Joycelyn Elders Biography
Minnie Joycelyn Elders is known as an American pediatrician and also public health administrator who worked as Surgeon General of the United States from 1993 to 1994.
How old is Joycelyn Elders? – Age
Elders is 90 years old as of 2024. She was born on 13 August 1933, in Schaal, Arkansas, United States, where she also grew up.
How tall is Joycelyn Elders? – Height
She stands at a height of 5 feet 9 inches (1.76 m) tall.
Joycelyn Elders’s Mother, Father – Family
Elders was born and raised in Schaal, Arkansas, to a poor, farm sharecropping family, and became the eldest of eight children, and valedictorian of her school class. Besides, the family spent two years near a wartime shipyard in Richmond, California prior to returning to Schaal.
Joycelyn Elders’s Education
In college, she later changed her name to Minnie Joycelyn Lee. Additionally in 1952, she got her B.S. degree in Biology from Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Arkansas, where she as well pledged Delta Sigma Theta.
She then went to the University of Arkansas Medical School, where she received her M.D. degree in 1960. Later after completing an internship at the University of Minnesota Hospital and also a residency in pediatrics at the University of Arkansas Medical Center, Elders obtained an M.S. in Biochemistry in 1967.
Is Joycelyn Elders Married? – Wife
She briefly got married to Cornelius Reynolds, who is a Federal employee, and later married Oliver Elders, who is a basketball coach. After serving as a nurse’s aide in a Veterans Administration hospital in Milwaukee for a period, she as well joined the United States Army in May 1953 and was a 2nd Lieutenant.
Joycelyn Elders Career
Before-governor Bill Clinton appointed Elders as Director of the Arkansas Department of Health, making her the first African-American woman in the state to hold this position in 1987. Likewise, some of her major accomplishments while in office involve reducing the teen pregnancy rate by increasing the availability of birth control, counseling, and and also sex education at school-based clinics
Experiences with racism
She besides believed that opposition to her Surgeon General nomination was driven by sexism and racism. In addition, some people in the American Medical Association, a certain group of them, didn’t even know that she was a physician. They were as well passing a resolution to say that from current on every Surgeon General must be a physician which became a knock at me.
As an endocrinologist, she became especially concerned together with young diabetic women getting pregnant. In addition, If young teen women who have diabetes get pregnant, they a well have a high chance of their bodies rejecting the fetus or the fetus and also developing abnormalities in utero.
Likewise, to prevent these pregnancies from happening, she seriously talked to her patients about the dangers of early pregnancy and also the importance of using contraceptives, as well taking control of their sexuality as soon as they started puberty.
Joycelyn Elders’s Net Worth
An American pediatrician and public health administrator who worked as Surgeon General of the United States, has an estimated net worth of between $1 million and $5 million.
You can find and follow Joycelyn on Twitter using the account name: @joycelynelders