Well, she was very good friends with the general curator, well, the reptile curator at the time, and Ted always said, I mean, he always said, “I’ll never hire female keepers because it’s gonna just be a total disruption.’ When I started in ’56, there was one woman, no, excuse me, two women, one was Mann’s secretary and the other was an administrative assistant up in the Admin Building, that was it. And it stayed that way for obviously a long time. And I think Ted was just concerned over the fact that I think he didn’t think that they could do their job. A lot of people thought that women would not be able to do the physical work that was required. And I don’t know whether that feeling is still prevalent, but I don’t think it is because I think most of the women that work in the profession now have shown that they can do the physical work or if not, they’re in positions where they can contribute in other ways. But yeah, and right now, the female keepers and even, I mean, not only the female keepers, but the female curators and vets outnumber males in the profession, not across the board in all zoos, but I mean, it’s a major change.
