Roberta Holder-Mosley ’73 chose to pursue nursing when she was 4 years old.
“My mother was a nurse,” she recalls. “She tried to get me to change my mind. There are so many other professions out there that I could choose from. She didn’t want me to narrow my choice down to one without exploring other options.”
Holder-Mosley’s mother was a nurse at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, during a time of intense social unrest sparked by poverty, racism, and civil injustice, among other factors.
“I also think there were a lot of racial things going on that she didn’t talk about; a lot of issues of how nurses were not respected then and in many ways are not respected now,” she reflects. “I think she wanted to spare me that, though she never said it specifically. I learned it the hard way.”
In spite of those difficulties, Holder-Mosley forged her own path in the field. After earning her bachelor’s degree in nursing from Simmons, she earned a master’s degree in advanced maternity nursing and nursing midwifery from Columbia University.
After working as a midwife in New York City, she pivoted to public service as a commissioned officer in the United Public Health Service within the Department of Health & Human Services. After a 30 year career, she retired from the Public Health Service and accepted a position with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene first as the deputy director and then as director of the Nurse-Family Partnership Program with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Balancing Science with Art
“I purposefully chose a women’s college because I didn’t want to have to compete with guys,” says Holder-Mosley. “I don’t know why I knew that was important for me, but it was … The whole college experience really broadens your horizons, it makes you an independent person, [and] makes you challenge yourself and other people.”
In her class, she met other women whose mothers were also hospital-trained nurses. “It caused us to have a conversation with the nursing faculty,” she recalls, noting a stark difference in the approach to nursing education at the time. “We hardly ever used the lab after sophomore year. [The students], especially the daughters of nurses, were outraged. [We said,] ‘We don’t know how to do catheters or IVs!’ The faculty relented and let us go back into the lab.” At her 50th Reunion in 2023, Holder-Mosley visited the then-new Nursing Simulation Center.
Holder-Mosley also valued the courses she could take outside the stringent nursing curriculum, including an English literature course and a graduate art history course that required special permission to enroll. “They invited free thinking,” she recalls. “Nursing was by rote, but [literature and art history] were not, and you got to stretch your legs.”
The art history course also inspired her first foray into writing poetry. “The professor said that he wanted something different, but said he knew that most of us wouldn’t do it.” The assignment involved visiting the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and choosing four sculptures on which to write a long-form paper, about 20 to 30 pages.
She was inspired by the marble sculptures from ancient Greece. “I wrote a poem to each of the Greek gods. At the end, I wrote a poem to the Muses to thank them for guiding me to write these poems. I had an introduction in prose and a bibliography about the statues, but it was only about seven pages long. I handed it in and sweated bullets until I got it back. Much to my surprise and great joy, the teacher got it, he understood! He gave me one of the few Hs at Simmons.” (Grading, at that time, was honors/pass/fail.)
Having played clarinet and piano through high school, Holder-Mosley “can’t manage without music.” Lacking an instrumental program on campus and not interested in auditioning elsewhere (“I’m not conservatory material,” she says), she joined Glee Club during freshman orientation and participated all four years.
“I’m still singing,” she says, launching into “Cantate Domino,” by Giuseppe Ottavio Pitoni (1657–1743). She has also retained friendships forged through singing, with plans to fly south this year to visit a fellow Simmons classmate and very good friend she met during Freshman orientation and sang in Glee Club for a celebration of her 75th birthday.
“[Simmons] was a great place to grow up, and it wasn’t just about the academics. It was about socialization, it was about community,” she says. “There was a community on the floor [of your dorm], in the building, within your classroom, within your major. It was fabulous, and I loved it!”
Midwifery and Government Employment
Holder-Mosley’s career in midwifery was inspired by Nursing faculty member Lois Schoppee, who had her certificate in midwifery. “She gave us a talk about it. All of my energy from that time forward was about getting out of Simmons and successfully becoming a nurse-midwife.”
After her Simmons graduation, Holder-Mosley worked for a year in the maternity ward of Kings County Hospital before starting her master’s program at Columbia. At the time, midwifery jobs were funded by external grants rather than the hospital’s budget.
When she completed her master’s program in 1975, the funding had dried up. She returned to Kings County as a nurse on the obstetrics floor and was hired by NYU as a nurse midwife, joining a team of eight nurse midwives serving patients in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. A year later, a fortuitous break: Holder-Mosley found an advertisement in The New York Times education section, looking for a midwife to start a midwifery service in East Harlem. At the interview, she learned her options: to join the National Health Service Corps as an officer or as a civil servant.
“I was 27 years old, and for the first time I remembered that you’re supposed to ask questions of the interviewer,” she says. “I asked, ‘What’s the difference in benefits between commissioned officers and civil servants?’ The difference in benefits was too great. I asked, ‘What’s the catch?’ Well, as a commissioned officer I would be on call 24/7. I said, ‘I’m a midwife, I’m going to be on call anyway!’ He said, ‘If there is a national emergency, you will be moved, housed, and clothed at the government’s expense.’ I was unmarried and didn’t have children at the time, so that was fine.”
The last catch: in the event that Congress declared war, a commissioned officer would be called to duty. “This was the year of President Jimmy Carter,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘We’re not going to war!’ I was commissioned on September 30, 1978, and stayed in service for 30 years.”
For the next six years, Holder-Mosley practiced nurse-midwifery in central Harlem. For her second placement, she was granted admitting and delivery privileges in the state of New York, delivering babies at Harlem Hospital — the first nurse-midwife to be afforded this privilege.
“It was an amazing six years. The obstetrician-gynecologist I worked with was trained in Canada and seriously believed in the abilities of midwives,” she recalls. “I would call him and say, ‘I have a patient that I need to transfer to your residents.’ He would say, ‘No, if she’s admitted, her blood pressure will go up. You and I will manage her together.’ We co-managed, over the phone.”
Due to federal reductions in force and service in 1984, Holder-Mosley was relocated to Madison, Wisconsin, to Maternal and Child Health and Crippled Children’s Service (now referred to as CYSHCN) at the state level.
She was later reassigned to Region II as a Maternal and Child Health nurse consultant and, after 18 months, was transferred within the office to the primary care branch, where she served as the regional nurse consultant for primary care. Region II included (at the time) New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands.
“I was the Federal Tort Claims Act Coordinator for the region,” she recalls. “Any time there was a suit filed against a community health center, I had to pull together the information, converse with the US attorneys, and converse with the health center. It was fun! I wore four hats.”
In 2008, after 30 years of service in a regional office, Holder-Mosley was required to retire, but didn’t actually want to leave the service. “I felt that I had more to offer in public health,” she says. “I love public health and maternal child health. There was still more to do.”
Instead, she joined the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and became deputy director of the Nurse-Family Partnership Program, overseeing teams of nurses who implemented the citywide, voluntary educational program for pregnant mothers.
“It was focused on developing the maternal-infant bond,” she says. “Clients were registered before their 28th week of pregnancy and could choose to stay until the baby was 2 years old.”
Advice for Future Midwives
Holder-Mosley considered the nurse-patient relationship to be collaborative.
“I would tell my patients, ‘We are in a partnership together. I’m looking for you to give birth to the next president of IBM or the next president of the United States. We have to work in partnership to make sure that you are doing everything you need to do to get that baby to that place.’”
She encouraged her patients to accept discomfort, but avoided reference to pain because “the definition [of pain] is different for everyone.” As for predicting a due date, Holder-Mosley made no promises. “You want to know when you will deliver? Talk to the baby and to God,” she says.
“Nursing and midwifery are not professions that you can be ambivalent about,” says Holder-Mosley. “You either love it or hate it. If you are ambivalent, don’t do it, because it’s too hard. You really have to be committed.”