persists, but more subtly. The mode of torture merely changes. I think what docs have done particularly well is supporting each other publicly - they do appear united and mutually supportive. And this, in fact, has led to problems of its own, such as tolerance of malpractice and unethical behavior.
Tommy Jean Winkley, "We cannot expect anyone else or any system or movement to advocate for us and to recognize and respect us until we do it for ourselves and each other in the daily work place and in our professional relationships." Never was a truer sentence written. But I do not think caring and nurturing others should necessarily entail internal backbiting - in fact, it seems counter-intuitive to me. Why on earth would we treat each other so badly? Is the in-fighting among nurses another stereotype, one that keeps us from speaking and taking action in a united fashion? Or is it genuine, rooted somehow in our inability to express our frustration in any direction but horizontal?
Right now the physician is the revenue driver in the hospital and the nurse is considered an expense.
If I had a penny for every time I've heard "just do the best you can" when we are working understaffed and the acuity is through the roof I would be rich.
There is a window of opportunity here for nurses to be more political and proactive in helping to restructure health care delivery. If we don't grab the power now the institutions will continue the push to use anciallary lower paid workers to do more and more of the care with poorer outcomes for patients.
I think the solution, if there is one, is nurse activism. Individual nurses have to stop taking this sh*t. Writing about it is one way that I'm protesting. But not the only way.
There is quite a bit of scholarly literature on what are considered "female jobs", but I realize your concern is activism. At one point in history, the AMA had proposed that medical care be arranged into a series of ranks with upward mobility by educational and experience levels, rather than two modes based on gender roles. Nursing organizations fought against this.
How is it that you as a worker have no responsibility?
what about mentioned nurses in general? Licensed Practical Nurses?
Any nurse who has worked in a clinical or hospital setting has experienced the unprofessional behavior within its own ranks. What other profession writes each other up for infractions frightened little children? This is a problem that only nurses can solve.
I don't think we can simply say "I blame nursing." We're in a tough situation without simple solutions.
I appreciate your insight very much! As a student about to enter nursing school (BSN), I do hope what you have mentioned would guide me in the future to not only be a good nurse, but a nurturing human being.
Also, being a guy, I hope that my entrance into the proverbial fray would contribute, at least in a small way, to make our career more egalitarian in its representation.
I should like to add a couple of points here:
1) AD nurses should not be discriminated against for their lack of advanced degrees. They are the ones holding the lantern high until things change. Personally, I had a sterling education in a community college 36 years ago that has stood me in good stead all this time. Now well over 60 years old, I continue to work because I love the comradery of other nurses and missed it when I thought I briefly retired. Almost all of my dearest friends have been met on various nursing jobs.
2) After moving from San Francisco to the Deep South 6 years ago I found that the practice of, and attitudes toward, nursing here is at a stage I encountered almost when I began so long ago. A national change in outlook toward the nursing profession will be the only fix for a decades-long problem.