Charlotte Houde Quimby ’60
By Laurie Morrissey

Charlotte Houde Quimby has retired from being a nurse midwife; but in a way, her current role as a New Hampshire legislator is similar. Instead of birthing babies, she ushers proposed laws through the study and revision process to adoption.

The 400-member New Hampshire House of Representatives is the third largest parliamentary body in the English- speaking world. It’s also the country’s oldest, established in January 1776. And the robust 66-year-old New Hampshire native is excited to be part of it. After a career that took her from the delivery room to academia and across the globe in the name of women’s health, becoming involved in state politics is like closing a big circle.

“It all comes back on itself,” she says. “You start locally, then you begin to see the larger issues. For me, it was maternal health. When I found out how many African women die giving birth, I was stunned.”

The issue became her passion. Houde Quimby spent most of the last 15 years helping to bring midwifery services to countries such as Ghana, Bolivia, Uganda, Indonesia and Vietnam.

As an undergraduate in the late 50s—when nursing majors were the only women on campus and they were bused back and forth from Manchester for classes—Houde Quimby planned to be a maternity nurse. After eight years as a labor and delivery nurse in Maine, she went to Connecticut for a master’s degree in midwifery at Yale. She stayed on as faculty, then chaired the program there. With six young children to raise on her own after her first husband, Bob Houde ’57, died, she left her administrative position to work in private practice.

The opportunity to return to her home state came in 1983, when Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center called her to help develop a nursemidwifery service. She met and married Tony Quimby, a Dartmouth College financial aid administrator, and together they built a home on a quiet dirt road in Meriden, a village of 450.

Houde Quimby loved her job and living near her children, but the more she learned about maternal death rates in developing countries— one in 25 in much of Africa—the more she wanted to help. She and Tony spent a year in Uganda, where she developed a midwifery program at Makerere University. Later, she moved around the U.S. working for the American College of Nurse Midwives, and was a visiting senior associate at the Lillian Carter Center for International Nursing at Emory University.

Back in New Hampshire, Houde Quimby served on the local school board for three years; but as a self- described political junkie, kept looking at those “larger issues.” A firm believer in the value of education, she was compelled by income tax-free New Hampshire’s struggle to fund public schools.

“I’ve always been interested in how decisions made at the state level impact the individual,” she says. Because of her profession, she was also interested in the Nurse Practice Act. So when her town’s Democratic committee asked her if she’d run for a seat in the House, she needed only 48 hours to make her decision. She entered a field of four vying for two positions in Sullivan County’s first district, and was elected last November.

“It’s like being in grad school all over again,” she says. Between sessions, she studies the issues in a loft office filled with books, framed photos, and African carvings. Her committee deals with the licensing of professionals from geologists to cosmetologists, as well as with the law that governs regulation of nurses.

“This is known as a committee with a lot of work,” she says. In her case, it’s become “a family thing:” her children (an attorney, a surgeon, two teachers, a pilot and a catering manager), Tony and his children, and even their eldest grandchild, enjoy talking politics when they get together.