By JOAN FONTAINE
WEBMASTER�S NOTE: This article appeared in MOVIES MAGAZINE circa 1943.
EDITOR�S NOTE: Joan Fontaine does not want to be singled out from other girls who have taken nurse�s aide training. She wouldn�t speak at the graduation exercises, saying she didn�t want any recognition not accorded to all. But because the American Red Cross felt that her words would interest many other women she recently consented to broadcast from Washington on a program with Mrs. Roosevelt. MOVIES asked Miss Fontaine for permission to give you the high points of that talk � and we present them here.
I am a nurse�s aide. This uniform I wear, with a blue stripe on the shoulder, signifies I have completed my eighty-hour course of training and am now qualified to assist graduate nurses in hospitals. The uniform is not an exclusive model. It is the only costume I possess which would cause pride and not embarrassment if another woman came in wearing a duplicate! . . .
Our job may not be spectacular or particularly exciting, but it is of vital need to our country and to the families of our soldiers overseas. Three thousand graduate nurses are being taken into the army every month, many for foreign duty. This, naturally, is depleting the hospital staffs all over the country at an astonishing rate. Many hospitals cannot give proper care to patients who badly need it, care that makes convalescence faster and easier. So in order to alleviate this pressing and vital need the Red Cross again is asking for volunteers (100,000 of them) to take the load of routine duties off the skillful hands of graduate nurses.
And that is one of the points most stressed in our classroom � that we therefore need take no responsibility for a patient�s life. Our tasks are to make him comfortable, bathe him, change his linens, etc., while we leave medicine, hypodermics and such to more competent hands. This work has been responsible for many of my happiest moments in nursing � to watch the light of gratitude spread over a patient�s face as we come in to ease and brighten his day! I cannot think of any war work more worthy for a woman with a few leisure hours to give to her country.
To me it is truly a religion, a religion of service�of a vital job worth doing�and doing efficiently, professionally and impersonally. By �impersonally� I mean we, in our blue denim uniforms and starched caps of the aide on duty, become one with a body of women sworn to uphold the banner of the Red Cross, to discuss our patients neither with them nor among ourselves, to accept discipline where it is needed � for wherever human life is at stake, discipline is absolutely necessary.
I have recently completed my training, and in all truthfulness I cannot say it was easy�After three weeks of classroom instruction, our group was assigned to the General County Hospital for Los Angeles. Here we had as many as four patients a day, witnessed a major operation, and a childbirth as part of our training . . .
One of our aides is on a swing shift at a western aircraft factory. One is a middle-aged woman with five grown children�Another is the wife of a soldier who is now, she believes, in the Solomons. Many are housewives with plenty to do at home but with the desire to �go to war� along with their men.
It is not unlikely that the war might involve us in twenty-four-hour duty right in our own country (for nurse�s aides are not liable to foreign duty)�but being a nurse�s aide is not a full time job. One hundred and fifty hours of service a year is �all that is required of us to maintain our membership. I expect to make my usual quota of pictures each year for the duration, and still give as many hours over the minimum that I can. Many women give one day or two a week to the hospitals with little inconvenience to their usual way of living. They can still sew, knit, make bandages, or whatever their present war activity is, and give a day a week after the initial five-week training class . . .
Naturally as the need for aides is great, the hope is that an aide will give as much time as she is able to spare�After all, the nurses on Bataan knew no rest in any twenty-four hours � among the nurses in England on twelve-hour duty there are many who walk four miles through the night and four miles home again when their long day is done. A five-or-four-hour shift once or twice a week is not so exhausting in the light of such a comparison!
Many people ask me why I joined the nurse�s aides, knowing that a happy marriage, a home and a career should keep any woman fairly busy, but I am an Englishwoman, and though I have lived most of my life in America and have never been in England, I feel that I owe an added debt to my foster-mother. Your wonderful public schools, public health services, service centers, the elasticity of your government has made a life for us all that is good. The American way is a good way. Through the nurse�s aide work I am able to show my gratitude for being allowed a place in the sun in blessed America.
