Last Monday I drove two and a half hours to New Jersey for a dentist appointment and a mammogram. At the imagining center the tech expressed surprise I would go so out of my way for the exam.
On the other hand, that doctor, my dentist and my dermatologist, all who are in New Jersey, are not surprised I’m still going to them even though I moved away fifteen and a half years ago. They have many patients that make the trip back to see them. I imagine these other patients return for the same reasons I do. These doctors treat me with respect and not like an old lady who doesn’t have the sense, hearing or wits to come in out of the rain, much less intelligently answer questions at a visit.
Being an older woman isn’t the first time I’ve dealt with discrimination. My first go around was as in the work force during the seventies.
I was a new lawyer in a small law firm in Manhattan and the only female. It was a young office. Most of the associates were my age, my late twenties, and every partner was in his forties. They were from all appearances a warm and friendly group who took pride in being caring, forthright and good employers at least that’s what the firm’s credo was and I bought into it 100%.
Therefore when I was assigned cases that seemed so easy I could have handled them before I went to law school, I did my best to see nuances even though there were none.
When my hours were criticized for being too low and not up to expectations, unable to figure out how to put more time into these very basic cases, I blamed myself. It had to be me.
I could see the guys my age all succeeding even when it seemed, when I was covering for them when they were on vacation, that they hadn’t responded to urgent requests from clients and adversaries and had missed court dates, I still assumed, it had to be my fault. I was doing something wrong.
Even when I returned from lunch one day, by myself, often the case since many of the associates expressed concern that it would look inappropriate to be lunching alone with me, a single woman, to find that all of the partners were out celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. Although I was hurt that I hadn’t been included since I was Irish too, I figured it was my problem.
I wasn’t invited because the private club where these men were having their celebratory lunch did not allow women in the main dining room. They did have a ladies dining room, a small flowered wallpaper spot on the floor above. But we females were excluded from eating with the men. It was hard to make that incident of being excluded my fault, but I did.
For the next fifteen years, I beat myself up for not being as talented a lawyer as I thought I was when I first got out of law school. I figured I just wasn’t meant for the law.
Ultimately, after raising my children, I returned to practice law. But it was a different time, the nineties, and a different place, the state’s Attorney General’s office, where women were in the majority. It was only then that I realized it hadn’t been my fault. I was a good lawyer who never had a chance. Only in hindsight did I come to recognize how much sexism went on, not to mention the sexual harassment that affected most of us back then.
So now when I go to a new doctor and am shouted at because I’m assumed to be deaf, or spoken to as if I were an idiot or might not be able to read, I remember why it’s worth it to drive the two hours to catch up with the doctors who I’ve known since I was in my thirties and forties and who continue to treat me as if I’m still competent. It’s worth every bit of the extra time it takes.
