JFN, May

Stuart / Allen:
2002, A
Vol.
Life8 in
No.Nursing
2

F. Moyra Allen: A Life

in Nursing, 1921-1996

Meryn Stuart, R.N., Ph.D.

University of Ottawa

Moyra’s life centered around evaluation—drawing the worth or value out of

something. To Moyra Allen, competence was the central ethical issue and
principle, the greatest human challenge. Moyra spent her days acquiring the
habit of doing the right thing. Quantities were of qualities. Questions were
more important than answers. Intellectual authenticity is perhaps her most
important legacy. She taught herself and others to say “I don’t know,” and
she gave us the courage to find out and the grit to carry on. We will continue
to ask: What are families telling us they require in the way of nursing care?
How do we respond to them with sensitivity and knowledge? How do we
know we are doing any good?1

Allen’s life and work may be found in the eulogy above, which was
among many spoken with the same intensity at the memorial services
held after her death on May 2, 1996. To attempt a revolution in nurs-
ing, she dared to think “outside the box,” where nothing is a given
and everything is an opportunity to learn, to question, and to change
the world. Helen Glass, noted Manitoba nurse leader and friend of
Allen’s, put it this way, “She never assumed that the questions to be
researched would be predicated on the present ways of thinking
about nursing and its practice.”2 As she forged ahead in her career,

The author gratefully acknowledges the contributions of Lynn Kirkwood,

who generously provided interview transcripts and writings for this account
of Allen’s life in nursing. Address all correspondence to Meryn Stuart, associ-
ate professor, School of Nursing, University of Ottawa, 451 Smyth Road,
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1H 8M5; e-mail: mstuart@uottawa.ca
JOURNAL OF FAMILY NURSING, 2002, 8(2), 157-165
© 2002 Sage Publications
157

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158 JFN, May 2002, Vol. 8 No. 2

often taking huge risks to push nursing knowledge forward, she was
perceived as “courageous and gutsy”, even relishing controversy. Yet,
as Allen stated in an interview, “They don’t even seem like risks to
me.”3
This avant-garde approach was similarly reflected in her life,
which was enriched by a sense of playfulness as well as a love of
music and of art. One of her former students and a close friend, Mona
Kravitz, said at Allen’s memorial service, “Her world was a riot of
color splashes of heliotrope and fuschia—no up and down lines, no
vanilla boxes. She adored Paul Klee and Marc Chagall. The Beatles
made her smile. Scott Joplin made her dance” (personal communica-
tion, May 21, 1996). Allen’s taste was eclectic, however, for she was
also passionate about pianist Glenn Gould and about classical music,
especially Bach (J. Gilchrist, personal communication, October 14,
1999).

EARLY LIFE

Moyra Allen was born November 2, 1921, in Toronto, Ontario and

grew up as an only child outside Beaurepaire, at that time an isolated
and sparsely populated village on the West Island of Montréal. Her
father, who was an accountant with the Canadian Pacific Railway, had
immigrated from Ireland as a young man. Her mother was Canadian-
born and spent much of her adult life in bed because of severe hyper-
tension. Allen’s father built the house in the rural area about a mile
and a half’s walk to the train station because the young family was rel-
atively poor, and it was cheaper to live there than in the city. Books
were Moyra’s best friends and she read broadly. Her long, solitary
walks to a rural school gave her ample time for reflection, and per-
haps this is how she grew up to be an independent and visionary
thinker (J. Gilchrist, personal communication, November 27, 19984).
As Allen grew into her teen years and took the train to Montréal for
high school, there were more children living in the area. She formed
close bonds with a small group of friends with whom she kept in
touch until she died. Her friends were always important to her, and
they in turn were loyal to her for life. Allen’s sense of humor and
enjoyment in life were contagious—one lifelong friend recalled that
she could still hear her laugh after 50 years of friendship. She was
always “good for a joke” (M. Jarvis, personal communication, Novem-
ber 9, 1998). Allen was also very close to her father, who taught her to

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 Stuart / Allen: A Life in Nursing 159

swim, among other things, and to love learning. After her mother
died when Allen was in her mid-20s, she lived with her father until his
death in 1961.

BEGINNING A CAREER IN NURSING

When Allen finished high school, it was the end of the Depression
and there were few opportunities neither for women nor for many
men. Although she wanted to be a school teacher, she entered the
School of Nursing at the Montréal General Hospital in 1940 because
“you either were a nurse or a secretary, and so the easiest thing to do
was to go into nursing where you just had to get in and . . . your life
was controlled from then on and you got somewhere.” Her aunt had
been a nurse, and her mother had started in nursing but dropped out.
Like many young women of her generation whose families did not
have much money for education, Allen saw the practicality of a hospi-
tal training program in exchange for graduating with a diploma and a
lifelong way to earn a living. She stuck it out for 3 years, through the
war, when students had even less supervision than usual and were
expected to do all the patient care. When asked why she stayed in
training when she found it so “dreadful” and all “laborious labor,”
she said simply, “There was no place to go. I never thought of not stay-
ing.” She made few friends in training, and one of her classmates later
reported that they “could not understand Moyra, they did not know
where she was coming from.”
After graduation in 1943, she went to work for a year as a staff
nurse at the Veteran’s Hospital in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue to be near her
mother, who was ill and needed her at home. She “liked it very much
and met a nice group of people,” joined the Army as a nursing sister,
and then worked in Windsor, Nova Scotia and at the Montréal Mili-
tary Hospital until 1945, when the war ended. At one point during the
war, she volunteered as a cook for miners in Nova Scotia, baking hun-
dreds of lemon pies for them.5
Now 24 years old, Allen decided she wanted to teach nursing. In an
interview, she explained that she “really didn’t have the things that
made the old-fashioned nurse,” what she also called the “missionary
spirit.” So she went to McGill University School for Graduate Nurses,
probably on a veterans grant, and earned a diploma in teaching and
supervision in 1946. For the rest of her long career, she would focus on
nursing education and on investigating the relationship between

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160 JFN, May 2002, Vol. 8 No. 2

nursing practice and health outcomes. Allen clearly wanted to exam-

ine the assumptions about what made a “good” nurse, assumptions
on which her own training had been built. She later enumerated these
assumptions as “following orders assiduously, being precise, punc-
tual, pleasant, and having other such personality characteristics”
(Gottlieb & Allen, 1997).

BUILDING AN ACADEMIC CAREER

While at McGill in 1945, Allen met Muriel Jarvis, who persuaded

her to come to teach at the Saskatoon City Hospital School of Nursing
where Jarvis was the assistant director of the hospital. Allen taught
the “nursing sciences,” which were anatomy, physiology, and materia
medica (pharmacology) at that time. She also studied at night for her
senior matriculation by correspondence because she wanted to return
to McGill for her bachelor of nursing degree. She stayed in Saskatoon
1 year, returning to McGill in 1947, and completing her degree in 1948.
After graduation, she went back to the Montréal General Hospital
School to teach nursing sciences for 3 years, then went on to earn a
master’s degree in education at the University of Chicago in 1952.
Here, she encountered the ideas of John Dewey and the progressive
school of thought in education. Before returning to Canada, she went
to Detroit with Chicago classmate Virginia Cleland and taught medi-
cal surgical nursing for 2 years at Wayne State University with Irene
Beland.6
In 1954, at age 33, she began her career at McGill School for Gradu-
ate Nurses as an assistant professor, teaching medical surgical nurs-
ing in the Bachelor of Nursing program for Registered Nurses (RNs).
That year, under the leadership of the school’s new director, Rae
Chittick, the nursing faculty were instituting a reorganized program
for R.N. students and were planning a basic, 5-year baccalaureate pro-
gram. In 1957, when the new program was launched, Allen was
appointed in charge (Tunis, 1966). She began to apply her ideas about
learning, which were well suited to the educational aims of the bacca-
laureate programs. As Allen’s student in the 1950s, nursing leader
Joan Gilchrist remembers that Allen never gave answers to students’
questions. Rather, “she would come up with more questions,” which
the student would then use to find out more about the situation at
hand (personal communication, November 27, 1998).

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 Stuart / Allen: A Life in Nursing 161

In 1962, after the death of her father, Allen decided to begin a doc-
torate in education and sociology at Stanford University in California.
In her words, this was a “fabulous” experience. Not only was she
intellectually stimulated by new ideas about learning and by her
research training, but also she met many fascinating people. Her dis-
sertation, completed in 1967, was an investigation of the relationship
between the degree of social stratification among nursing personnel
in a hospital ward and their performance with patients, as measured
by patient satisfaction. She collected data in 14 hospitals in Ontario
and Québec that provided clinical experience for students or had
schools of nursing. Her choice of topic clearly reflected her need to try
to understand the relationship between hierarchy and power in a hos-
pital and the way nurses related to individual patients.7
Returning to McGill in 1964, Allen became the coordinator of the
master’s program in nursing, established in 1960 as the second mas-
ter’s program in Canada.8 In addition to her leadership role, Allen
was actively involved in teaching and in beginning her research pro-
gram. In 1966, the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario commis-
sioned her to direct an evaluation study of the first 5 years of the nurs-
ing program at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto, the first
diploma nursing program in Canada to be organized in an educa-
tional institution rather than a hospital. Allen and her research associ-
ate, Mary Reidy, used a comparative design to study the process of
learning to nurse and factors influencing the process across four
diploma programs. One of the findings of this study was that, in plan-
ning care, the Ryerson students and graduates considered their obser-
vations of the particular patient, as well as information provided by
the patient, more than did the comparison groups of students who
relied primarily on institutional and medical protocols. In the report
of the study (Allen & Reidy, 1971), Allen referred to the Ryerson
approach as “situation responsive,” and to their mode of assessment
as “exploratory” in contrast to the “a priori” mode of other students.
These terms and the underlying concepts would find their way into
Allen’s formulation of a model of independent nursing practice a few
years later (Allen, 1977a).
In the early 1970s, Allen and the new director of the school, Joan
Gilchrist, explored the option of a course of study through which
non-nurse graduates of liberal arts and science programs could enter
the master’s in nursing program (Attridge, Ezer, & Macdonald, 1981).
They secured a W. K. Kellogg Foundation grant in 1973, and in 1976,
the first “generic stream” in graduate nursing education began.

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162 JFN, May 2002, Vol. 8 No. 2

Between 1971 and 1973, Allen traveled extensively as a consultant

to the World Health Organization (WHO) in the evaluation of educa-
tional programs in nursing. In addition to working directly with edu-
cators in South America, Africa, and India, she developed a design for
evaluation that was published in 1977 (Allen, 1977b) and later adopted
by the Canadian Association of University Schools of Nursing (CAUSN)
for accreditation of baccalaureate programs in nursing (Kirkwood &
Bouchard, 1992). Allen was a member of the CAUSN Committee for
Evaluation for 10 years from 1974 to 1984, and in 1994, she received
the association’s Ethel Johns Award in recognition of major contribu-
tions to Canadian university nursing education. Her criteria for accred-
itation and evaluation are still in use in university schools of nursing
across Canada.
In 1966 and 1967, Allen was cofounder and president of the United
Nurses of Montréal, the first union for English-speaking nurses in
Montréal. She and some colleagues decided that they would try to
organize nurses into a professional union, including all levels up to
director. As she put it, “It was through that union movement that we
hoped really to develop nursing . . . we would be able to do more and
become a kind of union group that was going to do something for the
health care delivery system and through that for nursing.” In 1983,
Québec’s professional association of nurses awarded her its Order of
Merit in recognition of service to her home province.
In 1969, Allen founded the first scholarly Canadian nursing jour-
nal, Nursing Papers (now the Canadian Journal of Nursing Research) and
remained its editor for 15 years. The journal was a forum not only for
publishing the work at McGill but also for “bringing together thinkers
from across the country to share ideas and engage in scholarly debate
around issues that would shape the discipline and the profession”
(Gottlieb, 1999, p. 9). Securing funds to keep the journal in print was
always difficult, but debate was in Allen’s blood and she relished the
opportunity to get talk going on practice, education, and research in
nursing.
Allen served on various research committees sponsored by the
Canadian Nurses Association (CNA) and played a central role in a
steering committee that was formed to implement recommendations
for the establishment of doctoral education programs for nurses in
Canada. In 1979, the CNA awarded her the Jeanne Mance Medal for
“practice [that] has made a significant difference to the health and
well-being of individuals and/or families and/or communities” (Cana-
dian Nurses Association, 1995).

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 Stuart / Allen: A Life in Nursing 163

RESEARCH AND MODEL BUILDING

Allen received her first national health grant in 1969, funded for 3
years to develop a series of videotapes of actual nursing situations for
use in the teaching of nursing. In 1973, she won a National Health Sci-
entist Award, possibly the first for a Canadian nurse. She held this
award for 9 years. Allen and Joan Gilchrist, the director of the school,
quickly applied for and received funding in 1974 from the federal
government to establish a research unit in nursing and health care.
According to the project summary, this was the only research unit of
its kind in a university school. Allen was appointed director of this
unit in part because she was the only researcher with a doctorate on
the faculty. In addition, she had the receptivity and drive to pull
together teams of people to work on projects. The 1970s were argu-
ably the most productive research years at McGill, in part because of
increased governmental interest in health promotion and in individu-
als learning to assume more responsibility for their own health.
The research unit, funded until the early 1980s, provided help for
faculty members in getting their research going while being a visible
entity in nursing research within the faculty of medicine at McGill
University, clearly an important goal. It also furthered Allen’s project
of “providing a picture of what nursing can do to assist clients and
families to cope constructively with everyday and long-term health
situations.”9 By 1977, 25 professionals from 10 disciplines were involved
in five major projects associated with the research unit. Three of these
projects were directly concerned with the development and evalua-
tion of a model of nursing that focused on health. Within practice sites
such as the family medicine unit of the Montréal General Hospital,
two nurse-managed community health centers, and the Montréal
Children’s Hospital Ambulatory Services, the model was applied,
refined, and elaborated by nurses in practice and by the research
teams (Gottlieb & Ezer, 1997).

CONCLUSION

After she retired from McGill in 1983, Allen continued to receive

accolades from her peers. Especially satisfying were the honorary
doctorates, one from McMaster University in 1984 and another from
the Université de Montréal in 1990. She was also honored with the
prestigious Officer of the Order of Canada in 1987. As a leader, Moyra

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164 JFN, May 2002, Vol. 8 No. 2

Allen presented many apparent contradictions. She was both an ide-

alist and an activist: a lifelong social democrat who believed in social
justice and collective action over individualism and, at the same time,
an unrelenting supporter of independent thought and personal respon-
sibility. Her achievements were not so much in the details of her activ-
ities but in her ideas about what nursing can be—an innovative
approach to health care that focuses on health, not illness, and is
responsive to the changing needs of a society and its families.

NOTES

1. Quote from a eulogy by Mona Kravitz at the Moyra Allen memorial held at
McGill University on May 21, 1996. Thanks to Joan Gilchrist for kindly lending me cop-
ies of the eulogies presented at two memorial services, one held May 10, 1996 in the
Ottawa neighborhood in which Allen and Gilchrist had lived since 1990 and the other
at McGill University.
2. Eulogy by Dr. Helen Glass, Moyra Allen Memorial, May 21, 1996.
3. Audiotaped interviews with Dr. Allen on November 30, 1983, in London, Ontario
conducted by Lynn Kirkwood and kindly lent by her. Unless otherwise indicated, this
quote and subsequent quotes from Allen are contained in the transcripts of these inter-
views. The “courageous and gutsy” attributes came from her close friend and colleague
Joan Gilchrist, interviewed November 27, 1998, in Ottawa.
4. Interview with Joan Gilchrist, November 27, 1998. All personal information about
Allen’s family and nursing training was obtained in this interview.
5. Eulogy by Mona Kravitz, May 21, 1996.
6. Beland was an American nurse scholar and author of a widely used textbook in
medical-surgical nursing, which went through four editions from 1965 to 1981.
7. The title of Allen’s unpublished dissertation is “Stratification in Ward Nursing
Groups: The Effects on Nursing Performance and on Patient Satisfaction” (Stanford
University, 1967).
8. The first was at the University of Western Ontario in 1959.
9. Information on the research unit was found in a progress report to the National
Health Research and Development Program, Health and Welfare Canada, 1977, among
Allen’s personal files, kindly lent by Joan Gilchrist.

REFERENCES

Allen, M. (1977a). Comparative theories of the expanded role in nursing and implica-
tions for nursing practice: A working paper. Nursing Papers, 9, 38-45.
Allen, M. (1977b). Evaluation of education programmes in nursing. Geneva, Switzerland:
World Health Organization.
Allen, M., & Reidy, M. (1971). Learning to nurse. The first five years of the Ryerson nursing
program. Toronto, Canada: Registered Nurses Association of Ontario.

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 Stuart / Allen: A Life in Nursing 165

Attridge, C., Ezer, H., & Macdonald, J. P. (1981). Implementing program philosophy
through curricular decisions. Nursing Papers, 13, 59-69.
Canadian Nurses Association. (1995). History of CNA’s Jeanne Mance award. Ottawa,
Canada: Author.
Gottlieb, L. (1999). From nursing papers to research journal: A 30-year odyssey [Edito-
rial]. Canadian Journal of Nursing Research, 30, 9-14.
Gottlieb, L., & Allen, M. (1997). Developing a classification system to examine a model
of nursing in primary care settings. In L. Gottlieb & H. Ezer (Eds.), A perspective on
health, family, learning, and collaborative nursing. A collection of writings on the McGill
Model of Nursing (pp. 18-31). Montréal, Canada: McGill University, School of
Nursing.
Gottlieb, L., & Ezer, H. (Eds.). (1997). A perspective on health, family, learning, and collabora-
tive nursing. A collection of writings on the McGill Model of Nursing. Montréal, Canada:
McGill University, School of Nursing.
Kirkwood, R., & Bouchard, J. (1992). “Take counsel with one another”: A beginning history of
the Canadian Association of University Schools of Nursing, 1942-1992. Ottawa, Canada:
Canadian Association of University Schools of Nursing.
Tunis, B. L. (1966). In caps and gowns. The story of the School for Graduate Nurses, McGill
University. Montréal, Canada: McGill University Press.

Meryn Stuart, R.N., Ph.D., is a nurse historian and associate professor, School of
Nursing, University of Ottawa. Moyra Allen supervised her research project in
1978-1979 for the Master of Science (Applied), McGill University. Recent publica-
tions include “The International Nursing History Collective” in B. Brush, J. Lynaugh,
G. Boschma, A. M. Rafferty, M. Stuart, and N. Tome’s Nurses of All Nations: A
History of the International Council of Nurses, 1899-1999 (1999), Philadelphia:
Lippincott, and “War and Peace: Professional Identities and Nurses’ Training,
1914-1930” in Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Per-
spectives on Women’s Professional Work (1999), Toronto, Ontario, Canada:
University of Toronto Press.

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