first published in Women Writers, Women’s Books https://booksbywomen.org/the-crafting-of-inspired-and-outraged-the-making-of-a-feminist-physician/
By Alice Rothchild
In 2005, in the midst of two years of severe back pain and an arduous 18-month recovery from a spinal fusion, I received the suggestion from a friend and former editor to write a book on health and human rights in Israel/Palestine. I had been co-leading delegations to the region, providing care as an obstetrician-gynecologist, and documenting conditions on the ground for several years, so I had gathered mountains of notebooks and audio diaries.
My friend also started her on-again, off-again campaign to convince me to write a memoir. Writing was my therapy against an overwhelming depression and fear that my productive work life was over in a blur of Percocet, physical therapy, and tiny moments of hard-fought recovery. Initially, the idea of a memoir felt not only daunting, but also of unclear value; nonetheless, the thought germinated.
Five books later, facing the backlash on reproductive rights in the US and personally concerned for the future world in which my daughters and grandchildren would come of age and live their lives, the idea of a memoir became distinctly compelling. I grew up in the 1950s with all the expectations for being a good, accomplished but not-too-threatening girl, came of age in the 1960s and 1970s in the cauldron of political activism, and tried to live a principled, feminist life as an obstetrician-gynecologist, partner/wife, mother, and activist. These were critical times in the social fabric of the US, as well as a time of dramatic changes in the options for women and the world of women’s health care.
I’ve now lived long enough to bear witness to the backlash from those threatened by what we accomplished—we aren’t done—and those fearful of loud, newly empowered womyn, LGBTQI folx, and people of color. A desire for mutual liberation seems to have been buried under an if-you-win-I-lose theory of political progress. The belief that the world is always changing and that those with privilege must create space for everyone else because we are all deserving breathing humans, now seems like a quaint if profoundly radical idea. I am deeply troubled and frightened by what lies ahead. The desire to write a memoir that not only chronicled my personal experiences in the political context of the times but was also a call to action, a shout out against complacency, grew overwhelming.
At first, I played with writing a chapter or two in prose, but that did not feel right. Dwelling on the themes of my life, poring over old letters, diaries, newspaper clippings —I was always a documentarian of sorts—the memories started arriving, and much to my astonishment and pleasure, they arrived in free verse. Hikes, bike rides, sleep were constantly interrupted with A THOUGHT that demanded to be WRITTEN
DOWN. I was an obedient scribe, one recollection conjuring up a host of other past moments, relationships, struggles, humiliations, victories. I felt like I was deep into psychoanalysis, and I was both shrink and patient, observer and reporter.
Each THOUGHT provoked hours of reflections and sometimes research, culling what was most important, what created a vivid sensory picture of a moment in time, a metaphor for something bigger, what moved the story of my life and times forward. Poetry gave me the power to be deadly serious, outraged, sarcastic, playful, capturing the mood of each encounter, explaining in metaphor and glancing suggestion something that would require a whole chapter to describe in prose. The book felt heavy and light at the same time. I wanted to write a book that touched people intellectually, but also awoke emotions and empathy. I wanted women in particular, to recognize fragments of their own lives in mine.
Once I had birthed all this poetry, I took on the task of choosing which poems to keep, which to drag into the NO file, how to organize the keepers into a coherent whole, developing chapters from the river of words that had flowed from my subconscious and conscious self. I also wanted to end the memoir with an “UNADULTERATED, UNAPOLOGETIC HERSTORY” of both psychiatry (my first love) and obstetrics and gynecology (my life work), to unearth the foundations of each specialty in the worlds of class privilege, racism, and sexism—a mini history of doctoring and health care in America. Thus, the book became not only a journey through a particular historical period, but also a call to action for women and girls, LGBTQI people, and all those who love and support them.
This conversation has become much more urgent given the time we are living in, the active threats to human rights in our country and beyond, and the dangers to the mental and physical health of women, people of color, immigrants, and gender queer folk. Men who are redefining what it means to be male in this society and everyone challenging classic binary norms are also under threat. The political backlash, the silencing and demonizing, the fantasy that a return to the good old 1950s would be a good (if unattainable) idea, must be met head on with a deep knowledge of our pasts and a commitment to move the struggle forward, grounded in a dedication to justice. Storytelling is one piece of this critical work.
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Alice Rothchild is a physician, author, and filmmaker who pushes boundaries and engages us in unexpected conversations. She practiced ob-gyn for almost 40 years and served as Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Harvard Medical School. She received Boston Magazine’s Best of Boston’s Women Doctors Award was named in Feminists Who Changed America 1963–1975.
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