first published https://womenshistorynetwork.org/inspired-and-outraged-the-making-of-a-feminist-physician/
My memoir, Inspired and Outraged: The Making of a Feminist Physician, is both a chronicle of my life in the 1950s in a first-generation Jewish family, coming of age in the 1960s, and my embrace of feminism as I encountered outrageous contradictions and outright sexism in college, medical school, and residency. It is both a personal glimpse at women’s history through intimate free verse poetry and a call to action to women and their supporters everywhere.
Childhood
My childhood was infused with a subtle combo of mixed messages: I could be anything I wanted, but I was expected to be a good, well-behaved girl, get educated, find a career, but put that second to a nice Jewish husband and children.
painfully lonely
but accomplished, striving
I sometimes felt like
a prized race horse
galloping around the track
top speed
no exit.
College
The four years at Bryn Mawr College were “my first uneasy collision/with class and race.” It was also the late 1960s and I had a strong dose of the pervasive politics involved in the struggle to end the Vietnam War. Thus began my growing understanding of imperialism, militarism, racism, and major flaws that haunt our US democracy.
Medical School
I attended medical school “before women did that,” and was radicalized by an oppressive educational and medical system, a psychiatrist that told the few women in the class we were there “because of [our] unresolved penis envy,” the shock of Playboy bunny photos “all boobs and shimmery butts,” mixed into the microbiology slides.
we went to the Dean
explained how
demeaning
sexist
objectifying
that felt.
this apparently was news to him
can’t we take a joke?
Unlike most of my male classmates, I chose to become an obstetrician-gynecologist not because I fell in love with a mentor or an organ or a scientific problem, but because it was the field “Most In Need of Big Time Radical Surgery/at the hands of an angry, ambitious lady doctor.”
I packed my dynamite
filled out my applications.
readied for battle.
I was not disappointed.
Internship and residency
A medical internship at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx, “a poor orphaned sister in the public hospital system,” deepened my commitment to health care justice and reform. The Albert Einstein affiliated hospital had been seized by the Young Lords and attracted a group of socially and politically conscious house staff.
the Collective formed: doctors, nurses, mental health workers
Young Lords with berets and power handshakes
in a heady, messy, uneasy, fractious coalition
ready to make revolution
full of idealism
burdened by a 100-hour work week
and very sick patients.
My training continued at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital where doctors called their patients “girls,” and IV’s, “poodle preps,” enemas, and birthing flat on your back with legs hung in stirrups, draped as if for major surgery, were standard of care. Postpartum women with private insurance recovered on a different floor than their poorer sisters with Medicaid. Four years of study, struggle, finding allies, developing a new woman-centered way of being a doctor, cemented my commitment to feminism. I learned from my patients, honored their intelligence about their bodies, strategized and educated, paying close attention to the women’s issues traditionally ignored or dismissed as frivolous or hysterical: premenstrual syndrome, postpartum depression, pelvic pain, to menopause.
Ob-gyn practice
These principles became the foundation of my practice, first in a small, inner city, not-for-profit group with other women ob-gyns, midwives, nurse practitioners, and pediatricians, and then, as our pregnancies and the challenges of being working women brought us to our knees, in a large group practice with less night call.
the whispers in the back of my brain
women can’t do this
women are too emotional
women aren’t strong enough
women aren’t smart enough
always worrying
am I good enough
am I staying up-to-date
have I forgotten anything
anybody
anywhere
am I too distracted
will the kids be okay
does my husband even remember me?
you know what they say about working mothers.
Personal journey
The memoir is woven with the ups and downs of my personal journey, a challenging mother/daughter relationship, an emotionally distant father, adolescent loneliness and despair, developing my voice and power, making mistakes, losing in love and finding it again. I set these memories in a web of poetry that also reflects the important politics of my time: my grandparents immigration from Eastern Europe, the assassination of JFK, the murders at Kent State, the attack on abortion providers in Boston and the attacks on reproductive choice by the Supreme Court.
Herstory
The book ends with an “UNADULTERATED, UNAPOLOGETIC HERSTORY/In which the origins of outrage are revealed.” In the first section, the poems examine the history of psychiatry.
you will find
the history of racism is central
to the history of psychiatry.
in my youth
I nearly became a shrink.
years later, I’m still doing
all kinds of psycho
analysis.
The second section explores the tortured saga of obstetrics and gynaecology:
women have always been healers for whatever ails
from the spirit to the womb
from lust to labor
the herbalists, abortionists, counselors
primordial scientists dispensing advice, folk medicine
empirically through trial and error
mother-to-daughter, neighbor-to-neighbor
wise women to some
witches, shamans, and charlatans to others.
it has always been an issue of power, money, control
the establishment of medicine as a profession
with university training
led men to bar women from the practice
long before science intervened.
they took command
over profits and prestige
while their patients perished
from unsterile surgeries
aggressive childbirth practices
faith-based medicines
pure arrogance.
I want readers to understand that important victories are hard fought and must never be taken for granted. Politics is always personal, and the lessons learned are easily forgotten by subsequent generations. I hope my poetry touches the heart as well as the mind and inspires outrage that leads to a striving for social justice and political action in this very troubled world, both for women and for the people who love and support them.
Front cover of Alice Rothchild’s Inspired and Outraged: The Making of a Feminist Physician. The image is a portrait by Robert Shetterly from Portraits of Peacemakers in which Rothchild featured as an essayist and subject.
Alice Rothchild is a physician, author, and filmmaker who graduated from Boston University School of Medicine, 1974. She practiced ob-gyn for almost 40 years. Until her retirement she served as Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Harvard Medical School. Alice writes and lectures widely, blogs regularly, and is the author of books and poems for adults and children. She received Boston Magazine’s Best of Boston’s Women Doctors Award, was named in Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975, had her portrait painted for Robert Shetterly’s Americans Who Tell the Truth, and was named a Peace Pioneer by the American Jewish Peace Archive.