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Dialogues@RU is published annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume One
Spring 2002
Removing
Cultural Stereotypes to Find Real Differences
Between Doctors and Nurses -
Page 2
by Jon Laor
Smoyak's essay begins with a brief history of medical care. She points to the fact that women were delegated the job of caring for the weak and says that as a result they were treated worse. "Those who do demeaning work- who clean up the messes of others- are treated with little respect" (Smoyak 78). She then describes how agriculture allowed society to develop more humane qualities, and she ends her history lesson remarking:
How ironic that this women's work, once the lowliest kind of labor, now is accorded such high value and high status- when men perform it. Obstetricians rank higher than midwives on our social scale. This historical perspective lends understanding to problems in interprofessional relations. Women and men, physicians and nurses, find it useful to consider their present in the light of their past. (Smoyak 78)
The "lowliest kind of labor" is a culturally charged and unsupported description of the female's position in history. Even if this were true, it does not reflect the views of today's society. In any case, the fact that the modern nursing profession is mostly female does not justify the belittling of the nursing profession. Though she inverts the order, the way the author connects her sentence "women and men, physicians and nurses" shows that she has labeled one profession masculine and the other inextricably feminine. While she could be conceived as sympathizing with women and nurses for their long, oppressed histories, her connection between the profession of nursing and the female predicament harms both and helps neither. It is an excellent example of what Martin refers to as "reimportation" of cultural stereotypes inaccurately infused into scientific literature (Martin 103). Giving nursing the imagery of domestic servant, we will soon see, is a dangerous "sleeping metaphor" (Martin 104).
Martin's main emphasis in "The Egg and the Sperm" was to show the differences in the depiction of the male and female reproductive organs in different scientific representations; it should be noted that this is very similar to assigning nurses and doctors the traits that the culture believes to be feminine or masculine. The inequitable representations Martin described unfairly gave the male and female parts characteristics that the culture and society considered appropriate for males and females, when in fact the sperm is not as aggressive and powerful and the egg is not as passive and wasteful as depicted. Keep in mind that these biases apply to the description of nurses as much as they do the description of gametes because they both show society's disdain for women. Often times, no effort is made to give the "sense that both the egg and the sperm initiate action" (Martin 100). The false depictions are still used, as in past examples.
Once the Origin stood as a description of the natural world, complete with competition and market struggles, it could be reimported into social science as social Darwinism, in order to justify the social order of the time. What we are seeing now is similar: the importation of cultural ideas about passive females and heroic males into the 'personalities' of gametes. This amounts to the 'Planting of social imagery on representations of nature so as to lay a firm basis for reimporting exactly that same imagery as natural explanations of social phenomena.' (Martin 103)