Sometimes I forget what it was like. Back then, back in the day, when women in greater number were starting to forge professional careers outside the traditional range of options open to us: nurse, teacher, social worker, secretary.
Women I know who interviewed for jobs in business were told, ‘why should we hire you when you’re just going to go off and get married?’
I graduated from college in 1971. That fall, only 12% of those enrolled as first year law students were women. My friend Mary was one of them. She went on to become a judge, and has plenty to say about the sexism and misogyny she faced.
I don’t know the exact number, but I think women made up about 20% of my business school class. (It was MIT, so we might have been lower than “normal” schools.) But there weren’t a lot of us.
No, none of the barriers that women had to overcome in my day were anything as formidable as those experienced by Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to earn a medical degree in the U.S. (Google her for her remarkable story.)
Still, 50 years ago, even if we were told ‘you’ve come a long way, baby’, women still had a long way to go. We weren’t exactly welcomed in a lot of places, and we were often treated poorly and/or sexually harassed when we got there.
It was far worse for women just a few years older then I am.
And one of the areas where it was especially difficult was academia.
When Marilyn Webb asked a distinguished male professor to serve on her dissertation committee at the University of Chicago, he said he would do so only if he could go to her apartment and give her baths.
So she asked another prominent professor, this one an expert in moral development. He pinned her against the wall, kissed her forcefully and “began slobbering all over my face,” she recalled, adding, “He told me it was quid pro quo.” (Source: NY Times)
At this point – it was 1967 - Webb had put in three years finishing her courses and taking the preliminary PhD exams in educational psychology.
Then she had these back to back encounters.
Where did you go with something like this, back in the day? No one was all that interested. Me, too? Yeah, me, too. So what?
So Webb ended up dropping out.
She forged a successful career as a writer and editor. But her having been stymied with respect to the career she’d originally wanted still rankled. So when she turned 75:
…she wrote to the president of the University of Chicago, Robert Zimmer, laid out what had happened, and asked him if the university could correct this injustice.
Professor Bathtub and Professor Slobber were both dead. But Zimmer called for an investigation and Webb’s story checked out. So Chicago put together a dissertation committee and decided that she could:
…submit as a dissertation a book she had written, but with a new theoretical framework.
So she did. And on June 15th, Marilyn Webb will become Dr. Marilyn Webb.
A few years after Webb left the University of Chicago, Cheryl Dembe, too, departed.
Dembe, a chemist, was finishing up her doctorate when her research adviser died.
She could not find another — because she was female, the university acknowledges — and so had to drop out with a master’s.
A faculty committee reviewed Dembe’s work as a doctoral student and was impressed; it resembled contemporaneous work at Cornell University that later won a Nobel Prize. So Dembe, too, will be awarded a Ph.D.
Nobel Prize, huh? Just a wild guess: it went to a guy.
I’m not all that keen on those with PhDs using the title “Doctor.” Maybe because my PhD husband thought we’d get better seating in a restaurant if he made a reservation under “Doctor Diggins.” This always made me nervous. What was he planning to do if a medical emergency occurred, and Jim was called on to revive someone? Talk to them about Federal Reserve policy? Gulp…
But I’ll make an exception for these two women.
Congratulations Dr. Dembe. Congratulations Dr. Webb.
Better late than never!
1 comment:
Outside of a work setting, I don't know why anyone would refer to themselves as a doctor including medical doctors. For an obituary, I think having any kind of a doctorate qualifies someone to use the Dr title. Considering the amount of work required to get a doctorate, I think they deserve it. I think the custom of giving medical doctors the title doctor is archaic and elitist. Ditto for referring to priests as Father rather then Mister. Must be an old throwback to the days when shaman type people had special standing in the tribe.
Where I worked, whether you were a medical doctor, a psychologist, upper level management, an examiner, or a clerk, everyone was referred to by their first name. Professionals in other fields who have graduate degrees (such as engineers, architects, nuclear physicists) don't use a special title.
When people get off their knees, medical doctors will have to get down from their pulpits. Most medical doctors have some degree of ego whether large or small. They spend a lot of time tripping over their egos which results in inaccuracies.
Franny G.
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