Endeavoring to Do Better

1970s Carleton Spotlight

Dr. Jane Hodgson

Campus Health Care

The Women’s Caucus and a famous alum get it done

Carleton offered co-ed housing for the first time in the winter of 1970, and the following year the school officially abandoned “intervisitation” (a term long employed by students as a euphemism for conjugal visits). Now students fighting for gender equity ramped up their efforts toward obtaining reproductive health care on campus.Minnesota’s abortion laws, in place since 1873, were some of the most restrictive in the nation. An estimated 7,000 women left the state in 1971 to end their pregnancies. The Carletonian described the number of calls to a local social service agency that year “staggering” for a town the size of Northfield: 125 people received referrals for unwanted pregnancy and 100 for abortions.But the administration at Carleton was still framing contraception as a moral issue. “We have something even better than the pill, and that’s abstinence,” Dean Jean Phillips told the Carletonian in 1969, the same year she was given a petition with 300 signatures requesting that the health center “include those services necessary to prevent Carleton women from becoming pregnant.” Though Phillips told the Carletonian this was “a kind of solution which deserves more thought,” nothing came of it. So in the fall of 1970 students put together a program of speakers from the Mayo Clinic and Planned Parenthood and met with PP’s community education director about bringing a gynecologist to campus once a week. According to the Carletonian, the students’ resulting proposal was rejected “because of the financial and political problems involved.” The following spring, they tried again. They planned to bring birth control pills directly to campus through a program on human sexuality, but the Mayo Clinic would have had to send a gynecologist to distribute them and it refused.As school resumed in fall of 1971, students now operating under the banner of the Women’s Caucus regrouped and came at the issue again in a more organized fashion. Their first action was to survey the women students about their position on health care. Two-thirds responded, and the results showed that fully 90 percent wanted a school gynecologist, 58 percent said they needed access to birth control, and 36 percent said they’d avoided addressing gynecological problems because they didn’t want to see Dr. J. Willard Hanson, who’d been at the health service for almost 30 years. An alumna would come to their aid. After decades as a doctor who had worked to improve the lives of women all over the world, Minnesota obstetrician Dr. Jane Hodgson (’34) was convinced by her work that abortion should be “a humane medical service, not a felony.” The previous year she had risked everything, intentionally breaking the state abortion law to become the only doctor ever prosecuted for performing an abortion in a hospital. Hodgson’s test case was that of a young married mother of three in St. Paul who had been exposed to rubella, which can cause serious birth defects. Hodgson was convicted and sentenced to 30 days in jail and a year of probation and prohibited from practicing medicine in Minnesota.“I was beginning to feel like a criminal anyway,” she told the New York Times. “I’ve performed very few of the so-called ‘legal’ abortions, but they aren’t the ones that bother me. It’s the ones I’ve refused to perform that haunt me.”During her appeal, between March 1971 and February 1972, Hodgson gave three talks at Carleton and met with the Women’s Caucus, whose minutes of October 1971 say she promised that if the school would arrange for a gynecologist to practice on campus, she would donate an examining table. A few weeks later, the Social Policy committee finally approved the caucus’s proposal for a part-time gynecologist, agreeing to a trial period from January to June 1972. Next up was the College Council. A graduate described the CC meeting for the Carletonian a few years later: “President Howard Swearer was extremely opposed to such an innovation. (He even sent a drunk but articulate gynecologist to collar me at a retreat to assert for an hour and a half that college-age women did not did not need such services.) At least six Caucus members presented him with a petition and spent 30 minutes giving him their arguments. It was scheduled for committee. The Caucus assigned a member to speak to every member of every committee which would discuss the issue. When the proposal finally came to the College Council, the gallery was filled with students. If the Caucus had merely dropped a proposal into the Governance system, it would have certainly been rejected.”The Women’s Caucus came to the meeting armed with careful responses to eight common objections to the proposal, from financial considerations to “condoning pre-marital sex.” As the Carletonian reported, “Again and again, [they] emphasized medicine and health as their chief concerns.” President Swearer worried the college would be taking on the outdated role of in loco parentis, but was reminded that medical care was as important as food and shelter and that gynecological care encompassed much more than birth control. The council approved the proposal on November 2, 1971, with “two low-pitched voices dissenting.” That winter, Carleton got its first part-time gynecologist: Dr. Elizabeth Mussey, a Carleton classmate of Hodgson’s, who brought her own supplies; Hodgson donated tables and lamps. Patients were billed $3 per exam, with additional charges for tests, which had to be sent to Rochester for analysis. Mussey was succeeded in the fall of 1973 by Dr. Elizabeth Jerome, a pioneer in adolescent health who had been an expert witness for the defense in Hodgson’s trial. After a month on the job, she announced that “Carleton women know no more about sex today than did their counterparts 20 years ago. They know the mechanics, the biology, but they have little real understanding of the emotions involved, of themselves.” Jerome stayed through the fall of 1974, but the students’ hard-won gynecology program didn’t last long after that. Services were provided briefly by a school nurse and medical school interns, but soon they were absorbed into the general health service. Then in the spring of 1975, doctor visits moved off campus, to a twice-weekly clinic held at a new joint Carleton-St. Olaf health service at Northfield Hospital. The Carleton’s Women Caucus continued to administer the Abortion Loan Fund and sponsor discussions as well as art festivals, speakers, and films. Dr. Jerome and Dr. Hodgson, whose conviction was overturned by Roe v. Wade, both received honorary degrees from Carleton. But not everyone appreciated what Hodgson had done for women. When she returned to Carleton to receive the honor at her 50th reunion, some of her classmates wouldn’t speak to her. “Some of these people I hadn’t seen since college, and I’d rush forward to greet them and they’d turn away.”

1973

Dr. Elizabeth Mussey