HEALTH
HERSELF, BACK IN TOPEKA
FROM HER ADOPTED HOMETOWN, A PIONEERING WOMEN’S HEALTH ADVOCATE POINTS THE WAY FOR AGING AS AN ADVENTURE
W
hen I showed up to interview Diana Laskin Siegal, a plate of orange sections and toast triangles sat on her dining table. I apologized for interrupting breakfast. She laughed, saying she is of a generation that believes when someone shows up, even for an interview, you serve them something to eat. Siegal is a gracious hostess as well as a pioneering health policy advocate. She’s also co-author of the classic guidebook for older women, Ourselves, Growing Older, published in cooperation with the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective in two editions, the most recent of which was praised by Publishers Weekly as “a self-help book with a conscience.” Although Siegal initially wrote the book while living in Boston in the ’80s, she has since retired to Topeka. ‘BIGGEST MOUNTAINS’
I first met Diana Siegal when she came to Topeka in 1994 as a keynote speaker at a conference on women’s issues. Harriet Lerner, a Menninger Clinic staff psychologist at the time, introduced Siegal and mentioned that she had celebrated her 60th birthday three years before by going to Nepal. I asked Siegal about this intrepid trip. “The sherpas, who are among the most wonderful people in the entire world, baked me a birthday cake in a skillet over an open fire at about 12,000 feet,” she recalls. Why Nepal? Siegal says someone had been condescending when they learned she had never visited Paris or Rome. Although Paris and Rome had appeal, Siegal wondered where she might regret not going when she was on her “death bed.” An image emerged for this mountain enthusiast of “the biggest mountains in the world.”
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She stayed for a month and went on three separate treks, two of them alone with the sherpas because no other tourist signed up. STUDENT YEARS
Siegal was born in 1931 in New York City, the only daughter of Russian immigrant parents who came to the United States as teenagers, met in their 20s and married. Growing up in Boston, her father went to law school for a year, but when the Depression hit, with responsibility for a wife and daughter, he abandoned that plan. Among other jobs, he worked at the Beth Israel Hospital as a butcher and storekeeper before eventually becoming a kosher caterer. Siegal’s mother was an artist and craftswoman who taught at summer camps in Maine and Massachusetts. Siegal attended Girls’ Latin School (now the Boston Latin Academy) in Boston. “We had to memorize sections out of Shakespeare, and poems, and the opening of Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and the opening of Virgil’s Aeneid. I remember the opening sentence of dozens of things and nothing beyond that,” she laughs. As a member of a Labor Zionist youth group, Siegal nurtured fantasies of living in Israel on a kibbutz. So when it came time to go to college, she applied and was accepted at the newly opened Brandeis University, where modern Hebrew was offered. There, Siegal studied psychology under the estimable Abraham Maslow, best known for his theory of the hierarchy of human needs. She was in the first class to graduate from Brandeis and followed Maslow’s recommendation to pursue graduate studies at the University of Kansas, boarding a westbound train in September 1952 with her typewriter in tow. A couple of years later, Siegal netted a good job as a research assistant on a new project at Menninger’s and moved to Topeka. Ultimately, she dropped out of graduate school just short of a master’s
STORY BY JEFFREY ANN GOUDIE | PHOTOGRAPHY BY JASON DAILEY
HEALTH thesis and married Menninger psychologist Richard Siegal. They had two children, a girl and a boy, 22 months apart. BOSTON AND THE BOOK
Siegal’s life was upended when Richard died at age 39. Newly widowed, she returned to KU full-time to earn her master’s degree in public administration while interning with the first Health Planning Agency within the Kansas Board of Health. She became a staff member after completing her studies but soon returned to the familiar Boston, where she says she knew the schools, the neighborhoods and the streetcar connections. Her parents still lived there as well and could provide extra support.
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THE MOST RECENT EDITION OF
OURSELVES,
GROWING OLDER WAS PRAISED BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AS “A SELF-HELP BOOK WITH A CONSCIENCE.” The move was serendipitous in other ways, too, as she reconnected with her oldest childhood friend, Norma Meras Swenson, a member of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Siegal helped the collective with the menopause section of the chapter on women growing older in Our Bodies, Ourselves. Paula Doress-Worters, who was in charge of the chapter, proposed an entire book on older women and invited Siegal to work on it. She declined, citing her full-time job at a medical foundation and teenage children. “Then three weeks later I called her back and said, ‘Guess what? I just lost my job … and I can work on the book with you,’” says Siegal. CITY OF ‘DEAR FRIENDS’
Siegal retired at age 66. Over the years, she returned to Topeka for visits with friends, and it was during a luncheon at Brewster Place one day that she had a revelation. “I looked around the dining room and I thought to myself, ‘I know more people in this dining room than I would know in any community in Boston, Massachusetts.’” Back in Topeka since July 2005, Siegal has been surrounded by “dear friends” and stays active in the League of Women Voters, a local OWL chapter (an advocacy organization for midlife and older women) and the Board of Trustees for Brewster Foundation, among other organizations. Irv Rosen, the retired director of the outpatient department at Menninger’s, says of his friend: “She has a good heart, coupled with boundless energy.” In an e-mail, best-selling author Harriet Lerner, who now lives in Lawrence, describes Siegal as a “feminist pioneer” who is “also fun, adventuresome, authentic and without a pretentious bone in her body.” At that conference in 1994, Siegal told the largely female audience: “Think of what kind of older woman you’d like to be.” Diana Laskin Siegal, who had just made a three-day drive from Florida a few days before our interview, provides a standout model of aging with verve.
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