From: Julia Landau <julia@julialandau.

com>
Date: September 14, 2006 11:00:42 PM PDT
To: carmen burana <enlayuma@yahoo.com>, yip <yip@infomed.sld.cu>
Subject: Una mujer para admirar

I thought you both might like to read Dru's mom's obit-- she was so funny! A history-making
woman like you two doctors. Medicine (carmen), politics (Soraya), and jokes about men
(Julia).

Estelle R. Ramey; Used Wit in Women's

Advocacy

By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 10, 2006; Page C08

Estelle R. Ramey, a Georgetown University

endocrinologist who never hesitated to craft a funny and
pointed line to overturn assumptions about the
physiological differences and similarities between women
and men, died Sept. 8 at her home in Bethesda. She had
Alzheimer's disease.

Dr. Ramey, dubbed the "Mort Sahl of the women's

movement" and "George Burns with an X chromosome,"
burst into the headlines in 1970 when she challenged the
assertion of a Democratic National Committee official that
women were unfit for the presidency or for handling
emergencies such as the Cuban Missile Crisis because of
their "raging storms of monthly hormonal imbalances."
As a credentialed expert in the field, "I was startled to
learn that ovarian hormones are toxic to brain cells," she
wrote in a letter to the Washington Evening Star. She
pointed out that President John F. Kennedy had Addison's
disease, a chronic, severe hormonal imbalance, and that
his medications could result in dramatic mood swings.
"If it's testosterone the public wants in a president, as an
endocrinologist I can't recommend a 70-year-old man in
the White House. They should get a 16-year-old boy
instead," she said. "It seems the only thing the public
doesn't want to see in a president is estrogen."
Men, she said, are clearly the weaker sex, and Mother
Nature may well be a radical feminist, based on the
biological evidence. The female of every species, she
noted, is stronger in terms of stamina, longevity and
performance under stress.
"Men were designed for short, nasty, brutal lives. Women
are designed for long, miserable ones," she opined.

Dr. Ramey became a popular and much-sought speaker

on society's myths about how physiological gender
differences affect political and social roles. She won over
an audience of conservative women in Winter Park, Fla.,
and the graduates of Sidwell Friends School, where she
was the school's first female commencement speaker.
Always good for a quote, she appeared in major
publications across the country and wrote two books,
numerous scientific articles and a piece ("Men's Cycles --
They Have Them Too") for the first issue of Ms. magazine.

Her wit was rooted in statistics, scientific research and

personal experience with discrimination.

Born in Detroit as Stella Rosemary Rubin, she was raised

in New York City by her mother, a French immigrant who
was illiterate but insisted on education for her daughter.
Dr. Ramey skipped several grades, graduating from high
school at age 15. Thanks to the virtually free Brooklyn
College, she graduated in 1937 and was immediately
hired to teach chemistry at Queens College. Teaching by
day and studying by night, she earned a master's degree
in chemistry at Columbia University in 1940.

She met her husband, James Ramey, a Columbia law

student, at their New York boarding house. They were
married by the not-yet-famous theologian Reinhold
Niebuhr in his apartment.

In 1941, the couple moved to Knoxville, Tenn., where her

husband worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority. The
chemistry department chairman of the nearby University
of Tennessee refused to hire her because he thought she
should be "home taking care of her husband." But when
the military draft of World War II thinned his faculty of
men, he asked her to teach Air Force cadets. No matter
that she was pregnant -- Dr. Ramey took the job, at one-
third the pay of her predecessor. Her husband, she told
the New York Times, "was absolutely determined that I
not falter in my career. . . . He didn't have to carry me
piggyback while he was climbing.''

After the war and a short period in Washington, her

husband got a job in Chicago at the Atomic Energy
Commission. Dr. Ramey earned her doctorate in
physiology at the University of Chicago in 1950, on the
relationship of the nervous system to stress responses.
She taught for several years in the university's medical
school until her husband's career bought them back to
Washington in 1956. Dr. Ramey became a faculty
member at Georgetown, where she worked until retiring
in 1987. She was a founder and the second president of
the American Women in Science.
In addition to her husband of 65 years, Dr. James T.
Ramey of Bethesda, survivors include two children,
Drucilla Stender Ramey of New York and Dr. James
Ramey of Bethesda; and five grandchildren. One
granddaughter, Sara Ramey, is writing a biography of Dr.
Ramey.

Dr. Ramey's decades of endocrinology research brought

her recognition in the medical world, but her facility with
quips gave her a national audience. Asked once by a
sneering lawyer if she preferred the title "chairperson,"
Dr. Ramey responded, "I'd rather be a chairman. They
make more."
She traded ideas on helping abused women with an
Egyptian feminist at a White House tea. She was a regular
at the Renaissance Weekends made famous by President
Bill Clinton.
Dr. Ramey continued to investigate the impact of stress
hormones on males and females and blamed the lack of
related research on bias in the largely male scientific
establishment.
"I am appalled at the fact that men have not studied the
differences between males and females for their own
advantage,'' she said in the 1980s. Such studies would
help men as well as women and society, she said,
because women outlive men by seven to nine years.
"Now, I like testosterone. Every home should have some,"
she said. "But it becomes damaging as a man gets older.
I'm trying to help men live longer, although I'm not sure
all of them deserve it."
She told a convention of surgeons in 1989 that the human
heart, if receiving a normal supply of blood and nutrition,
has a life expectancy of 150 years and the brain 200
years. Researchers have found ways to slow the aging
process and revitalize the body. Essential to the scenario,
she said, is getting the right chemical balance with
nutrition, vitamins and drugs.
"The goal is to die young at a late age. I'd say 120 years
looks like a good goal," she said.
At the time of her death, Dr. Ramey was 89.