Pants!
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One hundred years ago this month, American women got the right to vote.
Fifty years ago, Nashville nurses got pants.
On Aug. 14, 1970, nurses at Nashville Memorial Hospital in Madison ditched their signature white dresses and wore pants while on duty for the first time.
Memorial was following the lead of Vanderbilt Hospital, which had begun allowing its nurses to wear pants just two weeks before. The trend had started six months earlier at a Chicago hospital and had been spreading across the nation.
At Vanderbilt, rules stipulated that "the outfits must be white, tailored and the tunic top must reach to near mid-thigh," according to a front-page story in the Aug. 15, 1970, edition of The Tennessean. (Also on the front page were articles about Mideast peace and a TVA price increase, as well as a photo of President Richard Nixon arriving in New Orleans to discuss school desegregation.)
Douglas Clifton of Hendersonville, a patient in the coronary unit of Memorial Hospital, smiles his approval of the new pantsuits worn by nurses at the hospital Aug. 14, 1970. They are Miss Jane Reynolds, left, Mrs. Margaret McCoy and Miss Jenny Byassee.
Nurses had complained that the uniform dresses were "too revealing at times" and "very embarrassing."
"We believe the pantsuits are more functional," Roy Moncrieve, assistant director of nursing at Vanderbilt, told The Tennessean. "The nurses do a lot of bending, stretching, lifting and holding, and in pants they don't have to worry about where their uniform is."
The pantsuits were a hit with patients — mostly.
"We had only two people who didn't like them. They said pants aren't professional," said Norma Shepard, nurse supervisor of the coronary unit at Memorial.
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