Labor Day Déjà Vu – Nurses’ Views of Work, Then and Now

By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief

Photo from otisarchives4, via Flickr. Photo from otisarchives4, via Flickr.

If you like nursing history, there’s a new blog called Echoes and Evidence by the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania. (The first post draws on a 2005 AJN article on how nurses over 100 years ago responded to a series of typhoid epidemics in Philadelphia.)

Because AJN is over 100 years old (115 next year), it has a rich archive that I’ve been digging into recently (see my post from last week about an article Virginia Henderson wrote for AJN 50 years ago, and from late June, about nurses and D-Day).

So it seems especially fitting, just after Labor Day, to point to a January 1953 article by Sister Mary Barbara Ann, a former president of the Iowa Nurses Association (INA), which detailed findings from a survey of 223 general duty nurses in Iowa to learn their opinions of the hospitals in which they worked. I won’t present her exact findings here—we’ve made the article free until the end of September: just click through to the PDF. (Subscribers can always access the archives.) But here’s how she summarized what she learned:

“They [general duty nurses] are asking only for reasonable working conditions in which they can feel happy and secure. They are pleading for recognition and appreciation for what they are as persons and […]