07/01/2024
I’m going to end this pride month with an LGBTQ story that focuses on a topic near & dear to me, maternal & infant health. It was written by a friend of mine.
“Happy Pride!
Dr. Sara Josephine Baker was an American physician working in New York City in the early 1900s. .My own grandmother, born in 1918, was still a year away from being born when Baker discovered that infants were dying at alarming rates — higher mortalities than World War 1 soldiers! Her own family had balked when she wanted to become a doctor, but that didn't stop Baker from not only becoming a physician, but even starting the first-ever department related to infant/mother health in NYC.
Typically dressing in men’s tailored suits, Baker encountered many male colleagues who didn’t realize she was a woman and would disparage women physicians to her in conversation. From accounts I’ve read, she seemed to laugh this off and just go on her way with her work, probably realizing she was better off if they thought she was a man anyway.
After changing careers in mid-life and going from newsrooms to hospital delivery rooms more than 100 years after Baker's career, I had a first-hand look at the hierarchal medical system that makes accomplishments like Baker's even more impressive.
One of my first nursing preceptors warned me of which doctors to watch out for; which ones were rude to nurses; which ones would ask the most questions about the patient and expect all the answers; who would gripe if called at night etc. One in particular was a doddering old man who apparently would accost new nurses and quiz them on the spot, making them feel stupid if they couldn’t answer his off-the-wall questions about medical topics while standing in the hallway. He’d been known to bring new nurse graduates to tears apparently. I honestly think he thought he was doing a great service by making sure the squeaky-new graduates were on their toes, but his delivery scared the wits out of some. My age protected me from some of this sort of harassing behavior I'm sure, since my age would point to many years of nursing experience, not just the actual 15 minutes I'd done it.
But Baker didn't let intimidating encounters, society, family pressure or the outright negative talk from male doctors stop her. She became one of our nation’s first leaders in public health, leading departments in education about basic hygiene, midwife training, smallpox eradication, parenting classes, and she helped in identifying the patient known as “Typhoid Mary,” all leading to life-saving changes in how things were done By the time Baker retired in 1933, NYC had the lowest infant mortality rate of all U.S. cities, thanks in large part to her work. Basic hand-washing was a cornerstone and as we all know, it's something we are still trying to teach in the Post-Covid age.
Baker lived with her life partner writer Ida Wylie on a farm, from 1920 until her death in 1945, which sounds like an idyllic ending to me. (Wylie’s book, the 1942’s “Keeper of the Flame,” was also turned into a film and starred Katherine Hepburn, but that's another story.)
Meanwhile, Baker and Wylie participated in the Heterodoxy Club, women’s “radical discussion group,” in which about 25 percent of the 100 women were le***an or bisexual. They bantered ideas of feminism and other topics and if that's not a great example of women supporting each other, I don't know what is. I would LOVE a group like that!
Baker taught us not only tenacity, support for other women, but also showed the way of how to be yourself and just ignore the haters. Sometimes, that's just the best thing to do. Hats off to all those working in women and infant health!
Happy Pride!”
