Nurses in Works Progress Administration Memories

Nurses in Works Progress Administration Memories

Evidence from American Life Histories: The Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940

American nursing transformed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century from a family and community duty performed largely by untrained women in family homes, to paid labor performed by both trained and untrained women and men in a variety of settings. Distinctions between types of nurses increased in this transition. Life histories of nurses taken by Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.) writers in the late 1930s provide valuable insight into the experience of some of these nurses.

Enthusiast historians within the leadership of professional organizations have commonly focused on the accomplishments of notable nurses and professional organizations in what became a narrative of professional and societal progress. This narrative, whole providing much rich historical data and analysis, ignores the vast majority of nurses’ experience and voices. In the mid nineteen eighties, as nursing was increasingly embattled in a growing health care industry, historians, some from outside the nursing profession, began to examine this history.

Barbara Melosh examined written and oral accounts of nurses in American from 1920 and through the Second World War in The Physician’s Hand: Work Culture and Conflict in American Nursing. She found that while the reform aim for nurse leaders in this period was professionalization, other nurses resisted or were distant from this process. For these nurses, the shared experience of the changing of the demands and rewards of nursing shaped their work and thinking. [1] Melosh attempts to place nursing within the context of women’s, labor and medical history. She proposes that the growing divisions within nursing itself arose from nurses’ position in the medical hierarchy, and the fight for both legitimate authority and control over the work process itself. She also posits that nurses developed an “occupational culture” that placed manual skill and direct patient contact over theoretical training at the same time that nursing elites were successfully winning a battle for degrees and credentialing over the apprenticeship model of the nineteenth century. [2] Lastly, she finds that while stratification of nursing as paid labor mirrored societal relations of gender, race and class, the experience of both apprenticeship and professionalization contributed to the separation of nursing from pre modern roots.[3]

Susan Reverby in Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing, 1850-1945, finds that the story of American nursing revolved around the women and an obligation to care…in a society that refuses to value caring.