• January 19, 1976
• Vol. 5
• No. 2

Dr. Estelle Ramey Is a Woman Who Knows Her Places—Wife, Mother, Scientist, Activist

I was brought up to believe that all men's egos were extraordinarily fragile and that the worst thing a woman can do is threaten that ego by assertion," says Dr. Estelle Ramey.

So much for upbringing. A professor of physiology at Georgetown University and a prominent researcher in endocrinology, Dr. Ramey did not set out to make a career of devastating male psyches. (For one thing, she has been married for 34 years and is, to all appearances, a very feminine mother of two.) Still, she has become one of the medical-academic community's leading feminists, and if she has deflated any sexist egos in the process, she isn't apologizing.

"Now I know that females don't castrate men," she says. "Other men do. When a man lies awake at night, he isn't worrying about not being sexy to his wife. He is worried that some young turk at the office is taking over."

Dr. Ramey's own freedom to speak out so bluntly is enhanced by her tenure at Georgetown, where she teaches endocrinology to medical and dental students in addition to doing extensive research. Nonetheless, she is by no means a stranger to discrimination.

While teaching chemistry at Queens College in New York in 1938, she had met Jim Ramey, a young law student. They married in 1941, and when he took a job with the Tennessee Valley Authority, she applied at the University of Tennessee. She was told women teachers were not wanted. The war changed that attitude, and Dr. Ramey taught at the school, later moving to Chicago for graduate work and another position. She moved to Georgetown in 1956 when her husband became executive director of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy.

Until 1970 Estelle Ramey had been a subdued liberationist while researching such questions as why women live longer than men ("Women are biologic marvels"). Then Dr. Edgar Berman, a member of a Democratic Party advisory group and Sen. Hubert Humphrey's physician, declared that women were unfit to hold high public office because the "raging hormonal imbalances" brought on by the menstrual cycle and menopause made them unstable.

With both her professional and feminist passions aroused, Dr. Ramey took Dr. Berman on in a debate. "The first thing he said to me," she recalls, "was, 'I really love women.' I said, 'So did Henry the Eighth.' " The evening went rapidly downhill for Dr. Berman after that.

A year later, Dr. Ramey confronted another adversary: the publisher of an anatomy textbook illustrated with pin-up pictures of women suggestive more of plain brown wrappers than medical information. When Ramey, then president of the Association of Women in Science, suggested its members boycott the publisher's books, the offending text was revised.

In frequent lectures on college campuses and in magazine articles, Dr. Ramey has also blasted "the stereotype of a woman doctor as a horse-faced, flat-chested female in Supp-hose who sublimates her sex starvation in a passionate embrace of the New England Journal of Medicine."

But she is not averse to using sexist attitudes as a weapon. "If I'm facing a hostile audience of middle-aged men," she says, "I'll tell them I'm somebody's grandmother and it takes the fire out of their ire. How can you glare at a grandmother?"