The Struggle for Wage Equity

Prior to the 1960s, women working outside the home confronted a longstanding and substantial wage gap both in respect to the wages paid male workers in the same industry and to wages for so-called women’s jobs, including nursing and care-giving. Fueled in part by the advances initiated by the burgeoning civil rights movement, women saw the sixties as an era in which barriers to employment equity and educational achievement would be challenged aggressively.

As Baida’s “A Nurse’s Story” reveals, this new political awareness was unprecedented in its influence. In taking the initial steps towards unionizing the nurses in the Booth-Tiessler Community Hospital, Mary McDonald and Clarice Hunter initiated a challenge that cut across age barriers (Clarice was ten years Mary’s senior), issues of faith (a Catholic, Mary pickets a hospital run by the Church...