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Although the
Depression brought hardships to most Clevelanders, living arrangements for nursing
students actually improved. Prior to 1930 nursing students endured substandard
housing. According to an author in the Cleveland Club Woman, the
nursing student retired after her long day of service to "any old shack or firetrap
on the hospitals grounds ... At nightfall she was so tired she tolerated it; wherever she
could drop down and get some sleep was good enough."13 Now that
nursing aspired to become a real profession on equal ground with medicine, nurses needed
accommodations that supported learning. Dean Louise M. Powell wrote in 1925, "I
feel sure that if we wish to attract and hold the best type of young women in our School,
we must greatly improve the conditions under which our students live."14
Powell enlisted Frances Payne Bolton's support in raising funds for a new dormitory
complex. Completed in 1931, it was named for Cleveland philanthropists and pioneers in
nursing: Flora Stone Mather, Isabel Hampton Robb, Isabel Wetmore Lowman, and Kate
Hanna Harvey. Consisting of four buildings, housing 400 students in single
rooms, it became the largest residential complex in Cleveland after the Hotel Statler and
the Hotel Cleveland. Several years later, the School honored its most important
benefactor by renaming the school The Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing.
Reflecting later in life on the name of the school, Bolton wrote that she was initially
reluctant to have her name associated with the institution: "There were so many
who had given long, long years of ‘blood, sweat and tears’; building it bit by
bit until it had the capacity to become a University School. Mrs. Lowman-Mrs. Harvey-Mrs.
Alfred Brewster, etc. wove the warp and the woof down the years."15 In 1932, Marion G. Howell took over as dean. A Vassar Training Camp student during the war and a Lakeside graduate of the class of 1920, she was a rising star in the public health nursing field in the 1920s. Many attempted to lure Howell away from the city and the school that she loved, but Howell believed in the potential for Cleveland as a public health nursing center-a potential that she herself helped the city and school to attain. In the 1930s, Annie Goodrich commented that after Cleveland there is "no city in the United States whose citizens have so diligently sought for knowledge of its health and welfare needs and have so insistently striven to develop a program through which these needs might be met." 13 Cleveland Club Woman, 8
Oct. 1930, CWRU Archives, Rg. 29, series 29H, box 1. |
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