“‘Hotel Refuses Negro Nurse’: Gloria Clarke Baylis and the Queen Elizabeth Hotel” in Canadian bulletin of medical history 35 (2), 278-308.
On 2 September 1964, one day after the Act Respecting Discrimination in Employment was introduced in Quebec, Gloria Clarke Baylis, a British-trained Caribbean migrant nurse, inquired about a permanent part-time nursing position at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel (QEH). In response, she was told that the position had already been filled. Less than a year later, Gloria appeared as the key witness in Her Majesty the Queen, Complainant v. Hilton of Canada Ltd., Accused, to determine whether the QEH violated the new legislation. Drawing on excerpts from the court transcript, this article expands and complicates intersectionality as a theoretical framework to include other markers of difference. Critical to this discussion are two interrelated concerns: first, the connection between Gloria’s experience at the QEH and Black women’s historical relationship to nursing; second, how her subjectivity and identity influenced her decision to pursue the lawsuit.
Karen Flynn is an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and the Department of African-American Studies Program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include migration and travel, Black Canada, health, popular culture, feminist, Diasporic and post-colonial studies.
Other publications from this author include:
- “‘The thing behind the thing’: White supremacy and interdisciplinary faculty in schools of nursing” in Nursing Outlook (2021)
- “Black Feminist Thought and the Gender, Women’s, and Feminist Studies PhD: A Roundtable Discussion” in Feminist Formations, 32 (2), 1-28 (2020)
- “In Search of Zora/When Metadata Isn’t Enough: Rescuing the Experiences of Black Women Through Statistical Modeling” in Journal of Library Metadata, 19 (3-4), 141-162 (2019)
- “Writing Black Canadian women’s history: Where we have been and where we are going” in Reading Canadian Women’s and Gender History, 63-89 (2019)
- Moving Beyond Borders: A History of Black Canadian and Caribbean Women in the Diaspora (2011)