Author Description

In her first memoir, The Door of Last Resort: Memoirs of a Nurse Practitioner (Rutgers University Press, 2013) Frances Ward lent her voice to issues in primary health care delivery to poor, urban populations from the perspective of her work as a nurse practitioner. In A Working Woman, her new memoir, she tells the story of her life, from her childhood in Kearny, New Jersey, to her retirement in Palm Harbor, Florida.<br/><br/>Advised by her Catholic school counselor that college was a ridiculous path to nursing, she charts her own future. She experienced the 1967 Newark riots as a high school senior, attended college at Rutgers as the city struggled to recover, married, earned a PhD, raised a family, and became a nationally known nurse leader. She also reflects on her health missions to Rwanda after the 1994 genocide and to impoverished areas in India in 2018.<br/><br/>Describing her increasingly complex life as a working woman, Ward provides a vivid picture of the control and power tactics used by leaders of health care organizations, major foundations, and institutions of higher education who too often latch onto a single belief: Women are less than men.<br/><br/>Granted the right to vote in 1920, but still not constitutionally awarded equal rights, women create change through energy-expending strategies aimed to build communities. Yet the cost is great. The toll on goal-oriented women is exhausting.<br/><br/>Professionally, Ward vividly recalls her experiences with colleagues at a variety of universities. She recalls microaggressions (“she barks like a dog”) and macroaggressions (“our general education committee knows best what courses are needed in the nursing curriculum”) that dominate the behaviors of leaders in hierarchically organized American universities.<br/><br/>Privately, Ward describes the increasingly complex life with home responsibilities, labor quietly hidden by our culture. Equally present is barely hidden disdain of other women, constant social ce