Welcome, Peter.
Part I
Mark Twain observed that there are “liars, damn liars, and statistics,” and while Twain is one of my favorite writers, sometimes it helps to believe in numbers. Perhaps that’s just the historian in me, since I also write history, but statistics—one in particular, that is—certainly came in handy when I was writing my first novel, Comeback Love.
By the time I sat down to write Comeback Love, I was up to my neck in numbers, because for several years I had been researching and writing a history of the Cold War. And one question kept nagging me. What was the greatest change that occurred in the United States during these years?
Which leads me to the 5.8 percent. That was the percentage of women in medical schools in the early 1960s. (Today, the percentage has climbed to approximately 50 percent.) I wanted to look at a woman from that bygone era, and explore how the changes impacting her also impacted the man she loved. That was the beginning of Gordon and Glenna.
For research, I had notes that I had made during the 1970s when I worked in a hospital. I had met a number of med students, men and women, and I’d heard plenty of stories, many of which I had the good sense to write down. One of the most revealing was of a male attending physician talking to a group of med students, only one of whom was a woman, and at one point the attending turned to the young woman and asked if she would bring him some coffee.
Of course, to examine the changes in women’s roles during the 1960s and 1970s, I could’ve looked at a variety of professions, but none offered easy access to an issue that remains as controversial today as it was then: abortion.
Peter returns Friday for Part II.
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His debut novel, Comeback Love, will be published by Atria Books on April 3, 2012.
Peter, Your statistics seem accurate. I graduated from a well-known medical school in 1960, and as memory serves me, we had five women in a class of 100 when our freshman year began.
ReplyDeleteBefore my retirement, I spent a decade as a professor at that same medical school, working with residents (doctors in specialty training). About 40% of them were female. My, how times have changed.
Yes indeed I've read different stats but the first big jump seems to come around by 1970
DeleteNice and helpful post... Actually I am searching about research paper on different blogs.
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