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Not Just Women’s Work

In 1982, a landmark case was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. It involved Joe Hogan, a registered nurse and qualified applicant, who was turned down by the Mississippi University for Women for entrance into their baccalaureate program for nursing on the basis of gender.

A lower court had ruled against Hogan stating the “maintenance of MUW as a single-sex school bears a rational relationship to the State’s legitimate interest ‘in providing the greatest practical range of educational opportunities for its female student population.’” This decision was then overturned in the court of appeals which held that MUW’s admission policy was unconstitutional because it discriminated on the basis of gender. The university appealed to the US Supreme Court which decided to hear the case.

In a 5 to 4 vote, the Court ruled in favor of Hogan. In writing for the Court, Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman Supreme Court Justice, noted that because the university discriminated against applicants based on gender, it fell under the scrutiny of the Fourteenth Amendment and thus had to show an “exceedingly persuasive justification for it.” In the Court’s view, the state failed to prove that justification. Instead, the university’s admissions policy tended to “perpetuate the stereotyped view of nursing as an exclusively woman’s job.”

MUW v. Hogan has become an important precedent for cases involving single-sex educational institutions. Sandra Day O’Connor was an important voice for the Court during this case. She is also the fifth cousin (once removed) of my eldest son who serves as a nurse in Colorado.

Michael Ondrasik and Home Video Studio specialize in the preservation of family memories through the digitalization of film, videotapes, audio recordings, photos, negatives and slides. For more information, call 352-735-8550 or visit our website. And please watch our TEDxEustis Talk on YouTube at https://youtu.be/uYlTTHp_CO8.

The Watermelon Girl

The medical field has come a long way since leeches and bloodletting were a common technique to treat certain ills of the body. We should be grateful that we live in a time that is, relatively speaking, more advanced in prescribing cures that will help us to heal whatever ails us. But even in the recent past, it was not always so.

One of our young ancestors, my wife’s first cousin, Donna Marie Del Colliano, found herself in the national spotlight at a tender age. She had been diagnosed with nephrosis (a kidney disease) about a year previously. When her doctors determined that watermelon juice might help her condition, her parents tried to acquire the fruit, but in New Jersey it proved to be unavailable at the time. They made a public appeal and a local politician was able to locate a supply in Florida which he had flown to Jersey.

By now, the eyes of the country were watching the progress of “the Watermelon Girl” and, for a time, she appeared to be improving. Unfortunately, in September of 1953 she was found in a coma. Though she was put into an oxygen tent, her condition continued to decline and she died a few hours later from nephrosis and anemia. She was five years old.

Michael Ondrasik and Home Video Studio specialize in the preservation of family memories through the digitalization of film, videotapes, audio recordings, photos, negatives, and slides. For more information, call 352-735-8550 or visit our website. And please watch our TEDxEustis Talk on YouTube at https://youtu.be/uYlTTHp_CO8.