Read on Twitter
Pre pandemic I’d been visiting the @britishlibrary and had begun listening to the start of Mary Brancker’s 25 hour interview series that is held on their audio database. Let me tell you, she’s something else... (a thread) https://twitter.com/britishvets/status/1341715515060973570
She talks so openly about what it was to be female veterinary student. In one part of the interview she talks about her final exams. Now Mary had never failed an exam in her life and was often near the top of her class-
The same examiners would go round all the colleges and one particular medicine professor was renowned for for believing that women shouldn’t be vets. He thought they weren’t practical enough.
So he undertook a viva with Mary and unsurprisingly for the first time in Mary’s life, he failed her. This delayed her graduation by 6 months and cost her a job. However when the interviewer asked her why she couldn’t say anything she said-
I couldn’t, it would have looked like an excuse. She alludes in the interview that all 20 of the women in Mary’s class in 1937 failed that year.
As the interviews continue Mary continues to brush off questions about sexism and defines it as, just the way it is. Listening to her makes these excuses is heartbreaking-
And because whilst we have made progress, our profession is far from perfect. ‘That’s just the way it is’ is something I still hear now in reference to our attitudes to diversification/flexible working/pushing colleagues to the point of mental illness-
And you know what? ‘Just the way it is’ wasn’t good enough for Mary and it’s not good enough now. Members of our profession still feel like this and that’s not on them, just like it wasn’t on Mary, it’s on us. We all need to do better, myself included.
So whilst this day is absolutely something to be celebrated, it’s important to know we’re not done. We’re done when ‘just the way it is’ doesn’t exist anymore.
I would thoroughly recommend to any vet to go and listen to Mary’s interviews. She was an inspiring woman who truly shaped the profession. The other fact that blows the writer part of my mind about Mary is almost too weird to be true-
She wrote a book called All Creatures Great and Small that was published on THE SAME DAY as Alf White published his. I mean come on, that’s rotten luck isn’t it? I spent ages tracking it down and eventually found it in the RCVS library-
The book is not fiction and was never designed to be read by the same audience that read James Herriot-
But to me her story is just as inspiring and deserves to be told, which is something I hope to do one day. But for now, I guess, for Mary’s sake and the sake of the profession we need to prioritise eradicating ‘just the way it is’ because it’s quite frankly, not good enough.
