Yeah to Regina Lockyer!  Now if we could only clone you, and have one of you
in every WIC office, one in every county hospital......

I've posted before about my experiences as a WIC mom in 1980/81 -- I was
totally amazed at how shabbily I was treated when people thought I was poor.
Still white, still in graduate school, still wearing the same clothes and
driving the same car, but pull out those WIC coupons and I became a
completely different person, in the eyes of the store clerks.  Someone they
could be rude to, could sneer at, could accuse of trying to get around the
program guidelines (by buying chocolate milk, which *was* allowed).  Like
why do they care?  Does it make them feel better to be rude and
condescending?  Of course, the WIC people way back then also made me sit
through little film strips about the four food groups at the same time I was
taking graduate classes in nutrition at the university.  But hey, if you're
poor you MUST be stupid, right?  And I've had my own ob/gyn treat me like an
idiot until I gently reminded him that I had a Ph.D., that I was "Dr.
Dettwyler" to him, and that he'd better treat me as a partner in my own
health care.  But why should women have to do this?  And why should the
doctor only be polite and respectful to women he considers *close-to-being
peers*?  Don't get me going.....

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Katherine A. Dettwyler, Ph.D.                         email: [log in to unmask]
Anthropology Department                               phone: (409) 845-5256
Texas A&M University                                    fax: (409) 845-4070
College Station, TX  77843-4352