After graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in nursing, I was a visiting nurse in New York City. One of our jobs as a visiting nurse was to provide follow-up home visits for the Maternity Center Association's home birth service. This was in the mid-1950s when the standard of hospital maternity care was heavy sedation in labor, inhalation anesthesia and forceps extractions for delivery. Consequently, the women were out of control and labored alone while husbands waited at home. The hospital labor and birth suite was not a pleasant place to work and I concluded long before completing my nursing education that I was not going to choose maternity nursing as a career.
Who were these nurse midwives from the Maternity Center who were delivering babies naturally in their homes with their loved ones close by? I was intrigued by the idea. So, when Hattie Hemschemeyer offered me a scholarship to be a member of the first class of student nurse-midwives at Columbia University, I jumped at the opportunity to join one of the most rewarding careers one could ever imagine.