Nurses in Los Angeles

First mass action of some 10,000 graduate nurses, assembled last week in Los Angeles for concurrent conventions of three national nurses' associations, was to be blessed by a Protestant Episcopal bishop in the Hollywood Bowl. They next heard a "vested chorus" of Los Angeles nurses, who had practiced for months, gently sing Green Cathedral. Cinemactress Kay Francis who plays Florence Nightingale, nurses' special saint, in The White Angel (see p. 49), was put on exhibition, along with her director of this latest Warner Bros, cinematic biography. Handsome, informed Susan Catherine Francis of Philadelphia, president of the American Nurses' Association, talked about "the old pioneer spirit" which stirred the nurses to go West for their conventions. Dr. Annie Warburton Goodrich, 70, dean-emeritus of Yale's School of Nursing, stirred them deeply by declaring:

"Called the heroine of the Crimea, history will portray Florence Nightingale as the archetype of emerging social forces. She is the modern nurse, reproduced in country after country in ever-increasing numbers, varying in ability and preparation. She functions most effectively when most true to type."

With such thoughts to soothe fallen arches, pelvic pains, aching hearts, worried minds, the 10,000 nurses, a collection of tidy women in printed dresses and floppy hats, scattered to conferences and lectures to face the hard, professional problems which the American Nurses' Association (120,000 members), National League of Nursing Education (4,100 members) and National Organization for Public Health Nursing (7,500 members) are trying to solve.

Nurses want to work eight-hour shifts instead of tradition's twelve hours but have not dared to push their campaign too hard on account of Depression. They hope to have wages standardized, according to the kind of nursing and the community, at $4 to $7 for an eight-hour day; $5 to $8 for ten hours; $6 to $9 for twelve hours.

There are about 400,000 graduate nurses in the U. S., more than can find regular, paying work. "In spite of an oversupply, hospitals cannot find enough graduate nurses to staff their wards," observed Secretary Claribel Wheeler of the N. L, of N. E. ". . . On the other hand, small hospitals in scattered regions require such long hours for such low salary, that competent women are reluctant to take up staff positions there. Unless we can solve this problem, the small hospitals threaten to hire practical nurses. . . .''

There are 1,399 reliable schools for nursing in the U. S., graduating about 18,000 nurses a year. Top schools are Yale's School of Nursing and Western Reserve's Bolton School of Nursing which require a B. S. or B. A. degree for admission to a three-year course. Next June they will graduate the nation's first Masters in Nursing.

Last week in Los Angeles Yale's Nursing Dean Effie Jane Taylor presided over deliberations of the National League of Nursing Education. Two years ago this body set out to shut down schools of nursing operated by hospitals with less than 100 patients a day on whom student nurses might practice. The move was to reduce the number of new nurses entering the profession and to compel those who did enter to have excellent training (TIME, Oct. 1, 1934).

Though discretion prevented an active drive against such small schools, a campaign for improving the quality and range of teaching had progressed so well that Dean Taylor last week could sternly declare that harder studies for prospective nurses are now in order.

"Trends toward the organization of large medical and health centres, sickness insurance and possibly state medicine," observed Isabel Maitland Stewart, Columbia University's professor of nursing education, "probably mean fewer free-lance nurses and more organizations in groups, fewer de luxe nurses catering to the wealthy and more serving the needs of the common people, fewer nurses for the sick and more working on the preventive end of the job." Despite the deadly seriousness of their meetings, the 10,000 nurses in Los Angeles last week enjoyed some diversions. United Air Lines offered a stewardess job to the graduate nurse "most perfect in looks, charm, poise, intelligence." Winner: Helen Clark, 22, well-dressed Tucson, Ariz, brunette. Eugenist Paul Popenoe of Pasadena's Institute of Family Relations, father of four, stirred bitter merriment among the nurses by pontificating: "To increase the number of superior children each year, educated young people should be encouraged to marry by increasing the circle of their acquaintances, by developing the social life of students (this applies to nurses in particular), and by reducing the economic pressure of marriage."

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