Posting this on International Women's Day! * * * * * * * I was a feminist long before I knew such a word existed.
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This is a bit long, but the prompt made me get this out.  Now, 37 years later, it seems rather dramatic, but this was really an awakening for me!

Women are heavily involved in health issues and institutions.  From shamans to physicians, to x-ray technicians, to health care consumers, we have always filled many roles in whatever health system has existed in the culture.  My perception of my own role has recently changed through a process of self-evaluation.  I want to share some of that process, that evolution.  I also want to share some of the readings which helped me in my growth.

When I define myself, I am first a woman.  Born female: two X chromosomes, two ovaries, a vagina, a clitoris and a uterus to distinguish me from a male.  Then forced into a mold by a society that felt a need to bend and twist me to its own design.  I am a woman doctor.  Years ago, I saw the “doctor” part as my primary identity.  Now I have a truer perspective.  I know that my role as physician, healer, helper is an extension of my woman-ness.

Over nine years ago I first entered the medical world as a health provider.  For nine years, they taught me, trained me, tried to form me into a “doctor.”  I hope they have failed.  I now look back over those years, trying to figure out what they have done to me, how they have shaped me, what I must unlearn.  Four years of medical school, five years of residency in obstetrics and gynecology; now in my tenth year of training, seeking a more humanistic approach through counselling—what have those years wrung out of me? What has filled the gaps and chinked the holes where they tore my woman-ness out of me?   My answers are still incomplete, but he questions continue to multiply.

I started to question my training’s effect on me a little over a year ago.  I had had to suppress doubts and challenges before then, I now realize, in order to survive in that patriarchal bastion of society we call the medical establishment.  Toward the end of my residency I began to surface from the immersion in medical academia, looking ahead to my career plans for the future.  I began to feel a slowly growing discomfort, even disgust, with the roles women fill as both providers and consumers of health care.  Personally, I felt a distrust rom male resident doctors because I was a woman and I was good at my job.  I suffered the sexist jokes, especially after my divorce (as if, how dare I not be attached to a man?)  I saw women professionals treated as appendages, not permitted to question or be creative; saw them turn against each other in their oppression; felt humiliation at seeing my sisters accept these roles.  But, especially, I saw the women patients, the “girls,” the “dears,” the “honeys.”  I heard male physicians speak paternalistically to these women, their patients.  Then, outside the women’s rooms, I heard the more blatant condescension.  I began to get angry.

The anger was simmering in me, but it was unfocused. I still had a few months to go in my residency.  THEY held a power over me still.  I did not know how to break out of my dis-empowerment.  Then I met a young woman in my clinic who helped me, unknowingly, to start in the direction I needed to go.  She was a “DES Daughter,” exposed to powerful hormones while still in her own mother’s womb.   She came to me for medical procedures and advice.  After I had performed the necessary tests and we had discussed her questions, she asked if I could recommend further reading for her.  I admitted that I did not know of any.  A few months later another woman consumer, also DES-exposed, told me about a book which she had read and found useful.  So I bought it to read, to see if I would recommend it to others.

That book was Barbara and Gideon Seaman’s “Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones.”  It turned out to be more than extracurricular reading for me.  As I read, I found myself bristling at many of the authors’ accusations against the medical establishment.  I found much of the style inflammatory; I identified issues that were presented without balanced viewpoints.  However, as I read further, I began to want to try some of the suggestions for uses of vitamins and other “non-traditional” remedies (indeed, I began to take B-6 supplements for premenstrual breast tenderness with great success).  When I finished the book, I had the overall impression that it had conveyed some very useful information, and I began to question my first reactions.  I recognized that I had been identifying with the establishment which the Seamans were challenging.  I began to ask myself, why NOT do things differently? It was a monumental question, a giant step.

After I finished my residency, I began to read more.  I had once heard Barbara Ehrenreich speak, and now I looked for the pamphlets she had written with Deidre English: “Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers” and “Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness.”  The authors of these booklets offered me clear analysis on the exclusion of women from healing fields and their exploitation as medical consumers.  I began to view the medical profession with suspicion.  I began to identify myself first as a woman, and secondly as a physician, wanting to be separate from the patriarchal, male-dominated system.  I was able to disengage myself and see that system with a new perspective.  I felt as if the medical establishment were being exposed; I saw its nakedness.

The writing of this article was spurred by the next book I read.  Its message disturbed me deeply.  Gena Corea’s “The Hidden Malpractice: How American Medicine Mistreats Women” is devastating.  It is a thorough, well-documented indictment of the essentially male medical system.  I was impressed with the minimum of medical errors (although I was sure that the few present may be singled out to discredit or ignore the book).  Corea’s style is clear and only rarely provocative.  She deals with medicine’s treatment of women both as healers and as patients to be healed, delineating the oppression they experience in both roles.

As I read Corea’s book, I became very perturbed.  I began to question medicine’s mistreatment of women.  I could only agree with most of the accusations Corea makes, for I had seen or heard of the situations she describes.  I examined my own experience and discovered that I, too, had mistreated women in both their roles as healers and consumers.  I began to realize that I had to question the attitudes which I had slowly internalized over the preceding nine years.   Early in medical school I had recognized that I wanted to avoid buying the total package of traits and values that make up the accepted doctor “profile.”  I thought that I had succeeded fairly well.  But now I was shocked to discover that, merely having existed within the system for so long, I had become a part of it.  I had absorbed many attitudes which I had not wanted.  I recognized that, in questioning the system now, I was questioning and doubting ME.  It was a frightening confrontation with myself.

Over the last year, I have explored my feeling.  I have attempted to identify and discard learned prejudices and paternalism.  I have become a political activist in women’s health issues.  I have also, in some ways, become more frightened.  Where do I now fit as a physician, as a woman physician?  I have been reevaluating all my future plans, all my investments in the system.  Instead of the well-outlined future in academic medicine which I had laid out for myself, I now want other options.  I am searching for some way of working with women in a non-paternalistic setting.  I want to use my skills to enable women to resume a central role in their own health care.  I want to be my sisters’ partner, not their provider.  As of now, I have not been able to identify a situation in which I can meet all these goals.  There is a lurking fear in me that I will be unable to find, or create, what I want and need.

There is also a sense that there is SO MUCH to work against.  The realization that my goals are political, not just personal, pits me against a very large, very powerful status quo.  My dilemma about my future career plans reflects the problems of all women who interact with the medical system as it now exists.  Finding a job in which I can be a sensitive partner in women’s health care would imply that the system is willing to respond to our needs.  And medicine is not eager to do so.

Along with these concerns, I am also experiencing a revitalization.  I know that I can recapture the part of my woman-ness that was wrenched from me by those who wanted me shaped in their mold.  I see that I have returned to my first identity as a woman, and have found it intact, albeit wounded.  I also feel hope and joy as I experience a desire to change the way my sisters are treated in the medical world.  I am looking forward to an uncertain, but challenging, future as a WOMAN working to heal and love other WIMMIN.

I was at community college in 1972 and scrambling to fill my class roster for the semester. Womens’ Studies was one of the few classes still open so I signed up.

The professor was brilliant, patient, respectful and clearly progressive in her views about “Women’s Lib.” The class consisted of a diverse set of young, old, curious, angry, smart and funny women…and me. Which at times made me the sounding board, the control group, the coach, the victim and the recipient of lots of attention. Which at first scared me, and then later delighted me.

Rhonda approached me on the first day. She was confident and beautiful and far more worldly than I. She had opinions and wanted to know mine. We became campus companions during those two years and she opened my mind to thinking outside of the books I had immersed myself in. We went to a McGovern rally together on campus because we heard Jane Fonda and Neil Young were going to be there. I remember visiting her charming old Victorian home and hearing Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” for the first time. I still lived with my parents, and when she stopped by once, it was obvious my mother didn’t appreciate Rhonda’s street smarts.

I transferred to university and we lost touch. Years later I ran into her at a coffee shop, where she was a waitress. I had followed the straight and narrow path of college>career, while she had traveled the world. She was happy to see me and glad things had turned out well for me. She was as sharp-witted as ever and clearly knew how to handle the customers. My friend Roger was with me. Always “on the make” with a pick-up line, he couldn’t resist flattering Rhonda, still striking and exotic in her waitress uniform. I don’t remember what was said, I just remember that I never saw a woman put Roger in his place like that. I laughed out loud.

Learning about “Women’s Lib” in class was one thing. Learning it from Rhonda in the real world was another.

 

In the fall of 1974 I arrived as an incoming freshwoman at Mills College in Oakland, California. We were each assigned a “zipper,” an upperclasswoman who helped orient us to the college, the Bay Area, and the particularities of language in the heyday of feminism. My college essay included something about how comfortable I expected I would be at an all-women’s college, given that I was raised in what I referred to as a female-dominated household. My mother had a beauty salon in the house and the place was like an all-day sorority party.  I don’t imagine my father even read my application so he had no opportunity to take offense.

When I arrived at the dorm I entered the small library off the main lounge. On the table was a printed copy of the then-fresh essay by Judy Brady that had been published in Ms. magazine in 1972. It rattled me to the soles of my shoes. Through the years I returned to it occasionally, almost as a measure of how well I was doing keeping the equality of the sexes uppermost in my mind. Thankfully my delightful husband has equality deeply imprinted (thank you dear mother-in-law,) so nontraditional divisions of labor came naturally to us through the years. One of my favorite birthday presents from him, for instance, was a gas-powered lawnmower with a catcher bag, which I happily pushed around the yard while he prepared dinner.

 

WHY I WANT A WIFE By Judy Brady

Originally published in Ms. magazine in 1972

Reprinted as “Why I [Still] Want a Wife” in the same magazine in 1990.

 

I belong to that classification of people known as wives. I am A Wife. And, not altogether incidentally, I am a mother.

Not too long ago a male friend of mine appeared on the scene fresh from a recent divorce. He had one child, who is, of course, with his ex-wife. He is looking for another wife. As I thought about him while I was ironing one evening, it suddenly occurred to me that I, too, would like to have a wife. Why do I want a wife?

I would like to go back to school so that I can become economically independent, support myself, and, if need be, support those dependent upon me. I want a wife who will work and send me to school. And while I am going to school, I want a wife to take care of my children. I want a wife to keep track of the children’s doctor and dentist appointments. And to keep track of mine, too. I want a wife to make sure my children eat properly and are kept clean. I want a wife who will wash the children’s clothes and keep them mended. I want a wife who is a good nurturant attendant to my children, who arranges for their schooling, makes sure that they have an adequate social life with their peers, takes them to the park, the zoo, etc. I want a wife who takes care of the children when they are sick, a wife who arranges to be around when the children need special care, because, of course, I cannot miss classes at school. My wife must arrange to lose time at work and not lose the job. It may mean a small cut in my wife’s income from time to time, but I guess I can tolerate that. Needless to say, my wife will arrange and pay for the care of the children while my wife is working.

I want a wife who will take care of my physical needs. I want a wife who will keep my house clean. A wife who will pick up after my children, a wife who will pick up after me. I want a wife who will keep my clothes clean, ironed, mended, replaced when need be, and who will see to it that my personal things are kept in their proper place so that I can find what I need the minute I need it. I want a wife who cooks the meals, a wife who is a good cook. I want a wife who will plan the menus, do the necessary grocery shopping, prepare the meals, serve them pleasantly, and then do the cleaning up while I do my studying. I want a wife who will care for me when I am sick and sympathize with my pain and loss of time from school. I want a wife to go along when our family takes a vacation so that someone can continue to care for me and my children when I need a rest and change of scene.

I want a wife who will not bother me with rambling complaints about a wife’s duties. But I want a wife who will listen to me when I feel the need to explain a rather difficult point I have come across in my course studies. And I want a wife who will type my papers for me when I have written them.

I want a wife who will take care of the details of my social life. When my wife and I are invited out by my friends, I want a wife who will take care of the baby-sitting arrangements. When I meet people at school that I like and want to entertain, I want a wife who will have the house clean, will prepare a special meal, serve it to me and my friends, and not interrupt when I talk about things that interest me and my friends. I want a wife who will have arranged that the children are fed and ready for bed before my guests arrive so that the children do not bother us. I want a wife who takes care of the needs of my guests so that they feel comfortable, who makes sure that they have an ashtray, that they are passed the hors d’oeuvres, that they are offered a second helping of the food, that their wine glasses are replenished when necessary, that their coffee is served to them as they like it. And I want a wife who knows that sometimes I need a night out by myself.

I want a wife who is sensitive to my sexual needs, a wife who makes love passionately and eagerly when I feel like it, a wife who makes sure that I am satisfied. And, of course, I want a wife who will not demand sexual attention when I am not in the mood for it. I want a wife who assumes the complete responsibility for birth control, because I do not want more children. I want a wife who will remain sexually faithful to me so that I do not have to clutter up my intellectual life with jealousies. And I want a wife who understands that my sexual needs may entail more than strict adherence to monogamy. I must, after all, be able to relate to people as fully as possible.

If, by chance, I find another person more suitable as a wife than the wife I already have, I want the liberty to replace my present wife with another one. Naturally, I will expect a fresh, new life; my wife will take the children and be solely responsible for them so that I am left free.

When I am through with school and have a job, I want my wife to quit working and remain at home so that my wife can more fully and completely take care of a wife’s duties. My God, who wouldn’t want a wife?