When nurses battle for public support

More than 15,000 nurses in Minnesota who staged a three-day strike aren’t just fighting for better pay and working conditions, they’re battling to secure public support — especially as evidence mounts that patients will die in their absence.
A century’s worth of sentimental blather about nursing as selfless women’s work has left Americans ill-equipped to grasp the severity of the current crisis, which has already fueled numerous nursing strikes before
the walkout. The history can help us understand why, unlike workers at Amazon.com or Starbucks Corp, nurses must confront decades of other attitudes that have condemned them for being anything other than tireless, self-sacrificing caregivers.
The modern nursing profession originated in the 19th century, when women volunteered to tend wounded soldiers during the Civil War. These first female forays into medicine helped pave the way for more formal nurse training schools in the decades after the war ended.
These new programs focused exclusively on training women. Though men had served as nurses during the Civil War as well, almost all the new schools refused admission to men. Nursing had become woman’s work.
Typically, hospitals would set up adjacent schools
for their female students. These women received most of their training on the job in the hospitals, serving as free student labour while living as dependents in dormitories that were run like convents.
When these apprentice nurses finished their program of study after two or three years, most went into private nursing, serving individuals in the comfort of their own homes. Very few went to work full time in hospitals because most of the work there was done by students.
This arrangement helped cement a public perception that nursing was less a conventional job and career than a selfless endeavor akin to motherhood. Indeed, many left their jobs when they married and had children.
Strikes were rare. The reliance on transient, unpaid student labour kept militancy to a minimum. So, too, did the fact that the nation’s burgeoning nursing schools — nearly two thousand in number by 1929 — guaranteed a surfeit of labour. In some cities in this era, 10% of female workers listed nursing as their vocation.

—Bloomberg

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