What's Wrong with the Nurses?

ARMY & NAVY

Congress, which has backed away from the idea of drafting male labor, moved last week towards the drafting of women nurses.

Few Congressmen liked the idea. But the Army says that its Nurse Corps should number at least 60,000 to be adequate; present enrollment is only some 47,500. The Army is convinced that the only way it can get the nurses it needs is to draft them.

The Senate Military Affairs Committee listened to the Army and approved a draft measure similar to one already passed by the House. If it did not go through, the committee warned, Congress would "fail our stricken combat soldiers."

But Congress had not listened very carefully to the nurses. If recruiting has failed, the nurses declared, it is due to many things and not all of them are women's lack of a sense of duty. Methods of recruiting, they said, are ham-handed and confused. Too many agencies are involved and no single agency is responsible.

Civilian hospitals and doctors are loath to cooperate, for a very good reason: they hate to lose their help. They will sometimes even go so far as to give a nurse a bad report in order to hang onto her. Civilian nurses, admitting that few of them are downright eager to join, turned their sharpest words on the Army Nurse Corps. Complaints from nurses in the Corps, they said, are enough to cool their ardor. Some of these complaints are just normal gripes: U.S. women hate to be ordered around, particularly by other women; homesick Army nurses may exaggerate their woes; many gripes are directed at the nursing profession itself.

But other criticisms cannot be shrugged off. Said nurses in the Corps:

P: The Regulars who were in at the beginning rule the roost. Civilians, obliged to enter as Reserve second lieutenants, are often outranked by women with half their medical background.

P: They have to go through such antics as calisthenics and close-order drill (to harden them up, explains the Army).

P: In some hospitals they are treated by chief nurses "like girls in a boarding school."

P: Too frequently they find that their main duties are routine jobs which require little if any medical experience: making beds, keeping house, making out reports, carrying bedpans. They think WACs or civilians could do more of this work.

P: Too frequently they sit around in base hospitals just waiting, while other women in other areas are overworked to the point of collapse.

Substance of the Corps's reply to these criticisms: that is the way things are in the Army.

Nurses thought the Corps should get an overhaul. They pointed out that, of some 330,000 registered nurses in the U.S., more than 15% have already joined the Army (or the Navy) Corps; many others, who volunteered, were rejected. To many a U.S. citizen the drafting of any women is repugnant. The nurses believed that their record scarcely justified Congress in singling them out and making them, alone of all U.S. women, objects of such legislation.

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