- Collection:
- Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women's Movement Archives
- Title:
- Rooks talks about the effect her pro-choice activism had on her professional life (5:09)
- Creator:
- Rooks, Judith
- Contributor to Resource:
- Paulk, Janet, 1932-
- Publisher:
- Atlanta, Ga. : Georgia State University Library
- Date of Original:
- 2004-04-26
- Subject:
- Feminism
Social movements
Women's studies - Location:
- United States, Georgia, Fulton County, 33.79025, -84.46702
United States, Georgia, Fulton County, Atlanta, 33.749, -84.38798 - Medium:
- audiocassettes
- Type:
- Sound
- Format:
- audio/mpeg
- Description:
- Judith Rooks was born in Spokane, Washington in 1941. Her father was a surgeon in the army reserves during WWII, and her mother was a nurse. She attended the University of Washington where she received a B.S. in nursing in 1963. Rooks married after graduation and then moved to Washington, D.C. where, in 1964, she began working as a nurse at the Clinical Center (part of the National Institute of Health). While in D.C. her husband was sent to Vietnam and during his absence Rooks pursued her graduate degree in nursing at the Catholic University of America. During the late 1960s, after moving back to the west coast, Rooks worked on the weekends at San Francisco's Haight Ashbury Free Medical Center. The couple moved to Atlanta when Rook's husband took a job at Emory University Hospital. Once in Atlanta, Rooks became head of a Georgia Citizens for Hospital abortions, an organization which fought to get the Georgia abortion laws changed. In addition to her activism, Rooks also worked for the CDC (Center for Disease Control) as an epidemiologist in the Family Planning Evaluation Division where she uncovered revealing statistics regarding the disparity between black and white women who were allowed to have "legal abortions" prior to the change in the state laws. This research was used in the Doe v Bolton case which challenged Georgia's abortion laws. She has continued to work as an epidemiologist for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and as the Principal Investigator for the National Birth Center Study at Columbia University. Rooks authored numerous publications about family planning, and women's health, as well as being an expert in the field of midwifery. She has also been the recipient of numerous honorary awards including the Martha May Eliot Award for exceptional service to mothers and children, in 1993; the Hattie Hemschemeyer Award for continuous contributions to nurse-midwifery and maternal and child healthcare, in 1998; and the National Perinatal Associations' National Award for Outstanding Contribution to Maternal and Child Health in 1999.
Rooks describes her childhood during WWII. The daughter of a doctor and a nurse, she believed that aside from teaching, nursing was the only occupation a woman could pursue. Graduating from the University of Washington in 1963, Rooks married in 1964, and went on to earn a graduate degree in nursing at Catholic University of America. She describes her early professional experiences, and says that her interest in reproductive rights began when, teaching at San Jose State University, she assigned students to research the effects of illegal abortions on Mexican agricultural workers. Rooks says that she became politically involved with reproductive rights through the Georgia Citizens for Hospital Abortion. She discusses the abortion laws and their realities in Georgia, especially for poor women, who made up the majority of those seeking illegal abortions, and goes on to describe her experiences in getting support for legislation that would change the existing laws. She describes her committee's failed attempts to get the new legislation passed, after which, she says, she held a press conference on the steps of the Capitol and declared, because the Georgia legislature has turned its back on the health needs of Georgia women, my committee will establish a counseling center to provide information and arrange legal abortions in Washington, D.C. or New York for Georgia women who could not access necessary health services in Georgia. Rooks goes on to describe the committee's efforts to assist women in getting safe abortions. She believes that it was her pro-choice activism that resulted in her being turned down for a job in the school of nursing at Georgia State University, and she recounts her aborted contract signing to illustrate this. Rooks went on to work at the CDC where, in her research into the epidemiology of family planning, she began gathering statistics on legal and illegal abortions. She talks about the Georgia Citizens for Hospital Abortion committee's decision to bring a suit to challenge the abortion law on the books as unconstitutional, and describes in detail the work that went in to the Doe v Bolton case, and the people involved, including Margie Pitts Hames who argued the case in the Supreme Court. Rooks talks about her book, Midwifery and Childbirth in America, and goes on to discuss the history of midwifery in the United States. She talks about her move to the Pacific Northwest with her second husband, and about the work she has undertaken since then, both nationally and internationally. She finishes by describing what she considers the most important accomplishments of the Women's Movement: "My life would be totally different without it. The freedom of contraception, the freedom of abortion, the ability to have informed education and consent for your health care. The whole world is changing because of the strengths of women."
Transcript of this excerpt: JR: I had, however, interviewed with people in the school of nursing at Emory [University] and people in the school of nursing at Georgia State [University]. And I had been offered jobs at both places because I had this master's degree and I had two years of very successful experience as a nursing teacher at a university in California. So, but, I thought I would -- You know, my husband was working for OEO and we were in this city with so many poor people, and I thought it would be more interesting to work at Georgia State than at Emory because Emory had this sort of elite group of students. And I thought it would be more important to work with a more middle-class group of people. So I had accepted a position at Georgia State and I had already been told what course I was going to teach and, you know, had met the person who was going to be my office mate, and had seen the room, and had done that. But I needed to come back and sign the papers, and so I had an appointment to come back on a certain day that happened to be the week after this press conference on the steps of the Georgia legislature. JP: And that was the spring of '70? JR: Yeah. And so the chairman of the Nursing Department was going to take me to the vice president's office to have an interview, and then we were going to go out to lunch and then we were going to come back to the president and sign my contract. And so, we went to the vice president's office, and I don't remember his name but I believe that he was -- had been a coach. And he was extremely conservative and, of course, I had been in the newspaper that week as chairman of Georgia Citizens for Hospital Abortion. JR: I knew that there was a good chance that he knew that I was active in the anti-abortion [sic] movement and this was, you know, early 1970 which was the height of the sort of cultural revolution that we think of as "The Sixties" -- most of which actually happened in the '70s -- and he was a very conservative man. So, we talked about my experiences in nursing and my education and my experiences teaching nursing in California and he asked me what I had done in Georgia since we moved here. And I told him that I was chairman of Georgia Citizens for Hospital Abortion, and he asked me about that. And, you know, I said, "Well, that this was a -- I was interested in it, in particular, because of health problems and that as a nursing teacher in California, I had encountered the health problems of poor women who were hurt or killed by illegal abortions and put it in the context of a citizen doing what citizens in this country are supposed to do, which is to improve the laws through the legal means of the legislature. And so, when the head of the -- the chairman of the Nursing Department and I left, and she said, "Well, we're going to go back to my office and get my purse and, then, we're going to lunch and then we have this appointment with the president." When we got back to her office to get her purse, the phone was ringing and it was the vice president's office calling to tell her that he wanted to see her. And so she said, would I stay there and she would be right back. Well, she never came back. I stayed sitting in her office for 45 minutes, and finally the phone rang and she told her secretary, without talking to me, that the afternoon appointment was cancelled and she would call me. So I knew that I was not going to have a job at Georgia State, and I was unhappily married and I wanted -- I needed to have a job. I felt like I was a professional woman and I needed to have this job that would pay a decent salary. And so I was extremely distraught by the -- I had already said "no" to Emory; it was already late in the season. I knew that I couldn't leave my husband until I had a job. I didn't want to go back to nursing practice. I wanted to teach. And I could see that I wasn't going to have this job. There were only two university nursing programs in Atlanta. JP: Georgia State did not say that was the reason? JR: They didn't say anything. JP: OK. JR: Just the appointment was cancelled and she would call me. But I knew. - Metadata URL:
- http://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/coles/id/2036
- IIIF manifest:
- https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/iiif/2/coles:2036/manifest.json
- Language:
- eng
- Additional Rights Information:
- Copyright to this item is owned by Georgia State University Library. Georgia State University Library has made this item available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
- Extent:
- 79 pages (three audio cassettes)
- Original Collection:
- Georgia Women's Movement Project Collection
Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women's Movement Archives - Holding Institution:
- Georgia State University. Special Collections
- Rights:
-
