Clarissa Crooks interview, History 150 Spring 2016, Conducted by Samuel Krise, Nursing and Gender, March 12, 2016.
a. The interview was conducted in person by using a micro USB with a voice recording function. I didn’t have to edit too much, the only problem that I ran into was some background noise from the nearby fridge. The quiet space that I tried to create was in the kitchen, it was working fine until the fridge started to increase in noise.
b. Clarissa B. Crooks was born March 8th, 1941. She lived in a factory town in Endicott, New York in a place where most of the people in the community worked in a factory. She attended George F. Johnson Elementary School, and was one of five children. Her mother stayed at home, but eventually went to work as a nurse to help pay tuition for her children. Clarissa started nursing school in September of 1959 at Charles S Wilson Memorial Hospital School of Nursing. She finished in September of 1962. She also went back to school in 1973 at the University of New York State at Binghamton, New York. Her degree is a Bachelor’s of applied Social Science with a major in health. She moved to Dayton, Ohio in 1979 and became a hospice nurse. Two years later in 1981, she received an award for being an exceptional hospice nurse. She finally retired in Hopewell, VA after 25 years of being a hospice nurse in 2005. Then eventually went to back to nursing in 2007; working as a home health nurse; she supervised home health nurses’ aid. So by the end of her career she worked a total of 54 years as a registered nurse.
c. During the 1960s and 1970s female nursing had stricter standards. Women at the time were expected to cater to the doctor at all times, and had to maintain a strictly professional aspect. They were required to address patients as sir or ma’am. In addition to this they had a very strict dress code, and were not allowed to wear any jewelry. Nurses during these time periods were supposed to represent high standards.
d. Oral History Transcription (Nursing and Gender)
Sam- What were your duties when you were growing up and how did they change once you started nursing?
Clarissa-I was one of three girls and two brothers and we all had chores to do as we were growing up. At one point, my Mother was very ill after surgery and so around 12 years old we were taught how to wash and iron clothes and we had responsibilities of helping with meals and domestic kinds of things. When I was in high school, I got a job working as an aide at the hospital so it gave me an introduction to the roles of what Nurses do and the aides do and I think because of that I always had respect for the aides wherever I was working because I realized the value of what they did.
Sam-Can you explain what it was like to balance work and family life?
Clarissa-Well, I will tell you when I was in the 8th grade, I had a teacher talk to me out of wanting to become a Doctor, and she said you should think about that because you can’t be a Doctor and have a family at the same time. So she recommended that I consider other profession and that’s when I decided well I would choose nursing, my Mother had been a Nurse. I think with Nursing, it’s a job that has flexibility and often times you can work part time so it allows you to try to incorporate time with your family and also time at work. It’s something that you have to work together with your husband to make sure that the children are cared for, but I think Nursing as a profession is a good profession for someone who wants to have a family.
Sam-Was there anyone that didn’t support your career choice?
Clarissa-Well, as I mentioned earlier, we had a teacher that was telling me as a woman I should not consider being a Doctor. Actually, when I was in high school, there were like three or four choices for girls after high school. You could either go on to be something in retail or you could go to school for a year and become a Secretary or you could go on to become a Teacher at college or a Nurse and at that time very often Nursing was a three year program at a hospital and that’s where I graduated from initially was a three year program. There wasn’t a whole lot of talk about women going into Science*. In fact, I was discouraged to that I didn’t really need Physics because I wouldn’t be using Physics so I think there was kind of a tendency to downgrade what women were doing at that time.
Sam-And how diverse was the gender at Nursing school when you attended?
Clarissa-Well, it was an all-girl program, there were no men in my class. We lived in a dorm and we had restrictions. We had to sign in at eight 0’clock in the evening our first year because they were trying to protect us and the House Mother was very strict, didn’t want us to leave the house with pants on unless we were going directly to a car. We were supposed to be ladies and when we complained she said well just a couple years ago the girls could not go out unless they wore hat and gloves. So, there was this feeling that you not only were trained to be a Nurse, but supposed to be socialized to be a lady. Of course now there’s a lot of men in Nursing, I think what they’re finding out that sometimes people chide them and say maybe you weren’t good enough to be a Doctor and that’s why you settled to be a Nurse, but that’s kind of reverse discrimination, but there were not very many female Doctors that I dealt with initially, but later there were.
Sam-What responsibilities were you given fresh out of Nursing school and how does that compare to the responsibilities of Nurses now?
Clarissa-The Nurses of today are dealing a great deal with technology. They have a lot of responsibility to record everything on computers, they have to monitor machines that are doing functions of giving medications or providing life preserving function where the training that I had was much more on actually hands on. There was importance in attitude and compassion and cleanliness was very strongly stressed, to keep the area where you’re working clean and then to avoid contamination with infection. I really think perhaps that the biggest thing was there was much more responsibilities for interaction with the families and the patients at the beginning and then as things progressed you had a lot more worry and concern about taking care of the machines.
Sam-How were you treated as a Registered Nurse, you know, as you first started off?
Clarissa-I think overall that I was treated fairly. I will have to say, as a woman, I had to learn to take a certain amount of kidding from like the resident Physicians and they reminded you that you were a woman as well as just being a Nurse, but I think the patients overall seemed to respect me as a young Nurse and I think I was encouraged to do my best and I think I had good role models of the older Nurses.
Sam-Now, have you seem more or less support for female Nurses over the years?
Clarissa-I think Nursing is still considered a good profession for women. I do think though, my concern, is that in the past, it was kind of a vocation. You chose it because you were called to do it, but now because salaries have been increased a woman can work as a Nurse and make a decent living it’s now being women going into this profession and maybe not their first choice, but they choose it because they feel that they can make a good living and there’s some flexibility with the job and therefore that’s why they would choose Nursing, not necessarily the commitment to the profession. I don’t mean everybody is like that, but I think there’s a temptation for people coming into Nursing not for the reason perhaps of having the passion and compassion for people. Actually, my favorite job that I worked with, the last part of my work, was as a Hospice Nurse and that required a certain type of commitment and ability to work with the dying. So I do think that the Nurses that are committed to that are really highly, to me, are highly respected.
Sam-How did the Doctors treat you when you first learned Nursing as compared to a few years ago?
Clarissa-As a Nurse, when I was at the hospital, in the Nurse’s station if a Doctor walked into the room it was expected for me to stand up, to make myself available. I would carry his charts while he made rounds. He would tell me orders to write down. I would write down his orders and then he would sign them. I was at all times to consider him to be in charge of the situation and to follow his orders. As you get older, more recently, Nurses have much more responsibility to speak up and have kind of a collaborative relationship with the Doctors. They no longer feel the need to wait on the Doctors, so to speak, they feel they can wait on themselves. But they do need to collaborate about the care of the patient and Nurses I think take very seriously the right to question an order if it doesn’t sound correct. I think in the past, at the beginning of things, you were probably frowned upon if you thought you needed to question the Doctor.
Sam-What positive and negative changes have you seen throughout the Nursing field over your career?
Clarissa-I think the positive changes is there’s, on the whole, society respects Nursing. There’s been some polls about what profession do people trust and Nurses rank very high in that area. I think Nurses have been given more and more responsibilities, we have had additional education, you now can have advanced practice degrees, you can have a Nurse Practitioner can actually serve health care needs of people in rural areas where there’s no Physician available. They have Nurse Practitioners in Pediatrics that can take care of well baby care so there’s opportunities for women to actually have a full Professional life and there’s some cases where women have made choices to go into that level of health care rather than to medicine because they feel that they’re having more actual contact with patients, appreciation from the patients.
Sam-What do you know now that you wish you would have known when you started off as a Nurse?
Clarissa-I think it’s because you learn things on a day to day basis and you build on previous information. I truly cannot say that I’ve ever been disappointed with being a Nurse, and I feel grateful that I have played different roles in that I have worked in a hospital, I have worked in home care, I have worked in Hospice, I have worked as responsible for Aides doing home care, all these different areas of Nursing have taught me things and I think it’s accumulative. I guess what I would say is that if a person is considering Nursing today, that they should have a commitment to hard work, and be willing to know that you’re gonna have to keep up learning all through your career, to keep up to date with what’s happening and to be willing to take a stand for your patients, speak up for them, be an advocate for them and be an advocate overall for good health and good health habits, because our overall goal should be not only fighting disease but to promote health.
Sam-This concludes the interview and thank you for your time.
Clarissa-You’re very welcome.