[From Biological Science: Molecules to Man, p. 701]

28-2 GROUP STRUCTURE IS SOMETIMES BASED ON SEXUAL DIFFERENCES

How does a society divide its work among specialists? The labor of a group may be divided according to sex. In your family, for example, your mother is largely responsible for raising children, preparing food, and cleaning the home. Your father has different responsibilities. He provides food and shelter for the family, and in times of crisis he provides protection as well. Of course, both parents share some of the labors. Both may take part in the education of the children, the play activities of the family, and many of the chores necessary to the life of the family. But a basic difference remains. There are two different family roles, and each is associated with a particular sex.

STATEMENT OF DR. ESTELLE R. RAMEY, DEPARTMENT OF PHYSIOLOGY AND BIOPHYSICS, SCHOOL OF MEDICINE, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Dr. RAMEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I am really representing a different kind of problem from the one that you have received such excellent testimony on this morning. I appreciate the opportunity to present this, because in some respects I believe that it is more difficult to deal with at a legislative level, and I have been encouraged by the testimony this morning to feel that perhaps I may not be alive to see it-the efforts of your committee and the legislation under consideration, and the women who are here today, with their male colleagues, may perhaps have made enough of a change that the publishers of scientific textbooks at graduate level may have gotten the message also.

I would like to present to the committee this morning, in a rather informal format, the situation as it exists at the present time with respect, primarily, to medical textbooks.

I think that it is appropriate to point out that we lay behind virtu ally every industrialized country in the world with respect to the percentage of our women in medicine, dentistry, law, and other professional areas.

Engineering, for example, women are virtually nonexistent in that field. I ask, rhetorically, the question why are American women, apparently, less ambitious than their British, French, Swiss, German, or Swedish counterparts? In part the answer may lie in the way in which this country denigrates women in books, television, and magazines.

As the president of the Association of Women in Science, I have been concerned with the state of science textbooks as regards their attitudes toward all females, and I am including with this letter to you some copies of the text and photographs, which are not very good unfortunately, as they appeared in a recent medical anatomy textbook intended to "liven up a dull subject for male medical students."

This book has since been withdrawn for extensive revision by the publishers as a result of a major effort by my organization. I would like to insert here a few of the surrounding details of this matter.

Despite the fact that you have heard this morning that society appears to be changing its attitude, at least sufficiently to force book publishers at the lower level of education to change their textbooks, at the end of 1972 this anatomy textbook was published and issued for use by all freshman medical students in the country.

It is a basic anatomy textbook. The book was displayed with a great deal of fanfare at the biggest scientific meeting in the country, the Federation of Biology and Medicine in Atlantic City, and it met with a raucous reception, which is about the best way I can describe it.

This was followed by the adoption of the book by a very large number of anatomy departments in this country. My organization, which consists largely of women in the medical sciences in every medical school in the country, we have a membership of about 1,500, we contacted the publisher and indicated that we found the book unacceptable.

The book publishers responded with a comment, which indicated that they were astonished that we would like to put ourselves in the position of book burners, because they felt that everyone had a right to publish the kinds of materials that might sell.

We persisted in this, and the book was finally withdrawn for revision. Nevertheless, the bookstores in all medical schools throughout the country, even under protest from medical students and women on the staff, continued to sell those books as long as any copies of it remained, so we could do very little about that.

Now, here are some quotes from the book. The pictures that they used to illustrate topographical anatomy were nothing less than Playboy type centerfold poses-I am sorry that the Xerox machine did not quite pick this up which illustrated not professional anatomical features, but merely the adolescent fantasies of the authors.

I am not a book burner, and anyone who wants to buy Playboy or Penthouse may do so. However, there was no choice in this matter. women medical students as well as men would have had to have used the book, and in some cases were forced to use the book.

The problem with those photographs, incidentally, is what the younger generation calls a "put on" because it is impossible to teach topographical anatomy by using pictures of very well fleshed out young women, because the whole purpose of teaching topographical anatomy is to describe muscle distribution.

No one selects young women for pictures of this kind who have very obvious muscle distribution, she has a very nice layer of adipose tissue which camouflages muscle distribution, and that is why she is a model for this kind of picture. It was useless from that point of view.

The authors maintained that, and they so indicated in the preface to the book, they felt that the young man in a class deserved a little lightening up of the subject. I may say, incidentally, that there was not a single photograph of an undraped male despite the fact that we have now about 13 percent of the class who are women. Apparently, they did not feel that they needed to liven up the classes of the women. The textbook was far more offensive than the photographs. I have quotes here, such phrases as: "the curse of estrogens which urges a woman to ensnare a man."

Mr. HAWKINS. Dr. Ramey, we have a problem with a full committee meeting at the same time, and we would like to declare a 5-minute recess, if I may interrupt your testimony, so that Mrs. Mink and I may go down and make the quorum, and return as soon as possible. It should not be longer than 5 minutes.

The committee is in recess for 5 minutes.

[The committee recessed for 5 minutes at this point.] Mr. HAWKINS. The subcommittee will come to order.

Dr. Ramey may proceed with her testimony.

Dr. RAMEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I would like to continue from a few of the major offenders in this regard, which are gynecology textbooks, which present problems for many, many women in this country, because of the programing that occurs with the doctors who will treat only women.

For example, if you would read a sentence of this kind in a professional textbook, and I will quote now:

If you think that once you have seen the backside of one female, you have seen them all, then you haven't sat in a sidewalk cafe in Italy where girl watching is a cultivated art. Your authors, whose zeal in this regard never flags, refer you to figures III-50 and 53 as proof that female backs can keep an interest in anatomy alive.

This kind of so-called humor permeates a surprising number of medical books, perhaps not as blatant as this. Even more than that, many medical textbooks curiously use the word "specimen" in referring to women patients.

One quote here is:

The student will see the ordinary specimen every day. Only on rare occasions will the attractive well turned specimen appear before him for consultation.

They have grown to regret that they cannot provide the addresses of the younger ladies who grace our pages. Our wives burned our little address books at our last barbecue get-together."

Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is at the highest reaches of American education.

Now, there are some quote from gynecology textbooks which are more subtle, but just as damaging. Wilson's textbook published in 1971 writes:

The traits that compose the core of the female personality are feminine narcissism, masochism and passivity.

Presumably, of course, this is from Freud; he has taken it out of the whole cloth here.

Now, this is the way that the doctor is advised, essentially, to see his women patients, and this is a doctor who will see only women patients.

Now, Novak and others in a text published in 1970 gives advice to young doctors on the advice that they should give in dealing with women's sexual problems, and I quote:

The frequency of intercourse depends entirely upon the male sex drive.... The bride should be advised to allow her husband's sex drive to set their pace, and she should attempt to gear hers satisfactorily to his.

This is, obviously, I think, designed to-perhaps not consciously, but certainly unconsciously this kind of attitude toward young women seeking advice from the doctor will make those young women feel either guilty or abnormal, if they don't happen to follow that kind of advice, or feel that they cannot.

Dr. Scott's text now gives the young doctor the ultimate justification of anything that he may choose to do with his women patients. He

writes:

If like all human beings, he (the gynecologist) is made in the image of the Almighty, and if he is kind, then his kindness and concern for his patient may provide her with a glimpse of God's image.

I would suggest that many physicians take this quite seriously, and quite literally.

We then go on to the biology texts used by high school or college students, now remember that these are the students who will be applying to the medical schools. In many school districts, for example, and I have included in my testimony here a letter from a group of women biology teachers in the Rochester, N.Y., school system, protesting a book called "Biological Science: Molecules to Man."

Some of the book is good, as far as the science is concerned, but in every section devoted to sex roles, the effect of hormones on behavior, they are almost vicious, in my estimation, in the way that women are denigrated.

For example, this is one of the milder ones. They have a section on group structure based on sexual differences. The authors then start out by saying:

There are two different family roles and each is confined to a particular sex. The male has looser ties with the children, and anatomically he is better fitted to enter into the competitive activities of providing food and shelter.

Other sections of the book denigrate female intellectual abilities and laud her "mothering" instincts. I don't believe that "mothering" and intellectual ability are mutually exclusive.

Books of this kind are used by students who are trying to get into medical school, and they work very hard to memorize the books and do well. Some of this message gets across.

Now, I would like to complete my testimony by referring you to a report, which was in part described in the New York Times last week, and it proves the success of our ability to destroy our young women's inner confidence. It is a very prestigious group that did this work on 21,000 college students in the junior and senior level.

The group was the American Medical Colleges, the Graduate Record Examinations, and the Law School Admissions Council, and their conclusion is, and I quote from their report: "Women are society's loss." And 44.6 percent of the men, and these are men and women about to graduate from college, and only 29.4 percent of the women planned to go to professional and graduate schools even though the women had better college records than men.

As many men with only C-plus or lower grade averages planned to pursue doctorates as women with B-plus or A averages. The great tragedy to me here is that one-third of the women with B-plus or A averages in any area, who are going to pursue doctorates, have decided to pursue them in the field of education to get degrees for an area in which there are no jobs, and no one is stopping them, apparently, from going into this area.

They are encouraged to go into these areas. I may say, incidentally, that the report also indicates that family and peer group pressure on women tends to push them in the direction of so-called appropriate jobs for women, which means underpaid, and low status.

We are now spending, it has been estimated, $15 billion a year of this Nation's wealth to keep 2 million women in college, but we have yet to be shown why we are doing this, and what this country wants to do with them once this great investment has been made.

Frankly, I don't know. I think that the passage of this bill, H.R. 208, is very important for many reasons, but I don't know exactly how