“It is time to tell the new story.” Those resonant words from Zainab Salbi, founder of Women for Women International, opened our new Center for Global Women’s Health on Friday. The Center’s inaugural symposium offered a thoughtful prologue to the body of global research in women’s health scholarship, education, and practice that Center faculty and scholars will produce. The Center’s first chapter is enriched by an extraordinary gift for our School, a generous endowment fund for visiting global scholars.
The benevolent donors of this endowment, Ambassador Martin Silverstein (a member of our School of Nursing Board of Overseers) and his wife Mrs. Audrey Silverstein (a lawyer and member of our Nurse Anesthesia Board) named the endowment for a mother called Dr. Soad Hussein Hassan.
This woman was born in a small village in Egypt called Abu al Akhdar to a mother who was a farmer who never went to school and a father who worked on the Egyptian railroad. She went to a diploma nursing school and became a popular school nurse first and a successful midwife later.
Through sheer persistence and commitment to her beloved nursing profession, she managed to get a World Health Organization scholarship to attend Syracuse University, leaving her family and not seeing her children for two years, to study for a B.S. in nursing, becoming one of the first people in the Middle East to receive this degree.
Knowing that she wanted a future in educating nurses, first in diploma schools, then in university programs, and realizing a bachelor’s degree would not be enough, she got herself admitted to the school of public health in her native Egypt and was the first nurse to receive an MPH. She went on to establish schools of nursing in her country as well as others such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. But she continued to dream about studying for a PhD and got herself admitted against all odds to another university in her country and completed a PhD in education at the age of 56.
Being the first nurse in her country to be admitted and to receive a PhD from a university in her own country -- others received PhDs ahead of her from U.S. universities – the defense of her dissertation was a major happening and was televised.
This woman, nurse, dean, global educator, and mother met in her life many of the obstacles many women encounter: poverty, harassment, discrimination, and marginalization. She was beautiful and hence accused of using her beauty to get what she wanted. Because she was a diploma-school graduate, she was marginalized by the young new college graduates. Because she was a nurse, she was devalued by her colleagues in other, more established colleges at the university. And because she started from very modest beginnings and was ambitious, men thought she was easy prey and chased her.
Her integrity, her aspirations, and her hard work paid off: She became the modern Nightingale of the Middle East. She retired at the age of 76 after opening and running eight schools of nursing in that region of the world. At least four of these were schools with BS, MS, and PhD programs. She mentored hundreds of nurses and was a revered leader. Her story is the story of many women and many nurses in the world. She epitomized inner strength, resourcefulness, vision, strategic thinking, commitment to excellence, and love for the discipline of nursing. She also epitomized the suffering and triumphs of women who come from modest backgrounds in the developed or developing world.
Another wonderful part of this story is that this woman, in whose name the endowment is given, is my mother!
She miraculously received a PhD without ever going to high school, was married for more than 50 years, raised two daughters, and died a few days short of her 88th birthday after experiencing Alzheimer’s disease for 10 years. Toward the end of her life, hearing me read to her from one of the 10 books she wrote about nursing, brought a smile and a glimpse of recognition.
Global women’s health is a story that connects the past with the future. We have much yet to tell.
