Gender Roles In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

In the 1960s, gender roles became a very relevant topic and many women starting working. Because of that many women became subject to sexual harassment. This happens to Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey because she is put in charge of the entire men’s ward at a mental institute. In this novel, McMurphy and the men use their sexuality to gain power, but the Nurse must hide her femininity and takes away the men’s confidence and threatens their masculinity in order to maintain her power.
The Nurse uses fear to control the men and force them into the conformity that she practices in the ward. At the beginning of the book, the Nurse finds some of the black boys gossiping instead of working and she goes to talk to them.

‘And McMurphy! He did. And Harding! And the-the-the rest! They t-t-teased me, called me things!’...He swallowed and waited for her to say something but she wouldn’t; her skill, her fantastic

The Nurse is unhappy with McMurphy because he has disrupted the order that she had spent so long creating. “She walked right on past, ignoring him just like she chose to ignore the way nature had tagged her with those outsized badges of femininity”(159). Since McMurphy has come to the ward, he has done nothing but cause trouble. He has continued to point out the fact that he can gain power over the Big Nurse because she is a woman and this quote shows how she tries to hide it because it is a weakness that she does not want McMurphy is taking advantage of. McMurphy believes that the only way to control women is through sex and when talking about this he says: “and I’ve never seen a women I thought was more man than me, I don’t care whether I can get it up for her or not”(74). He is referencing the idea of controlling women through sex and how the nurse is so unappealing as a woman that he can’t get an erection while looking at her. This helps to show how the nurse hides her femininity from the men on the ward because it is seen as a weakness and a way for the men to hold some power over her. Nurse Ratched is the head of the ward and her being female is seen as a weakness so she does the best that she can to hide it despite what McMurphy and all of the other men