Twenty-year-old Margaret Evans stood in the nursing dormitory bathroom on September 15, 1919, binding her seven-month pregnant belly with bandages, desperately trying to hide the pregnancy that would end her nursing career if discovered, terror on her face as she pulled the bandages tighter knowing she was harming herself and the baby but having no choice because pregnant nursing students were immediately expelled regardless of circumstances and Margaret had wo
rked too hard to get into nursing school to lose everything now, even though the pregnancy resulted from being assaulted by a doctor at the hospital where she trained and even though she had reported it and been told to keep quiet or face expulsion for making accusations against a respected physician.
Margaret had been training as a nurse for eighteen months when Dr. James Harrison assaulted her in the supply closet during night shift. She had reported the assault to the nursing director, who had told Margar
et that accusing doctors of impropriety would destroy Margaret’s reputation and career, that no one would believe a student nurse over a senior physician, that the best thing Margaret could do was forget it happened and focus on completing her training. Three months later when Margaret realized she was pregnant, she had gone back to the nursing director begging for help, and had been told that pregnancy—regardless of how it occurred—was grounds for immediate expulsion and that Margaret should quietly withdraw and handle the situation elsewhere.
But Margaret couldn’t quietly withdraw—nursing school represented her only path out of poverty, her only chance at a respectable career that could support her. So Margaret had made the dangerous decision to hide her pregnancy and continue her training, binding her growing belly, wearing looser uniforms, working through morning sickness and exhaustion, praying she could somehow graduate before the pregnancy became impossible to conceal. The photograph showed Margaret mid-binding, the bandages wrapped so tightly around her abdomen that she could barely breathe, her face showing fear and desperation, her nursing manual on the sink reminding her of how much she stood to lose.
The binding caused complications—restricted blood flow, inadequate oxygen to the baby, constant pain that Margaret had to hide while caring for patients. Margaret went into premature labor at eight months during her hospital shift, her water breaking while she was changing bed linens. She had tried to hide it, to finish her shift and then deal with labor privately, but the pain became too severe and she collapsed in a patient room. When other nurses discovered her,
discovered she was pregnant, the scandal was immediate and total.
Margaret was expelled from nursing school that day despite being in active labor. She was taken to the charity ward where student nurses weren’t allowed to train, where poor women gave birth without privacy or dignity, where Margaret delivered a son who was premature and struggling to breathe because months of tight binding had restricted his development. The baby, whom Margaret named Thomas, died at two days old from underdeveloped lungs, and Margaret was left with nothing—no baby, no nursing career, no future except the poverty she had been trying to escape.
Dr. Harrison faced no consequences. He con
tinued his career, eventually became chief of surgery, retired honored and respected, never acknowledging that he had assaulted a nursing student and destroyed her life. Margaret worked as a seamstress for forty years, never able to return to nursing, carrying the grief of losing Thomas and the rage of having her career destroyed while her assailant thrived. She lived until 1972, dying at seventy-three, and only in her final years did she speak about what had happened—the assault, the hidden pregnancy, the binding that killed her son, the expulsion while in labor, the doctor who faced no
