She is an attractive woman around 30 with two sons, the same husband she started out with, their mortgage (not the same one they started out with), and a license to practice nursing in Massachusetts.

And her story, anonymous but otherwise undisguised, will tell you more about the nursing shortage, the women's movement, the Medicaid crisis, the conservative revival and social change in America than any compilation of research, analysis, punditry and feminist literature. She is angry and the only reason she is going to take it any more is that she has not discovered a decent alternative.

She works odd, inflexible hours, some nights and Sundays, in the emergency room of a community hospital outside Boston. It is the kind of place to which your kindly old family doctor, interrupting a weekend frolic with the new cookie, refers his less affluent patients.