“SCREW THORNBURGH”: Visual and Vocal Protest and the Closing of Pennsylvania Schools of Nursing
Bio
Karol Kovalovich Weaver is a Professor of History at Susquehanna University (Selinsgrove, PA). She is the Book Review Editor for Pennsylvania History. Her research focuses on the history of medical caregiving and the history of women and work. She is the author of two books, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue (University of Illinois Press) and Medical Caregiving and Identity in Pennsylvania's Anthracite Region, 1880-2000 (Penn State University Press).
Abstract
Using newspaper reports and photographs, this article explores how gender, occupational identity, and regional history impacted the vocal, visual, and militant methods used by Ashland (PA) State Hospital School of Nursing students to protest the planned closure of their school. In response to Governor Dick Thornburgh’s proposal to close three state hospital schools of nursing, students, educators, and administrators gathered in March 1980 at the State Capitol in Harrisburg, PA. The young women defied acceptable gender norms, relied on nursing’s professional branding, and acknowledged the Anthracite Coal Region’s labor history to convince the Thornburgh administration to keep the schools open. This case study draws attention to the historic and current contributions of nurses to militant labor activism, reflects twenty-first-century health concerns faced by residents of Northeastern and Central Pennsylvania, and offers a reimagining and redefinition of Anthracite Coal Region history.
Key words: Nursing students; Pennsylvania; Anthracite Coal Region; Protest; Governor Dick Thornburgh
On March 19, 1980, twenty-three buses arrived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The people aboard had come to the State Capitol to protest the planned closures of three Schools of Nursing and proposed layoffs at state hospitals in the Anthracite Coal Region (ACR). Among the people who marched, shouted, and demonstrated were student nurses. Dressed in their crisp, white nursing uniforms, the young women demanded that the Thornburgh Administration rescind the closure plans. Some of the signs they carried, including one that read, “WE CARE/DO YOU,” reinforced the white, middle-class femininity expected of women who pursued nursing as a calling, while other signs reflected a working-class and regional militancy, such as one that read, “WHY CUT HEALTHCARE IN NE PA? WE PAY TAXES TOO,” which was attributed to women who hailed from coal country.¹ To convince the Thornburgh administration to keep the schools open, the student nurses launched a coordinated vocal, visual, and militant attack that incorporated various definitions of womanhood, nursing’s professional branding, and the Anthracite Coal Region’s history.
Perspectives about women’s unruly speech, whether verbal or performative, influence my investigation of this effort. Specifically, I ask how the words and actions of student nurses adhered to and resisted gender and professional expectations. Drawing on work that investigates labor activism and militancy by nurses from a historic and global perspective, this study also considers how the militancy displayed by the nursing students drew from and challenged acceptable gender and professional standards. Finally, I examine how the history of militancy and the history of speech in the Anthracite Coal Region impacted the protest at the State Capitol.² By analyzing published newspaper accounts and photographs, I seek to show that the young women navigated competing gender norms, relied on nursing’s professional branding, and acknowledged the Anthracite Coal Region’s labor history in their protests against political efforts to close their schools and to negatively impact their future. This case study draws attention to the historic and current contributions of nurses to militant labor activism, reflects twenty-first century health concerns faced by residents of northeastern and central Pennsylvania, and offers a reimagining and redefinition of Anthracite Coal Region history that centers the labor of women in the healthcare industry instead of focusing on how regional economic decline impacted industrial work done by men.
The Anthracite Coal Region
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the economy, culture, and social structure of the Anthracite Coal Region relied on anthracite coal mining, a male-dominated occupation. As a result of the gendered nature of mining, women generally worked as housewives, as mothers, and, by the twentieth century, as textile factory laborers. Their young adult daughters joined them in the clothing mills. Encouraged by their parents and hoping to improve their economic circumstances, some women went to college and became teachers while others graduated from nursing schools.³
Ashland State Hospital in Fountain Springs, Coaldale State Hospital in Coaldale, and Locust Mountain State Hospital in Hazleton had been founded at the turn of the nineteenth century as miners’ hospitals. This designation meant that staff took care of male laborers, including miners and men who worked for the railroad companies. Although many patients were native-born Americans, the hospitals also catered to immigrants since industrial work like mining drew foreign-born men. This polyglot and multiethnic region included descendants of British, Welsh, German, and Irish immigrants who had arrived in the nineteenth century as well as the so-called New Immigrants from Italy, Austria, Russia, and other regions in southern and eastern Europe who made their way to the area in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those admitted to the hospitals presented with major as well as minor injuries. Devastating wounds and life-threating burns caused by accidents and explosions were treated by skilled doctors and surgeons. Due to the working-class and immigrant patient population and the conditions that brought them to the hospitals, the facilities could also be described as industrial, ethnic, and specialty hospitals.⁴ In order to offer quality nursing care to patients, the hospitals opened Schools for Nurses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hundreds of local women (and men) received their nursing diplomas at the schools.⁵
By the second half of the twentieth century, the economy of the Anthracite Coal Region was in a state of decline. First, like other natural resources, coal was subject to depletion. Anthracite remained to be mined, but its deep, underground, and less accessible location was problematic. Secondly, as the oil industry developed, it competed with coal for a share of the home heating fuel market and emerged victorious.⁶ Thirdly, bituminous coal outpaced anthracite as the coal chosen for iron and steel production. During the post-World War II period, mining companies were sold and operations closed. Miners could do little to stop the economic crisis in the anthracite region. Thus, nearly an entire generation of miners was thrown out of work and faced the prospect of finding jobs in their forties and fifties without other marketable skills. When they did locate work, the wages were well below what they made as miners, and the jobs were usually outside of the area.⁷
Not only did the men of the region face an economic downturn in the second half of the twentieth century, women workers did, too. The closure of area textile mills and clothing factories in the 1970s affected the contributions that women made to the family economy. The shutdown of these facilities was a second major blow to coal region families who had already dealt with the loss of income due to the collapse of mining. In the second half of the twentieth century, when their husbands were either unemployed or underemployed, wives provided nearly the entire economic support of their families. Ironically, these factories, once known as “runaways” because the garment industry had run away from the high wages and unionization typical of New York City to the low wages and hard work tolerated by coal region women, went under as a result of the movement of jobs initially to the southern United States and then ultimately overseas. Finally, US trade policy, especially after World War II and due to the promotion of a free trade philosophy, increased American imports of foreign goods. Like coal mining and other American industries, garment manufacturing fell prey to deindustrialization.⁸ Instead of manufacturing jobs, Americans began to specialize in service occupations, including medical services. Successive waves of deindustrialization, first targeting coal mining, then textile manufacturing, and, by 1980, educational and healthcare industries, pounded coal region communities.⁹
In addition to these economic gut punches, the region witnessed two industrial and environmental tragedies—the Knox Mine Disaster and the Centralia Mine Fire. The visual shock of both events was astonishing and disturbing, symbolic of the dangers associated with mining. On January 22, 1959, the Susquehanna River broke into a Knox Coal Company mine in Port Griffith, flooding it and leading to the deaths of twelve miners. The disaster led to the loss of thousands of jobs. Then, only a few years later, a mine fire started by the burning of trash by local officials devastated the town of Centralia, located only a few miles from Ashland. Residents as well as visitors driving through the town endured smoke, buckled roads, and the stench of sulfur.¹⁰ The young women who studied at local schools of nursing thus grew up in a landscape scarred by disasters. They and their supporters used the memory and continuing trauma of these tragedies as they fought to save their schools.
On top of a devastated economy and environmental ruin, by the 1970s the entire country faced a national energy crisis. Only a few months before the nurses’ protest in Harrisburg, the model suburb of Levittown, Pennsylvania, was rocked by a protest over high gas prices and rationing on the weekend of June 23–24, 1979. Started by independent truckers blocking an intersection, the protest grew when residents—including working-class women who needed gas to drive to work, to the store, and back home—joined them. After police arrested a truck driver, the crowd erupted in anger, throwing bottles, destroying property, and lighting a car on fire. Police violently subdued and arrested the rioters, many of whom were young people, and established a curfew. Coal country residents, whose family members and friends had moved to the Philadelphia suburbs as the region’s economy declined, understood the pain and anger that the Levittowners felt.¹¹ At their own protest in 1980, the student nurses and their supporters made sure to declare that school closings and layoffs would exacerbate the gas woes that they, like the Levittowners and other Americans, already faced.
Growing up during a period of economic instability, surrounded by environmental devastation, and dealing with a national energy crisis, the students at local nursing schools then faced the loss of educational and employment opportunities. The proposed closure of the schools of nursing in 1980 was not a surprise for the administrators of the hospitals. As early as 1973, the Board of Trustees at Ashland State Hospital had received word from the Pennsylvania Department of Welfare that the nursing school, and other local schools of nursing, were set to be eliminated. A news report in early September said that the tuition paid by the students did not support the cost of running the schools and that, as a result, hospital patients were paying for the schools. To allay public fears about the closure, director of public relations for the Department of Public Welfare in the Northeastern Region of Pennsylvania, John Comey, shared that the Ashland School of Nursing “will not be closed in the immediate future,” and that “Department of Welfare Secretary Helene Wohlgemuth and Governor Milton Shapp must give approval to such a move, and to date such approval has not been given.”¹² Ashland Hospital board members responded quickly to the talk of closing the school. They said closing the school because of tuition concerns was ridiculous; if student nurses no longer staffed the hospital, then additional registered nurses would have to be hired and paid. They also worried about the impact on health care in the region. They argued that the school allowed young people to pursue a profession they might otherwise not have the chance to pursue. State Senator Fred Hobbs of nearby Pottsville agreed with hospital board members and sent a strongly worded letter to Shapp opposing the proposal to close Ashland’s School of Nursing.¹³ The title of a 1973 newspaper report, “Nurse school safe for while,” was correct.¹⁴ Just seven years later, the closure appeared imminent.
Women, Nurses, and Proud Coalcrackers
Just prior to the March 1980 protest at the State Capitol, student nurses, local leaders, and hospital administrators circulated petitions, held meetings, and encouraged community support.¹⁵ The Friday before the planned protest, over 400 residents gathered at a banquet hall to express their support for the schools of nursing and for staff whose jobs had been targeted for layoffs. State legislators, hospital administrators, and student nurses spoke out in opposition, noting the loss of jobs and low-cost educational opportunities.¹⁶
Community members headed to the State Capitol to protest. At the forefront of the protest were student nurses. As I have stated, these young women navigated multiple gender norms as they protested both vocally and visually. The white, middle-class femininity of nursing affected the ways in which they expressed their disapproval with Governor Thornburgh’s decision. Over the course of nursing’s history, the moral and physical duties expected of nurses matched feminine responsibilities associated with women—uplift, purity, modesty, and caretaking.¹⁷ In addition, the maternal ideal upheld by women in the Anthracite Coal Region shaped their protest strategies.
Similarly, their messaging was influenced by the demands of union women to secure both “bread and roses.” Earlier in the twentieth century, women workers had sought higher wages and improved living and working conditions, demands that came to be known as bread and roses. The slogan became associated with the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. During that strike, police violently attacked striking women—and their children, who were about to depart by train as their mothers were sending them away to safety. These laborers wanted to be recognized both as workers and women. Their example continued to inspire other Americans when, in 1976, Judy Collins released a song, “Bread and Roses,” which was based on a 1911 poem by James Oppenheim.¹⁸ Therefore, like their fellow nurses, in imitation of their mothers, and influenced by like-minded workers from other fields, the students demonstrated a conservative and domestic womanhood. One poster, “WE VOTED FOR A ROSE BUT ONLY GOT A THORN,” exemplified this traditional femininity, while simultaneously taking Governor Thornburgh to task for his wrong-headed decision.¹⁹
Figure 1. Pottsville Republican (Pottsville, Pennsylvania), March 18, 1980, p. 1. Used by permission of The Republican Herald.
Despite their seeming reinforcement of white, feminine values, their youth, unmarried status, and working-class background, the region they hailed from also impacted the student nurses’ visual and verbal speech in other ways. One particular sign, “SCREW THORNBURGH,” epitomized the rough femininity associated with coal region girls. The poster is emblazoned with the name, “THORNBURGH,” which is being penetrated with a large screw, and the message, “SAVE THE HOSPITALS!” The crowd of young women portrayed in this image is large and engulfs the lone man to the right. Several young women appear open-mouthed, likely yelling. The purpose of the chant, “We want Dick!” that echoed in the Capitol building that day was intended to emasculate Governor Thornburgh, who claimed to have been ill and unable to meet with the protestors. In the image, one sees that other women have their hands raised, some holding posters above their heads. The message “SCREW THORNBURGH” communicated the student nurses’ disdain for Thornburgh but also showed that they believed that he was not acting in good faith—instead he was screwing them.²⁰
Another element of the student nurses’ protest strategy was to rely on the professional identity and authority that nursing offered them. The young women came to the capitol dressed in their crisp, white nursing uniforms, white nurses’ caps, and white shoes. In the black and white photographs of the protest published by area newspapers, the women thus stand out from among the other protesters.²¹ The slogans that the nursing students chose to display on their posters and the contrasting black letters against the white background of those posters reinforced their identity as nurses. Using large, black letters, the posters declare, “SAVE OUR NURSING SCHOOL,” “SAVE OUR HOSPITALS,” and “NURSES CARE DO YOU?”.²² The white of the posters matched their uniforms—stressing moral purity, cleanliness, and good health. The words emblazoned on the posters highlighted the work that nurses do—they care, they work to save patients, they study, and they staff hospitals. In newspaper photographs, therefore, the crowd of student nurses and the mass of posters they carry fuse—their bodies and their message are unified. The young women on the upper left-hand portion of the Capitol steps exemplify this unity; moreover, they are well-positioned—they literally occupy the moral high ground in comparison to the governor, state representatives, and state senators.
Figure 2. Evening Herald (Pottsville, Pennsylvania), March 19, 1980, p. 1. Used by permission of The Republican Herald.
Nursing leaders joined the student nurses in their protest. Kathryn J. Grove, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Nurses Association (PNA), described the state government’s plan as “illegal, ill-conceived, ill-considered and unconstitutional.” Along with seven students, the PNA sought an injunction to stop the closures. Asserting that the rights of the student nurses had been violated, the PNA also sought assistance from the State Board of Nurse Examiners. Grove worried, too, that the closing of the schools would endanger the health of community members.²³
The students and their local political representatives and hospital school administrators also connected their protest with their regional identity. Specifically, the protestors recognized how nursing education impacted employment prospects in this geographic area together with the history of women’s participation in labor agitation in the coal region. They understood how the schools of nursing and local hospitals aided both patients and medical staff. An Ashland nursing student, Stacie Eichman, read one of the hundreds of letters attached to petitions signed by over 20,000 people. It said that the closures would endanger the lives and well-being of the residents of the local communities. She stated, “Many of the students and graduates would not have had the opportunity to pursue a career in nursing had it not been for the existence of these schools,” and she asked the governor to reconsider his decision.”²⁴ Eichman knew what nursing education meant to women and men in the Anthracite Coal Region—health care, employment, and opportunity. Despite her young age, she understood the limited educational prospects present in the area. As seen in figure 1, a message similar to that delivered by Eichman appeared on a poster that read, “LIVE AND LET LIVE/OUR STATE HOSPITALS AND STATE NURSING SCHOOLS ARE LIFE IN OUR COAL REGIONS.”²⁵ A coal region resident interviewed by communications scholar Melissa R. Meade came to a conclusion similar to the sentiment expressed by the protesting student nurse: “People were mined as well as coal and communities left empty like the mines after the resources dried up.”²⁶ If the medical institutions closed, faltering communities would lose residents due to illness and death, and they would lose skilled medical caregivers. Communities already struggling with decreasing and aging populations, resulting in shrinking tax bases, would perish.
Community Support and Solidarity
Like strikes and other forms of labor agitation, the capitol protest depended on community backing, whether people attended in person or expressed their support in newspapers or at regional political meetings. Solidarity was essential. Physician and Ashland hospital board member Joseph Shenciewicz invoked the fighting spirit of the legendary labor firebrand Mother Jones when he announced, “We are going to…fight like hell.” Mother Jones taught, “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living,” and she wanted people to “get it straight, I’m not a humanitarian, I’m a hell-raiser.”²⁷ She played prominent roles in northeastern Pennsylvania by supporting miners’ strikes, encouraging women to support the strikes through loud and boisterous demonstrations, and intervening in strikes by children and young adult textile workers.²⁸ The connection between the young female nursing students, most of whom were in their late teens and early twenties, and the young people that Mother Jones led was not lost on Shenciewicz. A Mount Carmel doctor, he grasped the historical role that children and young adults played in the region: as child laborers in the mines, teen girls in the textile mills, and young children trailing their mothers and fathers as they gleaned coal, gathered garden vegetables, foraged for wild produce in the surrounding woods, and hunted small game to feed their families.
In addition to attending the protest in person, community members offered their support in print. Local civic organizations published letters opposing the closures. The American Legion John Skiratko Post 909 of Mahanoy Plane spoke out in opposition to the governor’s decisions to close Ashland’s School of Nursing and to cut the number of workers there and at other area hospitals, further explaining the detrimental effects that it would have on the area: “To go through with such a plan would be nothing less than inhuman. This whole area is inhabited for the most part with elderly people, living on Social Security and meager pensions. Where could they go if they were deprived of these most necessary facilities? Where could those who would be laid off get work in this area?”²⁹ American Legion Post 608 of Centralia also disagreed with the proposed closure, addressing the feared lack of good health care and the loss of educational opportunities. Like other supporters, Post 608 members concluded that the plan would force local residents to travel further for medical care and for school, an expense that would exacerbate the energy crisis that the nation was facing. Finally, due to being located in a town that was enduring a mine fire that had been worsened by local and state governmental inertia, the Post pointed out: “It seems to us that when hospitals or any other institutions concerning the health and safety of the people of this area are concerned, the people of the Anthracite Region are the first to feel the axe.”³⁰
Religious societies also voiced their support for the schools of nursing and hospital staff. The Catholic Daughters of America, Court St. Celia in Girardville, included a request by member Maude Karwois to send a letter “objecting to the closing of the Ashland School of Nursing.” Members of the Court likely included women who graduated from the school or whose daughters and sons had recently attended.³¹ Local business people likewise expressed their displeasure with the plan. One week prior to the capitol protest, members of the Ashland Chamber of Commerce spoke out, saying that if the closure did occur, the government should take steps to ensure that the current group of students be allowed to finish their training. It also suggested that no additional students be allowed to enroll in the school.³²
Similarly, county commissioners, local borough officials, and state representatives came to the defense of the student nurses and other hospital employees. At the Capitol and in newspapers, local leaders communicated their displeasure with the Thornburgh administration and with what they believed were wrong-headed decisions. Schuylkill county commissioners wrote an official protest, arguing that the closing of the nursing schools would have a negative impact on local families who were trying to give their children, especially their daughters, better employment opportunities and better lives through the low-cost education that they received there. In addition, they feared the layoffs that the governor was proposing because it would affect an already struggling local economy and place additional people on welfare. Finally, they took issue with Pennsylvania Secretary of Public Welfare Helen O’Bannon’s claim that the nursing schools did not contribute to patient care.³³
The Ashland Borough Council joined, too, in voicing displeasure with Dick Thornburgh. Its letter of protest to the governor argued that it was ridiculous for the state to invest money in economic revitalization programs and then decide to reduce healthcare staff at local hospitals. Further, recognizing the outmigration of young people, the Council stated, “The State action to cut employment and also to close the Ashland School of Nursing will have a very detrimental effect and will add to the exodus from the area.” Moreover, like the capitol protestors, they worried about how residents would access health care. Citing the national energy crisis, they communicated to the governor: “Forcing people to drive relatively long distances for pediatric and obstetrical care in a day when energy is of prime importance is deplorable and only serves to work against the President’s Energy Policy.”³⁴ Images of sick children and laboring mothers driving to out-of-town hospitals underscored the cruelty and wrongheadedness of the closure and layoff plans. The borough officials’ protest thus connected local, state, and national concerns.
Such protests were not limited to local commissioners and council members, as other state leaders communicated their disapproval over the treatment that coal region residents experienced. State Senator Franklin Kury questioned Thornburgh’s unwillingness to meet with the protestors and wondered why the governor was “in Senator Hager’s office here in the Capitol” when he was reportedly ill. In his speech, Kury, a Democrat, portrayed Thornburgh as deceitful, uncaring, and condescending: “There was a tremendous outpouring of people from the lower anthracite region of Pennsylvania today. . . . I was appalled by what happened. . . . the Governor refused to make himself available to meet with the group. . . . That hospital is terribly important to the people of that area.”³⁵ Thornburgh’s absence and illness were clearly political strategy. In his autobiography, Thornburgh included a quote from David Osborne, author of Laboratories of Democracy, that read, “Thornburgh and his top staff. . . were known for their conservatism and their palace guard mentality.”³⁶ Thornburgh and his political allies closed ranks—like a “palace guard”—and refused to meet with the crowd.
Republican party members including Senate candidate Arlen Specter, Schuylkill County GOP Chairman Michael Kitsock, and Republican State Senatorial candidate James Rhoades also criticized fellow Republican Thornburgh for the proposed closures and staffing cuts. Like the student nurses and other protestors, they recognized the need for health care in the coal region. They further questioned why all the proposed cuts were in Schuylkill County. Kitsock wanted the governor to know that “our enraged citizens and their elected representatives simply will not stand for such a callous assault upon their dignity and collective well-being, and I agree with them wholeheartedly.” All three men called on the governor to “rescind” the plans.³⁷
In the media, Thornburgh became a target for local newspaper editors who questioned these decisions and his refusal to meet with coal region residents at the Capitol while spending money and time on a trip to China. An editorial printed in the Evening Herald (Pottsville, PA) noted, “The governor was able to spend two weeks traveling halfway around the globe—at taxpayer expense…in what he says was an effort to drum up trade. But the same governor on Tuesday couldn’t spare even a minute to greet hundreds of coal region citizens who—at their own expense—went to his doorstep to plead for their state hospitals and nursing schools.”³⁸ Local newspapers not only took aim at Thornburgh but also criticized state senators, state representatives, and local county officials for their off-the-record comments disparaging the coal region protestors at the same time that those political leaders were publicly supporting them.³⁹
The Protest Fails to Stop the Closures
Unfortunately, the coordinated effort by student nurses, nursing professionals, and local political representatives failed to stop the closure of the schools of nursing. In May 1980, the Ashland Hospital School of Nursing graduated its final class of nurses—seventeen women and four men. Other nursing schools in the area, specifically Hazleton Area, welcomed the remaining students who had yet to complete their three years of nursing education. Following a larger national trend, these school closures at both small and large hospitals in Pennsylvania reflected a shift to public and private university baccalaureate nursing programs.⁴⁰ At the same time that Governor Thornburgh worked to divest local hospitals and schools of nursing, he grew the state systems of higher education, the spaces where nursing degrees could be obtained.⁴¹ Thornburgh proudly touted his gubernatorial economic policy, which had, in his words, “cut 15,000 unnecessary positions” and led to technological and economic innovation in places like Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, the Lehigh Valley, and University Park. Tellingly, the Anthracite Coal Region did not figure into his description of his economic policy—he failed to even mention it.⁴²
Despite being unsuccessful, the attempt to save the nursing schools reflects nurses’ historic and current contributions to labor militancy, especially by means of vocal and visual protest, which speak to current healthcare issues now facing people in the region. It also brings forth a reconsideration of how Anthracite Coal Region history can and might be understood and communicated. First, gender impacted the nurses’ speech. Historian Jane Kamensky points out “the relationship between gender, language, and authority,” noting “female silence” upholds “social order.”⁴³ The student nurses took advantage of the economic, social, and political instability of the region to end their silence and voice their demands to very powerful men. The economic collapse of coal mining communities and the outmigration of residents contributed to their willingness to speak; coal region daughters behaved like “disorderly children” in relation to paternalistic, political fathers.⁴⁴ The words screamed, shouted, sung, and written by student nurses and their supporters remind us to heed Kamensky’s directive to “listen carefully to the dense counterpoint of voices that make up our communities of discourse.”⁴⁵
The nurses, who, as we've seen, proudly wore their white uniforms and caps, wanted political authorities to know that, as medical caregivers, they knew how to observe and deal with ill health—Thornburgh’s, that of their schools, and that of their ailing communities. Ironically, years later, Thornburgh used similar medical language to defend his economic policies: “But we constantly reminded ourselves that the state’s problems were deeply rooted and required harsh medicine.”⁴⁶ Kamensky writes, “Speech… becomes a cultural system whose meanings take their shape from a nexus of persons, places, and times.”⁴⁷ The protestors used the language of nursing and caregiving to make clear their demands and their viewpoints.
In addition to being medical caregivers and comparing their plight to fighting illness, the protestors had grown up in communities where language,—including what was said, how it was said, and what it meant—was integral to one’s identity. The way they spoke and the words they used served to define them as “coalcrackers,” a term that coal region residents embraced with pride even as it was simultaneously being used by outsiders to mock and denigrate them. For example, instead of using the term “pharmacist,” locals said “druggist.” They declared “already” for emphasis and as an exclamation.⁴⁸ Residents not only employed “coalspeak,” but they also used unique regional pronunciations and colloquialisms. Acme, a local food store, was pronounced, “Ack-a-Me,” and a battery was pronounced “battree.” Other words took on different meanings in the coal region compared to how they were defined elsewhere. “Couple” could denote two or more items, while elsewhere it meant two.⁴⁹ The inferior status ascribed by outsiders to men and women from the Anthracite Coal Region made reference to the accent of and words used by residents; demeaning comments were plentiful. Shamokin resident Eric McKeever shared, “So, when I left Shamokin in 1947, I went first to Danville [PA], where I worked for a year, and then to Philadelphia. My speech patterns caused immediate comment anywhere outside the coal region…and not in an admiring way. I devoted several years to…modifying my accents.”⁵⁰
Those who assembled at the Capitol understood that speech was a key element of coalcracker culture. They chose their words carefully and delivered them in a variety of ways—singing, chanting, haranguing, and pleading. They used their words to try to save their region. The statements, speeches, and letters by the protestors, the civic organizations, state representatives, and newspaper editors spoke about the region and its people with pride, emphasizing their unity amid economic and political difficulties, while simultaneously deriding Thornburgh and other politicians for ignoring the people and the region from which they came. The written and oral commentary displayed an us-versus-them, or a coalcracker-versus-outsider, mentality.
The labor militancy of the student nurses and their supporters is a significant example of how nurses have contributed to labor organizing, labor protest, and coalition building. Historically, nurses participated in strikes, protests, and labor organizing to seek redress of dangerous working conditions and low wages and to demand increased benefits. Like these coal region student nurses, nurses elsewhere framed their calls by referencing local concerns, the state of health care, and nursing’s professional standards and values.⁵¹
In addition to showing the value of visual and vocal protest, especially when connected to militant labor activism by nurses, the capitol protestors accurately predicted the area’s economic and social future. Recent scholarship about the region focuses on ruins---ruined landscapes, ruined economies, and ruined people.⁵² The capitol protestors recognized the ruined coal economy and foresaw future and ongoing wrecks—abandoned schools and shuttered hospitals that led to broken-down bodies riddled by stress, addiction, cancer, and heart disease. The story of the protest is a study in what anthropologist Paul Shackel has called “historical trauma in coal-mining communities.”⁵³ The student nurses and their supporters clearly understood and felt the elitism and sexism displayed by Governor Thornburgh, and they understood that the nursing careers they wanted to pursue could only be available to them through their local nursing schools.
Finally, the story of the student nurses and the protest in which they engaged suggests a reimagining of Anthracite Coal Region history. In his book, Telling of the Anthracite: A Pennsylvania Posthistory, literary scholar Philip Mosley challenges readers to reconsider the history of the Anthracite Coal Region by focusing on the second half of the twentieth century and the demise of the coal industry, what he calls the “posthistory” of the region. He encourages historians and other scholars to use various historical perspectives, including the history of medicine and health care and the history of women, in their research.⁵⁴ Whether identifying the area as the Anthracite Coal Region or connecting it to the Rust Belt, the terminology used to describe it typically privileges labor associated with men, not women. Men mined coal and worked in heavy industry, and although “belt” is a geographic term, it also conjures an article of clothing worn by men, especially working men. When words more commonly associated with women’s work, like “apron,” are used, they are not meant to celebrate women’s labor, but to highlight the need for specific types of employment based on gender. Appearing before a Senate committee in 1959, congressman Dan Flood, who represented northeastern Pennsylvania, declared, “My men are in the kitchen. Do not tell me that is where they belong…. they are wearing aprons, sir—aprons. Thousands and dozens of thousands of the best workers in the world are housekeepers.”⁵⁵ Many scholars, including Mosley, have recognized that women’s labor was integral to the Anthracite Coal Region’s economy in the second half of the twentieth century.⁵⁶ Women, not coal, sustained the area’s economy and populated its streets as adult men traveled elsewhere for work or stayed at home unemployed. The hulking presence of massive culm banks, deteriorating breakers, shuttered factories, vacant hospitals, and empty churches and its designation as the Anthracite Coal Region or as part of the Rust Belt conceal its economic and social history in the second half of the twentieth century and make invisible the contributions of women. The young women who boarded the buses on March 20, 1980, and traveled to Pennsylvania’s Capitol hoped that their posters, petitions, pleas, and presence might change Thornburgh’s mind and stop the closure of nursing schools in their region. They skillfully navigated competing gender norms, relied on nursing’s professional branding, and acknowledged the region’s labor history as they protested vocally, visually, and militantly. Community members supported them in person that day as well as in print, crafting letters and declarations of support. Despite their best efforts, though, they could not stop the state government from closing their schools. Scholars should look to the example of the student nurses, who knew that words, chosen with care, might save lives; therefore, scholars, too, should choose words and write histories that define a region by recognizing the roles women played in securing its economic, social, and cultural survival and impacting its future.
NOTES
¹ Molly Groody, “1,200 make trip to Capitol,” Evening Herald (Pottsville, Pennsylvania), March 19, 1980, 1.
² Linda Briskin, “The Militancy of Nurses and Union Renewal,” Transfer: The European Review of Labour and Research 17, no. 4 (2011): 485–499, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1024258911419761; Sally Gillen and Kat Keogh, “Furious Nurses Protest against Refusal to Grant Them a Pay Rise,” Nursing Standard 28, no. 30 (2014): 7; “Student Voices Heard in a Week of Protests,” Nursing Standard 30, no. 25 (2016): 7; “Protest,” Nursing Standard 31, no. 19 (2017): 7; Monika Binkowska-Bury, Malgorzata Marc, Malgorzata Nagorska, Pawel Januszewicz, and Jozef Ryzko, “The Opinions of Polish Nurses and Patients on Nursing Protests,” Collegium Antropologicum 37, no. 3 (2013): 691–699; Karina Ramacciotti and Adriana María Valobra, “Conflicts and Protests of Argentinean Nursing during the Covid-19 Pandemic,” História, Ciências, Saúde--Manguinhos 30 Suppl 1, no. Suppl 1 (2023): 117; Frances Cadd, “'The March of the Masked Nurses': Remaking Nursing's Tradition of Vocation through Public Protest in 1930s Britain,” Women’s History 2, no. 14 (2019): 48; Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 911, 72, 90, 153, 156-157, 159, 164–169, 185–186, 192, 194.
³ Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht, The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).
⁴ For a full discussion of medical care and caregiving in the Anthracite Coal Region in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Karol K. Weaver, Medical Caregiving and Identity in Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Coal Region (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011); Charles E. Rosenberg, The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America’s Hospital System (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 112–114; Centennial Committee, History of the Ashland State General Hospital, no page number; Amos Mylin, State Prisons, Hospitals, Soldiers’ Homes and Orphan Schools (Harrisburg, PA: Clarence M. Bush, State Printer of Pennsylvania, 1897), 132. For a secondary source description of the stress laid on surgery, see Susan Reverby, Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing, 1850–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 39.
⁵ Roberta Mayhew West, History of Nursing in Pennsylvania (Harrisburg: The Pennsylvania State Nurses’ Association, 1926), 233–237; “History of the Hospital,” https://www.coaldale-alumni.com/article_history_hospital.html. Accessed 10/8/2022; and “Popalis Family History: Locust Mountain Hospital,” http://popalis.50webs.com/locustmt.htm. Accessed 10/8/2022.
⁶ Harold Aurand, Coalcracker Culture: Work and Values in Pennsylvania Anthracite, 1835–1935 Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2003), 16.
⁷ Dublin and Licht, The Face of Decline, 51-52, 85–113, 159.
⁸ Kenneth C. Wolensky, Nicole H. Wolensky, and Robert P. Wolensky, Fighting for the Union Label: The Women’s Garment Industry and the ILGWU in Pennsylvania (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 194–201, and Dublin and Licht, The Face of Decline, 159.
⁹ Anne E. Parsons, From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 3–5, 125–145.
¹⁰ Dublin and Licht, The Face of Decline, 110–112 and Philip Mosley, Telling of the Anthracite: A Pennsylvania Posthistory (Mechanicsburg, PA: Oxford Southern, an imprint of Sunbury Press, Inc., 2023), xi, 16, 25.
¹¹ David M. Anderson, “Levittown is Burning! The 1979 Levittown, Pennsylvania, Gas Line Riot and the Decline of the Blue-Collar American Dream,” Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 2, no. 3 (2005), 47–50, 55–59 (47–66) and David Janzen, "Petrocultural Formations: Crisis Discourse, Energy Geographies, and Neo-liberalism," Canadian Review of American Studies 53, no. 3 (2023): 276–277 (276–294). muse.jhu.edu/article/915874.
¹² “Nurse school safe for while,” Evening Herald (Shenandoah, Pennsylvania), September 7,1973, 1.
¹³ “Hobbs protests school’s closing,” Pottsville Republican (Pottsville, Pennsylvania), September 7, 1973, 11.
¹⁴ “Nurse school safe for while,” 1.
¹⁵ Pat Purcell, “More cuts ordered: 2 state hospitals ‘hit’ second time,” Pottsville Republican (Pottsville, Pennsylvania), March 12 1980, 1.
¹⁶ “400 protest nursing school closing,” The Daily Item (Sunbury, Pennsylvania), March 15, 1980, 11.
¹⁷ Charissa J. Threat, “’The Hands That Might Save Them’: Gender, Race and the Politics of Nursing in the United States during the Second World War,” Gender and History 24, no. 2 (August 2021): 456–474, specifically 458, 467.
¹⁸ Andrea D’Atri, Bread and Roses: Gender and Class Under Capitalism, trans. Nathaniel Flakin (London, Pluto Press, 2021), 1-2. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1c7zfjr and Bruce Watson, Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream (New York: Viking, 2005), 1–4, 256–257.
¹⁹ Pat Purcell, “Hospital protest rocks state Capitol,” Pottsville Republican (Pottsville, Pennsylvania), March 19, 1980, 1.
²⁰ Pat Purcell, “Hospital protest rocks state Capitol,” 1.
²¹ Philip A. Kalisch and Beatrice J. Kalisch, American Nursing: A History (Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2004), 75–78.
²² Molly Groody, “1,200 make trip to Capitol,” 1.
²³ “Action called ‘unconstitutional,’” Pottsville Republican (Pottsville, Pennsylvania), March 19, 1980, 5.
²⁴ Pat Purcell, “Hospital protest rocks state Capitol,” 1.
²⁵ Pat Purcell, “Hospital protest rocks state Capitol,” 1.
²⁶ Quoted in Mosley, Telling of the Anthracite, 134.
²⁷ Quoted in Elliot Gorn, Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America (New York: Hill and Wang, A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 3.
²⁸ Gorn, Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America, 75–83, 88–89, and Bonnie Stepenoff, “Keeping It in the Family: Mother Jones and the Pennsylvania Silk Strike of 1900–1901,” Labor History 38, 4 (Fall 1997): 432–449.
²⁹ “Legion protests hospital closings,” Evening Herald (Pottsville, Pennsylvania), March 20, 1980, 7.
³⁰ “Letter too late,” Republican and Herald (Pottsville, Pennsylvania), March 8, 1980, 7.
³¹ “Girardville news,” Republican and Herald (Pottsville, Pennsylvania), March 8, 1980, 7.
³² “Ashland chamber voices opposition to closing,” Pottsville Republican (Pottsville, Pennsylvania), March 12, 1980, 6.
³³ Tom Sage, “County joins hospital protest,” Evening Herald (Pottsville, Pennsylvania), March 12, 1980, 19.
³⁴ Both quotes appeared in “Council sends Dick its letter of protest,” Evening Herald (Pottsville, Pennsylvania), March 19, 1980, 8.
³⁵ Both quotes appeared in “Public not welcome: Sen. Kury blasts no-show governor,” Evening Herald (Pottsville, Pennsylvania), March 20, 1980, 1. See also “Roadblocks thrown up to stop hospital cuts,” Evening Herald (Pottsville, Pennsylvania), March 21, 1980, 1.
³⁶ Dick Thornburgh, “Reshaping Pennsylvania’s Economy,” in Where the Evidence Leads: An Autobiography, Revised and Updated Edition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 128 (125–146). https://doi-org.libgateway.susqu.edu/10.2307/j.ctt5hjsqd.13
³⁷ Both quotes appeared in “Specter, Kitsock, Rhoades join cause,” Evening Herald (Pottsville, Pennsylvania), March 20, 1980, 3.
³⁸ “Man of the people,” Evening Herald (Pottsville, Pennsylvania), March 20, 1980, 4.
³⁹ Molly Dalton, “Lesson in Harrisburg,” Evening Herald (Pottsville, Pennsylvania), March 21, 1980, 4.
⁴⁰ Pat Purcell, “Ashland hospital vows to fight Thornburgh,” Pottsville Republican (Pottsville, Pennsylvania), March 27, 1980, 1; Pat Purcell, “At Ashland, it’s hail…and farewell,” Pottsville Republican (Pottsville, Pennsylvania), May 31, 1980, 1; Pat Purcell, “Ashland School of Nursing bid farewell,” Pottsville Republican (Pottsville, Pennsylvania), December 31, 1980, 38.
⁴¹ Dick Thornburgh, “A Governor’s Agenda,” in Where the Evidence Leads: An Autobiography, Revised and Updated Edition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 156 (147–174) https://doi-org.libgateway.susqu.edu/10.2307/j.ctt5hjsqd.15.
⁴² Thornburgh, “Reshaping Pennsylvania’s Economy,” quote on 129, see 134–137.
⁴³ Kamensky, Governing the Tongue, quotes on 90 and 72.
⁴⁴ Kamensky, Governing the Tongue, 185.
⁴⁵ Kamensky, Governing the Tongue, 194.
⁴⁶ Thornburgh, “Reshaping Pennsylvania’s Economy,” 127.
⁴⁷ Kamensky, Governing the Tongue, 9-10.
⁴⁸ Tom Klopper, The Anthracite Idiom, or Sundays We Are Closed Go Around The Back, Revised Edition (Scranton: 1st Due Graphics, 2012), 1, 20.
⁴⁹ CoalSpeak: The Official Coal Region Dictionary, https://www.coalregion.com/speak/speaka.php Accessed 1/26/2024.
⁵⁰ Quoted in Aurand, Coalcracker Culture, 124–125; also see 127.
⁵¹ Briskin, “The Militancy of Nurses and Union Renewal,” 485–499, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1024258911419761; Gillen and Keogh, “Furious Nurses Protest against Refusal to Grant Them a Pay Rise,” 7; “Student Voices Heard in a Week of Protests,” 7; “Protest,” 7; Binkowska-Bury, Marc, Nagorska, Januszewicz, and Ryzko, “The Opinions of Polish Nurses and Patients on Nursing Protests,” 691–699; Cadd, “'The March of the Masked Nurses': Remaking Nursing's Tradition of Vocation through Public Protest in 1930s Britain,” 4–8.
⁵² Mosley, Telling of the Anthracite, 15–16, 25–56, 61–68, 220. Paul A. Shackel, The Ruined Anthracite: Historical Trauma in Coal Mining Communities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2023), 8, 133–148.
⁵³ The quote is the subtitle of Shackel’s book. Shackel, The Ruined Anthracite, 26–29.
⁵⁴ Mosley, Telling of the Anthracite, 220.
⁵⁵ Quoted in Dublin and Licht, The Face of Decline, 149.
⁵⁶ Mosley, Telling of the Anthracite, 16, 220; Shackel, The Ruined Anthracite, 8, 69–83; Wolensky, Wolensky, and Wolensky, Fighting for the Union Label; and Robert P. Wolensky, Sewn in Coal Country: An Oral History of the Ladies’ Garment Industry in Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1945–1995 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020).