By Barbara Ridley
1978, on one of many protests against the cuts. Student nurse Barbara in the centre
I cycled the three miles home from the hospital after my eight-hour evening shift and manoeuvred my bike into its slot in the hallway, before walking through the living room to get myself a cup of tea from the kitchen. I would have been wearing my blue gingham uniform dress and dark blue cape. The year circa 1977. I lived in a large collective household in Islington, owned by a woman who was a professor at a local college, and many of her friends were fellow academics, a few years older than me. I was in my mid-20s, and it’s fair to say I found them intimidating.
On this occasion, a bunch of these women were gathered in the living room, and there must have been some commentary about me coming off shift as a nurse. One woman exclaimed, in a haughty upper-class accent, “Good heavens. How can a feminist be a nurse?”
I don’t remember if I managed to mumble a reply. I was probably too flabbergasted.
How had this feminist ended up training to be a nurse in a large London hospital? I had graduated with a degree in sociology, a useless qualification in the full-blown recession of the early 70s. But I needed to pay the rent. I answered a wanted ad in the newspaper and found myself in the central supply department of a large teaching hospital. It was like factory work, cleaning, packing, and sterilising instrument trays for the wards and operating theatres, and I stayed there for two years, unionising the workers and becoming the department shop steward, fighting for better working conditions such as cooling fans, and a more equitable, transparent system for rotation into the higher paid roles on the floor.
I should explain that during this time, I was active in the Women’s Liberation Movement, traveling by coach, or sometimes hitch-hiking, to conferences in Edinburgh and Newcastle as well as London, and I was also involved in the Red Collective, a small group of Marxist feminists. Many group members took jobs as factory workers, hospital cleaners, or council maintenance workers, essentially as a form of embedded field research. At monthly meetings in a flat in West Hampstead, we ate lentil curry and compared notes, analysing the working conditions from a political perspective, as well as examining our personal and sexual relationships. We wrote papers and pamphlets that were distributed at those conferences. I recently found one of these pamphlets buried in my files; they went for 15p.
Back in the central supply department, a turning point for me came when one of the “lads” who delivered the sterile packs to the wards was on holiday, and the boss asked for volunteers to take his place for a week. My hand shot up. It was a welcome break from the routine of the assembly line, riding in the lorry, visiting every area of the hospital, and it gave me my first close-up glimpse of the nurses, efficiently bustling about in their crisp uniforms and starched white caps. I decided I wanted to be like them when I grew up.
I applied to nursing school and was accepted, but there was a long backlog to get into one of the three classes admitted each year. So I worked for two years as an auxiliary nurse while I waited. In those days, nursing students were employed full-time by the hospital, and all the training was hospital-based. It was predominantly a working class job, and my classmates were mostly 18-year-old girls from Ireland or Jamaica; I was one of only three who were English, the only one over 20, and the only one with a college degree, a fact I hid from everyone including the Admissions Office. A friend of mine who also had a university degree had applied the year before and was rejected because she was “over-qualified.”
In later years, I was sometimes asked why I didn’t go to medical school instead. It never occurred to me. Women doctors were still rare, and I had no science background; the prerequisites would have taken me years. But nursing attracted me precisely because it was a working class job. Unlike my inquisitor at the house that evening, I didn’t disparage nurses as subservient handmaidens to male doctors. I came from an upper middle class family in the Home Counties, but I wanted to prove to myself that I could do a “real job.”
Some members of the Red Collective stayed at their manual jobs for a few years before going on to publish books about their experiences and returning to academic life. But I stayed in nursing for 40 years. I discovered I was good at it. I was good at listening to patients, understanding their needs and advocating on their behalf, and in the process, gaining their deep appreciation, a form of instant gratification not always easily attained in my personal life. As a student, I excelled in the course work, quickly figuring out the required formula for exam questions, essays we had to write on how to care for a patient undergoing gall bladder surgery or dying from leukemia. And I received an excellent clinical education, rotating through every department of the huge hospital system, learning on the job from senior staff nurses and ward sisters, some of whom were kindly teachers, others more like army drill sergeants. But they all knew their stuff, and made sure we knew it too.
Soon after completing my nursing training in London, I left for America, originally for a six-month trip to explore the mountains of the West and the lesbian culture in San Francisco. But one thing led to another and I ended up staying. Nurses were in high demand, and I easily got a job at San Francisco General Hospital, working with the first AIDS patients before we knew what to call the disease ravaging the gay community. The pay was much better than in the UK, and I could comfortably support myself working three days a week, allowing me to volunteer two days at the (very feminist) Berkeley Women’s Health Collective, doing pelvic exams and diaphragm fittings.
I ended up working in Bay Area hospitals for 35 years. Nursing was very different in California. Registered nurses came from a variety of backgrounds but most had college degrees. After a few years I went back to school and got a Masters in Nursing, and later a Post-Masters certificate to qualify as a Nurse Practitioner, eventually running my own specialty clinic in a large hospital system.
Initially I felt some guilt, perhaps, or regret about abandoning the National Health Service. However, I spent most of my career working not with wealthy, private-pay patients, but with those who were poor, disabled and under-insured. I became a leading national expert in a highly specialised treatment for patients with spasticity following spinal-cord or brain injury, and far from being anyone’s handmaiden, I had physicians and other providers from around the country call me for advice and troubleshooting.
How can a feminist be a nurse? Let me count the ways. The work was challenging, and exhausting at times, but it introduced me to people from diverse cultures and different ways of life, allowing me to advocate for those less able to speak for themselves, and make a huge difference in their lives. And it connected me to my community. I have been retired for ten years now, but I still run into former patients at the grocery store or at the movie theatre, people who welcome me with a big hug, and want to tell me how they’re doing.
I’ll take it.