Male Nurses Are An Important Part of the Nursing Family
Anyone who’s seen Meet the Parents remembers the uncomfortable moment when Gaylord “Greg” Focker revealed he chose nursing over medical school. The disbelief, the embarrassment, and the ridicule all reinforce the outdated stereotype that nursing is a profession for women.
It wasn’t always so.
Nursing has been around as long as humans themselves have, as family and community attended to childbirth and cared for their sick. Caring for strangers began to evolve into a community effort; there is evidence in India of hospitals and nursing going back to the 5th century BC. The first known mention of nursing as a profession came around 300 AD as the Roman Empire labored to build hospitals through it in each town within its domain. The image and definition of a nurse grew through the Middle Ages as skilled care was provided by the local church by monks and nuns prompted by their vows of duty.
On battlefields, men cared for their fellow soldiers, lifting, feeding, and washing them. It was skilled but physically demanding work. And then society changed, too, and “modern” men felt it was not appropriate for women to see and touch men, particularly men that they didn’t know. Slowly, the concept of nursing outside of the family home became exclusively a profession for men and the early schools refused to admit women.
Today, nurses practice in hospitals and rural communities, delivering babies, performing high-tech procedures, and providing direct care to patients in hospitals and rural communities across the country as a vital part of our healthcare system.
But men account for just over 10% of the total nursing workforce today.
Women’s hard-fought battle to enter nursing came at the cost of their male counterparts; the same arguments that allowed them into the field became the reason for excluding men.
It was during the period beginning with the Crimean and Civil Wars and the severe shortage of men available, that women would prove their ability and skills. A battle-trained nurse herself, Florence Nightingale’s arguments for accepting them into the profession focused on their innate nurturing nature, empathy, and caring composition. Her schools, the “gold-standard” for professional training that established the standards and practices of most US and European institutions, accepted only female applicants. While her motives might have been sound, at the time, it was the only profession available to women; her words of support for their success, including “every woman is a nurse by nature,” indirectly told many that men were not suitable for nursing.
Men struggled for opportunities after the Civil War. Their history of battle service was relegated to pharmacy duties and orderly and other un-skilled positions. The founders of the newly formed Army Nursing Corps outright banned men from joining.
The Bolton Act of 1943, created by the first Congresswoman of Ohio, Rep. Frances Bolton, established the US Cadet Nursing Corp. The Act, opening the field to Black students but excluding men by a 1947 Amendment, provided ground-breaking education and expenses to graduate over 120,000 trained women nurses.
As more and more women entered the ranks with professional certifications it took some pioneering men to step up for their rights to become nurses!
In 1955, LeRoy Craig, R.N., the first superintendent of the Pennsylvania Hospital School, sought the support of Rep. Bolton to successfully amend her earlier Bolton Act again with an equal-right amendment that permitted men to be commissioned as officers in the military at the same level as female nurses. That year, 2nd Lt. Edward T. Lyon became the very first male nurse to be commissioned in the Army Nurse Corps in the US as a reserve officer, beginning active duty as a nurse anesthetist.
Luther Christman, turned away from two other institutions, graduated from the Pennsylvania Hospital school and would go on to become a hospital administrator and noted educator who fought for increased clinical studies and predicted specialized nursing care. In 1967, at Vanderbilt University, Christman became the first man to hold the position of dean at a nursing school. At a Chicago meeting of like-minded male nurses in 1974, he and his cohorts founded the National Male Nurse Association, which later became the American Association for Men in Nursing.
Yet men were still denied a nursing education at many US hospitals, colleges, and universities.
In 1979, Joe Hogan was an African American nurse with an associate’s degree who wanted to get a bachelor’s degree. With the closest co-ed school 150 miles away, Hogan applied to Mississippi University for Women (MUW). Based solely on his gender, the school told him that he could audit but not enroll in classes. In a lawsuit that ended up before the Supreme Court, the MUW policy was ruled unconstitutional, and Hogan was allowed to enroll in 1982, opening doors to men everywhere.
