Tag: activism

Feminist Nurse: Not An Oxymoron

Nurses Build Trust Not Walls. Women’s March on Seattle, 2017.

One of my first patients was a suffragette poet. She was 102 in 1981 when I cared for her in a Presbyterian nursing home in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia. I was a recent Harvard Divinity School drop-out working full-time as a nursing assistant, wrestling with the decision of whether or not I wanted to be a nurse. I was—and still am—a feminist. I was not sure I could be both a feminist and a nurse. Nursing seemed anti-feminist, steeped in the traditional subservient roles to which women were relegated.

I’ll call her Lillian because in my memory she stands out as steely kind and sharply intelligent as I imagine Lillian Wald, the founder of public health nursing, to have been. As a young woman “my” Lillian had met and worked with Susan B. Anthony. “My” Lillian had marched in suffragette demonstrations in Washington, DC and had written suffragette tracts and poetry and lobbied hard for passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 that finally granted women full voting rights. She never married and spent the rest of her life as a Presbyterian missionary in various African countries. Being a missionary was one of the few acceptable roles for single women at that time, along with nursing and teaching. (The drawing below is from my paternal grandmother’s 1919 college journal showing the “choices” she was considering for her life—ranging from Old Maid to Bride.)

In my research this past week I ran into an article written in 1904 in Seattle by a man named Honor L. Wilhelm. In between his serialized stories of his honeymoon to Victoria, BC, and guest articles on Native Americans, he wrote a piece titled “The Girl Alone” that made my feminist blood boil. He stated, “Motherhood is the acme of womanhood. The girl alone is a sinful, selfish, miserable, abhorred, ugly, wretched, hideous creature, whom to know is to shun and to meet is to pass by. She is an outcaste and a social parasite.” (p. 74, The Coast: Volumes 7-10, 1904)

The elderly suffragette poet I was fortunate to have had in my young adult life helped convince me that in becoming a nurse I did not have to trade in my feminist ideals and identity. I mainly worked evening shift at the nursing home. Late at night, once I had completed all my work, I sat beside her bed while she told me stories of her life and read drafts of poems she was working on. She gave me a hand-written poem which I treasure—a talisman of feminism.

A year later when I went back to school for my bachelor’s degree in nursing, I had no feminist nurse professors or role models. The sole feminist nursing student I knew dropped out of school in disgust after our first semester. I wish I had known about the work of feminist nurse Peggy Chinn and her colleagues who had just started Cassandra: Radical Feminist Nurses Network. Dr. Chinn’s work continues, including through her NurseManifest Nursing Activism Project. And the next generation of feminist nurse activists have started the Radical Nurses group.

March on. We still have so much work to do to help make our world a safer, healthier, more equitable place for all.

No Time to Be Silent: On Radical Nursing

P1020860There is a time and place for silence, but only when it is freely chosen, not imposed. But now is not the time for silence. Now is the time to step us, speak out, and, at least in the United States, to vote. It is time to remember that progress on human rights and social justice issues in our world is not a given. That basic respect for girls and women is not a given. That universal abhorrence of gender-based violence is not a given. We all have to work for it—even when (and especially when)—our lives are turned upside down.

Nurses are the most trusted professionals in both the U.S. and the U.K. (although tellingly, nursing was only added as a legitimate profession to these polls in the U.K. two years ago). As nurses, we have always prided ourselves on being truthful, for speaking out and advocating for our individual patients or communities. But for various reasons (including a lack of contemporary role models or inclusion in nursing curricula), nurses have not be so good at political advocacy and activism.

Historically, nursing does have some amazing examples of nurses who bucked the status quo, spoke truth to power—who were radical nurses. Florence Nightingale in the U.K.—and especially her work after the Crimean War in bringing nurses to work in poor/workhouses in England.  And in the U.S., my favorite historical role model is Lillian Wald in New York City. Lillian Wald founded the Henry Street Settlement in the poorest section of New York City, and she founded public health nursing. Public, community, population health nursing is what drew me to nursing in the first place and it continues to be my passion. Public health nursing work is always political work.

In the U.K. in the 1980s there was the short-lived but influential Radical Nurses Group (RNG). Some of their archived material was the subject of a (again, short-lived) blog, “The Radical Nurses Archive” written by a former NHS nurse using the lovely pseudonym, The Grumbling Appendix (with another blog on nursing and politics in the U.K. that ended in 2015).  Where have the radical nurses in the U.K. gone? I am currently on a quest to find them.

Back in the U.S. we have the NurseManifest website and resources on nursing and activism co-founded by Sue Hagedorn, Peggy Chinn, and Richard Cowling. Beginning in the summer of 2018, they have added the Nursing Activism Project with a growing list of historical and contemporary nurse activists “Inspirations for Activism.”  In addition, they have a dynamic list of resources for nurse activism.

No excuses. All you nurses out there in the world: Get informed. Get inspired. Get active.

I include a recent interview I had with my colleague here at Edinburgh Napier University School of Nursing and Social Care, Dr. Peter Hillen, on nursing and activism.

 

Summer Reading Challenge 2016

IMG_7812Reading through the recent NYT article “12 New Books We’re Reading this Summer (and 6 Not So New),” with the list of summer reading by their book critics and staff, I was reminded that it is time to come up with my own summer reading challenge book list with a health humanities and social justice slant. Also, I was reminded to come up with a more diverse reading list than the one offered by the NYT. I did  similar list last summer (see previous blog post, Summer Reading Challenge with a Health Humanities/Social Justice slant ( June 2, 2015), with subsequent posts on my reading progress and reviews of the books.

My Summer 2016 Reading Challenge list of fifteen books is mainly composed of books I’ve acquired over the past few months during my cross-country travels, as well as from both the Association of Writers and Writers Programs (AWP) Conference in Los Angeles and the Health Humanities Consortium meeting in Cleveland. Four of the books on my list are truly ‘new’ books and the rest are new-to-me books. Here they are, listed from the bottom up as shown in the photo above:

Happy and thoughtful and humanistic summer reading everyone!

Creating Change

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Part of the timeline of slavery, racism and related issues. On the wall at entrance to UW Hogness Auditorium for the Health Sciences Service-Learning and Advocacy/Common Book Kick-off event, 10-6-15.

This past week at the University of Washington Health Sciences Common Book kick-off event, I heard a moving speech by Benjamin Danielson, MD. Dr. Danielson is Medical Director at Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic, a Seattle Children’s community-based clinic in Seattle’s Central District, an area which because of ‘redlining’/racial segregation in Seattle’s history, had been a predominantly black neighborhood. (see the excellent short video “A Really Nice Place to Live” by Shaun Scott). Odessa Brown is co-located in a building with its sister clinic, Carolyn Downs Family Medical Center, a clinic I worked at for five or six years. I had the pleasure of working with Dr. Danielson while coordinating care for a teen with sickle-cell anemia, and I know first-hand what an exquisitely competent and compassionate physician he is. But this week was the first time I’d witnessed his powerful public speaking abilities.

Our UW Health Sciences Common Book this year is Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Time of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010). This is the fourth year we have had a UW Health Sciences Common Book, with interprofessional activities based on the book’s theme interspersed throughout the academic year. Previous books have been Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (a classic if not a bit ‘overdone’ by now), Gabor Mate’s In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (great topic but his book is in need of heavy editing–he rambles), and last year’s book was Seth Holmes’ Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States (great topic but read like a doctoral dissertation–which it was). The New Jim Crow is written in an accessible, non-academic and powerful style, and is, of course, on a painfully current topic in the U.S. and one pertinent to health care inequities: racism.

Dr. Danielson started his talk by acknowledging the history of the Central District where he works, and the ‘strong black women,’ of the neighborhood’s past, Odessa Brown and Carolyn Downs, for whom the two community clinics are named after. Both women advocated for quality and accessible health care for their communities. Odessa Brown, who had experienced racial discrimination in accessing health care, was active in starting a children’s clinic in the Central District before she died at age 49 of leukemia. Kudos to the Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic for including information on Odessa Brown (the woman) on their front webpage, in ‘Our History,’ right under ‘Our Mission.’

Carolyn Downs was part of the Seattle Black Panther movement, who with the financial help from people like Jimi Hendrix and James Brown (both from the Central District), in 1968 opened what was then the first health clinic in the community. Less of her history is included on the webpage for the clinic, but I know from having worked there and taking care of the daughter and granddaughter of Carolyn Downs, that she died young of breast cancer–and at least partially because of disparities in access to breast cancer screening and treatment.

I provide some of the history of both Odessa Brown and Carolyn Downs because I admire the work they did during their too-short lives, and because–as Dr. Danielson said in his speech–this can become another example of “black people being deleted from history.”

What to do about the continued, pervasive, and destructive problem of racism in our society, including in our institutions ranging from prisons to hospitals and clinics? The main message from Dr. Danielson and Michelle Alexander (through her book) is that it will take both individual and collective action for us (for the U.S.) to create positive change. During his talk, Dr. Danielson spoke of using the companion community organizing guide to The New Jim Crow, titled Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow: An Organizing Guide by Daniel Hunter (Veterans of Hope Project, 2015).

In chapter one of this guide, “Roles in Movement-Building,” Hunter references the terminology used by Bill Moyer in his book Doing Democracy: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements (New Society Publishers, 2001) This work divides people’s roles into four main groups: 1) Helpers–direct service providers, 2) Advocates-who work to make systems work better for those in need, 3) Organizers–who bring people together to change systems, and 4) Rebels–who speak truth to power and agitate for radical change. The key is to recognize our own strengths and roles–where we are most comfortable working– but also to see the value in the rage of roles played by different people, because an effective social change movement requires people working in all of these roles.

This is similar to the “Bridging the Gap Between Service, Activism, and Politics” group activity from the Bonner training curriculum that I have used for many years when teaching community health. But (of course!) I like the addition of the category ‘Rebels’ to the mix and plan to add that the next time I use this in teaching.

On a very sobering (as if we weren’t already very sober) note, Dr. Danielson ended his talk Tuesday night by adding that for all the good work and innovative community outreach programs of the Odessa Brown Clinic, he often asks himself if they aren’t keeping children healthy enough that they too can end up in our country’s prison system.

Hope: Dream a Better World

IMG_1230 - Version 2Amidst all the Year in Reviews and New Years Resolutions and post Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Festivus consumerism hangovers, I’m thinking a lot about the power of hope. The power of dreaming a better world. The power of dreaming and then doing something concrete to help bring about a better world. Direct service, political advocacy, and activism: we need a healthy combination of people involved in all three areas of civic engagement. And just because we might be drawn to one area (like direct service) and repelled by another (like in-your-face activism) doesn’t mean that they aren’t all equally as important.

Brought to you by the U.S. government (with the amusing tagline “Government made easy”) is the website page “Popular New Year’s Resolutions.”  They list thirteen resolutions with the first being the all too familiar ‘lose weight’ and the second being ‘volunteer to help others.’ The ‘volunteer to help others’ links to the Tumblr blog for the Corporation of National and Community Service, the federal agency responsible for national service programs like AmeriCorps and SeniorCorps. Continuing with the hope-inspiring web-surfing, I discover Tublr’s Year in Review 2014/top blog posts and sites. Under ‘activism’ I find some terrific blogs, including Seattle-based Citizenship and Social Justice, CultureStr/ke (arts and activism around immigration), Pioneering Justice (photojournalism on human rights issues), and 100 Days of Activism. There are also some amusing blogs, such as Cats Can’t Be Vegan, Idiots.

Art and writing as activism. The living writer who best exemplifies what it means to dream a better world (and to write great literature about it) is science-fiction writer Ursula Le Guin. This year at the National Book Awards, Le Guin received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In her powerful acceptance speech (YouTube video of it here), she states:

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality”

For a good article related to her speech, read Bill Moyer’s article “Ursula Le Guin’s viral video: we will need writers who can remember freedom” 12-27-14. And for a link to the complete transcript/copy of her speech, Le Guin has it on her author website here.

Happy New Years. Resolve to dream (and write and create and serve and agitate) a better world.

Resource:

A terrific training module/activity guide I use (in an adapted form) in my undergraduate community health course is the Bonner Foundation’s Bridging the Gap Between Service, Activism, and Politics.