nursing wasn’t always clear. “It just took me a long time,” she laughs, explaining the journey that brought her—hotpink bangs, conch-shell tattoo, and all—to New Haven. After college, Lipkin decided to become a doula, a nonmedical caregiver similar to a midwife without medical training. Lipkin also spent time working with survivors of domestic abuse and recently released prisoners, before arriving at Yale in the fall of 2011 to begin a three-year master’s of science in nursing. That February, she attended Yale’s leftist lawyering conference, “Rebellious Lawyering,” (or, affectionately, “RebLaw”), held annually at the law school. The conference brings lawyers together to discuss how they can use their expertise to work on behalf of people who face discrimination. She started thinking about ways to bring RebLaw’s approach to law into the field of nursing. The questions brought up at RebLaw about economic inequality, structural violence, and oppression seemed similarly applicable to nursing, but no one in the medical field was talking about them. Throughout the conference, and over the following weeks, I talk to other nurses and students. They’ve worked in hospitals, clinics, schools, camps, hospices, classrooms, Planned Parenthoods, and outreach programs; they come from Baltimore, Philadelphia, Tennessee, Brooklyn, Seattle, Virginia, and New Haven. The stories accumulate, and a common thread runs through them all: nurses witness horrendous treatment but lack the resources to change the system. A patient shows up in the ER complaining of pain, but colleagues deny pain medication because he’s probably a junkie looking to take a “rest” and get high. Another patient can’t speak English, but the staff doesn’t bother to call a translator. A fourteenyear-old girl gives birth as her mother screams at her and calls her a slut; a nursing student looks on and wonders what she can ethically do. Another teenager has a stillbirth; she’s black and living in the South and the hospital administers a drug test, even though there’s no legal requirement to do so; because there are traces of crack in her system, she’s charged with murder. A secretary shreds disability forms, hoping to encourage self-advocacy in a patient. An older woman isn’t given pain medication, because pain is just part of being old. Neither are some Hispanic or African-American patients,
december 2013
because “those women” are “too proud.” A patient of color is referred to as a “thug.” Rude and judgmental comments are made about a larger patient’s weight. An obstetrician has a busy day—so she encourages a patient to have a Csection. Too often marginalized or underestimated, nurses themselves become targets. A nurse is a little too assertive—so co-workers whisper that she’s a lesbian. Nurses are sexually harassed by doctors or patients. A doctor dismisses a nurse’s suggestions about best how to treat a patient. “Doctors make all the decisions,” complains Tino, a cardiac nurse from Tennessee, “but they’ll be in the room for a minute, while I’m in the room for twelve hours a day. I see different things.” If doctors treat cases and nurses treat people, and if nurses are powerless and doctors in control, ultimately, both the patient and the nurse suffer. Peggy Chinn, the conference’s keynote speaker and professor at the University of Connecticut’s nursing school, was a key figure behind the 1980s radical nursing movement known as Cassandra, which promoted feminism in the health care profession. She quickly became something of a patron saint to Lipkin, who was beginning to envision a twenty-firstcentury reimagining of radical nursing. Armed with Cassandra’s archives of mimeographed newsletters, Lipkin realized that Chinn and others in the movement had begun a conversation that she wanted to continue. Lipkin reached out on Facebook and Tumblr in early 2012, searching for other “rebellious” nurses. “As a student, I have felt isolated in my attempts to find forums for progressive conversation around the practice of Nursing,” she wrote. It turned out that Lipkin wasn’t alone. By that fall, she and her cohort of online supporters had made a lot of progress. “It’s kind of a miracle,” she reflects. “I don’t think this could have happened ten years ago.” By the following September, the group was ready to go: hundreds of nurses, students, and allies gathered in Penn’s Claire Fagin Hall for the first Rebellious Nursing! Conference. The conference’s goals were bold and broad: the manifesto on the very first page of the pink booklet declared that they were “envisioning justice and liberation for health seekers, health workers and communities,” and uniting “to find
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