Liza Blue

It’s a mystery how all my grade school yearbooks remained intact over the years, surviving several moves and clutter purges, but there I am in senior kindergarten looking so very confident in the front row.  The class was asked the typical question of “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  There was a smattering of “a nurse, a veterinarian, living on a farm with a horse.”  I find my response very prescient: 

“I guess I’ll be a mother.” 

Even at the tender age of six, I think I was already feeling the societal pressure for marriage and motherhood gnawing at my confidence, to meekly acquiesce to the only models that were presented to us girls in the 1950s.  As I read my response again, I sense the resignation in the words “I guess,”  as if my future had already been mapped out for me. 

Thank God for the women’s movement in the mid-sixties.  I was too young to be directly involved, or even know about such strides as The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan or the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibited discrimination based on gender, but I was the lucky beneficiary of all these efforts.  Somehow it seeped down to me that there were more options for women than motherhood.  The world opened up.  I went to medical school and successfully combined the careers of physician and mother.