The women of Ward 81 do not hide their feelings about the problems that plague the ward. There are all sorts of complaints about lack of freedom, violations of patients' rights, the horrors of meds and shock treatments, and the staff. But in the end, the talk always boils down to their confinement and the fact that most of the time the women of 81 have to live without men.

"I don't think it's right to separate men and women," says Gloria, "not in any place they are. We have problems, real problems, that's why we're here. But that doesn't mean we should be taken away from what's human. Being with guys is what's human for most women.

"Know what I wish?" she asks. "I wish some club would take over this hospital and put the men and women together. A motorcycle club!"

"Yeah! Bikers!" yells Dixie, jumping on an imaginary motorcycle and pretending to rev its engine. "I'm not the type to play with myself, but I'll play with men! The worst thing about this place is that nobody can ever get it on here. We all need sex, some sex."

"Seriously now, folks," says Mary, addressing the whole ward in her best TV-hostess voice, "two and a half years in this joint without a husband is not the 'funnest' thing in the world for a girl. What do you think?"

"That's right, Mary," says Grace adoringly.

"I want a man to visit me--any man to visit me," Ellen says.

"I need three thousand dollars," says Jane.

"I need a raise," an aide adds.

"Merce, merce! I need a hearse!" Dixie giggles loudly.

"I need a man. That's all," Henrietta says softly and slowly.

One day, while coming back from yarding through Ward 82, Mary notices some nude pinups on the walls of the men's rooms. Some of these men were committed after raping and/or murdering women. The courts found them "sexually dangerous or not guilty by reason of insanity." The idea of these men having nude pinups infuriates Mary.

"Some of you weirdos," she yells, "I'm here to tell you that those dirty pictures you have on your wall are pictures of dead women. You wound us up, and then you murdered every single one of us.

"I'm talking to every man on the face of this earth. Do you know what kind of hell women have been through? I've done everything for you men. I've given birth to you. I've washed your diapers. I've cleaned up everything in the book for you. And you still want more! Well, you can't have no more! Whatever you got in your crazy head or your trousers, just keep it. If you stick it in my face anymore, I'm gonna see that God Almighty comes down with a butcher knife and cuts it off! Go read your Bible!"

"Mary doesn't need you anymore," Grace adds in her tiny voice. "She has me."

But Mary's not so sure about that. Like most of the women on Ward 81, she does feel she's been treated badly by men, or been physically hurt by them, but, "I kind of like to be with men more than with women. I'm a man's woman," she states, "rather than a woman's woman."

All the same, says Mary, she doesn't put men up on a pedestal the way she used to when she was convinced that men were better than women.

"I'm beginning to feel I'm coming into things as a woman, as a human being. I like women now."

"I like to be female," Ann cuts in, "and I'm not crazy. But I don't want to be called female. I'd really like to have a new name for woman. 'Course I never met her, but I have read about her in people's voices."

Lack of men is not the only community problem on Ward 81--it's just one frequently discussed. Sometimes an individual patient becomes the central problem, either because some action of hers affects the entire ward's welfare, or because the entire ward has taken on her problem.

For example, one day Mary receives word that she's finally been accepted into the rehabilitation program. She's to report to the Rehabilitation Facility at 7:45 the next morning. She's delighted, and everybody on the ward is delighted for her.

All evening she prepares--choosing clothes, laying them out. At breakfast, she's dressed and raring to go.

"Mary, you're not dressed appropriately," an aide tells her.

"What's the matter with me?" she wants to know.

"Take that junk off your head."

Mary is wearing her sequined scarf. "It looks good," she insists.

"It's inappropriate," the aide says. "I care how people from 81 look when they go off the ward."

"Well, then, look in the mirror!" Mary yells.

A compromise is reached. Mary puts the scarf in her purse. She says she'll put it on when she gets off the ward.

An hour later, she is back. The whole ward wants to know what happened.

"When I got there, they wanted me to cut a bunch of wires with pliers. But that wire-splicing job made my eyes burn. And they wouldn't let me smoke or wear my head scarf. But the reason I quit--and I did quit--is that I can't see myself sitting on a stool splicing wires all day. I figure I can do better than that. I could enjoy some kind of paper work or helping out in a kitchen.

"I really enjoyed walking over there and back without restraints," she tells the others. "The air was fresh, and I could see nature without having bars or a fence around me. I talked to a cute little robin hopping along. But in a way it's nice to come back. I missed Grace."

Mary's experience is a disappointment for the whole ward. The rehabilitation program might have led to a real job requiring real skills. A job could have been a stepping stone to being discharged, a way that a woman from 81 could survive in the outside world.

But the biggest community problem on Ward 81 is Dixie.

One day Dixie refuses to take her medication. "Thorazine tastes horrible," she tells the aide, "and it makes you feel more depressed, tired, lazy. You wouldn't take this poison if you tasted it. Why don't you see how it makes you feel?"

"Dixie, take your medicine," the aide insists.

"No, I don't want it and I don't need it. I didn't do nothing wrong."

"That doesn't mean you don't have to take it," the aide argues. "You don't want to go back into restraints, do you?"

Dixie is furious. "You guys think restraints is the answer for every fuckin' thing! I'm not taking that poison! I'm not!"

"One last chance," the aide offers.

Dixie counters with the one threat she knows can scare the aides. "Then I'll cut myself out here. I'll pull out all the stitches! I'll cut myself worse!

"You bitch!" she howls at the aide. Two male aides grab her and drag her to her room. On the way she manages to injure herself. They padlock her to her bed where she continues to rip her flesh with the edges of the restraining straps.

The women are alarmed. Dixie is now severely injured. They fear for her.

The next day, Gloria approaches her. "I'm sick of you cutting yourself open, Dixie," she says.

"I do it 'cause I don't want to put pressure on anybody else," Dixie protests. "I don't want to bother anybody when I'm feelin' bad, so I cut myself."

"You do it 'cause you don't care," Gloria says.

"Yeah, and I wanna die! These new cuts on
my leg don't bother me!"

But they bother Gloria. "It's sickening. It just upsets me. There's other ways to prove you're brave, Dixie. But I don't think you know another way. You need something to make you care, so you'll stop messing with yourself."

Dixie looks glum and doesn't answer, but Gloria persists. "I know why you really do it. But I don't want to say it. It might hurt your feelings."

"Say it!" Dixie demands.

"You think you're ugly--so ugly you want to make it worse. You think nobody thinks you're pretty, but you really are. Your personality's pretty--especially when you put on makeup ... "

"No," Dixie howls. "People tell me I'm ugly. People do. And I'm fat. Look at my legs! I hate myself, so I cut me up!"

She is screaming. The alarmed aides quickly put her back into restraints. Moving any way she can, she continues digging at her wounds.

An aide phones for a doctor. The psychiatric resident comes in to examine Dixie. When the resident doctor leaves the room, she comments, "I can't believe anyone would cut her own body that way. Why would anyone do that?"

Dixie keeps inflicting wounds on herself. She tears off chunks of her flesh and puts them in her mouth. Blood streams down her chin and neck.

She's taken to a hospital emergency ward to be sewn together. "Kill me! Burn me! Murder me!" she screams on her way out.

During the next few days everyone thinks about Dixie.

"It was the most upsetting experience I've had in nineteen years of working at this hospital," an aide says. "I didn't sleep all night. I kept thinking of poor Dixie."

Finally, the word comes that Dixie will recover. She's resting in restraints. She will be back on Ward 81 in a few days.

When Dixie returns, she rarely leaves her room. She is still weak, and she's being given three shock treatments a day.

Patients are not allowed to see other patients receive shock treatments. All the women are locked into their rooms while Dixie receives hers. Ellen is terrified.

"I'm frightened! I don't want to get shot with a gun!" she yells. "I don't like to get shot with that gun!"

"Ellen, it's all right," Gloria calls out from her room. "Calm down. It's not for us. It's for Dixie. We always get ours before breakfast, remember? They'll let us out when they finish with Dixie."

"Doctor, doctor, it's not taking!" a nurse calls out in alarm from Dixie's room.

"Yes, it is! Yes, it is!" screeches Dixie. "I feel it! I'm having a convulsion! Watch me!"

"I hear my friend Dixie yelling, and I love her," Grace calls out from her own room. "Doctor, don't give her no more shock treatments. Please help her, Sweet Jesus!"

"Help me, God!" Jane begs. "I can't take it. I'm gonna freak out! God, give me restraints. Sweet Jesus, get me out of here!"

"There is no Jesus." Ann says nervously. "I saw Jesus die today. He didn't really die. But he left. He left no incandescent space. He predicted no human race. He was not America. He was not Miss America. He was not missed.

"Don't worry about the Bible. The Bible is crazy. I have him in my locker, the Bible. He's crazy, got it bad. Really got it BAD!"

Several days later, Dixie comes out of her room.

"What's your name?" she asks everybody. "Hey, how do I get money? I want to send money to mother so she can buy a bus ticket to come up here. I like the black girl. Black people treat you better than white."

"There's city transit workers, but no Negro," says Ann into the air. "The Negro is not. The Negro is not at all. And I'd like to say a word on my behalf for the sponsor of the electorial bill of concerned payment of all welfare. But I can't think of it. I lost all my thinking and I can't get it back. There's no way for me to get it back."

The pace of the ward returns to normal, and everybody goes about her business. Everything seems to be the same, but not quite as it was.

A week later, Mary receives word that she's being transferred to an unlocked ward. The staff has decided to separate her from Grace.

"There's only one thing that's beautiful on 81," she says. "It's not the ward itself. It's the love, the friendship, the unity of it all, the blessedness we share with each other. We're patient with each other, waiting to be free together.

Epilogue

On a rainy day in April, thirty-six days after our arrival, Mary Ellen and I left Ward 81. It seemed so strange to see the world directly instead of through steel wire "bars," and so odd not to hear the cries for meds and quiet hours that had regulated our days for five weeks. We could eat whenever we were hungry, and the mere act of stopping for a hamburger whenever we wanted to seemed an extraordinarily free thing to do.

But our happiness was tempered with sadness. We were glad to be leaving the confines of Ward 81, but sad to be leaving the women. Our leaving underlined the fact that we were merely playing at being on Ward 81. We were able to leave, an option 81 patients don't have. We never had to undergo involuntary confinement, therapies, drugs or electroshock. But we did grow close to the women on 81.

To a degree we became like those women. One morning, two weeks after we had arrived, a giggling Dixie grabbed me by the elbow and dragged me over to a full-length mirror. "How come you're dressing like one of us?" she wanted to know.

It was absolutely true! My uninterrupted days on 81--the endless hanging-out in front of the TV set had unraveled me. My hair was not combed very well, my clothes looked like fleamarket rejects, I smelled a bit--I seemed to have lost all semblance of tidiness. I was content to slump anywhere, to drift into a chair or couch and nod off in the direction of the TV set.

It had happened to Mary Ellen also. Somebody told her that if it weren't for the camera around her neck, you couldn't tell her from the patients.

We felt the degeneration of our own bodies and the erosion of our self-confidence. We were horrified at the thought of what we might become after a year or two of confinement and therapy on Ward 81.

It's been three years since our stay on Ward 81, but I have followed the progress of these women we came to know so well.

Within months of our departure, Jane ran away from her family while on a weekend visit.

Gloria was transferred to an unlocked ward. She ran away from that ward. She was picked up by police in California and was hospitalized there.

Mary was transferred back to Ward 81.

Grace was released and moved to a group home. Months later, her skeleton was found in the woods in Oregon. She had been dead for six months.

Dixie finally succeeded in killing herself.

Henrietta, Ellen and Ann are still in a locked ward in the Oregon State Hospital.

The patients we knew as the women of Ward 81 are tattooed on our memories like graffiti. For the rest of our lives, we will dream about them and their confinement. Again and again we will be surprised to wake up in beds without straps or padlocks, surprised to be able to see out of windows free of wire barriers.

We identified with the fragility and the strength of these women we came to love, these adopted sisters of ours. They are the women we might have been, women we might one day become.

Postscript from Oregon State Hospital

Ward 81 ceased to exist in November 1977 when it became the female segment of a coeducational treatment ward.

p 1 2 3 + Top