History and My Carrier
My specialization is respiratory care with a respiratory care management concentration. It means that I will work in a hospital and the essence of my job won’t be much different from those it could be in the 1930s-1950s (except some technical details as the medical science improved significantly since that time), but my working environment, colleagues and patients could look different. The second quarter of the 20th century was a time of first successes of women's suffrage movement, the Great Depression, World War II, and racial segregation between whites and blacks. People didn’t have equal opportunity to get a job, education or medical care. If I had lived in the 1930-1950s I would have been surrounded mostly by blacks, or mostly by whites, but not by both; I would have met women in a hospital, but almost all of them would have been nurses; and surely I would have worked harder, longer and for less money than I can do today. This paper describes these issues in more detail.Nowadays women can build successful carrier in various professional fields.
Educational and healthcare services are traditionally popular with women: women are engaged in them three times more often than men (Dol.gov, 2015). Today about 57% of women in the U.S. work, earning (per week) in average only $150 less than men (Dol.gov, 2015). It’s also remarkable that for now more women than men get a degree (SSD, 2015). In the 1930-1950s situation was different: it was a very low probability to meet a female doctor. In the 1940s about 1.5 times less white women and five times less black women graduated from a college than white men (Snyder, 1993, 8). Since that time an image of a “white woman nurse” has firmly rooted in a social consciousness (Anderson, 2014). In the 1930s 24% of women worked (more than two times less than today), and three quarters of them worked as schoolteachers and nurses (comparing with 36% today (Dol.gov, 2015)), nevertheless, the society didn’t encourage married women to work (Ic.galegroup.com, 2001). They had to overcome difficulties at work, at home and probably not to dream about career advancement.Black people are the other category of population that had fewer opportunities to work in the healthcare service. Jim Crow laws existed until 1965. In the 1930-1950s racial segregation involved hospitals and schools. The educational goal of “black schools” was to create a “accommodating … and conforming individuals” (Yull, 2012, 2), not a competitive specialists. Despite this in the 1930-1940s the strong black hospital movement took place: black physicians needed black hospitals (Gamble, 1987). Therefore, one could find a job, but worked harder, longer and for smaller wages than whites in “white hospitals” (Sustar, 2012).
Finally, working conditions were harder than today, even if you were white man – a “privileged” individual. Economic crisis led to high unemployment and small salaries, war and low level of life increased amount of patients and therefore the workload …
