This thesis seeks to promote future collection and preservation of popular culture resources at academic libraries by demonstrating the research potential and instructional value of a particular collection—the Nurse Romance Novel collection, held by the UWM Special Collections department. The study examines the history of American nursing and the history of romance fiction, raising questions about the role mass media and popular culture played in the professionalization of nursing and in the construction of dominant ideologies about gender roles in twentieth century America. This study treats romance novels as both consumer goods and as narratives, analyzing not only their literary content but also contextualizing their production, consumption, and aesthetic conventions within the historical time period of the 1940s to 1970s. Romance fiction about nurses offers one lens through which scholars can investigate how mass media participated in society's debates about women, work, care giving, domesticity, and marriage.
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I begin by orienting my readers to the historical context of the twentieth century particularly as it relates to women and the profession of nursing. The prevailing historical approach to the postwar period has focused on the “conservatism-and-constraints” faced by women. The history of nursing demonstrates that gender ideologies did create barriers to women’s full participation in the workforce but nurses through the twentieth century also fought for workers’ rights, professional autonomy, and increased educational opportunities. (5)
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In chapter two I will provide a history of romance fiction, its place in the paperback revolution of American, and its importance to women’s history. I will also describe the growing field of popular romance studies and how critical romance studies have evolved alongside feminist discourses over the past half century. In chapter three I will introduce my readers to the Nurse Romance Novel Collection, addressing its place in the Special Collections department, explaining how these novels fit within the genre of popular romance, and suggesting methods for analyzing them historically as a collection. Chapter four narrows my analysis to individual titles, selected as representatives of novels published in particular decades. I move chronologically by decade from the 1940s to the 1970s and interrogate each novel’s representation of marriage or love, nursing as a profession, and the place of work in women’s lives. In addition, I highlight how individual novels present additional personal and social issues for their protagonists to navigate; couched between scenes of dramatic love triangles, the novels comment on real and often serious issues: death, grief, racism, gentrification, and even labor organizing. I argue that these nurse-themed romance novels portray women and nurses in ways that are far more nuanced and complicated than many imagine. Despite having happy endings that frequently depend upon an engagement, the novels do not prescribe marriage and motherhood. (6)
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In chapter five I describe the process of creating an accompanying digital exhibition for the Special Collections department. The digital exhibition serves as a venue to raise research questions beyond the scope of this thesis. The exhibition juxtaposes the Nurse Romance Novel collection with nonfiction resources of the UWM History of American Nursing Collection and suggests instructional possibilities for UWM academic programs. Though complimentary to this thesis, the exhibition has the additional goal of promoting use of the collection for academic instruction and primary source literacy instruction. (7)
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Before the nursing contexts became as outlandish as they did in the early seventies, they increasingly saw the nurse travelling both domestically and abroad. I suggest that the nurse romance novel served as a vicarious replacement for domestic and international travel. In the sixties, nurse-protagonists travelled to the Bayou, the Everglades, Las Vegas, Hawaii, the Blue Ridge Mountains, Cape Cod, reservations, tropical islands, and Europe. Nurse-protagonists introduced readers to different socio-economic classes and ways of life as they took nurse assignments at dude ranches, lumber camps, fancy ski resorts, and private social clubs. In the mid-sixties, they travelled around the globe to Ghana, the Congo, Sri Lanka, the West Indies, Afghanistan, Tasmania, Acapulco, Vienna, Paris, and Spain to name just a few. Increasingly, the nurses worked for organizations like the Red Cross, the Tourist Service, and the Peace Corps., blending global missions work with their medical training. Though beyond the scope of this investigation, there seems to be a potential relationship between President Kennedy’s executive order in 1961, which creating the Peace Corps., and the emergence of these new themes in the nurse-romance novel. Perhaps the country’s changing attitudes about international relationships and foreign policy are echoed in popular fiction. (114)
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I selected several texts from each decade within the period of the 1940s through the 1970s to read entirely. Of these, I will discuss here just one or two from each decade. (128)
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The novels discussed in more detail are:
Nurse into Woman (1941) by Marguerite Mooers Marshall
A Nurse Comes Home (1954) by Ethel Hamill
Hospital Zone (1956) by Mary Stolz
Border Nurse (1963) by Dorothy Dowdell
Soul Nurse (1970) by Rose Dana
Marilyn Morgan, R.N. (1969) by Rubie Saunders
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What I found outside of the courtship plots in these novels were references to the Korean War, PTSD, economic development of small towns, urban renewal projects, California farm workers strikes, the Civil Rights movement, and the Women’s Liberation movement. Nurse-protagonists might have filled up their social-calendars with romantic dates, but they also found time to attend community meetings, mentor teenagers, and do charity-nursing work with people marginalized by the healthcare industry. I was surprised to find that even though most secondary female characters were flat, they played crucial roles in helping illustrate the protagonist’s value-system, especially through dialogue. For example, female characters have conversations about depression, drug addiction, suicide, racism, current and local events, labor organizing, and more. In light of this, many of these novels would pass the infamous Bechdel Test. (129)
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A Nurse Comes Home was published just a year after the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed, which brought a halt to the immediate hostilities of the Korean War. The protagonist of the romance is Nurse Elizabeth Lane, who is travelling home to the United States, as the narrative opens, after being freed from a prisoner of war camp in North Korea. (143)
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Issues that are raised in Border Nurse relate to changes in agriculture and its effects on the economic stability of farmers, in particular regard to irrigation and water district management, domestic and foreign labor, and the inability of small farms to survive against large-scale farming. (160)
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Dowdell also raises issues about race and stereotypes about worker’s willingness to perform various types of labor necessary. Characters assert the difference in work ethic and willingness to perform hard labor between Mexicans and Americans. Gary Hunter explains to nurse Reynolds that he depends on Mexican labor because “usually a good domestic worker isn’t willing to do the stoop labor that braceros will do.” Nurse Reynolds also encounters racism when Peter, the son of her doctor colleague who she has befriended, explains to her that his best friend, Raúl, is Mexican but begs her not to tell his parents because they don’t like Mexicans. (162)
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As discussed briefly in chapter three, most romance novels limited their introduction of race and ethnicity to situations in which a white nurse is nursing people of color. There are a few exceptions, for examples in Reservation Nurse, in which the nurse’s own native heritage is an issue in her romantic life. Border Nurse exemplifies the way in which authors addressed race issues very cautiously. It appears that publishers assumed that their mass-market audience was white. Many romance novels featured tangential characters of color, mostly identified in service work. For example, in Sundown Nurse, the protagonist briefly recollects her African American nanny. Or, in Hospital Zone, the hospital porter is a kind “negro.” The authors often rely on paternalistic stereotypes. By the end of the sixties though, some authors decided to write their nurse-protagonists as black Americans. I juxtapose two novels featuring black nurse-protagonists (169)
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Ross’ novel indeed focuses on the challenges of interracial dating and the protagonist’s understanding of her racial identity in relationship to social and political circumstances. Ross’ novel was published just three years after the US Supreme Court ruled anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional in Loving vs. Virginia. (170)
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The novels discussed in more detail are:
Nurse into Woman (1941) by Marguerite Mooers Marshall
A Nurse Comes Home (1954) by Ethel Hamill
Hospital Zone (1956) by Mary Stolz
Border Nurse (1963) by Dorothy Dowdell
Soul Nurse (1970) by Rose Dana
Marilyn Morgan, R.N. (1969) by Rubie Saunders
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