Interview with Dr. Catherine Monk

February 27, 2025

Hosted by Clara Robinson with Serene Williams

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Clara Robinson: Can you tell us about your academic background and what brought you to enter this field?

 

Catherine Monk: In college I studied political economy, and I didn't take any psychology classes, and there weren't really so much neuroscience classes back there, back then, and I wanted to either go to graduate school in macroeconomics, economics and political theory, or become a journalist, which I pursued for a while. I had some wonderful experiences, adventures working in Duluth, Minnesota and other places, small places, but I increasingly started to have experiences where even though I liked writing, I was realizing the pace of journalism wasn't necessarily for me. And I was a fact checker, which used to be very routine to ensure the reliability of what the journalist or writer was reporting. It's a way to learn how to do writing and reporting. And it was a story about teenage suicides, and I had to call the parents and ask them questions to verify things in the interview, which was obviously very emotionally heavy, but it, it, it really, it's sort of a light bulb experience in terms of as difficult as it was, I found speaking with the parents and trying to understand what had gone on in their children's lives and their lives very, very moving, and it was part of what got me going In the direction of clinical psychology. So I went back and got in touch with a professor from undergrad, and had good conversations with her, and served as an advisor several years after graduating, and then studied to become a clinical psychologist. And all the time, all the while I was in graduate school, I did research when I finished, I was, as most graduate students are, trying to figure out what job I could possibly get, and felt a certain amount of anxiety, and a place where I was working clinically said, “Oh, we have a job for you, and it's this. It's a really great job, because if you take it on, and the fewer times you see patients, the bigger the bonus.” 

 

And I couldn't believe they said this to me. I thought it should be illegal. It seemed pretty corrupt, but it wasn't the kind of clinical work that I, you know, wanted to do, although, again, I was very anxious about how I was going to find a job. And I really wanted to find a research job. I got very lucky in writing an old fashioned letter to someone giving a talk understanding attachment processes and development from a biological perspective. I was always very interested in looking at the psychological as well as the biological levels of functioning and development, and that's how I really just through, you know, some perseverance and curiosity and also luck, ended up with a fantastic postdoc position at Columbia in the psycho biological sciences, and then was lucky to get great training and to stay here. 

 

Robinson: That's very interesting. So, why women's health? I know in your lab you're doing women's health stuff now. So, how did you get involved in that?

 

Monk: When I was even younger than you are, because you seem pretty young. Back in the early 1970s, when Ms. Magazine started, my mother got me a junior Ms. t-shirt. When you, you know, signed up back in the old days to receive a magazine each month in the mail. I was really influenced by my mom, you know, she was very much a product of the 1950s and the early 1960s, she gave up her writing career. She was a successful fiction writer. That could either be done while you have a baby, which is not very realistic, or would just be given up. And I don't mean to fault my father, it was really the culture that was part of her identity also. I think as the women's movement, second women's movement of the 20th century, really. Took got steam. She was very identified with it, and that influenced me so much. 

 

I went to a boarding school that was over 200 years old and had been a male school only, and it absorbed the sister school, which just no longer existed. I think there'd been seven years of females allowed into the school, and that really influenced me. It was, in a good way, helping us, all the students, think about stereotypes of what it means to be a male or female and how times were changing. I ended up going to a single sex college, to Barnard, but I'm a little embarrassed to say because now my views are different. At that time, what I really wanted was to go to college in New York City and Columbia didn't accept women, and for a variety of reasons, NYU and other places just weren't on my landscape. And so I went to Barnard because I wanted to be at Columbia. But now I really realized that there were a lot of advantages of being at a school for women that could help raise awareness about women's abilities and some of the ways that they're still vestiges of sexism.

 

Robinson: Yeah, that's really interesting. Thank you for sharing. 

 

Monk: Let me just finish my thought. I'm lost in history–you know, both heart disease and all the way down to the cellular level, have been males for so long and really understanding that we do have different biology, and it affects our health and interacts differently with the environment. So I think I was primed to be interested in that because of this awareness, but my identity of feminism and my awareness of gender roles and sex, biological sex.

 

Serene Williams: Your mother sounds absolutely fascinating. 

 

Monk: Thank you. She was, thank you. I mean, she's, she's very old now, she really was, she's a published fiction writer at like 17, you know, writing short stories. She's really kind of a trailblazer. And I think I started to just really think about how courageous that must have been at that time. 

 

Robinson: So then kind of a broad question, related to the [proposes AP U.S. women’s] course, in your opinion, what historical events or stories or people, do you think are significant when learning about the history of women's health?

 

Monk: Yeah, that was one of the questions you sent that stumped me, just a little bit in terms of, I mean, there are people who are still in my world that I admire very, very much. Kathy Wisner is a phenomenal perinatal psychiatrist and researcher who's and she's doing an amazing job right now of looking at the effects on mental health when there isn't access to full reproductive health care. She's just fearless and intelligent and wonderful. 

 

Janet Pietro was someone doing similar work to what I ended up doing in prenatal programming, and she became a vice chair of research at Johns Hopkins. So she really rose through the ranks. And she is an amazing science writer. She could write a science paper, but make it interesting. It will have some kind of nice flare in the writing and she will explain things so well and be so rigorous about her data. So I could kind of go on and on. 

 

If you're thinking more about historical people, they're there, but I can't say honestly, that they were like a driving influence for me when I was in graduate school and very, very immersed in clinical and actually psychoanalytic writing. And psychoanalysis was a very male dominated field, with few exceptions of some women there were women whom I read, and I was very aware of them as what the challenges must have been for them.

 

Robinson: That's really interesting. There's definitely so much still going on, in the present. Do you have any advice for anyone who's trying to become involved in what you do? 

 

Monk: Openness and curiosity is just so important, and building relationships is always really important, because you can always learn from people and hopefully then pass it on. There's actually a book by Sylvia Hewlett, who is an economist, and when I was in college, I worked for her. She's written several books, but one of her books was, forget a mentor, get a sponsor, or something like that. And the idea is, yes, of course, you need mentors, but you also need people who are they're the ones who might recommend you for a committee or for, you know, joining a project, and they're not necessarily the same people, so I like that idea of of people who also can be your sponsor. They may not be your primary mentor, but you've gotten to know them a bit, and they might mention you for an opportunity. 

 

You know you have to be willing to be lucky and and then find what you love and and that can happen somewhat serendipitously, although I think I mean, if I can say that I'm studying perinatal mental health and its effects on the next generation, my mother suffered from a terrible postpartum depression and ended up writing a published story about it. And I certainly don't mean to suggest that I have memories of being a baby and her experience, but of course, it was in our family narrative. And so there are a lot of influences on how we choose, what we choose, and being reflective about those, and reflective on when you're forcing yourself to do something that people expect, that is not what you enjoy, because you've really gotta love and be excited, not every moment of the day, because that's unrealistic, but overall, excited about your mission and able to keep connecting with it.  

 

Robinson: That's really good advice. Serene, do you have any questions you want to ask before we wrap up? 

 

Williams: I just want to thank you so much for your time. I know you're so busy and we are so grateful for your time. Something we're trying to do with this project is, like the story you told with your mother, we're trying to document how women get Ms, Magazine and what kind of word of mouth was there. We wonder about the distribution system and access. We're interviewing a lot of people like that. I don't know if she's able to be interviewed, but, you know, maybe not, but that, you know, that's something we're really doing, and we're sharing this documentation with the College Board. We've written a proposed curriculum for the course, and once we get the required letters from the College Board, we're sharing the proposed curriculum with them, and I know it's very, very light on your field. So I appreciate you sharing the names of the women you mentioned.

 

Monk: I'm happy to share more, I’m happy to do a follow up.

 

Williams: That would be wonderful. One of the challenges we're hearing a lot from educators is they think this is a great idea. They absolutely want to teach it, but they do not feel well equipped to do it. So we're trying to make it as accessible to educators as possible. So if you have any articles that you have written, or the essay you just mentioned that your mother wrote that would be accessible to high school students we would love to include that in our curriculum. 

 

Monk: Good to meet you both.