by Nora Ephron
In any event, the extremist fringe of the self-help movement in no way invalidates the legitimate case women have against gynecologists. These doctors are undoubtedly blamed for a great deal that is not their fault; they are, after all, dealing in reproductive and sexual areas, two of the most sensitive and emotionally charged for women. Still, I have dozens of friends who have been mis-diagnosed, mis-medicated, mistreated and misinformed by them, and every week, it seems, I hear a new gynecological atrocity tale. A friend who asks specifically not to be sedated during childbirth is sedated. Another friend who has a simple infection is treated instead for gonorrhea, and develops a serious infection as a side effect of the penicillin. Another woman tells of going to see her doctor one month after he has delivered her first child, a deformed baby, born dead. His first question: “Why haven’t you been to see me in two years?” Beyond all this, there are the tales of pure insensitivity to psychological problems, impatience with questions, preachy puritanism particularly toward single women, and, for married women, little speeches on the need to reproduce. My usual reaction to these stories is to take a feminist line, blame it all on complicated sexism or simple misogyny. But what Ellen Frankfort has managed to do in Vaginal Politics—and what makes her book quite remarkable—is to broaden women’s health issues far beyond such narrow analyses. “The mystique of the doctor, profound as it is, is not the only negative feature of the present health system,” she writes. “Unfortunately, the women from the Los Angeles Self-Help Clinic … seemed to be focusing mainly on this aspect of the problem while ignoring the need for institutional change. Feminist politics cannot be divorced from other political realities, such as health care and safety.”
The problems women face with doctors stem not just from their own abysmal lack of knowledge about their bodies, and not just from female conditioning toward male authority figures. (The classic female dependency on the obstetrician, Frankfort notes, transfers at childbirth to dependency on the pediatrician, all this “in perfect mimicry of the dependency relationship of marital roles.”) They stem also from inequities in the health system and from the way doctors are educated. The brutalizing, impersonal training medical students receive prepares them perfectly to turn around and treat their patients in exactly the same way: as infants. Writes Frankfort: “We feel hesitant to question their procedures, their fees or their hours, and often we’re simply grateful that we’re able to see them at all, particularly if they’re well recommended.” My sister-in-law, who is pregnant, told me the other day that she was afraid to bother her gynecologist with questions for fear of “getting on his wrong side.” As Frankfort points out: “The fear that a patient will be punished unless he or she is totally submissive reveals a profound distrust of the people in control of our bodies.” (I have, I should point out, exactly the same fears about my lawyer, my accountant, and my maid. Generally speaking, none of us is terribly good at being an employer.)
Vaginal Politics covers a wide range of health subjects: the New York abortion scene, drugs, psychoanalysis, breast cancer, venereal disease, the law, the growth of the consumer health movement in America. At times, the tone is indignant to the point of heavy-handedness. Also, I caught several factual errors. But Frankfort has written with contagious energy and extraordinary vitality; without exaggeration, her book is among the most basic and important written about women’s issues, and I hope it will not be overlooked now that the more faddish women’s books have had their day.
The tendency in reviewing this book, of course, is to stress the more outlandish and radical aspects of the health movement, but Frankfort’s real strength lies in her painstaking accumulation of political incidents. There is the case of Shirley Wheeler, who had an abortion and was convicted for manslaughter under an 1868 Florida law. The condition of her probation: marry the man she lives with, or return to her parents in North Carolina. If she refused, if she, for example, lived instead with a woman, her parole would be rescinded and she would be sent to jail. There are the guidelines for sterilization proposed by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists: no woman can be sterilized unless her age multiplied by the number of children she has borne is 120 or more. Writes Frankfort: “The logic behind this sliding scale of reproductive output has it that in order to earn her right to not have children, a woman must first produce some.” For men, under the same guidelines, voluntary sterilization is available to anyone over twenty-one. Period. Another incident in the book, and one that is particularly compelling, is the case of Dr. Joseph Goldzieher, who is at the Southwest Foundation for Research and Education in San Antonio, Texas. Some years ago, Dr. Goldzieher got to wondering whether one reason birth-control pills prevent conception might simply be psychological, and he decided to run a test to see. There were 398 women, most of them Chicanos, coming to the clinic, and one fifth of them were given placebos instead of contraceptives. Within a year, six of the women, all mothers of at least three other children, had given birth. Writes Frankfort: “The ethics of a researcher who considers an unwanted child an unfortunate ‘side effect’ of an experimenter’s curiosity needs no further commentary. However, what should be pointed out … is that not only does Dr. Goldzieher work at a research institute where poor nonwhite women are selected for experimentation, but he is also a consultant to several drug companies. In fact, the experiment was sponsored by Syntex, a leading pill manufacturer.…”
And so the doctors work for the drug companies and prescribe accordingly, the hospitals take advantage of the poor, the laws are antiquated, it goes on and on. Knowing what your uterus looks like can’t hurt, I suppose, and knowing more about your body can only help, but it seems a shame that so much more energy is being directed into this sort of contemplation and so little into changing the political structure. There is a tendency throughout the movement to overindulge in confession, to elevate The Rap to a religious end in itself, to reach a point where self-knowledge dissolves into high-grade narcissism. I know that the pendulum often has to swing a few degrees in the wrong direction before righting itself, but it does get wearing sometimes waiting for the center to catch hold.
December, 1972
Bernice Gera, First Lady Umpire
Somewhere in the back of Bernice Gera’s closet, along with her face mask and chest protector and simple spiked shoes, is a plain blue man’s suit hanging in a plastic bag. The suit cost $29 off the rack, plus a few dollars for shortening the sleeves and pants legs, but if you ask Bernice Gera a question about that suit—where she bought it, for example, or whether she ever takes it out and looks it over—her eyes widen and then blink, hard, and she explains, very slowly so that you will not fail to understand, that she prefers not to think about the suit, or the shoes, or the shirt and tie she wore with it one summer night last year, when she umpired what was her first and last professional baseball game, a seven-inning event in Geneva, New York, in the New York–Pennsylvania Class A League.
It took four years for Bernice Gera to walk onto that ball field, four years of legal battles for the right to stand in the shadow of an “Enjoy Silver Floss Sauerkraut” sign while the crowd cheered and young girls waved sheets reading “Right On, Bernice!” and the manager of the Geneva Phillies welcomed her to the game. “On behalf of professional baseball,” he said, “we say good luck and God bless you in your chosen profession.” And the band played and the spotlights shone and all three networks recorded the event. Bernice Gera had become the first woman in the 133-year history of the sport to umpire a professional baseball game.
I should say, at this point, that I am utterly baffled as to why any woman would want to get into professional baseball, much less work as an umpire in it. Once I read an article in Fact magazine that claimed that men who were umpires secretly wanted to be mother figures; that level of idiotic analysis is, as far as I am concerned, about what the game and the profession deserve. But beyond that, I cannot understand any woman’s wanting to be the first woman to do anything. I read about those who do—t
here is one in today’s newspaper, a woman who is suing the State of Colorado for the right to work on a team digging a tunnel through the Rocky Mountains—and after I get through puzzling at the strange desires people have, awe sets in. I think of the ridicule and abuse that woman will undergo, of the loneliness she will suffer if she gets the job, of the role she will assume as a freak, of the smarmy and inevitable questions that will be raised about her heterosexuality, of the derision and smug satisfaction that will follow if she makes a mistake, or breaks down under pressure, or quits. It is a devastating burden and I could not take it, could not be a pioneer, a Symbol of Something Greater. Once I was the first woman to deposit $500 in a bank that was giving out toasters that day, and I found even that an uncomfortable responsibility. The point of all this, though, is Bernice Gera, and the point of Bernice Gera is that Bernice Gera failed to play out the role. In her first game, she made a mistake. And broke down under pressure. And couldn’t take it. And quit. Which was not the way it was supposed to happen: instead, she was supposed to have been tougher and stronger and better than any umpire in baseball and end up a grim stone bust in the Cooperstown Hall of Fame. Bernice Gera turned out to be only human, after all, which is not a luxury pioneers are allowed. At the time, I thought it was all hideously ironic and even a little funny; a few months later, I got to wondering what had really happened and what was happening to Mrs. Gera now, now that she had blown her modest deferred dream.
Bernice Gera lives in a three-room walk-up apartment in Queens. In it there is a candle shaped like a softball, an ashtray shaped like a mitt, a lighter shaped like a bat, a crocheted toaster cover shaped like a doll wearing a baseball cap, an arrangement of dried flowers containing a baseball, powder puffs, and a small statue of Mickey Mouse holding a bat. On the wall is a very large color photograph of Mrs. Gera in uniform holding a face mask, and a few feet away hangs a poem that reads: “Dear God, Last night I did pray/That You would let me in the game today./And if the guys yell and scream,/Please, God, tell them You’re the captain of the team.” All the available shelf space is crammed with trophies and plaques; there must be forty or fifty of them, some for bowling (she averages 165) but most for baseball, for her career on a women’s softball team in Detroit, and for her charity batting exhibitions against people like Roger Maris and Sid Gordon. “I can hit the long ball,” she says, and she can, some 350 feet. There is also a framed clipping of an old Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, a syndicated feature that has come a long way since the days when it printed items that were remotely unbelievable. “Believe It Or Not,” it reads, “a New York City housewife has won 300 large dolls for needy youngsters living at the children’s shelter of the Queensboro Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children by her skill at throwing a baseball at amusement parks.”
Mrs. Gera is a short, slightly chunky woman who wears white socks and loafers; her short blondish-brown hair is curled and lacquered. Around her neck is a gold charm decorated with a bat, mitt, and pearl baseball which she designed and had made up by a local jeweler. Her voice is flat and unanimated, unless, of course, she is talking about baseball: she can describe, exultantly, one of the happiest days of her life, when she had a tooth extracted and was able to stay home from work to see the Pirates win the World Series in 1960. Bernice Gera is, more than anything, a fan, an unabashed, adoring fan, and her obsession with baseball dates back to her childhood, when she played with her older brothers on a sandlot in the Pennsylvania mining town where she was raised. “I have loved, eaten, and lived baseball since I was eight years old,” she says. “Put yourself in my shoes. Say you loved baseball. If you love horses, you can be a jockey. If you love golf or swimming, look at Babe Didrikson and Gertrude Ederle. These are great people and they had an ability. I had it with baseball. What could I do? I couldn’t play. So you write letters, begging for a job, any job, and you keep this up for years and years. There had to be a way for me. So I decided to take up a trade. I decided to take up umpiring.”
In June, 1967, Mrs. Gera enrolled as a student at the National Sports Academy in West Palm Beach, Florida, a school run by an old-timer named Jim Finley for ballplayers and umpires. The Associated Press sent a reporter to cover Mrs. Gera’s education, and Finley said she was coming along just fine. “She had the habit of carrying on conversations with the players,” said Finley, “but we broke that by giving her push-ups.… I had expected a tomboy when she signed up, but Bernice is every bit a girl.” A few months after her graduation from the Academy, magna cum laude, Mrs. Gera commented good-naturedly on her experience there. “I didn’t have too much trouble,” she said. “The chest protector didn’t fit very well. Those things aren’t made for women. And the players tried to give me a hard time.” (Little jokes about Mrs. Gera’s chest protector were to become the leitmotiv of her saga.) Years passed before Mrs. Gera confessed that the school had actually been a nightmare. “It was a horrible, lonely experience,” she said. “They all thought there was something wrong with me.” At night, in the dormitory, the men threw beer cans and bottles at her bedroom door. On the field, the players hazed her, threw extra balls into the game during a play, spit tobacco juice on her shoes, cursed to try to shake her up. She would call a runner safe and he would snarl, “Bad call. I was out.” Said Mrs. Gera: “When you begin, you take an awful lot of abuse. They make you, to prepare you for the future. I think they overdid it with me. Tobacco juice. That was unnecessary. It all hinged on whether I could take it. I took it. But after, I’d go home and cry like a baby.”
A diploma in umpiring was worth nothing at all when it came to getting a job, and so in 1968 Mrs. Gera began the first of several lawsuits against professional baseball. Her lawyer, who served without fee, was a New York politician named Mario Biaggi, who called press conference after press conference to announce action after action. Finally, in 1969, Mrs. Gera was given a contract by the New York–Pennsylvania Class A League promising her $200 in wages, $300 in expenses, and five cents a mile for a month, beginning with a twilight double-header August 1. The sports pages were full of pictures of Mrs. Gera, thumbs up, victorious. But on July 31, the president of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues invalidated the contract by refusing to sign it. Mrs. Gera was heartbroken, but she confined her reaction to a string of sports metaphors: “I guess I just can’t get to first base.… It’s a strikeout but I will come up again. The game is not over.”
The lawsuit continued. There was a hearing at the New York State Human Rights Commission, where George Leisure, attorney for the baseball interests, said that Mrs. Gera was publicity mad and that furthermore she did not meet any of the physical requirements for being an umpire. Umpires, he said, should be five feet ten inches tall, and weigh 170 pounds. “Being of the male sex is a bona-fide qualification for being a professional umpire,” said Leisure. In November, 1970, the Human Rights Commission held that the National League discriminated not only against women but against men belonging to short ethnic groups and would have to “establish new physical standards which shall have a reasonable relation to the requirements of the duties of an umpire.” The League promptly appealed the decision, and the legal process dragged on.
Maury Allen of the New York Post went into the locker room of the New York Mets at one point during Mrs. Gera’s years in chancery and asked some of the ballplayers how they felt about her. He recorded, in response, a number of attempted witticisms about her chest protector, along with a predictable but nonetheless interesting series of antediluvian remarks. “I read the stories about her and she said that she expected people would call her a ‘dumb broad,’ ” said Jerry Koosman. “Hell, that’s the nicest thing people would call her. What do you think she’d hear when a batter hit a line drive off a pitcher’s cup?” Said Ron Swoboda: “She’d have fifty guys yelling at her in language she wouldn’t believe. If she heard those dirty words and didn’t react, then they would have to give her a hormone test.”
Bernice Gera waited almost two years f
or the State Court of Appeals to uphold the Human Rights Commission ruling; finally, in the spring of 1972, she once again signed a contract with the New York–Pennsylvania League. In late June, having allowed to reporters that she was “grateful to God and grateful to baseball,” she drove to Geneva, New York, for her début. There was a banquet Thursday night and she was cheered over roast chicken. She was ecstatic. “I was in baseball,” Mrs. Gera recalled. “I can’t tell you. I was on top of the world. And then, the bubble burst.”
On Friday, there was a meeting of the League umpires. “That meeting,” Mrs. Gera said. “It was like, if you had a group of people in a room and they just ignored you. How can I express it? They made it obvious they didn’t want me. How would you feel? You’re supposed to work your signals out with your partner. You’re a team. You have to know what he’s going to do. But my partner wouldn’t talk to me. I sat there for six hours. A lot of other things went on that I don’t want to discuss because I’m going to write about it someday. I should have realized if they fought me in court they weren’t going to welcome me, but I never thought they would do that to me. That was the only way they could get to me, through the other umpires. If they won’t work with you, you can’t make it.”