MEET EFFIE

This is a story about a little girl named Effie. She was about 10 years old when I met her, some 50 years ago. Truth is, I don’t really remember what she looked like—only that she was slight, mousey, somewhat unkempt looking, and subdued.

I met her in the hospital. I was in the ob/gyn ward for testing and a surgical procedure. Back then, hospital rooms were either two patients to a room (that was the more private level of care) or a ward of 8 patients. There was no such thing as a private room.

Since the testing I was undergoing was not painful or strenuous, when no tests were scheduled I was “free to roam”—within limits, of course. But I could walk around the ob/gyn area. And that’s how I met Effie.

Understandably, all of the patients in this area were women—and all were there for reasons relating to women’s reproductive health. The gynecological patients (which I was) were separated from the obstetric patients. So, there were no newborn babies or nursing mothers nearby.

In the course of my wandering around the area, I met a Puerto Rican woman, in one of the 8 bed wards. She was in her mid-50s—likely in the hospital for a hysterectomy. The nurses were very concerned about her because she wasn’t eating. Keep in mind, this was in the days before “get you in and get you out” hospital stays. You could be there for upward to a week for even routine surgery. So, her not eating was of concern. Because I am nosey, and was wandering around chatting with other patients, I quickly discovered the Puerto Rican woman spoke no English. The daily food choices were printed on menus in English and given to patients each day to circle their choices for meals. If nothing was circled, the default meat was beef. This woman did NOT like beef. After talking with her a bit (dusting off my high school Spanish), I learned that she had not been circling any choice on her daily menu. So, she constantly was served food she didn’t like. A bit of quick translation on my part—pollo y puerco—and she was able to give her preference and began eating again. (When the nurses discovered my “translating skills,” they asked me to tell the woman not to smoke with the oxygen tanks so close by!)

Back to Effie. As you can see, she was an anomalous patient. She didn’t need ovarian surgery, as I did. She didn’t need a hysterectomy as did the Puerto Rican woman. And, I assumed she wasn't pregnant because this was not the obstetric part of the hospital. So, what was her problem? When I talked with her, all she could tell me was that she understood she had a “growth” in her and needed to have it removed so she could get better.

Well, that piqued my curiosity. Growth? In a gynecological ward? It didn’t take much figuring to work out that she WAS pregnant. I was so stunned, that I asked a nurse—why does Effie think she has a growth and doesn’t know she is pregnant. The nurse explained (note: this was in the pre-HIPPA days) that a) the child had no sexual understanding at all. Obviously, she hadn’t been told “the facts of life,” including what it meant when she began menstruating early; b) she was about 8-10 weeks pregnant; c) she had been impregnated by her father; and d) the hospital was going to use a procedure which would cause her to go into “labor", deliver the fetus, and then go home. BUT she was NOT to be told why she would have all this done—that she was pregnant.

That’s the last I heard of Effie. I have long wondered what happened to her? Did she return home to be abused again? Did she realize, when she reached adulthood, that the pains were that she experienced as a girl in the hospital was actually “labor”? Where did she end up in life?

So, why I am telling you this long story? I am telling you this because this is a sad occasional reality. Pre-teen girls become pregnant because someone impregnates them. A medically safe abortion is a kindness for that young girl.  I am also telling you this story because it happened in 1970—before the Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade. Then, without abortion being legal and safely available, women AND girls who became pregnant had few options. Yet, someone found a way to have Effie’s wrong pregnancy terminated. Not that I think it was handled in a way that was psychologically healthy—but it was handled.

I leave you to draw your own conclusions about what criminalizing abortion will do. BUT one thing I can tell you—it will NOT end abortion. But it will end medically safe procedures. Like it or not, you cannot accomplish the end of abortion until you make it impossible for a woman OR girl to become pregnant.

JUST LIKE A WOMAN

OK I have to say it...I don't get it.

My Vanity Fair magazine arrived today complete with Caitlyn Jenner on the cover. And that got  me to thinking...just what is a woman?

Are you a woman because you think like a woman? More on that in a bit.
Because you look like a woman?
Or have a body like a woman?

Thinking like  woman?
Well, what is that?

An article by Elinor Burkett in June 6  NY Times nails it. In responding to the interview question about recognition of being transgender, Jenner had responded “My brain is much more female than it is male.”  Burkett asserts that “People who haven’t lived their whole lives as women, whether Ms. Jenner or Mr. Summers*, shouldn’t get to define us…” Jenner has not had a lifetime of being defined as a woman and THEREFORE shaped by those presumptions. I commend the rest of the article for you to read -- here.

Another recent story is also informative.  Earlier this month, Nobel prize winning scientist Tim Hunt remarked at the World Conference of Science Journalists explaining why he couldn’t work with women scientists. His reason? He said, “Three things happen when they are in the lab.... You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry." What an appalling view of women.

Thankfully many women scientists displayed far more intelligence, sense and humor by their responses.  Perhaps that is thinking like a woman.

It’s one of the oldest excuses in the book—when men get into trouble—quick, blame a woman.  Ahem, does the name Eve come to mind?

So, back to the subject of what is a woman. It is understandable that the thinking displayed in the Tim Hunt story, replicated many times over in thousands of other examples, unavoidably shapes women.  Girls who are pampered, protected, diminished, demeaned can’t help but experience life differently—think like a woman—than boys who have been encouraged to be assertive, be bold, be strong.  That does NOT, of course, mean that girls can’t assert themselves and find their own identities.  But it is much easier to do that when girls are encouraged to be assertive, be bold, and be strong.

One more observation on the Caitlyn Jenner transformation. As the Vanity Fair story reveals, Jenner had two years of treatment to remove facial hair (I can think of many post-menopausal women who would envy the chance to undergo such treatments).  Further, she had 10 hours of surgery to help “feminize” her face. She had body sculpting, including—obviously—breast augmentation. And, lastly, that waist!  As the cover photo reveals, the body constructed is quite stunning.  It is a body that many many women do NOT have, and yet they are most decidedly women.  The irony is that in order to be a woman, Caitlyn Jenner opted for a physical, visual approach—yet again defining how society too often defines women.

What I find so very sad is that these stereotypical ways of thinking about what it means to be a woman—looking great, “thinking” like a woman—miss the mark and what I think is the most important attribute of being a woman.  When our daughter was a little girl, like many little girls she would say she wanted to be pretty. I used to tell her—I don’t want you to just be pretty, I want you to be intelligent.  And then I would add—pretty can fade, but intelligence doesn’t.

That’s what I wish people meant when they say—just like a woman.
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* Lawrence Summers--former president of Harvard, among other accomplishments. He "famously" stated that there aren't many women in math and science because of "biological differences."

Our Bodies, Ourselves

40 years old!  It's hard to believe that 40 years ago, a group of women got together and wrote a small pamphlet which helped alter women's awareness of their bodies.


Titled appropriately Our Bodies, Ourselves, this booklet dealt with subjects that were taboo in the early days of women's liberation.  It talked about human sexuality in frank straightforward terms.  It gave detailed descriptions of the types of birth control available.  And it used rudimentary drawings to show female anatomy.


Hard to believe that such information was revolutionary, but it was.  I bought one of the first versions of this booklet--a newsprint paper version that did not hold up well to constant consultation.  Then I got an upgraded version with a more substantial cover that helped the book weather all the use.


I soon got one to give to my sister, who is 12 years my junior.  As I recall, my sister took her copy and disappeared into her bedroom for hours.  Since at that time, she was a teen, no doubt she too was learning things she had not known about her body, herself.


When I had a daughter, and when she was a preteen, I gave her a copy.  She too took her copy and disappeared into her bedroom for a time.


One of the things my parents did absolutely right in raising me was to always be very straightforward when it came to talking about human sexuality.  This booklet was written in that same vein--straightforward information.  Truth is always better than myth.


As our children were  growing up, my husband and I likewise were very straightforward with them.  Inevitably, both our son and our daughter, as they grew up, asked the inevitable questions:  "How did I get to be born?"  Many parents have that experience--it is even the subject of comedy.  Mothers or fathers tongue-tied, unable to tell their children in direct language about human sexuality.


Well, that was not us.  We always used correct terms, completely avoiding euphemisms.  I recall one day when a neighbor several houses up the street from us asked me if we had told our son "about sex."  Of course, I said, why?  Because, she said, their son (about the same age as our son) had asked them something he learned from our son.  Well, I said, haven't you talked with him? Oh, no, she said, he's too young.  My response--if he's asking his friends, he's not too young.


So, many many thanks to the women of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective.  I just hope that we don't lose all the gains of women controlling their bodies, their selves, in the next 40 years.

The Fairer Sex

This date--June 4--is the 91st anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which gave women the right to vote. The first election, then, in which women were allowed to vote was the national election of November 1920 when Warren G. Harding, who was from Marion, Ohio, beat Ohio Governor James Cox. It has been opined that part of what helped Harding win was his good looks, and women voters who were swayed to pick him. No one seems to have considered that women may also have been moved by the fact that Harding supported women's suffrage.

Well! An inauspicious beginning for more than half the population having the basic right in the U.S. to vote.

This anniversary seems like as good a time as any to ruminate of the state of women in the 21st century. Relax--I have no intention of tackling the sweep of challenging issues today. I guess I am in a somewhat saddened and reflective mood. Last week, our local paper ran an editorial--one of those "my turn" type--entitled "The Pill: Are women really better off with it?" The writer suggested that birth control has several adverse effects on culture. To support her premise, she cites a particular study. Her support points are three-fold: contraception leads to more divorce; contraception leads to more infidelity; and contraception leads to more abortion.

Oh my. I won't try to tell you how she (or the study she cites) reaches those conclusions. It is enough for me to rue the fact that as we forget where we came from, we will risk losing all the advantages we have gained. We, incidentally, means women AND men.

I wonder how many people know that it was not until 1965 that birth control was declared to be legal, within the privacy of marriage. Certainly there were many methods for birth control, particularly with the development of vulcanizing rubber (making condom development possible) as far back at the early 1800s. But such birth control devices were no sooner developed than they were declared to be illegal.

One of the issues the early feminists focused on, in addition to securing the vote for women, was birth control. It is difficult to control your life when you can't even control what happens to your own body. One of the real heroes of this early era was Margaret Sanger. When she disseminated information about birth control (a term she coined) by sending it through the mail, she was charged with violating obscenity laws. She opened the first ever family planning clinic in Brooklyn. Nine days after it was opened, the police raided it and Sanger went to jail.

So, when was birth control declared legal? Not until 1965 did the Supreme Court finally decide, in the seminal case of Griswold v. Connecticut, that using birth control was a right that was protected by "marital privacy." (This right to privacy has been the hook upon which other subsequent Supreme Court cases have been decided, most particularly abortion which the court ruled should be a PRIVATE decision between a woman and her doctor.) If you are now 45 or older, when you were born, birth control was NOT a right for your parents. The 45 years between 1965 and now is a whisper of a blink in the recorded history of humanity.

If you think we can't or won't go back, think again. There are people today actively working to once again deny women the right to control their bodies and what happens to them. Goodness, might "they" even decide women should not have the right to vote?

I think I once met one of "them." This incident in my life counts as one of the stranger conversations I have had. At the time, I was working for the state medical association. I had been assigned to staff the newly created Committee on Bioethics. I loved this assignment, and eagerly looked forward to meeting with the physician chairman and crafting the agenda we would have for our first meeting. I drove to Philadelphia to meet with him--he was a radiologist working in one of the many suburban Philadelphia hospitals.

As we walked through the halls of the hospital, we got to talking. We discovered that we were both Presbyterian. Upon that revelation, I told him that I was, in fact, an elder (in the Presbyterian church, elders constitute the governing body for the church). He stopped, and looked at me. Then, he said--I've never met a real life woman elder. I was stunned. I asked if his church didn't have any. No, he said, they did not. Then I asked, how did they meet the national church body's requirement to have a governing body that reflected the general composition of the congregation? Well, he said, they didn't.

Well, why not? I asked. Well, he said, Jesus picked only men disciples. And, further, he asked, how did I answer the fact that the Bible always referred to God as Father. With that, I gave him my final response. I said--I don't think the term Father for God means that God has a penis. And, further, I don't think a person needs to have a penis to be an elder.

Silence.

The halls of the hospital went totally quiet. The radiologist said no more. Either I had just revealed something unimaginable to him, or I had doomed our working relationship before it even began.

I am so grateful that I know many men who do not think as that physician thought. But I worry when young women think as the editorial writer did. No, birth control did NOT set back women. The right to vote, and contraception--two hallmarks in the universal struggle for women to be valued.

June 4 may not rank up there with July 4, but for women it is every bit as important.

Heroines

Were I not a subscriber to the Daily Almanac, that Garrison Keillor brings, I would not have known of the convergence of birthdays today.

A more unlikely pair you cannot find, I think. Yet Flannery O'Connor and Gloria Steinem share a birthday today. And each has been a heroine to me.

I suspect many people who know me well would say I am a feminist. Yes, I am. But I am not a strident one. I never burned my bra, for example. If pressed to define what kind of feminist I am, I may just offer my life--upon graduating from college, and getting married, and starting a family--I never stopped working. I worked the year my son was born--he was born at the end of January, I took February off and then resumed teaching. When my daughter was born, I worked the day before she was born, took three months off and then returned to working.

So I guess I would say that I am a feminist in terms of life choices--not marching, not philosophizing, just being.

Gloria Steinem was/is a feminist heroine for me. She is a very attractive woman--belying the old myth that all feminists must be ugly (take that, Rush!). In fact, early in her career she was a Playboy bunny. That particular detail always horrified and amused me. She was/is whip smart. As the founder of Ms Magazine, she may have had as much influence on current populist feminism as any one person.

On the other end of the spectrum of this shared birthday is Flannery O'Connor. As a lit major in college, I came upon her darkly grim and humorous stories. I knew little of her life then, but in graduate school I did a lengthy paper on her and learned a bit. Flannery was painfully unattractive. And she suffered from lupus that would eventually rob her of mobility, and cause her premature death. She lived a somewhat solitary life, staying on the family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. After her father's death, it was just Flannery and her mother plus a menagerie that included peacocks.

With all of her writing done in the first half of the 20th century, her stories anticipated the kind of disassociation that characterizes literature of the 20th century. One of the most famous of her short stories "A Good Man is Hard to Find" has the kind of grim ending that we have almost come to expect with current movies--example No Country for Old Men.

Yet through all this dark view of humanity, Flannery was a fiercely devout Catholic, and you can find glimpses of the possibility of redemption everywhere in her fiction. Her body of writings is not extensive, since she died in 1964 at age 39. Yet she influenced many of today's writers.

Two of my heroines--born on the same day.

Hello, My Name is. . .

As each new semester approaches, I speculate what names will be the double-up names. You see, each semester that I have taught at my community college, I always have two students who share a first name. And almost always, this occurs among the young women in class. From this doubling up on first names, I can tell what were the trendy names the year they were born.

• Megan


• Jessica


• Desiree


• Ashley


• Karen


• Brittany


• Amber

These are but some of the double up names I have had. So, I peeked at the advance registration for the spring semester—and, sure enough, I have a double up name: Amanda.

This business of naming does fascinate me. I wrote about it a while back, here. At that time, I looked at the Social Security Administration’s listing of most popular first names over the decades. I found another spiffy site that shows the same thing, with a bit more pizzazz.

A year ago, I read the highly interesting book Freakonomics. The authors suggest that some first names that are super-trendy or super-ethnic may not serve their charges well. You can see some of what they have to say here. It would certainly be interesting to hear their take, now that we have elected our first African-American president with a decidedly un-presidential first name of Barack.

To this point in our history, we have had 2 presidents first named Andrew, 2 named Franklin; 3 named George; 4 named John; 4 named William; and the most popular first name with 6—James. Prior to Barack, probably the previous most unusual first name was Ulysses.

I wonder how long it will be until we have a U.S. President with a first name of Amanda, or Ashley, or Karen, or Kristen, or. . .?

Maybe part of the mental block that Americans have for envisioning a woman as president has to do with the lack of strength too many first names for women hold these days. When our daughter was born, and we pondered a strong first name for her, we naturally turned to family first names. While I dearly love the women in my family life, I was not prepared to give our daughter some of the old-fashioned names. So I eschewed names like Dorcas, Mary, Ada, Kathryn, Leoda, Emma, Cora, Lillian and Ida. Even though we didn't pick a family name, I like the strong name my husband and I agreed on for our daughter’s name.

Several years ago, I remember that Garrison Keillor read a poem about strong women names—so I went looking for it. Here it is: what a wonderful way to celebrate the strong names of women.

Mourning the Dying of American Female Names

By Hunt Hawkins

In the Altha Diner in the Florida panhandle
a stocky white-haired woman
with a plastic nameplate “Mildred”
gently turns my burger, and I fall into grief.
I remember the long, hot drives to North Carolina
to visit Aunt Alma, who puts up quarts of peaches,
and my grandmother Gladys with her pieced quilts
Many names are almost gone: Gertrude, Myrtle,
Agnes, Bernice, Hortense, Edna, Doris, and Hilda.
They were wide women, cotton-clothed, early rising.
You have to move your mouth to say their names,
and they meant strength, spear, battle, and victory.
When did women stop being Saxons and Goths?
What fate frog turned them into Alison, Melissa,
Valeria, Natalie, Adrienne, and Lucinda,
diminished them to Wendy, Cindy, Susy, and Vicky?
I look at these young women and hope
they are headed for the Presidency,
but I fear America has other plans in mind,
that they be no longer at war
but subdued instead in amorphous corporate work,
somebody’s assistant, something in a bank,
single parent with word processing skills.
They must have been made French
so they could be cheap foreign labor.
Well, all I can say is
good luck to you
Kimberly, Darlene, Cheryl, Heather, and Amy.
Good luck April, Melanie, Becky, and Kelly.
I hope it goes well for you.
But for a moment let us mourn.
Now it is time to say goodbye
to Florence, Muriel, Ethel, and Thelma.
Goodbye Minnie, Ada, Bertha, and Edith.

Published in The Domestic Life, 1994.

Where All the Women are Strong. . .

In the past several weeks, I have had a couple of women credit me as influencing them at some point in their lives. In one instance, a high school girlfriend told me that I was one of the first "progressive" people she had met. She reminded me that as someone who grew up in a Navy family, she had never been around anyone with progressive ideas. The second instance was a chance encounter with a former colleague in a restaurant. We had worked together almost 30 years ago. She was ebullient, reminiscing of our working days together. Then she said--"you were one of the first women I knew who had everything--career, family and home--and kept it all balanced. I really admired that."

Well, I had no idea that I served as such a role model. But these encounters made me reflect on the women who had been my role models.

I grew up with strong women. Among the missionaries were three types of people--at least so classified by my childish brain--men who were married, women who were married, and women who were not married. I didn't know it at the time, but these women were going against the norm of the bland 1950s.

In an era when women were largely defined by being married and having children, these women were different. My guess is that for a good number of them, they might have wanted to be married but were not asked. They redirected their lives--they went to college, became teachers, nurses, doctors, administrators. I don't doubt that some of these women also heard God's call and decided to go into mission work. Perhaps they were asked to marry but when they learned the man asking wanted to stay on the farm, or wherever, these women demurred. They believed their lives held a different path and purpose.

As a young girl, I had a favorite missionary "aunt" (we missionary children called all women aunts) who was a registered nurse. I adored Rhoda. It seemed she could do everything. Having never married, she had an independent career. She was not all work--she could also knit, smock, tat--she knitted various sweaters and smocked dresses for me. When my sister died (written about previously), she helped other women line a simple wooden coffin with fabric.

One time, on the mission station in then Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), someone brought a dog to her. The dog had been in a nasty fight with another dog--and its side had been ripped open. Rhoda operated on the dog, stitching it up. My recollection is that, in spite of the heroic effort, the dog did not survive.

When my parents were moved to another mission, this time in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Rhoda was also there. She was the sole medical provider in the small mission clinic. She delivered many African babies--and, given the quasi-colonial atmosphere of the times, she would sometimes allow me to name the babies.

I do remember one specific medical emergency. The mission station was near a major road, and one night word came that a bus had overturned. There were multiple injuries. As the only medical provider, Rhoda was the one who worked to remedy the severe injuries--crushed limbs, crushed bodies.

The marvelous role models of strong independent women who made their mark in the world through their vocations greatly influenced me. I never doubted that I would go to college, that I would have a career. While I certainly hoped to find a life mate, and to have children, the example of these women helped me know that my personal definition did not come only from being someone's daughter, wife or mother. I could be a strong woman in my own right.

Brief addendum: my best role model of a strong woman has always been my mother--some day, I will have to write about her.