Volume 8, No. 2: Section 6

Source: Shayle Uroff
But author unknown

It is great to welcome another woman to the evening news.

Elizabeth Vargas (ABC news anchor)
On the announcement of Katie Couric taking over as the CBC Evening News Anchor

Sometimes I think change is a good thing. Although it may be terrifying to get out of your comfort zone, it's very exciting to start a new chapter in our life.

Katie Couric on the Today Show

But claims that Couric lacks the "gravitas" for the job are "thinly disguised sexism," said news consultant Andrew Tyndall. Few questioned Tom Brokaw when he switched from a "Today" host in the 1970s to become NBC's top anchor. At ABC, Charles Gibson frequently did the morning and evening newscasts on the same day this past year during the late Peter Jennings' illness.

David Bauder
Associated Press
4/6/06

Reflections on reading alumni publications

The University of Rochester and the Anthony Center for Women's Leadership at the University are honoring the 100^th anniversary of Susan B Anthony's death (http://www.rochester.edu/SBA/). In the Spring 2006 issue of Rochester Review, author Jenny Leonard quotes Nora Bredes, Director of the Anthony Center, "More women than men attend college, yet women don't earn as much as men, and the disparity grows as children are born. We don't have a solution to the work-life imbalance between men and women and how to combine a family and career, because our society views those issues as personal rather than collective. We don't look for ways in which communities can enhance women's ability to lead and be economically independent."

A fact unknown to me is that trustees at my alma mater (by virtue of graduating from its medical school) required an "unreachable sum" of $100,000 (equivalent to $1.8 billion today), later reduced to $50,000, to defray the expenses of opening the school to women. The 80-year-old Anthony went door-to-door during the 24 hours before the deadline of September 8, 1900, to raise the remaining $8,000. She pledged the cash value of her life insurance policy to secure $2,000 when trustees rejected the source of that pledged amount at the last minute. And the 33 women who subsequently entered the school encountered classroom doors slammed in their faces, and pushes and shoves by their male classmates.

Bredes also writes, "The inspiration for wanting women to be coeducated wasn't just to give women the skills they needed to be economically independent, but to allow men to see women's intellectual gifts, the rational side of their being, and come to respect them as equal partners.. What would be surprising to Anthony and maybe surprising to women from the second wave of feminism is that it seems every generation needs its consciousness raising, that the values and cultural norms persist."

Julie Stoltman, UR Class of 2006, is quoted, "Our generation grew up assuming that gender no longer mattered, that men and women were guaranteed equal access to all the same opportunities. And, as a female, you don't want to distinguish yourself from your male counterparts and imply that you are different in some way. You don't want to appear that you're asking for special privileges. At the same time, women still don't earn advanced degrees in the same numbers as men, still don't earn equivalent salaries, are still absent in significant numbers from the executive positions in many Fortune 500 companies and from senior faculty and administrative positions at universities. I continually get frustrated by the passive attitudes I encounter from both men and women my age who don't acknowledge that problems still exist and that it's our responsibility to find the solutions."

Turning to the spring issue of DukeMedAlumniNews, Jim Rogalski penned a feature story about Noel E. Walker-Robbins, MD'32, entitled "Dream Denied: First Woman Medical Graduate Sacrificed Career for Family." His sources included her daughter Noel Robbins, and a 1938 Charlotte Observer article. Rogalski wrote, "Small of stature, she frequently was mistaken for a student nurse, with one patient encouraging her to keep studying hard so she would 'finally earn her nurse's cap.' " This reminded me of both staff and patients confusing me with a nutritionist and a nurse when, as a rheumatology fellow at Duke, I visited wards to review charts and recruit patients for my assigned duty of teaching physical diagnosis to medical students and physician's assistants.

Walker-Robbins married a Duke Law School senior during her fourth year. Eighteen months into her residency, her husband "requested that she give up her career as a physician. The social column in the Charlotte Observer states that Walker-Robbins willfully agreed to honor her husband's request." Her daughter is quoted, "I got some insight into how bad the marriage was when I later read the depositions from their divorce [in 1956]. I think she needed to put all of her attention into making the marriage work because there were children involved. She was such a brilliant woman and so accomplished that I can't imagine that she did not want to practice medicine.. It breaks my heart. She could have made a big difference in the world. I only hope that she served as an inspiration to other women to follow a medical career." 

Walker-Robbins turned to leadership in civic organizations, such as the Charlotte Woman's Club, Liberty Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, local YMCA, and Charlotte League of Women Voters.

Inspiring but sad, isn't it?

Kris Lohr, Editor
University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry
Class of 1975
Duke University Medical Center
Housestaff Class of 1981

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