Mrs. Maisel thinks nurses are just marvelous
In a March 2022 episode, Mrs. Maisel offered a short tribute to the unsung nurses caring for a family member. She praised the nurses for spending time with patients and comforting families, as well as doing work like changing bedpans. But she portrayed nurses as unskilled female angels, not as serious health professionals like the male physicians who, though self-important and uncaring, at least got to use pens.
March 11, 2022 – The fourth season finale of Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel includes some well-meaning but damaging commentary on nurses. The finale (episode 8) finds standup comic Mrs. Maisel dealing with the hospitalization of her ex-father-in-law. We don’t actually see any professional care, as the show is focused on the bantering and antics of the main characters. Nurses don’t appear, and the physicians are merely seen rushing importantly to and fro. But Mrs. Maisel does work the hospital experience into a bit about 1960 gender dynamics for her nightclub audience. She argues that society thinks men are in charge, but it’s women who are the strong ones actually holding things together. She describes the God-like male physicians swaggering around with their pens, signing charts, while the female nurses spend time with patients, emptying bedpans, drawing blood, and placing suppositories. “They don’t get to sign the chart, they don’t even get a pen! But they hold you while you cry.” This leads her to suggest that perhaps women are “more important than God.” Yes, nurses do provide valuable psychosocial support, while handling tasks that many of us would find difficult. But this view of the profession is a stereotype: that nurses are unskilled female angels who provide comfort and perform scut work, but who play no role in the life-saving and serious care reflected in the charting. Apparently, two out of three nursing tasks are poop-related. And nurses don’t even get pens—can they read? In fact, the tasks the show sees as grunt work can involve great skill, since nurses use them to evaluate patient conditions. And the message about charts will be bitterly ironic for today’s nurses, whose charting burden is often so heavy it threatens their ability to actually provide care. We do appreciate the suggestions that the traditional disparity in social esteem for nurses and physicians is wrong, and that psychosocial care may be even more important than physiological care. But this vision of nurses’ quiet service does not show that nurses have the authority and skill needed to advocate for their patients, much less that they are “in charge” of hospital care. The episode was written by show creator Amy Sherman-Palladino.
Are women more important than God?
Mrs. Maisel often uses material from her own life for her stand-up work. And this hospital situation is no exception. One night, she tells her audience all about it at her regular gig at a New York strip club, which she regularly packs with women eager to see her perform. Mrs. Maisel explains to the audience how the men in her family are scared about this health crisis, not handling things well, while the women are managing everything. This dynamic is not unusual, she says, but it is unrecognized.
We never think about it like that. We just assume we’re supporting the real leaders. You look around this hospital, you see the doctors. All men, swaggering in and out of the rooms, really fast. I’m important, I have a pen in my pocket! I look at a chart, hmm, good chart, I sign the chart. I am God, God can’t hang around, God has to be in the gall bladder wing in five! But spend a few days in the hospital and you start to notice…the nurses. The nurses never rush out of your room. They just clean out the bed pans, draw the blood, insert the suppositories. The don’t get to sign the chart, they don’t even get a pen! But they hold you while you cry. So what does this mean? Are women more important than God? What if we discover one day that we were always the ones in charge? Just, no one told us.
The scene challenges the traditional idea that physicians are more important than nurses, and it mocks physicians’ God-like image. The show even means to suggest that the role it ascribes to nurses means that they have actually been in charge, in some sense, in the hospital setting. Noting that nurses are the ones who spend more time with the patients, and that they are the ones to comfort families, points to the central role nurses actually play in psychosocial care—a role that only physician characters are generally seen performing on most current Hollywood shows, including Grey’s Anatomy, The Good Doctor, and New Amsterdam. The bedpan and suppository references are meant to show that nurses stoically handle unpleasant scut work that few would want to do, much as women generally may be seen in this way. The reference to drawing blood may convey to the audience at least a little involvement in more technical elements of care. And the episode did not suggest that the way to female empowerment lay in abandoning nursing for medicine, as we have seen on Outlander, Bob Hearts Abishola, ER, Private Practice, even one of the best nurse-centric shows–Mercy. That might have been a temptation here, given that the Maisel character herself is breaking barriers by entering the male-dominated world of stand-up, and that her ex-husband’s new girlfriend is actually studying valiantly to become a physician.
But there are serious problems. The most glaring is the absence of any indication that nurses are skilled, autonomous professionals. On the contrary, the nurses here don’t get to sign the chart; in fact, they don’t even get pens! This tribute reinforces the sense that nurses are low-skilled angels, faithfully comforting patients while the physicians handle matters that require education—the life-saving. We weren’t around in 1960, but we’re pretty confident that nurses then were literate, had access to pens, and even made some nursing notes. Actually, the nursing tasks the show lists themselves involve real skill. The “hold[ing]” of families that the episode mentions sounds like something any good person could do, but in fact it requires advanced interpersonal skills. Even the bedpan-changing calls for skill, because nurses evaluate the stool they see for a range of critical signs, such as intestinal bleeding; partial bowel obstruction; kidney, liver, gallbladder, or pancreatic disease; and viral, bacterial or parasitic infections. But consistent with the show’s vision, few viewers will associate those tasks with advanced knowledge or skills. Finally, the notion that nurses and women are actually “in charge” because of the vital tasks they perform sounds good. But you can do most of the important work without having much real power. Real nurses have struggled for decades to overcome the harm their relatively low level of power has caused to themselves and their patients, for whom nurses have been unable to advocate as effectively as they otherwise could have. The show mocks the “swaggering” physicians, but how would it go if one of the nurses questioned their care plans? So while the show’s association of nurses with female empowerment is a promising one, the execution here leaves a lot to be desired.
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