Nurse Lavinia’s Mistake, Redheaded Nurse, The Disobedient Nurse and Nurse Cooper’s Dilemma.
Those racy titles are just a sample of what awaits the curious on the fourth floor of the Golda Meir Library at UW-Milwaukee. There, a climate-controlled room houses a unique collection of more than 425 nurse romance novels – all donated to the library’s Special Collections in 2005 by Leslie Bellavance, an artist, photographer and former UWM professor of art.
While researching images for a photography project in which she inserted herself in traditional nursing “habit” – bonnet, starched white dress – amid modern nurses in scrubs, Bellavance haunted garage sales, looking for old paperbacks with suitable covers. When she left Milwaukee to become the director of the School of Art and Art History at Virginia’s James Madison University, she put them in the tender care of Max Yela, the library’s curator of Special Collections.
Yela overcame his skepticism and gradually realized he had a zeitgeist gold mine: how nurses were viewed in popular culture (usually negatively) from the 1950s to the 1970s – a petri dish swarming with romance, proto women’s lib, men’s libidos and, of course, sex.
“There is a basic format,” Yela says. “A nurse is new to the profession, or she’s changed jobs. She loves being a nurse, but clearly something is missing. She finds love, and not just one – two men. She always chooses between them. And the winner embraces her, I would say envelops her.”
UWM has one of the only publicly funded, fully staffed Special Collections in the region. Though open to faculty, students and the public, Yela says that so far, only one person has looked at the nurse romance novels, a student doing research for a popular culture class.
“I really hope people will use the materials here,” Yela says. “We have 50,000 items in the arts, humanities and social sciences.” And some are pretty steamy.
