Is Rape a Crime? by Michelle Bowdler

Author:Michelle Bowdler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

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On the day I graduated from Harvard—hoping to embark on a career at the intersection of health care and social justice—I still worried that I was no match for other young professionals whose lives reflected a more linear trajectory than mine. So far, the jobs I’d applied for required more experience than I had, and I hadn’t received one call back.

A few hundred students processed to a small courtyard behind the school on a brilliant day in May. My entire family and several friends came early to sit up front since I had been chosen to give the commencement address. It was 1993, and the Clinton administration was working on developing a comprehensive national health care plan. Several professors had spent time teaching about what impact universal health care would have on our country if passed, some of them consulting with the White House on different models. I hoped to make a clear connection to health care as a basic human right and my father’s lessons to me as a young child that education was also a human right and great equalizer. Mary had heard me practice the speech several times, and Emmy had edited it. “You’re ready,” they’d both said after hearing the final draft.

“My father was the principal of a school on the west side of Chicago,” I began. He had cared passionately about the students he served and wanted their lives to be buoyed by a decent education and recognized the impact poverty had on their dreams, if they dreamed at all. He had taught me in the seven years I shared with him on this planet that everyone should have access to a decent education, economic opportunity, and health care—items that speak to basic dignity and fairness. And that we should stand up for values that championed fundamental rights and access to basic needs. Fifty years after his death, I still hear from his former students, who well up talking about his impact as a teacher and principal.

I finished my remarks and took my seat onstage next to the surgeon general of the United States, Joycelyn Elders, the keynote speaker. She leaned over and whispered, “Nice job,” but I was looking at my mother, who cried her way through the speech and was blowing kisses in my direction. After the ceremony, a favorite professor would introduce me to Dr. Jeanne J. Taylor, who ran one of the largest community health centers in Boston, and this introduction would lead to my first postgraduate job. I felt I understood public health and the way it related to my father’s beliefs about opportunity and access. The field I’d chosen could help me find a way to honor his legacy and make a difference. I felt proud; I felt hopeful. In that one moment, I experienced a sense of agency return to me that had been taken a decade earlier.

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