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EDITOR'S
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Despite the fact that 96 percent of nurses are women, it has long seemed to me that most feminists aren’t big supporters of the profession. Maybe it’s because nursing is considered a traditional field, or because we’re not seen to have garnered enough power and prestige. I’ve never been sure I was right about this; it was just a sense I’ve had. Then
I opened a new book of essays called Mothers
Who Think (edited by Camille Peri and Kate Moses, Villard Books,
1999). The condescending title alone bothers me—would anyone ever
publish a book called Fathers Who Think?—but there’s
one particularly annoying piece. It’s called “Drama Queen
for a Day: Dogsitter/Mother/Nurse Puncher,” by Arlene Green, a
part-time free-lance computer programmer from Northern California. Soon she was ready to deliver. She writes, “At this point a nurse stationed on my left grabbed my leg and pulled it up so far that my knee was touching my ear. I looked at her with all the calm I could muster and instructed her to let go of my leg. She looked at me and said, ‘Push, push!’ I more forcefully requested that she let go of my leg. She told me to push again. A third time I told her to let go of my leg and a third time she told me to push. Finally I doubled up my fist and punched her as hard as I could. She let go of my leg. I gave birth to an eight-pound baby boy.” There it is: the attitude I have long suspected. To portray hitting a nurse as humorous, like kicking a wastebasket, is incredibly demeaning. And it’s written by a woman, someone who at some level should have a sense of the enormous task assumed by that labor and delivery nurse during every shift. Even if Green couldn’t appreciate the nurse at that time, in the midst of delivery, then at least in hindsight she should have felt embarrassed and apologetic for having struck a woman who was trying to help her. Or the book’s editors could have wondered just how funny that essay really was. For
years nurses have worried about being portrayed by men as sexy bimbos.
It seems we also have to worry about fellow women making us look like
clumsy and insensitive menial workers. Barbara
Bronson Gray, MN, RN |