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PROMOTING SUSTAINABILITY THROUGH COLLABORATIONThey broke the rules—and founded Sigma Theta Tau International by Sally Brosz Hardin
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has!” So said Margaret Mead, and I think I agree with her. I want to talk about the “citizens” I respectfully refer to as the “Sigma Sisters,” the women who birthed the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International.
Six were students, all at the Indiana University Training School for Nurses: Dorothy Garrigus Adams, Elizabeth Russell Belford, Edith Moore Copeland, Marie Hippensteel Lingeman, Elizabeth McWilliams Miller and Mary Tolle Wright. One, Ethel Palmer Clarke, was director of that nursing school. In their 1922 graduation picture, the six students sport slightly bobbed brunette hair, show only a hint of a smile and have eager, hopeful eyes. They all were born around 1900, entered Indiana University Training School around 1918 and graduated in 1922. They came from Indiana towns that most of us have never visited, some of them with names reflecting people and places far from Indiana—Brazil, Jeffersonville, Olney, Rochester (Founders, n.d.). Clarke migrated with her family to the United States from Devon County, England, and graduated from the University of Maryland School of Nursing. She directed the De Soto Sanitarium in Jacksonville, Florida, and the University of Maryland Hospital before pursuing further education at Columbia University Teachers College in New York City. After graduating from Columbia, Clarke became director of the Indiana University Training School for Nursing. She remained there from 1915-1932, during which time our “Sigma Sisters” attended the school (Founders, n.d.). I imagine these talented young students entered Indiana University with excitement, anticipation and a bit of anxiety. What was nursing education like in those days? Just a decade before, in 1909, Minnesota had established the first school of nursing within a university. Soon, several other colleges followed with five-year programs that combined liberal arts with nurses training. The Rockefeller Foundation funded a nursing program at Yale University—open only to college graduates—to prepare nursing teachers and leaders. The year before our sisters entered Indiana University, the National League for Nursing Education published a curriculum designed to ensure a minimum standard for all schools of nursing. By 1925, 1,800 training schools and 22 colleges offered nursing programs in the United States (Wald, n.d.). What was nursing practice like in 1918? World War I had just ended. Nurse historian Jean Waldman, who served as technical adviser for the movie “In Love and War,” said the hardest part of that responsibility was convincing the movie producer of the rigid rules of nursing practice enforced at the time. Waldman worked with the star, Sandra Bullock, relentlessly until Bullock could make a bed meticulously in the style of a World War I nurse. She adamantly informed director Richard Attenborough that, in 1918, a nurse never would sit on a patient’s bed. She insisted—unsuccessfully—that he remove a scene in which Bullock not only suggests a new method of wound irrigation to a physician, but actually carries it out (Federwisch, n.d.). In 1918, this never would have happened! Marjorie Barron Norris (2002) observes that, at the turn of the century, a professionalization movement swept through nursing. In addition, nurses expressed during this time a renewed sense of patriotism, adventure and service. Certain hospital schools were selected to train nurses for service in The Great War. Typically, upon graduation, these nurses were sent to New York to language school. Then they were shipped oversees to set up base hospitals in churches and schools or treat convoys of soldiers wounded in the German Spring Offensive that began March 21, 1918. From a base hospital in Rouen, France, nurse Julia C. Stimson wrote her family shortly after the offensive began: “No one has had a minute ‘off duty’ for five days now and they are beginning to show it. ... Patients began to pour in upon us. We were told to be prepared to receive unlimited numbers. I have just been down on the lines and to the operating room, and you would not believe me if I told you how that place looks” (Norris, 2002, para. 1 & 4). At the same time, disaster struck on the home front. The most destructive pandemic of modern times, the 1918 catastrophic influenza outbreak, began to be felt with full force in the United States in September. Twenty million people died worldwide, one-half million in the United States. S.E.J. Davies (1919), a public health nurse in the western part of the United States, wrote: “There is a Ford machine provided for the nurse, which certainly helps, but in this epidemic it was invaluable, as bundles of pneumonia jackets were piled in the back seat, and containers of soup were carried to those needing it. A nurse walking could not have done it. … Patients are nursed three in a bed and, where children were concerned, four to six in a bed. Doors were left ajar for the nurse, and many good neighbors, unafraid, assist in … the care of the sick” (p. 46-47). In the American Midwest, a public health nurse wrote: “Too much cannot be said in praise for the staff nurses who worked without ceasing, turned private cars into ambulances … and acted as the only distributing relief agency during those 4 awful weeks” (Lupton, 1919, p. 48). Illness among the nurses compounded their work. Edna Foley (1918), a Department of Public Health nurse in Illinois, observed that “in no previous epidemic has the mortality and morbidity of nurses been so great” (p. 191). Nurses devised special infectious disease strategies to fight the influenza. Each day, they carried one apron for nonrespiratory disease cases and one long-sleeved full gown wrapped in newspaper for caring for chest cases, along with 16 stitched gauze face masks and two bags—one bag for clean masks and another for soiled—that had to be boiled and dried daily. Soon they ran out of masks and energy and conceived the idea of making strips of six thicknesses of gauze that could be pinned in their hair and then folded in a paper towel and burned after use (Foley, 1918). This was the state of nursing education, wartime nursing and public health as our six nursing students matriculated at Indiana University. Let us consider another pivotal character in the Sigma Theta Tau saga—Ethel Palmer Clarke, director of the school. Picture Clarke in her long starched sleeves, high starched collar and triangular starched cap perched on tidily upswept hair. A statement about her on the honor society’s Web site observes, “While director, she was instrumental to the founders while they were nursing students in 1922” (Founders, n.d.). But how was she instrumental? Tradition has it that our six student nurses, nearing the end of an unimaginably stressful clinical experience and an intellectually exhausting term, committed an unpardonable sin. With malice of forethought and full knowledge of probable consequences, they cut classes, cut clinicals and escaped to the bucolic countryside to enjoy a day of picnicking and to commiserate about their woes and the wrongs of their profession. Their stated testimony is that, on this very day, they envisioned a new nursing society devoted to knowledge—one that would help transform nursing into a science—a society for the best and the brightest. That is perhaps the way it happened. Entertain the following scenario and consider my interpretive speculation. Director Ethel Palmer Clarke sits rigidly behind her desk while six soon-to-graduate, recalcitrant and truant nursing students are escorted into her office. The bright, creative, assertive students—potential nursing leaders of the future—plead their case. It is not that they were delinquent in their duties, they tell her. They had gone off to spend the day divining their brilliant new idea—a nursing organization devoted to intellectual excellence! Director Clarke listens. She turns her back to the students, looks out her window and ponders. She considers the rules of the Policy Manual. To expel or not to expel? She decides not to expel and, instead, only confines the student nurses to their quarters. Weeks later, the nursing students tuck their treasured diplomas into their packed suitcases, hug each other goodbye and embark on their professional careers. In the following decades, they work in private duty nursing, industrial nursing and public health nursing, and also direct hospitals and state and national nursing organizations. They all marry and, among them, bear 14 children. They live in the U.S. cities of Houston, Fort Lauderdale, Oakland, San Diego and Washington, D.C., and the countries of Liberia, Nepal and Afghanistan. One—Edith Moore Copeland—serves in the Peace Corps after her retirement. Another—Elizabeth Russell Belford—moves to San Diego and directs the boards of Neighborhood House, Francis Parker School, Children’s Home and Dodson Home for the Aged, and she serves on the University of California and Mercy Hospital auxiliaries (Founders, n.d.). As women ahead of their time, these seven Sigma Sisters founded the honor society that was the first to recognize nursing as a science. Since then, more than 405,000 nurse scholars have been inducted into the Honor Society of Nursing throughout the world (Society’s vision and mission, n.d.). So, Sigma sisters—and brothers—let us thank and applaud this small group of thoughtful citizens who dared to break the rules and brought innovative ideas to the times and world conditions in which they found themselves.RNL —Sally Brosz Hardin, RN, PhD, FAAN, is a professor and dean of the University of San Diego Hahn School of Nursing & Health Science in San Diego, California, USA. References Fact sheet. (n.d.). Retrieved June 14, 2007, from http://www.nursingsociety.org/media/factsheet.html Federwisch, A. (n.d.). Nurse historian calls the shots in new movie, “In Love and War.” NurseWeek. Retrieved May 2, 2005, from http://www.nurseweek.com/features/97-2/redcross.html Foley, E.L. (1918). Department of public health nursing [Electronic version]. American Journal of Nursing, 19(3), 189-195. The founders. (n.d.). Retrieved May 2, 2005, from http://www.nursingsociety.org/about/founders1.html Letter from Julia C. Stimson to her family, March 25, 1918. Retrieved May 2, 2005 from Washington University School of Medicine, Bernard Becker Medical Library Digital Collection Web site: http://beckerexhibits.wustl.edu/mowihsp/ Lupton, H.B. (1919). Influenza in Louisville, KY. [Electronic version]. The Public Health Nurse, 11, 47-49. Norris, M.B. (2002). Sister heroines: The roseate glow of wartime nursing, 1914-1918. Calgary: Bunker to Bunker Publishing. Wald, L.D. (n.d.). Nursing: In the United States. Retrieved May 2, 2005, from Encyclopedia Britannica Online: http://www.search.eb.com/women/classic/C0028.html |
