Who is Judith Engelhart?
Judith Engelhart was born in Durango, Colorado (she helped her mother to receive pioneer status as the family has been in the state of Colorado since 1885). She grew up in Boulder and attended the University of Colorado. Judith and her family moved to Cheyenne in 1996. She worked outside of the home some, but was mostly a stay-at-home mom. She enjoys volunteer work and belongs to a number of clubs including the General Federation of Women's Club, The Genealogical Society, and the Wyoming Sate Daughters of the American Revolution. She volunteers in the elementary school in a 4th grade classroom. Judith considers herself a fiscally conservative libertarian.
Excerpt from interview with Judith Engelhart by Whitney Dow, 2018
Q: Do you think that your race or your gender has had a bigger impact on your life?
Engelhart: [01:36:01] I don’t know, race or gender? Probably gender from the time period I was growing up because—so, I’m born in 1954 in just the burgeoning feminist movement, which my mother totally embraced. My mother was a great, little anarchist. She was protesting at the University of Colorado during the Vietnam War. It was great [laughs]. I think she has her own FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] file. I need to do a [unclear] if I can get a hold of it.
Remember I made that statement a long time ago that Hillary Clinton ruined feminism for me? Because she was supposed to be the embodiment of feminist power in a woman who did all these things because she’s smart, and intelligent, and blah, blah, blah. And then her husband goes and gets involved with old Monica Lewinsky and all the other—the [makes air quotes] “bimbo eruptions,” James Carville called it. And Hillary Clinton who had told us she didn’t stay home and baked cookies, all of a sudden, is protecting her husband in a stand-by- your-man movement. And even then, I am young, I am not politically savvy, even I recognized that the only reason she was in that was to make sure that she stayed powerful herself. She didn’t care about females. She only cared about her.
So, we had her egotism versus Donald Trump’s egotism, what a lovely choice for the United States of America that came from George Washington who said, “I don’t want to be king,” and didn’t even want to be president, and we come to this. This is where we are now. So, it’s actually kind of a very—but anyway.
So as a young girl, I wanted to be a doctor. But it wasn’t the fact that I was a female that kept me back. It was my own intelligence level. I’m smart, but I can’t do organic chemistry and I hate calculus. You’ve got to do those if you’re going to pass into it. But I know women who have become—were discouraged from becoming doctors because they were girls. So they should be nurses because that’s what women do is they take care of people and leave the doctoring to the guys. I know I couple of people that—and my grandmother, I remember, told me once. She said, “Well, if you want to be in medical care—” She was an RN [registered nurse]. She said, “You go for the doctor because the nurses do all the work and the doctors get all the glory.” And that was what she told me when I was about fifteen years old, and that’s probably why I chose a medical career, so.
Interview Transcript