By scale, if not conditions, the exploitation is exponentially larger today.

‘Small Hospitals Exploit Student Nurses’ by a Worker Correspondent from Working Woman. Vol. 2 No. 9. September, 1931.

Practical Nurses Are Worked Long Hours–Small Hospitals Sweat Nurses Until They Drop from Their Feet

Sacramento, California.

May a graduate nurse say a few words about her profession?

To begin with, I’ve a bit of criticism for those inhuman bleeders, the training schools! Three months probation, they tell the prospective student nurse, and she must furnish books and uniforms upon entrance. At the end of three months she is given a cap, charge of a certain number of patients, and a small monthly allowance which barely covers her laundry bill. Of course, if she proves unworthy of a nurse’s diploma during the probation period, she is sent home (if she has such a thing! many girls put themselves through training on earnings gotten in other professions), and the noble hospital staff feels compensated for her short presence by the amount of work squeezed out of her body. Why shouldn’t the hospital furnish these necessities?

At a certain large and very beautiful hospital in San Francisco, I’ve seen nurses expelled from the training school twenty days and three weeks before they were to receive their diplomas. The charges? In one case, the theft of a pair of stockings from another nurse, and in the other, a secret marriage contracted three weeks before graduation. Both of these girls were splendid nurses, honest and conscientious in their work. The nurse who committed the theft came of extremely poor parents, and PERHAPS IF SHE HAD BEEN PAID MORE THAN TEN DOLLARS A MONTH, SHE WOULD NOT HAVE HAD TO RESORT TO THIEVERY FORA PAIR OF HOSE! As for the marriage, did this legal alliance with a respectable man in any way lower the standard of her nursing?

Dismiss Many Girls

At this same hospital, it was a common occurrence to see nurses dismissed after six, eight, ten and twelve months’ training. The charges were too often ridiculous, and the result of being “framed” by superiors who for some petty reason had resolved to get the girl out of the school.

If, after being dismissed from a training school, the student nurse has not the funds nor heart to transfer, she faces the prospect of registering as an undergraduate, and doing practical nursing.

And don’t for one minute think that she is admitted to register at the first class hospitals! She takes home cases for whatever she can get, and is often nurse, cook, laundress, and janitor, or she does general duty in a small-town hospital or asylum. THESE SMALL HOSPITALS NEARLY ALL REEK OF NURSES’ BLOOD THAT IS SWEATED OUT UNDER THE CONDITION OF LONG HOURS AND SMALL WAGES.

Dr. Morton Hoodwinks Girls

There is Dr. Morton running a training school in San Francisco, and nurses who step forth with one of his diplomas are barred from taking the state board examinations. Unfortunately for these women, Dr. Morton became involved in a criminal operation several years ago, and his nurses have no standing, but the doctor goes on practising and filling his pockets. Why is Dr. Morton allowed to run this training school, and hood-wink poor girls into training who more than likely don’t know of the existence of a state board examination at the time of their entrance into his hospital? Graduates from this hospital can either go on working for Dr. Morton for cheaper wages, or be interviewed by the osteopaths.

The osteopaths of this state have fattened their purses on the labor of undergraduate nurses. They are barred from the M.D.’s hospitals, and as a result their own small hospitals have sprung into existence. The small hospital is always run with a shortage of funds. The osteopath is “bucking” the M.D., and frequently offers cheaper rates as an inducement to the patient. The undergraduate nurse makes these cheaper rates possible with her long hours and low wages. In this state, there is a small hospital operated by osteopaths, where undergraduate nurses only a short time ago did twenty-four hour duty on general, were paid sixty-five & seventy five dollars a month, and were responsible for their own laundry bills. The accommodating doctors very kindly had a night bell installed in the nurses’ room, and when this little instrument of torture tinkled, the nurse roused herself, donned a robe over her nightie or pajamas, and sallied forth to “cool fevered brows.”

Worked Long Hours

Frequently, one hears that these undergraduate, or practical, nurses are paid all they are worth, and that they are incompetent. Perhaps they don’t come up to the standard of the graduate nurses in all cases, but aren’t they filling the places? Does the fact that they lack a diploma justify hospitals in working them overtime? One doesn’t hear the doctors who employ these nurses telling the patients that they are undergraduates. No Sire-ee! He says they are graduates, and has them keeping the floors warm with caps on their heads!

More power to the “Working Woman,” and here’s hoping more workers will come to realize that Communism is their Defender.

Graduate Nurse.

The Working Woman, ‘A Paper for Working Women, Farm Women, and Working-Class Housewives,’ was first published monthly by the Communist Party USA Central Committee Women’s Department from 1929 to 1935, continuing until 1937. It was the first official English-language paper of a Socialist or Communist Party specifically for women (there had been many independent such papers). At first a newspaper and very much an exponent of ‘Third Period’ politics, it played particular attention to Black women, long invisible in the left press. In addition, the magazine covered home-life, women’s health and women’s history, trade union and unemployment struggles, Party activities, as well poems and short stories. The newspaper became a magazine in 1933, and in late 1935 it was folded into The Woman Today which sought to compete with bourgeois women’s magazines in the Popular Front era. The Woman today published until 1937. During its run editors included Isobel Walker Soule, Elinor Curtis, and Margaret Cowl among others.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/wt/v2n09-sep-1931-WW-R7414.pdf