A century ago, as nursing graduates proudly posed in their white dresses and perfectly starched caps, there was a uniformity to the image. With little exception, everyone was white. In 1931, 99.8 per cent of Canadian graduate nurses identified as having British, French or European ancestry, Kathryn McPherson notes in Bedside Matters: The Transformation of Canadian Nursing, 1900-1990. The history professor at York University writes that the historical lack of diversity in the profession can be traced to immigration restrictions as well as racial discrimination from nursing schools — unwritten “colour bars” that came to light only when challenged. (In the 1931 census, Canadians with British, European and French ancestry accounted for 98.2 per cent of the population.)Administrators would say that patients won’t be comfortable being treated by a Black nurse, or Indigenous nurses wouldn’t be able to manage the science, says McPherson, listing examples she has come across in her research. “There are all these racist things, and underlying it to some degree is a concern around the reputation of the profession being undercut,” she says. Since the days of Florence Nightingale, nursing was intertwined with notions of feminine respectability, and “there all these swirls of character and reputation always bubbling up,” she says.While Chinese and Japanese Canadians were admitted in small numbers to Canadian nursing schools in the 1930s, the “formal exclusion” of Black and Indigenous nurses ended during and after the Second World War, she notes. Women’s College Hospital archivist Heather Gardiner has never seen any admission policies about race in the collection, but if there were any, they were likely unwritten: “You were encouraged to apply in person with your mother,” she says.This Monday, the Women’s College Hospital school of nursing is having its final alumnae dinner. The first nur ...
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