Jacqueline Woodman
Profile
THE NEW SECRETARY of the Chapel Society, elected at the AGM in December, is Jacky Woodman – or Dr Jacqueline Woodman, M.B., Ch.B., Dipl. Obst., MRCOG, DPhil (Oxon), to be precise. Jacky was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1967, into a community that was designated as ‘Coloured’ (i.e mixed race) under apartheid. She was the first member of her impoverished family to be fully educated. She won a scholarship to study at the University of Stellenbosch, the premier Afrikaner institution of higher learning. Jacky trained as a physician and qualified in 1991, three years before the first democratic elections in South Africa.
Jacky’s first job, in a rural hospital outside Cape Town, inspired her to pursue a career in Obstetrics and Gynaecology. Since 1994 she has worked and trained across three continents. A member of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, she recently qualified as a consultant and is seeking a permanent Consultant position. She has given presentations at international conferences in places as diverse as Taipei, Perth, Hungary, Madrid, Copenhagen, Brisbane, and Cairo. Her special interest is uro-gynaecology, which involves complicated surgical procedures including fistula repairs, reversal of female genital mutilation, and other specialised operations. (Many chapel members will remember the talk that she gave us last year about the impact of culture and religion on women’s health.)
In more senses than one, Jacky has come a long way from her childhood home in Cape Town. In a tradition dating back four generations, her father is a pastor in the Apostolic Faith Mission, an evangelical Pentecostalist church. Until the age of 25, Jacky completely identified with the values of her father’s church: she served as a Sunday School teacher, junior youth leader, Bible study leader, choir mistress, and church organist; and she spent Sunday afternoons preaching to drunks on street corners with her father. It was assumed that she would marry a pastor and maintain the conservative values of the church. Her first act of self-assertion was to choose to go to medical school rather than Bible college. Her second, when she moved to the UK, was to stop attending any place of worship. Jacky describes the next 10–15 years of her life as ‘a spiritual wilderness’. Influenced by books such as The Changing Face of Jesus by Geza Vermes and The History of God by Karen Armstrong, she gradually deconstructed the rigid religious concepts of her childhood – but she needed something to put in their place. In particular she needed to belong to a spiritual community.
Ironically, it was through her Muslim husband, Dr Taj Hargey, that Jacky found Unitarianism. In February 2007 we invited Taj, the Chair of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford (MECO), to preach at one of our Sunday services. Jacky came with him and instantly felt: “This is where I am supposed to be”. It was Unitarians’ freedom from dogma that first attracted her, our Sunday services. Jacky came with him and instantly felt: “This is where I am supposed to be”. It was Unitarians’ freedom from dogma that attracted her, and she enjoys the variety of theological perspectives that she encounters in our chapel. Music is an essential element of her spiritual life: besides Myles’ Hartley’s sublime organ music, she loves singing hymns, with their reminder, however faint, of the gospel music of her childhood. She says that music infuses every aspect of life in Africa, and the love of singing has never left her. Indeed, she is interested in forming a choir to sing at occasional Sunday services in our chapel.
Jacky first met Taj in Cape Town when he was doing academic study in connection with his post as professor of African History in America. In 1993 he was in the region to research the proliferation of AIDS throughout Southern Africa. Taj was introduced to Jacky by her head of department, a benevolent mentor who took a fatherly interest not only in her professional development but also in her love life! A lengthy transatlantic relationship finally culminated in marriage and their joint relocation to Oxford, where Taj had studied for his doctorate and which he regarded as his second home.
Jacky’s strong support for Taj’s bold initiatives with MECO to promote a progressive Islam takes many forms: lecturing and chairing scholarly conferences relating to forced marriage, feminism, integration, and religious liberty; organising MECO’s monthly cinema club, showing films relevant to Muslims and anyone interested in Islam; co-organising the annual Oxford Muslim Music Festivals; and spearheading Britain’s First Muslim Film Festival, run by MECO in 2008 in conjunction with the Oxford Playhouse. She and Taj are currently planning the 2009 Muslim Film Festival.
When not at work (training junior doctors, running clinics, and supervising difficult births – she delivered two babies on Christmas Day), Jacky enjoys playing piano, cooking for friends, and swimming, tennis, and cycling. Her main relaxation is middle-distance running; she runs three times a week, training for the Great North Run and the Great South Run. She has recently become a governor of Our Lady’s School in Abingdon. She has no plans to return permanently to the land of her birth (no longer seeing herself as South African, she says: “I am an African, not a South African; nationalism is not the answer to Africa’s problems”); but she might return as a volunteer, doing fistula repairs, for example. Her CV says “I feel strongly that my contributions to society should extend beyond a professional medical remit, so I am keen to participate in the wider sphere of education, politics, and charitable work.” Will she find time in her busy life for her role as Secretary of the Chapel Society? I have no doubt of it.
Catherine Robinson
December 2008