Jean Elshtain, Defender of the Family

In: Politics & gender, Band 11, Heft 3, S. 550-554

Abstract

In 1951, when Jean Elshtain was ten, she contracted polio. In the small Colorado town where she grew up (then as now, the population was under 200), the medical system did not understand well how to deal with polio. Her doctors sent her to a hospital, separated her from her parents, withdrew fluid from her spinal cord without anesthetic, and, for fear of contagion, sequestered her in a single room where even the nurse feared contact. Elshtain said later, "The only person I saw during that time was a nurse who [would] … put a meal down and leave a bedpan." After the nurse hurriedly left the room, this ten-year old girl faced the walls and her condition by herself.