Hysterical Female

Nurses are advised to conceal their emotions. But at what cost?

- Shawna Kay Rodenberg

I used to work with a surly charge nurse who loved to put his hands on his hips and joke, “Are you crying? There’s no crying in nursing!,” in imitation of Tom Hanks’s character in the film A League of Their Own, some of which was filmed in Evansville, Indiana, where I was living and working as a trauma nurse in 2005.

I’d been a nurse for five years and a nurse aide for two years before that, and much of my tenure had been spent traveling, working on contract—the nursing equivalent of a scab. Temp agencies dropped me as if by parachute into hostile, perpetually understaffed, and virtually lawless emergency rooms. Administrators overpaid me in the short term so they could, in the long term, underpay, underinsure, and understaff their nursing departments. All of this is to say that on early Sunday morning, November 6—the day an F3 tornado tore the toe off southwestern Indiana, decimating a mobile-home park, killing 25 people, and injuring more than 200 others—I wasn’t as seasoned and cynical as my charge nurse, but I wasn’t green, either, and I knew better than to cry.

“Nurses eat their young,” we’re taught on day one, surrounded by classmates, close to 90 percent of whom are female, even now. Nursing is historically, inherently female, and simultaneously historically, inherently misogynistic. Yes, women transformed this often icky work into a noble profession, but we labor under the direction and supervision of physicians and hospital administrators, most of whom are male (74 percent of hospital CEOs and 65 percent of physicians, according to reports by the American College of Healthcare Executives and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services), and who often fail to see value in the soft-science side of what we do.