Gender Roles In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

In the 1960s, gender roles became a very relevant topic and many women starting working. Because of that many women became subject to sexual harassment. This happens to Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey because she is put in charge of the entire men’s ward at a mental institute. In this novel, McMurphy and the men use their sexuality to gain power, but the Nurse must hide her femininity and takes away the men’s confidence and threatens their masculinity in order to maintain her power.
The Nurse uses fear to control the men and force them into the conformity that she practices in the ward. At the beginning of the book, the Nurse finds some of the black boys gossiping instead of working and she goes to talk to them.

“I can see she’s furious clean out of control. She’s going to tear the black bastards limb from limb”(4-5). When the Big Nurse sees someone doing something that goes against her rules she gets furious because she likes to run the ward with complete conformity and order. But, when someone misbehaves and disrupts the order that exists and creates chaos the Big Nurse becomes someone that all the men including the black boys are terrified of. The nurse gets upset with the little disruptions from the men but when something much larger happens she uses manipulation to make them feel even worse about what they did. “‘She d-did’ He looked around him.

‘And McMurphy! He did. And Harding! And the-the-the rest! They t-t-teased me, called me things!’...He swallowed and waited for her to say something but she wouldn’t; her skill, her fantastic

mechanical power flooded back into her”(316). After the Big Nurse catches Billy in the seclusion room with Candy she shames him for having sex with a prostitute and threatens to tell his mother. Billy is so terrified of that idea that he claims that it all of the other men’s fault and blames them for what happened. When the Nurse uses Billy’s mommy issues against him she threatens his masculinity because Billy’s mom is a woman that Billy is scared of as well and the nurse uses his weakness against her to gain power over Billy.
Throughout the book, there is a constant fight over power between McMurphy and the nurse but, in some circumstances, the men have an advantage. One morning McMurphy claims to have lost his clothes and walks around the ward with nothing but a towel. “‘You can’t run around here-in a towel!’
‘No?’ He looks down at the part of the towel she’s eye to eye with, and it’s wet and skin tight. ...‘Well, I guess there’s nothin to do exce-’
‘Stop! don’t you dare. You get back in that dorm and get your clothes on this instant!”(96). The idea of McMurphy dropping his towel and showing his genitals scares the Nurse which only helps to prove McMurphy’s theory that the only way to control a woman is with sex. This idea is brought up earlier in the novel by McMurphy, who is the one flaunting his power over her now. McMurphy exerts his power over the nurse by using his genitals but, also uses his anger as a weapon to scare the nurse. “This was supposed to be her final victory over him, supposed to establish her rule once and for all. But, here he comes and he’s big as a house! She started popping her mouth and looking for her black boys, scared to death”(201). The Big Nurse uses conformity and manipulation to keep her power in the ward but McMurphy comes along and just by himself with his size he scares the nurse just by being himself which implies the idea that just him being a man has the ability to scare the nurse.
In the ward and society, femininity is seen as a weakness so in the ward the nurse does whatever she can to hide her feminine side from the men in the ward.

The Nurse is unhappy with McMurphy because he has disrupted the order that she had spent so long creating. “She walked right on past, ignoring him just like she chose to ignore the way nature had tagged her with those outsized badges of femininity”(159). Since McMurphy has come to the ward, he has done nothing but cause trouble. He has continued to point out the fact that he can gain power over the Big Nurse because she is a woman and this quote shows how she tries to hide it because it is a weakness that she does not want McMurphy is taking advantage of. McMurphy believes that the only way to control women is through sex and when talking about this he says: “and I’ve never seen a women I thought was more man than me, I don’t care whether I can get it up for her or not”(74). He is referencing the idea of controlling women through sex and how the nurse is so unappealing as a woman that he can’t get an erection while looking at her. This helps to show how the nurse hides her femininity from the men on the ward because it is seen as a weakness and a way for the men to hold some power over her. Nurse Ratched is the head of the ward and her being female is seen as a weakness so she does the best that she can to hide it despite what McMurphy and all of the other men

say.
In the novel, the Nurse must hide her femininity and take away the men’s confidence to maintain in power as the men try to use their sexuality to gain power. Nurse Ratched struggles to maintain power because the men believe that she is lower than them due to her gender. Women during this time period struggled with positions of power because they were new to the workforce and were not taken seriously.