WHEN THE PERSONAL WAS POLITICAL

I'm not sure how I feel about finishing this. Dr. Martin and her friends really smart. From the gender essentialism (we learn women are more thorough and detail-oriented, which is why they shouldn't be in study groups with men) to the pity poker that Dr. Martin is sure she's winning against modern women doctors (because we have it so easy), everything in this book rankles me.

Maybe it's that I read Dr. Martin's “poor me” stories on the walk to and from my 30 hour shifts, because that's the only time during my 80 hour weeks that I have time to read and that makes it hard for me to feel bad for her 60 hour work weeks as a med student (I worked up to 120 one memorable week during my third year, and averaged over 90) and her “We only got summers off” (nowadays, medical school and residencies are competitive enough that the “summers off” end up being research time.) I scoff at her “dilemmas” such as whether to take her bra off when she sleeps on call (I have nights where taking my SHOES off seems like a bad idea.) But what really bothers me the most is the trivial work choices that she and her friends face. All of them work part time, most in private practice. Many have taken years off (a luxury the licensing boards in most states now frowns upon) and they complain about only having a month paid maternity leave plus 2 unpaid months. It's really hard to feel sorry for a women who states that she first learned “that I couldn't have it all,” when she had to move to SoCal, to marry a rich dentist, and where she rapidly joined an affluent private practice. Poor thing.

Over and over again, I think that far from being exemplars of female physicians, these women would be eaten alive in today's training world. And don't even get me started on her chapters on what clothes to wear in the hospital, her trivialization of reproductive health debates, or the easy way that the “study group” abandons the “politically correct” movement