Stereotypes In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

For decades the nursing industry has been stereotyped as a woman’s place. In 1975, the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest displayed this in full force. In the movie, Randle McMurphy is sent from prison to a mental institution for evaluation. McMurphy has repeated problems with Nurse Ratched, the Head Nurse. This movie is a prime example of the stereotypical view of the nursing industry at that time because all the nurses are women and the orderlies are men.

If you look at the history of nursing, you will find that until the 20th-century men filled the nursing shoes. The earliest record of a nursing school was around 250 B.C. which was a male only school. It was quite common for men to volunteer as nurses during wartime even the poet Walt Whitman did during the American Civil War.

Women's role in nursing continued to grow into the early 1900’s. In 1901, both the Amercian Nurses Association (ANA) and the Army Nurse Corps excluded men as nurses. But, by the middle of the 20th-century things began to change. In 1955, U.S government legislation allowed men to enter the Army as nurses again. By 1971, the American Assembly for Men in Nursing (AAMN) was founded. Then in 1982, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a man denied entry to the Mississippi University for Women’s School of Nursing.

With all of these changes over the decades, the number of men in the nursing field is gradually climbing. According to U.S. Census records, in 1970 only 2.7% of registered nurses were men, but in 2011 those numbers rose to 9.6%. Today, nurse anesthetists are the highest paid in the nursing field and men fill 40% of those positions. Yet with over three million nurses in the field, only 10% are men. There are still more women than men in the nursing field, but that is changing, and those men are making more money than the average