- Joined
- Oct 19, 2019
I don't have a hard time believing it. The prospects people had back then were grim. In a company town like that 90% of the men work in the mine, married women don't work at all (some did, but it was considered shameful and they faced pretty serious social backlash and/or domestic violence for it), and most single women worked in the hospital as nurses until they got married, because that was the only place employing women in any numbers. There wasn't any of the training we have now, it was just a week long course, a written test and then straight into on-the-job experience, and almost everyone absolutely hated it for reasons @MasterBaiter went over. The vast majority of nurses didn't want to be nurses, and for the obvious old-timey cultural and social reasons, most women were pretty eager to get married as soon as possible.Yeah I have a hard time believing women are fighting to date a male nurse when there are doctors around, doctor who usually end up dating a woman from work because they don't have any time to date much. Maybe if he was super duper ridiculously hot and also really kind and good at his job, but how many men like that are there in a field where men are already uncommon?
Most of them married miners, and there were constant strikes and violent labour conflicts at the time. Families of miners could go months without income. Marrying anyone who wasn't a miner or a drover was seen as a massive success. Even marrying the guy who drove around on the horse and buggy emptying out everyones shitters (yes, that's still how they did it there) was considered a better deal than getting stuck with a miner, and the vast majority of women back then got stuck with miners.
I'm realising now as I add this background that it's a lot more specific of a situation than I first thought, and how different things would be in a city hospital where prospects were better and you had some level of choice over what kind of jobs you wanted to do, but I don't doubt for a second that women back then would fight over some dipshit mid male nurse.