Mahon: Today is Friday, December 7, 2018. My name is Leeah Mahon. I’m the
Graduate Intern on this oral history project and Masters’ student in Public History at Indiana University/Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI).
Also, in the room and participating in the interview is Philip Scarpino, Professor of History and Co-Primary Investigator with Steven Towne for the IUPUI Oral History project funded by the campus administration. Dr. Scarpino also serves as Director of Oral History for the Randall L. Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence at Indiana University/Purdue University, Indianapolis.
Today, we have the privilege of interviewing Dr. Angela Barron McBride in a conference room in the School of Nursing on the IUPUI campus.
This interview is sponsored and funded by the Administration of IUPUI and is co- sponsored by the Randall L. Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence.
We will place a more complete biography of Dr. Barron McBride with the transcript of this interview. For now, I will briefly offer the following biographical summary:
Dr. Barron McBride earned her BSN from Georgetown University in 1962 as the valedictorian of her class. She then earned her MSN from Yale University in Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing in 1964, followed by her PhD in
Developmental Psychology/Social Psychology from Purdue University in 1978.
Finally, Dr. Barron McBride earned her Certificate from the Institute for Educational Management at Harvard University in 1992.
In 1978, she accepted a position as Associate Professor of Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing at the Indiana University School of Nursing in Indianapolis. Dr.
Barron McBride moved through the ranks of the Nursing School, becoming a full professor of Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing in 1981. Between then and her becoming Dean of the Nursing School in 1992, Dr. Barron McBride was
Associate…
McBride: My name is not hyphenated. So, it’s really McBride.
Mahon and Scarpino: Okay.
McBride: And I say that for alphabetical order when you’re doing things. I’m part of that old guard. People then later – I married too early to be hyphenated and so I just kept it as my middle name.
Mahon: Okay.
McBride: . . .And I’ve gone to hotels where they don’t have Angela McBride and then we look and I’m just sensitive to that.
Mahon: That’s okay, it’s just, in the documents I looked at, it appeared that way on some of them, so I just…
McBride: But it’s never hyphenated.
Mahon: Okay.
McBride: So, it’s just the middle – it would be like Angela Marie McBride…
Mahon: Okay.
McBride: … only I use my maiden name as my middle name.
Mahon: Okay. Do you want me to re-start?
Scarpino: No, we can fix that. It’s alright.
Mahon: Okay. Dr. McBride moved through the ranks of the Nursing School, becoming a full professor of Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing in 1981. Between then and her becoming Dean of the Nursing School in 1992, Dr. McBride was Associate and then Executive Associate Dean for Research in the IU School of Nursing and Interim Dean of the Nursing School. In 1992, along with her appointment as Dean, Dr. McBride was named Distinguished Professor of Nursing. She stepped down as Dean in 2003. Dr. McBride’s specializations include Women’s Health, Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing, Leadership and Career Development, and Quality Patient Safety. Outside of nursing, she also taught classes in
Philanthropic Studies, Women’s Studies, Psychiatry and Psychology at IUPUI.
Dr. McBride has an impressive record of publication, including several books and monographs beginning with Psychiatric Nursing and the Demand for
Comprehensive Health Care, an edited volume published in 1972, and The Growth and Development of Mothers, a single-authored monograph published in 1973 by Harper & Row.
McBride: Book, not monograph.
Mahon: I’m sorry. The Growth and Development of Mothers was translated into several languages including Spanish and Hebrew and reissued three times. Her last two book-length publications were The Growth and Development of Nurse Leaders and a multi-edited volume Nursing Leadership: A Concise Encyclopedia in which she also authored several entries. In addition to her book-length publications, Dr.
Barron McBride published more than seventy book chapters and several dozen refereed journal articles between 1967 and 2017.
Dr. McBride’s vita lists numerous honors, including a designation as a “Living Legend” by the American Academy of Nursing. She was also elected Fellow of the American Psychological Association’s Division 35, which is the Psychology of Women, in August 1991. The Growth and Development of Mothers was named as one of the “Noteworthy Books” of 1973 by the New York Times Book Review.
The Growth and Development of Mothers was also picked by the American Journal of Nursing as one of the best books of 1973. The Growth and
Development of Nursing Leaders won the 2011 PROSE Award in the Academy of Nursing and Allied Health.
Dr. McBride supervised 30 dissertations between 1981 and 2010. She has an impressive leadership record, serving not only as Dean of the Nursing School for
11 years, but also as the President of the Honor Society for Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International, from 1987 to 1989; on the National Advisory of Mental Health Council and Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration from 1987 to 1991; on the Advisory Committee of NIH’s Office of Research on
Women’s Health from 1997 to 2001; and as President of the American Academy for Nursing from 1993 to 1995.
Dr. McBride retired from the Indiana University School of Nursing in 2005, becoming Distinguished Professor and University Dean Emeritus.
Before we begin the interview, I’m going to ask your permission to do the same things you just agreed to do in writing, just in case the paperwork you signed gets misplaced. I’m asking your permission to do the following: record this interview, prepare a verbatim transcript of this interview; deposit the interview and the verbatim transcript with the IUPUI Special Collections and Archives and with the Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence and that the Directors of IUPUI Special Collections and Archives and the Tobias Center may make the interview and verbatim transcript available to their patrons which may include posting all or part of the audio recording and the transcript to their respective websites. Can we have your permission to do these things?
McBride: You have my permission.
Scarpino: Shall we hand it off here?
Mahon: Yep.
Scarpino: Okay. As we said when the recorder was off, we’re going to talk to you about leadership, and that’s my part. Because this interview is co-sponsored by both the IUPUI Administration and the Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence, I’d like to start by asking you how you define leadership.
McBride: Leadership, for me, is inspiring and catalyzing others to work together for a common purpose, to achieve organizational mission in a world that keeps changing. Values don’t change, but how those values will get expressed are going to be affected by the times that you live in. So, you can never stay the same. Being creative has to be part of your view of achieving organizational mission.
Scarpino: As a leader, how did you go about inspiring and catalyzing those who followed you?
McBride: I was Interim Dean for a year and a half before I was officially named Dean, so altogether, I was Dean for twelve and a half years. And I would say during that time, it was a period of lots of distress within all eight campuses because when I was Dean of the School, in fact, the title was University Dean eventually because it was a University-wide school. The President at that time subscribed to the view of one university with eight front doors…
Scarpino: I remember that.
McBride: … and so I was Dean of a school on eight campuses. We had Associate Degree Education on six, Baccalaureate on eight, we had a Masters’ program, we had a doctoral program, and we had a postdoc program. That interim period was a time of great unhappiness, I would say, throughout the system. We were headed towards a common accreditation, there were people who did not want that. And part of being a leader at that time was to try to be as inclusive as I could. I’m a great believer that you don’t argue about what you – I don’t think we have to be the same on eight campuses. Why argue about what we don’t have to be the same on? And actually one of the things that I did as part of leadership, I think, was to wind up engaging the faculty on all eight campuses with their notion of where we were one and where we were many. It was, we did, we got -- you know, just like in good research, you get all the items of what people think might be one and many, and then do several cycles of asking people to winnow it down so that you wind up beginning to have agreement. And I would say that one of the things that I did to at least bring enough working together that we achieved all of our goals was, as Dean, to also think through the difference between the University-wide administrative structure and the Indianapolis-Bloomington corridor because those were the two research campuses. Those were the two campuses where you wanted to be one of the top NIH research schools. I wound up changing the structure so that we had -- part of the idea of, “let’s work together for common purpose,” was to make sure that meetings were geared to- we did not just talk about Indianapolis and Bloomington when we were talking system-wide. And there what we had in common was a tremendous commitment to undergraduate education. That was what bound us together. I wound up every year doing both a State of the University School address and a State of the Corridor address for the Indianapolis-Bloomington campus because as we got some greater clarity, the idea was to -- we had different goals. We had different outcome measures. And one of the things I believe about leadership, especially if it’s a big complicated matrix organization, is that the leader has to stay on
message. That doesn’t mean you say the same thing all the time or people will make fun of you and you become a joke. But I think you need to know if you’re with a twenty-five-cent crowd, how to use twenty-five-cent words; if you’re with a
$1.98 crowd, you use $1.98 words; and when you’re with a $10.98 crowd, metaphorically speaking, you use $10.98 words. I’m being a little bit funny, but I think it’s staying… (LAUGHING)
Scarpino: Well, you’re talking about tailoring your message to your audience.
McBride: … it’s staying on message for what are the goals for what piece of the
organization you’re leading at that time. And actually, at one point, because I chaired, before we divided this up, if I, there was no one to really support
Indianapolis because I was both the head for Indianapolis and for the University- wide. And at that time, the School has gone on and changed. We created an Executive Associate Dean structure, and my goal for her was you have to argue with me in these University-wide meetings for the goals of Indianapolis and Bloomington. Particularly when they were coming from a different lens. I would say I think we were able in those -- every year our outcomes moved in the direction. System-wide we handled -- when Ivy Tech really became a full
community college in the 1990s, we knew that associate degree education for us was something that was dated. And at that point, working with all the campuses, I wanted all the campuses to then have three versions of the Baccalaureate
Degree. One is the generic program – you finish high school and you go on to college and you want to be a nurse and you go on in much more lockstep. But we also had, for people who had gotten their RN, which is not an academic degree; that’s just licensure – if they had gotten it as a result of going to an Associate Degree program or a hospital program, we had a BSN completion program which we did a lot. Most of it was web-based, and it was very creative.
My colleagues were enormously creative in coming up with web-based education to help people with a completion. And then we started, during my tenure as Dean, an accelerated second -- degree program. This would be for people who went to college and got a degree in Art or Sociology or History and decided that actually this wasn’t quite what they wanted. Particularly, if you have more life experience, I think, and I hate to say this because I wish it were not true, but I still think in 2018, if you’re a young man of 18 saying you want to become a nurse, you take an awful lot of razzing from your friends. At the age of 28, you may look at nursing and the range of career options that are there and say, “You know, I’ve always been interested in helping people, there is such a variety to the
profession, I think I want to go into another program to add…” And I would say that accelerated second degree program, we had wonderful students. We did have more men in it; we did have actually, I don’t know if we kept it up, but we had much more diversity of all kinds. We had people who had been
stockbrokers, we had people who had been in theater, we had people in
sociology. And I would say, all of those fields – nursing is such a big, and in fact, I think part of my leadership was to tackle in not only at IU School of Nursing, but everything that I did at the national or even international level, changing the stereotype of what nursing is because it’s not a cookie-cutter profession. In fact, when I used to do the welcoming of new students, it took me several years to get my schtick right because if you only have two or three minutes, what can you say that would actually be useful to people? I wound up developing three messages.
One was: Even if you came to IU School of Nursing because it was the public university and your parents reminded you that it was cheaper than the private, I want you to know it’s a nationally ranked school. You may not have been as aware of it as you applied because it was your state school and you just didn’t know that much about it. My second message was: Treat your basic nursing program as a smorgasbord because licensure really, when you become an RN, it’s a statement of you know a little bit about everything in nursing. And I don’t again want to be glib, but in some ways the RN is you know a little bit about all the basics. In fact, we go on in Masters’ and doctoral programs – we call it certification because that is a statement that you have knowledge in a specialty area – and those are different. Those are both laudatory that, you know, there are many, many, many jobs where you don’t need specialization, you actually need basics. But I wanted people to understand that if they didn’t like a piece of nursing that did not mean that they would not like nursing because, again, part of the stereotype is, and I used to get very tired of it, when people would just begin by telling me they don’t like blood or they don’t like taking people to the
bathroom. And it would be like, “you know, you certainly have reduced my field to the basic denominator.” I mean, it seems to me, and you know, I would then say to people you know, “I’m not fond of blood and smelly work just does not appeal to me all that much either.” I actually appreciate how important it is, but I wanted people to understand that you have to find your spot and that’s really true of all leadership. And I wanted people to really think through what piece had their name on it. By the way, the third thing that I would say in the orientation was I
wanted people to understand that the learning had changed because we were upper division and people had done the first two years, which is a series of humanity, social sciences and sciences. And I would always begin by saying, “I suspect you were like me and you stored it in your short-term memory so that you could pass the exam. Now the reality is application to complex human experience of all the things that you learned and you’re going to sort of regret, as I actually wound up doing, that you were not as awake when some subject matter came up because this patient has a lab value that you know is not good.But you’re really not sure what it means to not be good and it’s putting it together.”
And my hope was, I really do think because it’s a different kind of learning when it’s a -- when you are an applied field; and sometimes that gets a bad rap, like you’re second best. But the reality is there’s enormous artistry in applying all the different pieces of knowledge. And I will tell you, I have never worked with a patient and that person’s family without some piece of psychology or some piece of thinking about spirituality, or some piece of basic physiology, nutrition,
functional ability. What do I remember about muscles working that applies in this situation? That in fact, is I think the wonder and the magnificence of nursing.
Scarpino: I’m going to circle back here. I started by asking you how you define leadership, and you have articulated a pretty highly developed sense of what it means to be a leader.
McBride: Yes.
Scarpino: Do you have any notion of when you first began to see yourself as a leader?
McBride: Oh, I was raised not to have a big head. (LAUGHTER) You know, I am part of -- I went to Catholic education from first grade through college and I was raised to be a servant leader. The model of servant leadership, when I wound up reading about it, was not unfamiliar to me, but girls did not go to college when I was in high school. I mean, I went to a very good academic high school. But I will tell you, it was a period where you either commercial track and you were going to become a secretary, or you were academic and you were going to become a K through 12 teacher, a nurse or a nun, in which case you were going to become a K through 12 teacher or a nurse. The world of larger opportunity was not there.
And I worked as a nurses’ aide all through high school. From the age of thirteen, I worked every summer and weekends, because I knew, I really knew I wanted to go to college. I wanted to be college-educated. I’m not even sure -- well, partly that came from an immigrant background. My parents both mourned the education they were not able to have for financial reasons. My mother did not get to be a teacher. She finished high school nighttime. My father courted her by walking to the bus and picking her up and meeting her after night school after she worked during the day. And my father, who always wanted to be a surgeon, never finished high school and he got a GED at the age of 60. I thought that was courage in action. I came from a family where the message was always that education was your future. It was going change you. And I will also tell you I learned early on, as I became more my own person, that education was the way for me to strike out. I could do many things if I convinced my parents it was in the name of education. You could move away from home in the name of
education. I think becoming educated to me was always tied up with some view of leadership. And then, I don’t know when I first noticed it, probably was I think
really even in high school, that everybody got the same 24 hours. And some people never got things done, they never had fun - you know, it was sort of like every time I saw somebody who seemed to like what they were doing and they liked their lives. I tried to figure out what made them work, what made them that way. And I will tell you probably that, that is the theme of my life. I have constant -- now we talk of it mentoring, and I’ve done my own share because I’m a great believer that if you get mentored and people are invested in you and coach you, you can get further faster. I had to decode it myself. So I have had this lifelong interest in what makes for effective people and I’ve sort of pieced together elements. I think I’ve already said what they are, you know, that some how you’re effective. You actually know a job and know how to get it done.
Scarpino: Did it ever occur to you that most people don’t think that way?
McBride: No, I thought most people thought that way. (LAUGHING)
Scarpino: I’m listening to you talk and describing your Polish-Catholic upbringing…
McBride: Polish-Catholic upbringing. Nancy Pelosi and I went to high school together.
We’re the only two people who went to college in Washington.
Scarpino: Did you know her?
McBride: Oh, yes. (LAUGHTER) I mean, it was a small all-girl Catholic high school. I knew her husband before she knew him because he was in my year at Georgetown at the School of Foreign Service.
Scarpino: Are you still in touch?
McBride: Let’s just say, if we were in the same room, she would know who I was. At this point, her world is so much larger than mine, but yes. I mean, if Paul were here, he would say, “Angela, what are you doing?” (LAUGHING) And I did keep up with her after high school and then, you know, her own life is just so full that -- but I have an autographed copy of her autobiography that she wrote that came out right at the time sort of that she became Speaker, the first time.
Scarpino: Here’s what occurred to me when you were talking. You grew up in a Polish immigrant Catholic culture that imagined limited opportunities for women, and I actually went to a high school where you were either on the, you know, the work track or the college track. So, one of the options, whether you were a nun or a civilian, was nursing. As your life went forward and changed and your world view changed and you became a leader and a professional, you were still building on one of those options that was really a narrow range of options that was available to you when you were a young woman. . .
McBride: At the time, you know, I gave the speech at my high school…
Scarpino: In other words, you picked up the ball and ran with it.
McBride: Well, I was very affected by the women’s movement of the 1960s. I graduated from college before Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique.
Scarpino: 1963. . .
McBride: It was only in the 1960s that I not only read her book, but I, more importantly, read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, especially that second half of the book. The first half is very dated, but the second half is this erudite consideration of the roles of women. I married a philosopher of social/political philosophy. We actually do have dinner conversations where we might talk about some of these things. In fact, I will tell you that one of the recurrent themes in our life is every now and then I struggle with something and I come up with this idea that I think is just brilliant, it’s like I have a new insight because I actually taught what I believe to be was the first women’s health graduate course at IUPUI and probably at IU.
Scarpino: Do you remember when you did that?
McBride: It would have been probably 1980-ish?
Scarpino: You were born into a culture and a society that imagined pretty limited roles for women…
McBride: Right.
Scarpino: … and you…
McBride: I never liked it. I never liked that part. I didn’t like the constraints.
Scarpino: … but the women’s activists that you were reading, and the ones that you just mentioned, really kind of run counter to Catholic doctrine. Did you ever struggle with that?
McBride: I did. I just think religion is more complicated. I think Catholicism is very patriarchal to this day. I think it’s the tradition that I love. I value very much my Catholic background. But for me, religion and spirituality had to become more complicated too. It is, you know, I think that human beings, to the extent that we think the larger thoughts, the larger spiritual thoughts, I think we put too much of human beings into it. So, God the Father being a man with a long beard, you know, it’s like I gave that one up. We have no -- I think I believe in the meaning behind some things, I believe in the notion of prime cause, I believe that Jesus Christ was a person who transformed the ethic of the world in a very good way.
But I actually think that if you take Jesus Christ very seriously, you can be as radical as you want. I think that there are a few nuns on buses who stayed in Catholicism who are like my heroines, and I think Pope Francis is still a little stuck, but he’s got sort of the right idea that love is the answer and not getting too hung up on any one of the things. But many of the things that are now Scripture, they came up with them in the 19th Century and if you look at the historical reality at the time -- We also had a very dear friend who was on the committee put together in the late 1950s, early 1960s, for looking at the pill for contraception for the Catholic Church. And I can tell you that the committee recommended that it be approved and then the Catholic hierarchy decided that it would not be
tolerated. If you know those things and if you think larger thoughts, I like to think that I am not a black and white person. I have a big tent; I can hold many
different beliefs. That doesn’t mean that I’m wishy-washy. It just means that
when I put together my world view, it is complicated. And that really gets back to leadership because I think leadership is not being a knee-jerk. It is, I mean, you know, leadership becomes really interesting of how do you maintain morale for a community and build the community while pushing it and titrating the amount of change that people will be comfortable with because people are not comfortable with change. How do you change, what are the expectations? That was one of the biggest ones for my field because we had people who had become tenured professors who did not have doctorates, and yet the profession had changed and said you needed a doctorate. And how are you nurturing and mentoring to people who are in a different piece of time, and you’re trying as a leader to be in the avant-garde, at least for your period of time to push it? I think it’s a
complicated position and the more you can understand different points of view -- and I don’t mean just being politically correct, I mean do you understand the teaching mission? You actually understand how important research is to a university, you understand how important service is, and so that -- in fact, I’m giving you part of my answer for how I rallied everybody because Ernest Boyer wrote Scholarship Reconsidered just about the time that I became Interim Dean and then Dean. And I decided that that Carnegie Foundation for Teaching manuscript was my key to moving the school. Because if I looked at everybody, they were either the scholarship of teaching, the scholarship of service or the scholarship of research. Now, everybody was supposed to do a little bit of everything, but there were people who were truly excellent in each one of those.
And then if you recall, the year after Boyer’s book came out, his monograph, the next book that came out from them was – I can’t remember the exact title – but scholarship evaluated. It basically said no matter what kind of scholarship you do, you should be doing the same thing that is keeping up with your field, articulating, doing work that is subject to public refereeing, which gets you into refereed presentations and refereed publications. It gets you into looking for grant money. I tried to make it that no matter -- and in fact, we completely revamped, during my early years, all of the tenure promotion exemplars of excellence to be mindful that you still had to have outcomes, but each kind of scholarship was going to be valued, treasured -- and the leadership that was required was, I think, to come up with some scheme that would somehow cover everybody in valuing them, but also helping them move to the next level of where they needed to go.
Scarpino: We’re going to actually ask you a lot of questions about your time as Dean, but I want to follow up in the leadership context. . .
McBride: Yes. . .
Scarpino: You’re inspired by Boyer’s work and you just laid out his message, so to speak, and you then…
McBride: And it gave me power. There’s nothing like an external, highly regarded organization that says this is it, to when then you say to faculty, “Well, this has come out, what do you think of it? Can we use these ideas?”
Scarpino: And that’s where I was going with this. Once you were thinking that it was important to recast the tenured promotion guidelines for teaching, research and
service, as the leader then, you kind of had to sell that to your faculty, and to the administration. . .
McBride: Yes, and they were dubious because I had been the Dean of Research. I had been the Associate Dean of Research. . .
Scarpino: Well, that’s where I’m going with this. . .
McBride: You know, at least nursing was a good preparation and let me tell you that because being in academia, I’ve always known that people in clinical and hospital facilities are always suspicious of those who teach, that they probably didn’t really -- they don’t really know nursing or they wouldn’t have left it and become faculty and scientists. I think that understanding that, you know, you’re always, people are always a bit dubious about whether you are understanding real life, and I think faculty are like that. I was that way myself as a faculty member. Do you understand the range of what is going on? And, I mean, I -- what I also did was to really – when I say I valued, it wasn’t just something in my mind; it was cheering on, showcasing. One of the brilliant people I had on the faculty was Diane Billings who was a master of IT. Our whole move toward web- based, she had vision, and somebody like Marge Applegate, who was brilliant at evaluation. I think a lot of it has to do with looking at what people have and saying you know, “You are so terrific in this area,” and then helping them, well, making the connection to other people that how this is important to all of us because somebody being good at evaluation is good no matter what aspect of our school you’re concerned with, somebody being very good at IT. And we were the first school to go digital. I don’t know if you know that, on the IUPUI campus, and we did that in part, and I say this with great humility, I am lousy at IT. I am always afraid I am going to touch the wrong button, but I do get it. I got that it was transformational, that this was – I’m a great believer, as a Dean, that if you’re working in a larger environment like a university or a campus and you see big trends, and you should be reading so that you have some idea what those trends are, and there are big trends that you think really have legs. They’re larger ideas, they’re going to be transformational that sometimes to become the beta site gets you extra money at the beginning from the administration, and so I had understood that principle. I think that there were times when Jerry Bepko and Bill Plater thought I understood that principle perhaps even a little bit more than they wanted me to. But I actually thought that while I was not good in this area, that actually if you took that whole movement, informatics, that it was -- I could see where it was going. It was sort of like I can’t go there, but I can see where you’re going. And I think, I don’t know if faculty would say this about me, but I think I tried if I saw where you were going to do as much as I could to help you get where you were going. But then also to connect it to some larger message that would be like the State of the Corridor Campus address, or the State of the School address because I think also – I ran a T32 grant – it’s an NIH training grant – before I, well, while I was Dean and then before. And one of the things that I learned -- and we were one of the earlier doctoral programs. We got a T32 institutional research training grant early on. I saw the power of – I didn’t do it at the beginning; I was smart enough at the beginning of that grant to get an advisory board that was interdisciplinary because the School of Nursing didn’t have that much research strength, but we were collegial, and we were connected to pieces of the campus where people had really good CVs and grant records. It
was a good strategy so that it would have Chris Callahan with the Aging Center, Gary Bond with Rehab Psychology when he was starting. I mean, we really had a good advisory group. I’ll tell you the most transformative thing that we did though with our pre-docs and when we post-docs was the advisory group would meet with the – everybody who was in training at the beginning of the semester, at the end of the semester, in the fall and at the end in the spring and it was an update. You had to put together a statement of where you were – what grants, what monies, what publications, whatever you were doing, and the interaction upped everybody’s game. People would get a training grant thinking, “If I can publish one article ever in my life, it will be a miracle.” By the end of it, they are telling you that they are coauthoring or they’re on this grant or they’re doing something, and it’s sort of the principle of getting people engaged, showcasing it.
A lot of it is cheerleading, but I don’t mean this in a mindless way. I just think people need to believe that you have confidence in the excitement of what you’re doing.
Scarpino: What had become a really transformative emphasis on research in the Nursing School, you were the leader of that movement. I just wanted to get that in one place. So, I want to ask you two more questions about leadership and then I’m going to hand off to Leeah. So, you talked earlier about some of the stereotypes that exist about nursing as a profession. The question that I have is, and you wrote the book which we’re going to talk about later, The Growth and
Development of Nursing Leaders published in 2011, when did you begin to link nursing and leadership? When did those two things begin to connect in your mind?
McBride: The earliest thing that I have written on my CV is something about leadership in about 1971, but it started before that. It was, well, I was the first officer of Georgetown University’s Mask and Bauble, which is the theater group. So, you asked if I had leadership, I guess the fact that I became an officer in a Jesuit university of the long – actually, it’s one of the older theater groups in the country…
Scarpino: Would you tell us again the name of that group?
McBride: Mask and Bauble.
Scarpino: Okay, got it.
McBride: But it’s Georgetown’s drama group. . . Scarpino: Yeah, yeah.
McBride: And I was -- I did things in college but it was always, I didn’t think any of it was like a big deal. But I honestly - Simone de Beauvoir’s book where she talks about the masculine -- what has been the feminine and the masculine principle.
Immanence is how she describes the feminine principle, which is much more static, it is much more doing. And the masculine is transcendence, it goes beyond boundaries, it is future seeking. Immanence exists in the here and now;
transcendence exists in the future. And I would say that the stereotype of nursing had always been that nursing exists in the here and now and the caring
for in the here and now, the following of orders, which it’s true, physicians prescribe medical treatments and typically nurses implement them, but what nurses do above and beyond that piece of their responsibilities is large. It’s a constant assessment. It’s constantly facilitated functional ability. It is helping people understand how to put together changes in their life situation because they now have this problem that isn’t going to go away, but they’re going to have to be living with. There is a leadership in that. And then I always believed that what nurses did, because people tended to think it was following orders, that it was anti-intellectual when I thought it was actually enormously complicated and actually that actually prescribing a drug was easier than actually working with people to get them and their families to accept maybe a lifestyle change or whatever. When de Beauvoir talked about transcendence, I realized, because I had actually bought a lot of the literature – you know, I finished high school in the 1950s, so this is when people were talking about the man as the head of the family and the woman as the heart. And I will tell you that I fully understood by the 1960s that all human beings needed a head and a heart and that one being the head and other one being the heart was not going to work because human beings, just the very act – I mean, my book, The Growth and Development of Mothers, which was the first book that was well-regarded to look at motherhood in light of the women’s movement, it actually takes issue with static roles of motherhood. And for me, the static roles of motherhood, because often nursing was seen as she was the mommy and the physician was the daddy, that those roles needed to be completely rethought, and once, in the 1960s, my mind opened up to, “Lord I’ve been swallowing an awful lot of stereotype.” I never liked it because I sort of, I mean, I can tell you, all through high school I resented that I could not get a job in the park system that paid more money per hour and got you a tan by the end of the summer because only boys could get those jobs.
I came into high school with that belief and, you know, I grew up in a period where ads were jobs for women and jobs for men and all the interesting ones, you know, the Mary and Martha story. I knew which one I identified with. I wanted to be in there talking with Jesus and not in the kitchen making the dinner, and so that was my, that was who I was, and the women’s movement opened it up. There was a whole literature that then came into being and there is
something about a fresh -- a paradigm shift. It’s like the glacier moves and all of the things that didn’t seem quite right, or you didn’t have the right thought, you begin to realize that you can have your own thoughts. And for me, that also then has a lot to do with the whole issue of leadership, and what do you do in a situation and how do you think about it? And I probably, I would say, that I am, I give more thought to these things than most other human beings. I do not work on automatic pilot. I may look casual…
Scarpino: Hahaha, I’m not taking that one.
McBride: … but I rarely am. (LAUGHTER)
Scarpino: This is a sound recording, so I’ll say you don’t look casual. So I’m going to hand off.
Mahon: Okay. So, that was a good segue. You mentioned before that the women’s rights movement and feminism have constituted a common thread or an
influence throughout your life. In several places, you’ve described yourself as a
feminist. Now we would like to talk to you about women’s rights and feminism and see how your views on those subjects may have influenced the way that you approach leadership and your career and your life more generally. My first question is: Do you remember when you first began to think of yourself as a feminist?
McBride: Oh, you know, the word feminist has always been loaded because it was loaded in the 1960s when Friedan wrote her book. I always used to reframe arguments.
If somebody said to me what you just did, I would say, “I actually believe all human beings should be fully actualized and we should care about other human beings being fully actualized.” And from my point of view, that construction covers both the traditional and the feminist. The traditional meaning that you have more communal, you have more family oriented, you care about not just yourself, you’re not just guided by your individual desires. But I also believe greatly that self-actualization, that’s going to vary. I mean, what people want -- not everybody wants a career. Not everyone has a lot of energy to be ambitious to take -- I mean, we vary so much, but I actually think that’s the beauty of people, but I do think that whatever constitutes what’s important to you to realize has got to be part of the mix. It’s got to be part of the mix of a marriage. I mean, I don’t think you can have a partnership with another man or woman without it somehow being good for both. Now, when you say it’s got to be good for both, there are many times when you say okay, we’ll do it, we’ll do what’s important to you right now, but I’m keeping track. And you hope you don’t have a tit-for-tat relationship. But nevertheless, you’re keeping track so that the next time
something comes up, you are --and I also do think, I mean, I went through every anguish that a mother who works outside the home can feel. I can also tell you that with the gift now of hindsight, I anguished more than I had to because, for one thing, combining worlds has made me more interesting to my children. I mean, they call me for career advice as much as they call me because something bad happened to them. I mean, and I did work part-time when the children were very young, but I was fortunate, I mean, I say this again with the gift of hindsight. I was teaching at Yale when my first child was born and I had been on the faculty for three years. And I actually had quit and written a final grant report on something I was working on just around my due date because I was going to be to my child what my mother had been to me. That was my belief. This is 1967. And two months after I quit – she was born in June – my chair of the department called in August and said, “Would you do some part-time work for us?” And I just about kissed her feet because at the time, I had a skill already that they needed somebody to do – I actually did some Masters’
supervision during that time – and then when my second child was, well, the woman who was the department chair had then eventually gotten a grant. And for the next few years, including the time that I had my second child, I was working on a grant which I was the manager for, but that meant that I had a defined role. I didn’t have to do all the juggling that a tenure track faculty member does. And it also was a grant that came with secretarial support. I actually had, and the great fortune for me is even when I worked part-time, I worked part-time in an area that built my CV, that actually – I wasn’t smart enough at the time to say, “Oh, isn’t this cleaver?” I mean, now, in hindsight I say. I’m so glad they knew me and said, “Would you manage this grant and it’s only half-time and you can, you know, you can do things.” But in fact that was the period that was one of the, that was a great period of my own life negotiating
whether I was going to be like my mother and not once I had children (pause) because I realized that she lived in a different world than I did. She had a different background and I was going to have to work out something else and how I was going to combine things. But because I was really at a university at the time where the people knew me, it wasn’t – I am actually like a footnote in some nursing history. I probably have taught in the smallest nursing program at that time and then I’ve taught in the largest school at that time. I’ve always kidded that I’m Goldilocks who wants a medium-size bed. But because it was small when I was at Yale and people knew me, they were enormously supportive to what I was thinking I was capable of doing at that time. In fact, I got a grant from Yale one summer to write what was the first draft of The Growth and Development of Mothers because it was a project that I was interested in doing.
And I wound up -- you know, I’ve never had a book go so well actually. When you know nothing, sometimes God is good. That book got published because my husband had lunch with a very distinguished professor of philosophy who didn’t want to be by himself when a publisher was coming to town for lunch. And this – I believe it was Harcourt Brace at the time – at the end of the lunch, the man said to both this professor and my husband, “Well, do you have any books that you can give me?” And my husband said, “No, but I have this wife who has this book.” And he said, “Well, it’s not up my line, it’s not a philosophy book, but let me take a look, I’ll get it to the right person.” And actually, that person got it to somebody, it got a review by someone very distinguished at Harvard who said,
“This is an irreverent treatment of a subject that usually doesn’t have this kind of analysis, but it’s an interesting book, but it’s not a Harcourt Brace book.” So, with that particular commentary, it wended its way to Harper & Row and I found what was then the best editor I will have ever had, and that’s when people still did editing. She gave me comments on the first draft that unbelievably made the second draft better. And, you know, I have now lived many more decades and I have done a lot of editing, I now can appreciate how good she was. She was not heavy-handed because you’re a tender soul when it’s your first book and…
Scarpino: It’s like your first baby, isn’t it?
McBride: … it’s like your first baby. And actually it came out within three weeks of its debut. It was on page three of the Sunday New York Times Book Review, which I think at the time I thought, “Oh, this is my lot in life.” I tell you it’s been downhill since. And I will even tell you that the Review said that I had a doctor in
psychology, which I did not, which I eventually then got so I would not make the reviewer a liar. It was one of the co-founders of Ms. Magazine who did the review. Anyway, I digress. But we were talking about women’s…
Scarpino: I’m going to insert myself and ask you who the co-founder was in that handbag?
Who was the co-founder of Ms. Magazine that reviewed your book?
McBride: I knew you were going to ask and I’m having a (INAUDIBLE PHRASE), but was, it’ll come to me.
Scarpino: Okay. . .
McBride: . . .I lose names that I don’t think about too often. Oh, this is awful because she was so – I need to Google it.
Mahon: It’s okay. If you remember at any point, you can just back in and tell us. I’m just going to go back…
McBride: And I wound up, by the way, I wound up then writing a couple pieces for Ms.
Magazine along the way. If you look at that CV, you see that they’re a couple of pieces in it and that was sort of the connection.
Mahon: Ye. You did talk a little bit about the way that you define feminism that you would have been considered a feminist for a large part of your life. What about -- was there any inner struggle with part of you that was shaped by growing up in a Polish-Catholic culture in Baltimore?
McBride: . . .Oh, of course! Tortured, tortured, I still am. You know, I always kid to my husband that I’m merely a crapshoot. You never know when this radical piece of me is going to emerge and when somebody who insists, as I have this year on putting more Christmas stuff up because mothers put that up when their children come to visit, is something that we are to do hell or highwater. That’s not a very good example of being traditional, but that tug between – I just don’t, I think it’s called the human experience. See, I think you’re always going to be torn between what would be your own ambition and desires, what is good for your partner, what is good for your children, and you juggle. I have, in recent years, conducted sessions on juggling work and family that have been sell-out crowds, but I’ve done it with people much younger than me. In fact, I did this about three years ago with a woman who is a second accelerated degree coming into
nursing. She’s at Hopkins. She is in a lesbian relationship and I don’t know which one of them has the children, but we did a session because we talked about it as multigenerational and people would ask, the people who were now pre-docs and post-docs, would ask things like: “So how do you handle when you’re trying to get a grant and it’s Christmastime coming up and your family isn’t going to see you and you’re not doing what they expect you to do?” And my colleague answered by she then goes to the family and says, “I don’t know if you can get behind this, but the grant comes in,” explains why it is important, explains her absence, explains the help that she expects from the family. And says, you know, “I will emerge on December 24th and this is how it’s going to look.” And it was a very family-engaged process. And somebody asked me, “So how would you have handled the same thing?” I said, “I would have plowed through,”
because at the time it didn’t occur to me that I could even say to people, “Now, this is the help I’m expecting,” because I was part of that generation where if you said you needed help, they would tell you you didn’t belong in the first place.
And since I didn’t want to hear that – you remember, it was that old ad of I can get the paycheck, I can do the cooking, I can, you know, flip the bacon, I can do all of those kind of things. And, you know, I agree with Michelle Obama, it was in her Becoming, she takes issue with you, “Can have everything.” I think you can have many things of the course of your life, but you also have to figure out who you are; and for all of us, that’s a different configuration. I think who we are is always going to be shaped by the piece of history we live in because there are different opportunities, there are different challenges for each generation, and you’re going to have to figure out something. You know, there are people who I have met who their work is more important than anything else and I know – well, in fact, I’ve conducted because when I was President of Sigma Theta Tau around the country, I was one of the first people to do a talk on orchestrate a career and
I always, in every region that we went to, I would insist that we’d get people with different lifestyles; a person who never married and said I could have never fitted in children and a husband, people who were dealing with an ailing parent, people who had eight kids. And, you know, I mean there were these proverbia, you know, every region has different people, but the point was – and men and women -- because I wanted men and women in nursing to talk about juggling work and family. And I will tell you, everybody had a different story. For some, ambition was more important. For some, putting things on hold for a while, not knowing what was going to be there, but because they were bright people, they sort of were able to then seize opportunities even though they had not had a continuous career. So, for me, I don’t like when anybody has glib definitions of feminism or traditional or anything because, for me, it’s not even traditional. It’s the difference between valuing the individual and self-actualization and valuing and knowing that you share a role in whatever community you’re in, whether that’s the family, whether that’s your neighborhood, whether that’s the city or country or whatever; what is your piece in it? And people will play different roles.
Mahon: So, you did talk about how, when you were younger, that you felt like you swallowed a lot of stereotypes about women. When you were in college and graduate school during the women’s movement, what ways did the women’s movement impact your world view as you were earning your undergraduate and graduate degree that made you the woman that you then became?
McBride: Well, this would really be much more, after I even had a Masters’ degree, I was very big into -- I wound up being quite popular in graduate school. There weren’t that many women around at Yale and let’s just say I had an opportunity to date a range of kinds of men. One of the things – remember, I was getting a Masters’ in psych mental health nursing, one of the things that was true was Rogerian technique. And part of Rogerian technique in psychology/psychiatry is I’m working with you to get you to talk about things that are troubling in your background. And you say something and I don’t in a stupid way repeat your words, but you say – you make a sentence and you say, “I was uncomfortable, but I nevertheless did this.” Well, part of Rogerian technique might be to say,
“Well, tell me how uncomfortable you were? You said you were uncomfortable before you said you did this, tell me about it.” But Rogerian technique really is a repeating back to people what are elements of what they have said. And if you had read the dating books of that period, it was just the way girls were supposed to talk to guys -- repeating back to them fascinating things that they had said to get them to talk more about themselves. And let’s just say I could be very good at this. I actually met my husband then, my donnybrook. (LAUGHTER) I was destined to marry a professor of philosophy because, of all the men I’ve known, he really didn’t buy that. He would say, “So what do you think?” And he would – and I actually was very attracted by the fact that he actually asked me what I thought and what I was doing. And I would say that that is an enduring theme for our marriage. He’s always asked me what I wanted to do next and that sounds like such a simple question, but I will tell you, I didn’t think it was an appropriate question at various times, when he first started asking me. When I was a new mother, saying “what do you want to do next?” I thought isn’t that silly. I have to stay home and take care of the child, but it opened up, there was something about someone giving you, opening that up – and then reading. My husband had the same background that I did, is, you know, one of the most -- philosophers are
professional critics. They’re critical of everything. He doesn’t hesitate to be critical of everything, and there’s something about the things being open that was, that wound up, part of that became very good for me.
Mahon: So, was there anything, did the larger social ferment of the 1960s and early 1970s influence your thinking about women’s lives and women’s careers at all?
McBride: It did, particularly women’s mental health and women’s issues. I would say concretely, the big professional thing that came out of it because, with the women’s movement came women’s studies broadly conceived, but women’s health is really a real subset of women’s studies. And at the beginning, most of the thinking was a critique of what was. For example, it was a critique that the longitudinal study of aging that had gone on for twenty years never included women. Now, if you think about who is aging, the study that was originally done on, is an aspirin good for your heart, was originally done on men. And
biologically, what people always said was, you know those women have those cycles and so you want a control scientifically for those cycles, so you do
research on men. But what did we conclude from those studies? We concluded that whatever we found was true, was true for all human beings, and women got prescribed the same treatments. And so, I don’t know if you can see, but this is a whole new paradigm shift opening up. It is a major critique of what was. There used to be a time in the 1980s, so this is – I don’t happen to think that the 1980s are like, you know, so far away, when if they thought you might have breast cancer, you signed an informed consent that they would then remove the tumor and you would have surgery. So, you had anesthesia, number one, not even knowing if you really had cancer, so your mind had not come to terms with the fact that you had cancer. But you had cancer, they did a mastectomy, you woke up without a breast. And, at that time, if you were over forty and you ever wanted breast reconstruction, they saw it as narcissistic; they used the word narcissistic.
With the implication being that if you’re over forty, you’re over the hill. Why would you care whether your breasts were affirmed? Now, that’s a completely
masculine view of breasts. I mean, from my point of view, my breast is not a sexual object; it’s like a part of me that hurts like my hand does or my foot does or something else does. I mean, just imagine any other body part that if you got rid of it, and to be – and I’ve heard women talk about they feel lopsided.. You know, we do a lot less total mastectomies now, but that is an example of a critique of a procedure, and there were many of them. And there were many things that concerned women that men did not, that were not studied, I mean, nobody took seriously. When I was getting a Masters’ degree at Yale University and went to the student health, if anything was reproductive, genitourinary – you know what I mean; urology. Anything to do with your lower parts, student health did not do it; they told you to go to a community doctor for those things.
Basically, I’m paying a student fee for health services and part of me is being farmed out as not belonging to your health system. And that was the world, I mean, that’s not Yale, that was the world view at the time. I can come up with zillions, in fact, that was the basis of the graduate course because the graduate course that I taught was, I always described it, “It is not gynecology in the sense of plumbing; it is GYN-ecology, looking at woman in her environment around health and disease issues.” And the course was people who were in different aspects because you could be a nursing administration and write – and everybody wrote a paper on what was of interest to them. For example,
somebody might be interested in lupus, which is it’s much more prevalent in women. And you might, because that is the patient population you work with and as a Masters’ student want to write a paper on the experience of women with lupus and the treatment, etcetera. But if you were in administration, there were --the insurance company did not -- had different insurance policies for women and men for different things and things didn’t get covered. If you were in health systems research, there were issues to be critiqued as much as there were issues if you were in lupus or if you were in parent-child nursing. So, whatever aspect of nursing you were in, women’s health, taking a critical look, and I would say that was part of what I did. And, in fact, I was unhappy with a course,when I was a doctoral student at Purdue, because my husband was on the faculty. We introduced the first philosophy of women course and we co-taught it. I was an associate instructor in philosophy for a semester.
Mahon: Was this while you were taking classes?
McBride: While I was a PhD student. But we co-taught the course and developed the course, which by the way, continues to this day. My husband has always been interested in these issues because he’s open-minded, so he is actually the father of women’s studies at Purdue on the West Lafayette campus. But we actually had a course on what was, you know, it was like who were the all-time great male chauvinists of philosophical tradition. And we even had a little game with, you know, the saying and match it up to did Saint Thomas Aquinas say this? Did Aristotle say this? Who said this? But it was a course and then really looking to working towards then beginning to introduce somebody like de Beauvoir into a conversation. And, you know, there’s a whole tradition. I mean, I got my doctorate in 1978, so since then there’s a huge number of philosophers who have tackled this. But I was unhappy when I was first teaching the course because, in my mind, I knew that this was different. But how do you name it?
And there was no literature. And in fact, I wound up -- and I have to admit that, as I explained what I was trying to talk about, my husband said, “Well, that’s the lived experience, what phenomenology talks about.” And it was like, yes, what I am glomming onto is the difference in women’s health as a subset to study is the lived experience and taking more seriously the lived experience. You take so seriously the lived experience of women that you include them as subjects in studies and, by the way, the NIH was transformed around this time. I wound up actually being on the Office of Women’s Health for NIH at one – my CV tells you exactly what that title is – but it was – and one of the things that we actually did at the level of NIH is we came up with something like five volumes that were an overview of what we know about all sorts of issues that are of concern to women and setting a research agenda for what we don’t know. Sort of like what do we know/what don’t we know? But, so much – Bill and I actually wound up writing in 1981 a book that is called Theoretical Underpinnings for Women’s Health, because as I would tell him what I was struggling with, he was able, having my home-based philosopher, to talk about the ideas that I was talking about that were part of larger traditions. And we wound up then writing an article on women’s health as lived experience and we wound up then – it was an article that was important. I don’t, you know, it wasn’t like important like in some, everybody publicly knows, but like the first Center for Women’s Health that the National Institute for Health supported for nursing was at the University of Washington. I can tell you that they used that article as they set it up as
theoretical underpinnings for what they were going to study. Bill and I then wrote another article that came out about ten years later and, at this point, it wasn’t how do you name what we’re doing? Which is a critique; I was then chewing on the fact that how do you move from critique to assertion? That is, if you’re just merely critique – this is true of anything, the political system – if you’re only critique and you are not offering something that would be alright, this is a critique of the old order. What is going to be the positive statement? What is the
assertion? And we, we did something then about what had happened in the literature. And, for me, it was much more taking some of the NIH things that were happening out there and talking about you’re beginning to get people to study things that they had not studied before. One of the most profound changes at the national level was the requirement that unless there is a good reason, like you’re studying prostate cancer, you’ve got to document that there are women in your study. I mean, you can’t just have a study of men and, you know, that’s even more larger because now people would say, “Well, you just can’t have Caucasian women, you can’t just have middle class.” I mean, you have to have diversity and go on to larger studies and that’s how things have evolved over time. But the part that I would say I can lay claim to is that part that is trying to define some of those things. Then I wrote a lot about what the women’s
movement means for nursing and looking at decades in terms of changing views and social currents kind of thing.
Mahon: Now I’m wondering about -- you talked about women’s health in a wide sense, but what about women’s mental health specifically, especially around the stigma around women’s mental health in the 1950s about not asking for help if they needed help or…?
McBride: I think that, I mean, I think one of the best examples of changes in mental health, because of the women’s movement, there was a time when we talked – Bateman had written stuff, Margaret Meade’s husband, about the schizophrenogenic mother. We would talk about schizophrenic children having schizophrenogenic mothers. It was a view that it was the mothering that went astride. And the decade of the 1990s at NIH was the decade of the brain and that’s when they discovered so much more about the biological. I mean, schizophrenia and the genetic, there’s no one gene, there are multiple genes. And like anything that’s genetic, because you have the gene, doesn’t mean it will be manifest. You stress people enough and then, if they have that gene, it may be expressed. But there was a wholescale notion of how that was such a bum rap for the mother because the child has a problem and then you’re saying that the problem is the mother when many mothers of children with mental illness are heroic in what they do for the sake of the child. I also think we got into a much more
complicated view of depression during that time because women were
prescribed many more antidepressants, which, by the way, they did not work as well in the early stages on women as they did in men because they had never been tested in women. But then you look at the broader world of alcoholism, which stereotype – from a stereotype point of view, that was depression for men.
And people began to understand that depression and different kinds of biological and trying to understand the situation, trying to understand the (pause) to better understand women’s experience, I’d say we have only gone so far. I have a daughter who’s fifty-one and she’s a very distinguished professor of
developmental psychology. We have had a running debate for the last twenty-
five years where we each take turns taking a different opinion. It’s not because we do this as a debate. As the world turns, sometimes I’m more depressed and sometimes she’s more depressed – but it’s like are things really better?
(LAUGHING) You know, and there’s a part of me that says, “Oh, Cami, you have absolutely no idea; things are so much better,” and then we talk about situations.
You know, I think if I were writing The Growth and Development of Mothers again, the big thing that I missed in that book is how much you need social supports to handle individual and community stress. And, in our society, we’re so pull them up by the bootstrap that there is this kind of rugged individualism that inhabits everybody, not just West Coast, East Coast; everybody. And what happens is, it isn’t anything simple; it’s a different world view because we need more than paid leave when you have a child for both parents, which we do not have -- I mean, we have companies that do that, but we don’t have that as something that you can count on. We still have child--care as let’s make a deal.
There just, you know, depending upon the community – when my children were young, there was nothing in the community, there wasn’t anything. It was all individual. You had to get a babysitter and often that person – it was not good. I mean, you know, we know so much more now about what good childcare
includes, what are the advantages even of childcare especially when it is complemented by, you know, engaged parents. I mean, it broadens your world view. Anyway, theworld has changed a great deal, but we still do not have what I consider to be social supports for particularly the first three years of life, and the adults that are connected to those children, not just the children kind of thing.
Mahon: Support for the adults as well?
McBride: There was a study by Olds (SPELLING???) that has been replicated many different times and he was not a nurse, but he used RNs and they got money for vulnerable first-time mothers to have home visiting for – I can’t remember if it was two or three years – and the consequences, and they’ve now done the
longitudinal. It had consequences for high school graduation, it had
consequences for things that in no way would I ever think you would have those consequences kind of thing. Anyway, that sounds more like a sermon, but I just get very upset that we still have not confronted some of those issues. We still see them as the problem of the individuals. We have this fantasy that everybody lives near a family that could be supportive, and we don’t have those families anymore. You know, everybody is working. One of the dirtiest secrets of
American society is we make women going out to work sound as if we actualized women and we did it for that reason; and I’m telling you, the economy would have never been what it is. We only have the lifestyle and the economy we have right now because we have now gotten to two-wage earners in a family as normative.
Mahon: Yes.
McBride: That does sound like a sermon. (LAUGHING)
Mahon: Well, now I’m going to shift away from the women’s movement and it’s affect on you specifically and ask you a little bit about how you feel the women’s
movement -- because you mentioned this a little bit earlier -- how the women’s
movement may have had adverse effects on the nursing field in the 1960s. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that?
McBride: Yeah, you know, the first wave of the women’s movement, which was suffragettes, if you read the literature of the time, there is a lot of admiration, particularly for teachers, nurses and social workers. In fact, there was a literature that said you need to get – because, you know, you did have women social workers, nurses and teachers -- not nearly in the numbers that you do now, but you had them and there was the notion that somehow women’s values would make the American system better because it would feminize, it would soften; the values that the women have, their heart would now come into politics. I would say that nursing lived through that period where, you know, you had Ladies’
Home Journal articles about the nurse who delivers babies in Kentucky and, you know, real life people who were heroines and, and doing heroic things. The second wave of the women’s movement, which Friedan got going, was much more characterized by well, we got the vote, but there are all sorts of places where we are not now. And I am in no way critiquing that. I mean, that was true, there are places where women are not now. But it became completely a valuing of where women were not and in a funny way, evaluating men’s worlds in some sense. You know, we now have women engineers, we now have women physicians, we now have women lawyers. And it got to be – I cannot tell you how many times along the way I’ve been told that I’m so smart I could have been a doctor, and it’s like, “Can I punch you in the face now?” And, in fact, I always kid that I went through three periods – the first period that when somebody said you’re smart, you could have been a doctor, I sort of preened because I was the exception to the rule. You know, everybody likes to be the exception to the rule.
You know, “I thank you for the compliment.” Then I was into my more feminist militaristic period and it was like I would tell you off and I would go on and on and on and on. (LAUGHS) My third period, and I found this to be -- it took me many years to actually get to the point, was when people would really say that, I would just laugh and simply say, “Why would you say that?” Which puts the person on guard and it’s like you are ridiculous to have this world view. I mean, it’s sort of like such a crazy view. And it was, “I can give you the name of a hundred other colleagues, you can go talk to them. They’re much more interesting than I am;
let me give you their names,” kind of thing. But there was a period – well, we’re still in it – where people still think if the child is smart that then going into nursing is limiting options. I’ve been fighting that one for decades because, for one thing, people have no idea of what modern professional nursing is like. The range of possibilities and, in fact, I would argue because I know an awful lot of PhDs in many subjects where getting a good job is not going to be easy to come by where you could combine whatever interests you have – I mean, I know nurse philosophers, I know nurse lawyers – and have options that where the nursing sensibility then joins perhaps with another field to in fact lead to something very creative in your life. I mean, I know nurses who manage multimillion-dollar budgets kinds of things. Well, nursing and patient services is a big budget item in a hospital and there is a chief nurse executive. So, that person – now, I’m not saying everybody’s going to become a chief nurse executive. The nurse
practitioner role is terribly exciting in terms of the possibilities of what you can do, but, you know, I do feel – I was on the Indianapolis, well, the Central Indiana Community Foundation when Women’s Fund was formed. I’ve been on their Board and at one point, there was a booklet that they were going to distribute for
