A Nurse's Story (Historical Context)

Historical Context

Women's Rights and Political Change

The 1960s and 1970s were decades of remarkable political and cultural unrest in the United States, as young adults questioned vigorously their government's foreign policies and indifference to deeply rooted inequalities at home. As had been the case in the late nineteenth century, when female suffrage was in the forefront of political debates, women mobilized dramatically in support of civil rights, antiwar and antipoverty issues, and labor movements. Many of the younger women of the era subscribed to a new feminism that focused on gender discriminations in employment, education, sexual conduct (culminating in the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade abortion ruling of 1973), and family-based issues. Older and more moderate women were behind the formation of the National Organization of Women (NOW) in 1966. Under the leadership of noted feminist and activist Betty Friedan (1921-2006), the organization focused on a number of gender-related issues and the process known as consciousness raising in which individuals discuss inequities to become more aware of what has been tacit and covert.

With regards to the types and degrees of employment equity issues explored in Baida's "A Nurse's Story," the first big challenges to sex discrimination in the early sixties came from wage-earning women who had continued to secure factory work after the gender-breaking boom that accompanied World War II. After the war, women stayed in the workforce during marriage and even after the birth of their children.

Linking their own concerns with those being raised by civil rights activists, advocates from the labor movements scored a major coup in 1965 when the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) began to deal officially with complaints concerning inequities in wages, sex-biased recruitment policies and promotion, and substandard working conditions. (The first chairperson of the commission was Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr.) In the first year alone, more than two thousand complaints were filed with the commission from working women from all classes, races, and ethnic backgrounds. Such efforts were brought to public awareness by media that covered discriminatory employment practices and women's struggles to raise consciousness regarding them.

Health Care and the Catholic Church

Historically, the Catholic Church has been a significant influence in both the business and the philosophy of health care in the United States, especially in the care that is delivered in hospitals. The mandate of such hospitals has remained clearly focused: to offer substantive health care in accord with the example set out in the life and actions of Christ. This commitment is expressed in practical terms, as Baida's story highlights, in a dedication to providing care for those who are impoverished and most in need.

Extending the definition of health care to include the social terms and conditions of an individual's wellbeing, Catholic hospitals are equally committed to changing the conditions that lead to a decline in health. They are dedicated to the common good. Accordingly, these organizations examine the causes not just the symptoms of poverty and raise questions about the accessibility of health services and discrimination in health care delivery. Although Catholic hospitals have been configured under their own direction as a private, not-for-profit enterprise, they have been forced by the Church and by others to rethink their mandate in the modern world, which includes the need to review their philosophy on such issues as contraception, reproductive technologies, and labor practices. In 2006, the debate over unionization of Catholic hospitals continued in the pages of such widely read publications as the National Catholic Reporter and U.S. Catholic.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

• Margaret Edson's play, Wit, portrays a professor of metaphysical poetry, especially the work of John Donne, who struggles to accept the inevitability of her own death after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer. A scathing commentary on the ethos of medical intervention driven by the imperatives of research rather than care, the play traces, too, the friendship between the dying scholar and her attending nurse. Wit won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1999 and was adapted into a 2001 television movie, starring Emma Thompson.
• Another strong-willed woman is portrayed by Margaret Laurence in her novel The Stone Angel (1964). Ninety-year-old Hagar Shipley remembers her life on the Canadian frontier and the disintegration of her marriage, and nearing the end of her life, she faces failing physical and mental health.
• Clara Bingham and Laura Leady Gansler's Class Action: The Story of Lois Jenson and the Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment (2002) is an account of an important case in the evolution of sexual harassment laws in the United States. The book tells the true story of the injustices and personal humiliation faced by a small group of women who went to work the iron mines of northern Minnesota. This book was the inspiration for the 2005 movie, North Country, directed by Niki Caro and starring Charlize Theron.
• Football as both literary device and metaphor for small-town culture is captured in Buzz Bissinger's 1990 novel, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream. Tracing the trials and successes of a high school football team in the small, economically depressed town of Odessa, Texas, the novel underscores both the advantages and disadvantages of a culture in which sports teams and athletes are seen as saviors and superstars. The novel was adapted into the 2004 movie Friday Night Lights, directed by Peter Berg and starring Billy Bob Thornton.