When It Comes to Conservation, Alumna Doesn’t Hold Back

Education has been a constant theme in the life of Doris Ann Lindsey Whitfield ’53. Her father, Almont Lindsey, began teaching history at Mary Washington when Whitfield was just 5 years old, and after graduation she, too, embarked on a career in education.

Along the way, Whitfield has used her ability to share her knowledge with others, coupled with inspiration she garnered in school, to further the causes she cares most about: empowering women, and most recently, protecting the environment and conserving natural resources.

Armed with the sociology degree and teaching certificate she received from Mary Washington, Whitfield chose to enter one of the few career fields readily available to women in the early ’50s: education. But after four years of teaching social studies to ninth-graders in Raleigh, N.C., she was ready to chart new waters.

She became a career-planning counselor at North Carolina State University and borrowed from the inspiration she’d received from Mary Washington psychology professor Eileen Dodd, who had taken Whitfield under her wing.

“She was a defining person because of the tremendous amount of encouragement she gave young women,” said Whitfield, 75, who went on to share that same support in her new role.

“A lot of women were frustrated by the dead-end jobs they were in,” she said. “Or they wanted to work, but their husbands didn’t want them to.”

So, at NCSU, she developed an eight-week seminar on mid-career planning designed to help women identify what they wanted to do for the rest of their working lives.

In 1983, she married John Whitfield, and the two began indulging their love of the outdoors. Together, they’ve visited nearly every national park.

Doris Whitfield also became active with the Sierra Club in Raleigh, where she and John helped introduce urban youngsters to the wonders of nature and coordinated the club’s Adopt-A-Highway program.

When she returned to the Fredericksburg area in 1993, she found fertile ground for her conservation work.

“I was appalled by the lack of proactive land-use planning,” she said.

She leapt into action, helping rewrite King George County’s comprehensive plan to deal with growth. She also joined the river advocacy group Friends of the Rappahannock, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and the Virginia League of Conservation Voters, which aims to protect the environment through political efforts, and citizen education and participation.

She has chaired the Rappahannock Sierra Group, worked to protect the Dahlgren Railroad Heritage Trail, helped form the environmental organization Friends of Caledon, and volunteered her time with the Northern Neck Land Conservancy. She has helped control pollution and erosion at Fairview Beach and is currently active with the Cool Cities initiative, working with churches, businesses, and government agencies in an effort to curb global warning.

Whitfield helped develop the North Carolina Triangle Chapter of Mary Washington’s Alumni Association and served as president of the association in the early 1980s.

Her environmental work over the past several years with interns from Mary Washington’s ecology club illustrates her continuing interest in education and her ongoing ties to her alma mater.

–Marjolijn Bijlefeld