A
Woman’s Duty
Caring has always been seen as a
feminine quality. Women care for their homes, children, and husbands. Taking
care of the sick also falls to the family’s women. Most accept this part of their lives as their womanly duty.
But what happens to the idea of caring when women starts to get paid for it?
Are they revered? As one often sees in women’s history of labor, the answer is
no. Instead, as Susan Reverby writes about in her book Order to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing 1850-1945 their work
is marginalized [Reverby, Susan M. Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American
Nursing, 1850-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987. 1-36.]
Nursing really began in family homes.
Here mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters stepped up to help take care of
ailing family members [Reverby, 11]. Out of concern for those in their care, some women tried to learn as
much as they could about healing and how to properly take care of people
[Reverby, 12]. As the middle-class grew in wealth the women that were in need
of money and who had come to be known as good healers, were employed to take
care of other families ill members [Reverby, 11]. These women were often older,
widowed, white woman from poor backgrounds [Reverby, 14]. And they were not
considered healers but more of a higher domestic worker [Reverby, 15]. Early
nurses had no set list of activities they had to do. The matron of the home
they were employed in could have them doing everything from actually taking
care of her patient to doing housework and cooking [Reverby,15]. Nurses working
in the home could be held anywhere from high esteem from their community to
some of the lowest members of their community [Reverby, 15].
Women working as nurses in people’s
homes could be considered valued members of their community. But for those
working in early hospitals this was never the case. Florence Nightingale said
that hospital nurses “were too old, too weak, too drunken, too dirty, too
stolid, or too bad to do anything else” [Reverby, 22]. This is not total truth. But what is
true is that many hospitals of the time were far too disgusting to keep anybody
then either the very devoted or the very desperate [Reverby, 28]. Nurses were
usually also patients mobile enough to help care for other patients [Reverby,
27]. Not all nurses were “bad” people or patients. If a woman could stick it
out long enough she could learn a great deal from experience and doctors
[Reverby,32]. As in all things what actually took place in a hospital differed
from place to place.
“Ordered to Care” is the best way to
put some of America’s early nurses. Caring was tied to being a good women and
Christian. But it was also long and grueling when her other duties had to get
done as well. When disposable income became a part of an emerging middle class
it’s not shocking many looked for help from others to do it for them. It is
hard, however, to shake off a sense of duty. While nurses were paid to do this
job it was still strongly attached to their identity as women. Because of this
one can easily see the lack of respect that is often tied to the profession of
nursing. And clearly not the respect that these women deserved for doing the
hard job others did not want.
