A Nurse's Story (Themes)

Themes

The Struggle for Wage Equity

Prior to the 1960s, women working outside the home confronted a longstanding and substantial wage gap both in respect to the wages paid male workers in the same industry and to wages for so-called women's jobs, including nursing and care-giving. Fueled in part by the advances initiated by the burgeoning civil rights movement, women saw the sixties as an era in which barriers to employment equity and educational achievement would be challenged aggressively.

As Baida's "A Nurse's Story" reveals, this new political awareness was unprecedented in its influence. In taking the initial steps towards unionizing the nurses in the Booth-Tiessler Community Hospital, Mary McDonald and Clarice Hunter initiated a challenge that cut across age barriers (Clarice was ten years Mary's senior), issues of faith (a Catholic, Mary pickets a hospital run by the Church), and racial differences, as Eunice Barnacle's growing interest in the benefits of unionization underscores. Regardless of their differences or the historical period in which they find themselves working for a living, the women of the story are united by one question, repeated often by Mary and picked up at the end of the story by Eunice: "You think you're paid what you're worth?" In this sense, Baida's story captures the beginning of a revolution that shifted forever the way a country thought about sex, race, and wealth.

It was a revolution, too, that changed in equally important ways the intimate social fabric of communities across the nation, from the largest city, in which women in factories and offices united, and, as in "A Nurse's Story," to the smaller towns, founded upon a densely coded fusion of history, civic pride, and capitalist spirit. In a town like Booth's Landing, in which two prominent families are so influential and in which every story is interwoven with numerous other stories, the strike changed the way people looked at each other and talked to each other. As the narrator observes, the strike caused townspeople to take sides and begin to target individuals such as Mary McDonald as the source of the tension in the town. "In an interview on TV," for instance, "Cheryl Hughes, a woman whom Mary had always liked, whose husband prepared Mary and George's tax returns, said, ‘If you ask me, it's an outrage. Let's just hope nobody dies. Those women ought to be ashamed.’"

Such tensions ripple through the town, captured in Warren Booth's scowl and in the struggle of Mary's own son George Jr. to reconcile his mother's battle for equity and respect with his own loyalty to the local football team and to his star receiver, who also happens to be the son of the hospital's chairman of the board. As Mary tries to explain to her son, the world is evolving and old certainties, like new contracts, are open to renegotiation: "Out in the world," Mary observes, "where I work — well, let's just say that Warren's dad isn't my teammate." As Mary's one-time and now-dead nemesis, Sister Rosa, confirms when she speaks to Mary in the last moment of the nurse's life, the fight was, in the end, necessary and progressive. "Workers have to fight," Sister Rosa states succinctly. "The whole system depends on it."

The Power of Memories

Memory provides a holistic view of Mary's life, taking into account not only the political activism that so many people in town define her by, but expanding outwards to give readers a sense of her other passions (her family and the New York Giants football team), her faith, and her politics both before and after the strike. Memory, in this sense, never allows Mary (or the reader) to find a single angle from which to view her life and the decisions that shaped it. At any point in the story, a once-stable memory can be frayed by another version of the same story within a different episode. When the proud mother recollects her son's finest moment on the football field, for instance, she is creating, briefly, a fond memory that is put slightly askew later in the same episode by her remembering that the year of the catch was also the year of the strike. Her original memory is twisted in another direction a bit later in the story when her son steps forward to educate his mother about how her activism is affecting his preparations for a coming game. With memory, in other words, comes diverse perspectives within Mary's own reflections on her life, which is, as her memory underscores again and again, a work in perpetual progress.