A Ride For Sally

When we're young, it's difficult and even hurtful to learn that people we admired--whether celebrities or family members, teachers or others in our everyday lives--are, well, people.  We might find out that our favorite actor, writer, athlete, aunt or uncle did immoral or even illegal things.  Sometimes finding out the dark side of someone we took as a model for one aspect or another of our lives is painful even after we thought we'd "seen it all".

One celebrity about whom I never became disillusioned is Sally Ride.  In fact, I found myself admiring her even more as the years went by.  It seems that being the first woman in space was just one of many accomplishments in her life.  Few people have ever done more to encourage girls and young women to study math, science and technology--fields from which they were too often discouraged, dissuaded or even bullied out of studying or working.  

I think now of Sophie Germain, whose parents took away her clothes--and heat and light at night--in an attempt to stop her from studying mathematics, which was deemed inappropriate for a "proper" young lady.  I also think, in this vein, about 1977 Nobel Laureate Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, whose parents wanted her to get a college education but protested when she decided to study Physics on the grounds that "no man would want to marry" her.  

If Dr. Ride faced such opposition from her family or anyone else, she never let on.  In fact, she did not let on much about her personal life, including her relatively brief marriage to a man and her later, much longer partnership with a woman.  Most people did not know about those things until they read her obituary three years ago.

Whatever the circumstances of her life, she understood the difficulties young women and girls faced--and still face--in pursuing STEM careers.  So, she did everything she could to help them--and their teachers, who sometimes were not confident of their own abilities to encourage their students in those areas.

Here she is helping a student understand some of the principles of gyroscopic motion with--what else?--a bicycle wheel:



She would have been 64 years old today. If I could be in Northern Virginia two weeks from now and I were still racing, I'd take part in the Ride Sally Ride.

What Nobody Planned

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

ROBINSON HALL

CAMBRIDGE 33, MASSACHUSETTS

GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN DEPARTMENT OF CITY AND REGIONAL PLANNING

June 21, 1961

Mrs. Alvin Richman

3055 16th Street, NW.

Washington 11, D. C.

Dear Mrs. Richman:

Although we have not yet received your official transcript from Brandeis, on the basis of your letters of recommendation there would seem to be a possibility of your admission to the Department of City and Regional Planning even at this date.

However -- to speak directly -- our experience, even with brilliant students, has been that married women find it difficult to carry out careers in planning, and hence tend to have some feeling of waste about the time and effort spent in professonal education. (This is, of course, true of almost all graduate professional studies.)

Therefore, for your own benefit, and to aid us in coming to a final decision, could you kindly write us a page or two at your earliest convenience indicating specifically how you might plan to combine a professional life in city planning with your responsibilities to your husband and a possible future family?

Sincerely yours,

William A. Doebele, Jr.

Assistant Professor 

 for the Department

*******************************************

 

"Mrs. Alvin" is, in fact, Phyllis.  She was the Washington Post's restaurant critic from 1976 until 2000.  

Ms. Richman also managed to write books about food--including "food mysteries" as well as numerous articles on other topics for other publications.  And, oh yeah, she raised three kids, who are successful professional who report fulfilling lives.

But, as you can see, that was not what she envisioned in 1961.  She wanted a career in urban planning. A few years later, she would follow her husband when he got a job teaching political science at Purdue University.  She thought about enrolling in that school's urban planning program, but it was part of the engineering school.  Thus, the program emphasized things like land use and architecture. But Ms. Richman opted against it because she was more interested in people and the impact that urban planning has on our lives. 

She would, like many ambitious, intelligent women of her time, fashion a career around the "duties" to which Professor Doebele alluded in his letter.  

Fifty-two years after receiving that letter, she wrote back to Professor Doebele, who taught at Havard until 1997.  And he responded to her.  To be fair, he said he wouldn't write such a letter today, though he defended having written it.

I chose to write about Ms. Richman's story because, while interesting in its own right, it's also relevant now, as more states and countries are legalizing same-sex marriage and passing laws (or amending laws currently on the books) to ban discrimination based on gender identity, expression, history or appearance.  These things simply would not be happening were it not for the gains that women have made in the workplace, education and other areas of life.  While, as Professor Doebele says, things are "far from perfect," they are better.  And the fact that women are still fighting and making gains offers us lessons in the struggle for LGBT--and especially transgender--equality.

(You can see a copy of the original letter here.) 
  

What I Learned From Geraldine Ferraro

Is this turning into a blog about famous recently-departed women?


Today Geraldine Ferraro died.  If you're reading this, you probably know that she was the first woman (and first Italian-American) to be nominated as a major political party's Vice-Presidential candidate.  I remember it well:  It was 1984, and in a sadly ironic way, Presidential nominee Walter Mondale had nothing to lose by choosing her as his running mate. After all, incumbent Ronald Reagan was one of the most popular Presidents of all time (It pains me to write that!) due to the economy-- or, rather, people's perception of it--and the fact that Iran-Contra and other scandals had not yet come to light.  


A few people praised Mondale's choice.  But there was far more criticism, which ranged from ignorant to outright vicious.  Much of it included the old (but, in some quarters, still-persistent) stereotypes about women and our un-fitness for public office or much else besides domesticity and child-bearing.  Some saw her as shrill; given the attacks on her, I thought she was a model of restraint and dignity.


The interesting thing about her is that not many people can point to any significant legislations or policy that bore her imprimatur.   Yes, she was an Assistant District Attorney in Queens at a time when there were almost no other women in such offices, and she headed the office's Special Victims Bureau at a time (the mid-1970's) when rape and other crimes against women were starting to get the attention they needed and victims of those crimes were starting to get the compassion they deserved rather than the blame they unfairly received.  And, later, she was an effective advocate for women who were raped during the ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia.  As commendable as those efforts were, they were hardly ground-breaking.


What she will always be known for is for having been a "first."  Of course, the importance of that cannot be underestimated:  even Sarah Palin has acknowledged a debt to Ferraro.  And now I will.  You see, if one woman is allowed to go where her talents and ambitions take her, it's possible for other women to do the same. And in doing so, we have more possibility of, and more possibilities for, being ourselves and not having to fit pre-conceived notions and, therefore, proscribed roles.


That is one reason why I have been able to make my gender transition.  When the definitions of what a woman is, and can be are expanded, it makes it easier for a woman to realize the person she is--even if she happens to be in a male body.  I did not have to become another Marilyn Monroe (as if I ever could!) or June Cleaver; when Christine Jorgensen made her transition, those seemed to be the only options for women.  And so she had to fit into one after she had her surgery, and the other as she lived, got married and continued with her life as Christine.  Today I can choose to be a different sort of woman. In fact, I have no choice but to be. And from Geraldine Ferraro I learned about some of my possibilities for doing that.