World Woman's Day- remembering

This morning I heard a young woman on CBC:the Current. She prefaced many of her statements with the benefits that had been derived from the woman's movement and intimated that feminism was no longer needed. She had found no barriers to her career and extrapolated that no woman of her generation had any reason for failure to advance their careers other than their own determination. How little she knew of the past, the present or even the future! How far we have come and yet how far we have yet to go to achieve equity under the sky.

During medical school, I was constantly reminded of my inferiority - subject to hormone rages, likely to have babies at the drop of a hat or at least loss of a condom, unlikely to attract female patients to my practice because for unknown reasons women were more likely to want a real man as their physician and unlikely to have men in my practice because what self-respecting male would want to be examined by a woman. Not a promising outlook (and we all know how incorrect it was).

I started rural practice in 1980 in Wynyard. One of my colleagues grabbed my butt when we were standing in front of the entire high school assembly, another openly derided my skills. The head nurse was so antagonistic to a woman doctor that, years later, the nursing staff apologized for her behaviour. (Fortunately, I was thick-skinned; I knew that she did not like me but I had not know the extent.)

Within one year, 80% of the deliveries were being done by me. There had to be changes to delivery protocols - the lithotomy position had to be the choice, not the rule, erythromycin had to be used in place of silver nitrate drops, daily hgb on both mother and babe had to be discontinued, mothers were to be allowed to walk both before and after the delivery - and, who can forget the battles over rooming-in? The shit hit the fan when one of my patients came into the hospital, delivered at 9:00 am and asked to go home the same day - and I let her!! My medical judgment was questioned - and, of course, the nurse could find physicians to support her position that women should remain in the hospital for five days after delivery. For the first time, I had to explain myself to the College of Physicians and Surgeons.

My skill as a GP anaesthetist were in demand by the guys - but they were horrified when I insisted upon intubating the T&A's. (In fact, told the nurse not to fill my order for endotracheal tubes! 1981) As late as 1988, any IV push meds that I wanted to give were run past the older doc, male of course (who attended CME on cruises). One remarkable case, following the cardiologist's orders! (So I called local doc and told him to call the cardiologist and explain himself.)

Regional drug dinners? Male brag fest about their financial prowess. Or whine about the government. (Some things might not change too much.) And then in 1991 or 2 some recently graduated BC woman physician bragged in the Med Post how she "got where she was without any input from the woman's movement" - really pissed me off. When I was in first year medical school in Manitoba, there were only four women in a class of 75 people. That was "getting into mediclne without the woman's movement", getting into medicine in the mid-1980's was walking into medicine upon the backs of our foremothers (including me!).

I recognized that discrimination in the 80's was just part of the times. I became secretary to the Regional Medical Society but I refused to learn how to make coffee on the basis that it was an equal opportunity situation. On a separate and rather interesting note, Old Man Doc and I remain on, and are even friendly, speaking terms. I was enlisted as the primary and palliative physician for the other Old Man Doc in his retirement years. The third Doc, the bum grabber, seems to have bounced around the province (maybe grabbed too many bums?).

These are some of the lowlights of the 80's; one of the sad things for me is that there are still women experiencing these types of discrimination in medicine; fine researchers who don't get the plums, excellent orthopedic surgeons who put up with obsolete sexist comments, and so on.

There is evidence that people who respond to injustices with social activism are healthier, have less hypertension and gastro-intestinal disorders than those who either accept injustice as "just doing business" or normative or those who perpetrate the injustices. This is a good thing. It applies to women and men who believe in a partnership model of how the world should be run.