Feminists of the Month

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SARAH G. (SALLY) EPSTEIN, Feminist of Month, July 2010 "ROBBIE” MADDEN, Feminist of Month June 2010 LOIS RECKITT, FEMINIST of the MONTH - MAY 2010 DIANE POST, FEMINIST OF THE MONTH, APRIL 2010 WINNIE WACKWITZ, FEMINIST OF THE MONTH, MARCH 2010 MURIEL ARCENEAUX, FEMINIST OF MONTH, FEB. 2010 ROXANNE BARTON CONLIN - FEMINIST of MONTH JAN '10 BARBARA BERGMANN - FEMINIST OF MONTH - DEC.'09 ELIZABETH SHEPARD, FEMINIST OF MONTH, NOV. '09 BARBARA LOVE, FEMINIST of MONTH -- OCT. '09 DANIELA GIOSEFFI - FEMINIST OF MONTH, SEPT. 09 ALICE ROSSI, FEMINIST of MONTH AUG. '09 SHEILA TOBIAS on ALICE ROSSI KAREN SPINDEL, FEMINIST OF MONTH, JULY 2009

JULY 2010 FEMINIST OF THE MONTH SARAH G. (SALLY) EPSTEIN WORLDWIDE FAMILY PLANNING ORGANIZER, ADVOCATE FOR THE QUINACRINE METHOD OF STERILIZATION Sally Epstein with Edward Munch lithograph, "Woman in Three Stages. Photo... George de Vincent I was born on October 31, 1925, the first child of Dr. Clarence James Gamble and Sarah Merry Bradley Gamble. My father was a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. As a child, I remember being intrigued that in studying blood circulation he would hang upside down to see how this unusual position affected the flow of blood through his body. My father understood that babies are healthier if spaced about 2½ years apart, and so in planning a second child he researched birth control methods. My younger brother Dick was 2½ years younger than I, and Walter 2½ years younger than Dick. Two more siblings, Judy and Bob, were similarly spaced. At least that is what we were told. My father saw that I was included in everything my brothers did: horseback riding, soccer, ice hockey, science kits, tennis, building castles on the beach with cement and stones, and sailing centerboard boats so we could learn to right them when they capsized. He even allowed me to take flying lessons as a college freshman, although he had nearly been killed in a plane crash while flying with a medical school classmate who was a pilot. (The classmate was killed.) Believing that a daughter should take advantage of every opportunity, he encouraged me to get my driver's license at 14. In Michigan, where we summered every year, farm children often handled motorized farm equipment on the road, and so 14 had been designated as the official age for a license. My father taught me to drive. After I passed the written and driving tests he handed me the keys to the car and said, "I'll see you at home," as he commandeered a taxi. I was not too happy with this push to independence, but it certainly showed me that girls could be as independent as boys. Pathfinder Clinic in Egypt with 12 year old girl who was saved from having to undergo Female Genital Cutting. Clinic got the Iman to convince her parents that this procedure is not a command of the Koran. In the late 1920s, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, asked my father to test the shelf life of spermicidal jellies at his Philadelphia laboratory. This began a lifelong friendship and collaboration between them. I was intrigued by this feisty woman (with red hair, like me) who was willing to go to jail for her beliefs. At home there was much talk about birth control and its politics; I grew up believing that every child was wanted and planned. When I found out this was not true, I decided to help spread the message of family planning, so chose to become a social worker-rather than a doctor as my father wished. During World War II, I became a Nurse's Aide at Boston City Hospital. Because so many of the nurses had departed to join the military, I was given many of the tasks that nurses usually handled. My eyes were opened to the suffering of many women due to illness, poverty, brutality, and a lack of knowledge of their rights and options. I knew then that I was a feminist and would promote family planning-or birth control, as it was then known. I graduated from Oberlin in 1948, then went to the Simmons School of Social Work. While there I dated an MIT student who loved jazz and modern art; I had not been exposed to either growing up. He took me to a modern art exhibit-a retrospective of oils and graphics by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944). I absolutely fell in love with his work, and he became my artist for life. That year I met Fridel Smola of Austria, a mountain climber, who had trained American troops who would be fighting in the Alps . She was involved with The Experiment in International Living, a group founded by Donald Watt that worked to promote cross-cultural understanding and friendship by arranging student homestays abroad. During the summer of 1949 I lived with the Franz Kofflers, a doctor's family in Vienna (fortunately, I had taken German in high school). The horrors of war were brought home to me by the sight of bombed-out buildings, stories of near-starvation (including chewing on leather to lessen hunger pains), accounts of suffering at the hands of the Russians, and seeing the Koffler ancestral portraits, slashed by the stabs of Russian bayonets. After the summer program, I went mountain climbing with Fridel and our group leader Curt Geiger and was the first American woman to climb a difficult route up the Wartzman Mountain in Germany. Again I had the sense that women could choose challenges usually reserved for men. Pathfinder Clinic in Ethiopia. Sally Epstein meeting with local volunteers who will go house to house educating people on advantages of contraception and family health. That fall (1949) I met and married Lionel Charles Epstein, a Harvard Law student who had been an Experiment leader to Holland. He'd written a senior paper on U.S. sterilization laws after consulting with my father, and was interested in my father's efforts to send women to Third World countries to help start family planning clinics with education programs and services. Lionel incorporated my father's Pathfinder Fund as an NGO in the District of Columbia. In 1952 Lionel and I went to Holland as leaders of a high school group for an Experiment in International Living summer program. As we were about to sail on a student ship from New York City to Europe I discovered I was pregnant. Concerned, I consulted my father's friend Dr. Abraham Stone, who after examining me said I should simply check in with obstetricians as I traveled. After the summer program, we continued on to India to join my parents and Margaret Sanger for the first Asian International Planned Parenthood conference . We stayed on in India for family planning work; but later, with my mother I returned to Boston, where David was born on February 23, 1953-after his trip around the world. Soon Lionel and I traveled frequently overseas from our Washington, DC home on behalf of *The Experiment and *Pathfinder. Viewing horrible slums,learning how women were subjected to years of childbearing, seeing bodies of women under hospital sheets hemorrhaging after childbirth or abortion attempts, learning how different cultural views impeded a woman's ability to plan and control her family and life renewed my determination to continue working in the contraceptive field. Pathfinder International promoted the idea that if women were to be educated about the value of planning and spacing children, their advice and information must come from members of their own religion and culture. In 1962 we were asked by Sargent Shriver (an Experimenter) to sail on student ships to ascertain whether students would consider spending two years as Peace Corps volunteers. Between sailings, we visited the families of the two Norwegian au pairs we had had for our children, as well as other Norwegian friends. We saw Munch prints and oils in their homes and in museums. *We soon started collecting, and our Epstein Family Collection grew to more than 300 prints and several oils. I volunteered with the local Washington area Planned Parenthood organization and for twelve years I assisted the Planned Parenthood worker at Washington City Hospital, advising women who had just given birth on the advantages of delaying future pregnancies and explaining different methods of birth control. Often I wore earrings I had made from Lippes Loops (IUDs); I will never forget the woman who, after my explanation, looked at me full of doubt: "Miss, I don't see how them things in your ears can keep you from getting knocked up!" Equally unforgettable was the woman who pointed to the loop inserter, saying, "I don't think that thing could fit inside me." When I started at the hospital, maternity patients filled four wards; beds were sometimes in the hall and patients were often sent to other hospitals. After family planning was introduced in District of Columbia public health clinics, knowledgeable patients stayed for sterilization and many, with our counseling, went home with birth control pills. At the end of 12 years, only one ward was filled with maternity patients and the District of Columbia now had the lowest urban birth rate in the country. Lionel and I divorced in the early 1980s. I continued my interest in family planning and traveled widely to observe Women in Pathfinder Clinic in Egypt reporting on their family planning experiences. progress overseas. As a result, I met Donald Collins, who had spent many years with organizations that funded grants for contraception work. In 1993 he invited me to join a group of family planning experts on a tour to Vietnam. A Vietnamese group had undertaken a clinical trial, using quinacrine (a drug most commonly used for malaria) as a method of sterilization for women. The quinacrine sterilization (QS) procedure* was being offered at government expense to women thirty years of age with two living children. Eleven to one, these women were choosing QS over surgical sterilization as an inexpensive, nonsurgical outpatient method. (Both methods were offered free by the Vietnamese government.) Unfortunately, political and religious forces in the World Health Organization forced the Vietnamese government to terminate this research, which had helped 50,000 women obtain QS with no reported deaths. The only potentially life-threatening complication was a rare allergic reaction. Don and I married not long after our return from the Vietnam study tour, and have spent the years since educating doctors about QS at international OB/GYN conferences and attempting to obtain US Food and Drug Administration approval so that we can distribute low-cost QS kits worldwide. We have been severely hampered by religious and political enemies, but we will not give up. We work through Don's NGO, International Services Assistance Fund (ISAF). When Don went to work in 1965 for a large Pittsburgh philanthropy, he was immediately put on the national board of the Planned Parenthood Federation of American (PPFA). He then was sent overseas to observe their programs in action; the sight of women dying from difficult pregnancies or botched and illegal abortions, or harried by bearing more children than they wished changed his professional life-from banking and then heading a venture capital firm; he directed his energy to starting or funding programs to study women's needs and help women obtain contraception. He was a founding member of IPAS (International Pregnancy Advisory Service), FHI (Family Health International), AGI (Alan Guttmacher Institute), Population Dynamics, Women's Health Services, and The Center for Population Options, and also helped with the funding for many similar organizations. He started his own NGO, ISAF (International Services Assistance Fund), in 1976 and it is through this organization that he and I work to promote knowledge of QS and make plans to introduce it worldwide after its approval by the FDA.* Our website, www.isafonline.org, contains extensive information about QS and our work. While working to promote contraception, I learned about the impatience of feminist groups like the National Organization for Women, The Global Fund for Women, NARAL, Pro-Choice America, Emily's List, and Planned Parenthood Federation of America. I have contributed funds to these and other organizations, worked with their presidents, and participated in several marches. I have also served on the boards of Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington, The Population Institute, Population Services International (PSI), the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Development and Population Activities (CEDPA), and of course Pathfinder International. * Since 1957, Pathfinder International has maintained an unwavering belief in the right of women and families to have access to contraception and to quality reproductive health care. Pathfinder's founder Clarence Gamble, a pioneer in family planning and maternal health, introduced contraception to more than 60 developing countries, including some where Pathfinder is still engaged today. *We've given prints to the National Gallery in Washington; eventually the entire collection, plus about 90 interviews I have taped with Munch family, friends, neighbors, portrait subjects, etc., will go to the National Gallery. From the older Norwegians I learned a great deal about life and customs in Munch's era in the late 19th and early 20th century. Several catalogues with my introduction or essays have been published, and I continue to give tours and lectures when asked. For over a decade I have been involved with Tostan (which means “breakthrough” in the Wolof language), an organization founded by Molly Melching in Senegal, West Africa. More than thirty years ago, Molly spent a college semester in Senegal and then served there in the Peace Corps. She initiated a program to educate village women. It starts with discussions about human rights and uses local teaching methods, including singing, dancing, and acting. Later in the two-year program, literacy, math, hygiene, and local concerns are introduced. In 1997 women in one village recognized that the ancient custom of female genital cutting (FGC)—although considered essential to make their daughters marriageable—sometimes caused death and was detrimental overall to women’s health. The Imam, who had not realized the pain and suffering FGC causes, said the custom was not dictated by the Koran; however, he and village leaders were concerned that young men from surrounding villages would not marry uncircumcised women. The Imam, together with the women, educated the neighboring villages, and on July 31, 1997 eleven villages gathered and invited the national health minister and the press to witness their “abandonment” of this custom. Now more than 4,000 villages in Senegal and nearby countries have publicly abandoned FGC; a tipping point has nearly been reached. Women at Pathfinder Clinic in Egypt tell of their efforts to educate other women about contraception The Tostan program continues, also urging “abandonment” of early marriage. A training center has been established in Thies, Senegal’s second largest city. Teachers from other countries have been trained. Manuals are printed in many languages. Don and I have witnessed at several village gatherings the power of this program and the delight the villagers have taken in founding schools, practicing better hygiene, providing wells, solving problems democratically, and benefiting from the use of contraceptives. To my mind, this local grassroots approach is the way to spread democracy from the bottom up—and is much more effective than efforts using guns and tanks. There are millions of women around the world who would choose an affordable permanent contraceptive method—if they knew about it and had access to a provider. Their plight keeps me working today, in hopes that the QS method of family planning can soon be made available to them. We will defend QS before the FDA for a fourth time this summer. My father’s training started me on the path of recognizing myself as a feminist, and this has resulted in my many years of working for women everywhere who want and need to make their own reproductive choices. I consider myself a feminist on their behalf. I feel fortunate to have passed feminist values to my children. I am proud that they are all supporters of family planning, women’s rights, and ecology implementation. * QS has already been used by more than 175,000 women worldwide with no reported deaths and only two cases of anaphylactic shock. We had trained doctors in 40 clinics for a Phase III clinical trial when a faulty rat study was used by the FDA to put a clinical hold on our program. We are now working to resolve this with studies that scientifically prove that quinacrine is not genotoxic in vivo, and that women who had QS before 1993 have no more cancer than a similar group that had IUDs or surgical sterilization. Back to Table of Contents

ROBERTA MARGARET YOUNG "ROBBIE” MADDEN - CIVIL RIGHTS AND FEMINIST ACTIVIST, ERA ORGANIZER, BREAST CANCER SURVIV0R I was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on the ninth of November 1936 and brought up in Ames, Iowa, right in the middle of America. I was the eldest of four children, my sister Judy was a year younger, sister Sherry six years younger, and brother Charles Loren nine years younger. I was a serious child and, as the eldest, was most aware of the precarious position of the family’s finances. My father, an accountant, worked for the government during World War II. After the war he worked in various businesses, never successfully. He was a poor provider and I remember a time when we didn’t have enough to eat. My parents divorced when I was fifteen. I was a young child when my mother took a job in Rushing's Supermarket. When I was twelve, she came home from work one day and told us she had been passed over for the manager’s job in favor of a man who was younger and less qualified. For the first time I felt outrage and became aware that some things are just dead wrong. I remember my mother saying, “He was just a bag boy, that was all he did.” That instant marked my awareness of injustice. Even today I won’t retire from activism until racism and sexism are eliminated. Life seemed to go on as before in our two-story white house at 511 Lincoln Way after the divorce, but I had changed significantly. I took a job in the supermarket that had discriminated against my mother and used my earnings to buy books to improve myself. This resulted in a scholarship to Iowa State Teachers College, encouraging a misguided attempt at becoming a schoolteacher. In those days women became teachers or nurses, and I didn’t have the imagination to consider something else. Instead of going into teaching I did something seemingly even more conservative by temporarily abandoning my education to get married. Jerry David Madden was fresh out of the army when we met. He was a writer, a radical thinker, and an exotic creature in my world. Until I met him I was called Bobby, but I soon had a new nickname, Robbie, and I changed my surname as well. Within a year we married. My mother did not wholeheartedly support my choice of husband, considering Jerry Madden was a poet with no substantial prospects. In the early years I worked to support my husband, who later taught at several colleges and universities. In 1968 he was hired by Louisiana State University as an English professor, and we moved to Baton Rouge. There I started my political career in earnest. Our son Blake, born in 1960, remembers “When we moved to Baton Rouge, we had dinner with the landlord of our rented house. A young teenage black man was working for the landlord-. The landlord sat us at his table, but had the young man eat outside on the porch. My mom felt he did that because the helper was African American. I remember her crying because of the situation. She never forgave the landlord and I doubt he could ever have done anything that would change her mind." Public speaking didn’t come naturally to me, and instances like these compelled me to speak out. I remember *Sally Kempton saying, “It’s difficult to fight a battle when the enemy has outposts in your own head.” Brought up to believe that women’s main role is to provide a home and children, I found the path of activism to be long and filled with challenges. Robbie with Lou Gossett at a YWCA USA convention, where she received the One Imperative Award for her work on racial justice at the YWCA Greater Baton Rouge. This was about 2005. Books had been important in forming my political views; in particular, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex awakened my realization that women didn’t have to take second place. I went back to college in 1966 and graduated summa cum laude in Government from Ohio University in only two years. In Baton Rouge in the late 1960s, I found a job as book editor at Louisiana State University Press, where I met Maureen Hewitt, also a book editor. We became close friends at a time when the women's movement was sweeping the nation. Together we founded a chapter of the National Organization for Women. Many of our early meetings were consciousness-raising sessions. Sylvia Roberts, a feminist attorney who had successfully argued Weeks v. Southern Bell, became our mentor. Maureen and I participated in national NOW meetings. Locally, we worked to change discriminatory credit laws and to focus attention on the sexism in children's books (boys can be firemen; girls can be nurses). “Robbie preferred being in the background," says her friend Maureen. "So she persuaded me to be president of our newly founded Baton Rouge chapter of the National Organization for Women. Robbie served as vice president from 1972 to '75.” I became an active member of Women in Politics, precursor of the National Women's Political Caucus. The organization eventually died out, but I started it again in the 1990s, and at one time we had 300 members. However, we could not sustain it, and the organization is no longer active in Louisiana. Blake remembers as a teenager coming home to find NOW meetings being held in the living room. “I saw Mom was actively involved in making changes that have helped women and minorities,” he recalls. In 1979 I ran for state Senate as a Democratic candidate. My campaign news release read, “The needs of older citizens, especially those on fixed incomes, deserve special attention. Government ought to be more accessible to the people, and voter registration must be opened up to make it easier and simpler. Louisiana’s education system should be strengthened by supporting and better evaluating our teachers. Parents want to be and must be more actively involved in the schools. Environmental problems must be solved before Louisiana’s natural beauty and wholesome environment are lost forever. Voters have a right to expect equitable treatment for everyone, rather than government by special interest group.” I lost the race to the incumbent but got a third of the vote with a campaign budget of only $35,000. I know that my efforts had a positive impact on the people of the Senate district. Again, another consciousness-raising moment. I was once asked when I presented information, “Who wrote this for you, sugar?” It was difficult to be taken seriously as a candidate by most men. I gave up a political career and turned my energies to working for several nonprofit organizations, including the American Diabetes Association, Common Cause, and the Baton Rouge Consumer Protection Center, and I volunteered on countless committees and community projects. My most enduring commitment outside of my marriage has been my eighteen years at the YWCA Greater Baton Rouge. Eliminating racism and empowering women is the YWCA’s mission and mirrors my own personal mission. As Director of Public Policy and Women’s Health, I created the ENCOREplus breast health program, which helped low-income women get free breast and cervical screenings. With Maxine Crump, I helped design the highly successful Dialogue on Race program, and as Director of Racial and Social Justice, I established it as a major program, later adopted by other YWCAs. I also created other events dealing with racial and social justice for the YWCA and the community. In 1993 I was diagnosed with breast cancer. My treatment was a lumpectomy to remove the malignancy and radiation to stop it from coming back. This experience served as motivation for my later work on breast cancer awareness. I'd thought my diagnosis was a death sentence, but soon learned that early detection meant a good chance of survival. Researching my condition, I found that black women were more likely to die from breast cancer even though the incidence of the disease was higher in white women. Late detection is one of the factors that contribute to this disparity. My lump was found early due to my regular self-checks. On Mother’s Day 1995, I launched the YWCA Greater Baton Rouge ENCORE plus program to raise awareness of breast and cervical cancer. The program targets African American women who more often don’t have insurance or may not be aware that they need regular mammograms and Pap smears to check for breast and cervical cancer, but helps all women who need the service. THE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT (ERA), first proposed in 1923, has a straightforward goal: to ensure that equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States government or by any state on account of sex. I'd already spent a decade working to have the amendment passed in Louisiana and in 2004 I again took up the challenge and helped to organize the Louisiana ERA Coalition. The group has lobbied and testified for the ERA twice in recent years; both times it was defeated in committee. * Sally Kempton, a journalist and early radical feminist left public life early on and became a nun and follower of the late guru Muktananda. Robbie (middle) testifying for the ERA with State Rep. Monica Walker (right), lead author for ratifying the ERA in Louisiana in 2007. FAST FORWARD Last year Robbie and her husband moved to North Carolina . Retired from the YWCA, she immediately began whipping things up in her new hometown, organizing an ERA activist group and a forum and dialogues on race. Her dedication was noticed by the High Country Press, MAY 27, 2010 ISSUE. Excerpts from article writtenfollow: MAY 27, 2010 ISSUE Workers Needed for Equal Rights Amendment Ratification North Carolina One of Three States Left to Ratify Story by Bernadette Cahill Iowa-born Madden lived in Boone more than 40 years ago when her husband, author David Madden, taught at the Appalachian State Teachers College, now ASU. She was in town last week initiating a hunt for local supporters to work on ratification. She began the process in Black Mountain when she moved from Louisiana six months ago. Boone was the first stop on an evolving statewide trail. The ERA, first introduced in Congress in 1923, was approved by the House in 1971 and the Senate in 1972, with a seven-year deadline on ratification. The deadline was later extended to 10 years, but the ERA stopped three states short of ratification in 1982. It has been introduced in every session of Congress, except the current session. Madden’s plan is to establish a network of individuals in each of North Carolina’s 120 state electoral districts; the individuals would lobby their district’s representative regularly about ratifying the ERA. “Women are not included in the Constitution except for the right to vote. That is the only protection they have. They don’t have the protection that minorities have,” said Madden, stating why it is important to have the ERA ratified. “For every legislative battle we have to start all over again.” The Three-State Strategy Robbie at the MLK march in Baton Rouge in 2005. She is first from left behind the YWCA banner. When the ERA failed ratification in 1982, it was believed the amendment was dead and the process would have to begin again. But in 1992, a major development occurred that may have resurrected the original ERA. That year, the Madison Amendment concerning congressional pay raises passed ratification after 203 years, reported the ERA campaign website www.eracampaign.net. This 27th Amendment’s incorporation into the Constitution has raised the possibility of the continuing viability of the ERA, especially as mention of a deadline is not included in the text of the amendment. ERA supporters have adopted what is known as the “three-state strategy,” an attempt to have three more states ratify the amendment and challenge the deadline. Madden’s proposed network to lobby for ratification in North Carolina is part of this three-state strategy. The ERA would be “the bedrock” in the Constitution that equal rights litigants could point to for redress and if it went to the Supreme Court, “they will win,” she said. Comments... Jcvfa@aol.com, robertamadden@yahoo.com Back to Table of Contents

FEMINIST of the MONTH - MAY 2010 LOIS RECKITT, FEMINIST ORGANIZER, NOW LEADER, ADVOCATE FOR ABUSED WOMEN AND CHILDREN I was born on December 31, 1944 in Cambridge Massachusetts of a "mixed" marriage (WASP mother and Irish Catholic father) in a "hurried" manner (my mother was quite pregnant, which I discovered in later years). I was an only child, but never felt oppressed by this. My dad was in the Coast Guard and later worked a variety of jobs; my mother never worked outside the home. She was the book-intelligent person, he the people person. They were wildly mismatched, and although they stayed married until I was in college, I wish they hadn't. If there was violence in the marriage other than emotional, it was kept from me until my mother was in her 70's and 80's, and then only intimated. Both my parents were polio survivors with various degrees of impact from the disease. I myself had every vaccine that ever was. My mother wanted me to attend a university and "be somebody." My dad wanted me to be a secretary or maybe a nurse or teacher so I would have "something to fall back on." I was a voracious reader and an organizer; the Busy Beavers crafting club comes to mind. My rebellion began in 1964 at Brandeis University with the Northern Student Movement and spread to Boston University, where I organized a union of graduate students. As a child I'd spent summers in Maine. When I was seven I told my mother I was going to move there. She suggested I wait until I grew up. So in 1968, after four years at Brandeis (where I learned to think) and Boston University (where I learned again to memorize), with my marine biology degree in hand I moved to Portland. I got a job teaching marine biology at Southern Maine Technical College "because they couldn't find a man to teach it," I was told. School had already started and they were desperate. I was part-time and teaching more than the regular faculty, but was paid only $129 a week. The men all worked full time and were no doubt paid substantially more. I was one of three women faculty in the school and there were eleven women students. After a year they didn't renew my contract, I'm convinced, because I was a troublemaker. For example, there was a very tight dress code at the school. Men's hair couldn't be any longer than the middle of their ears, that kind of stuff. Officials came into my classroom one day and took everybody out except for the women and one man. The students were told they couldn't come back to class until they got haircuts, so they went into the men's room and trimmed each other's hair. There and then I gave the students a lesson in civil liberties, and sent them to the Maine Civil Liberties Union. The subsequent lawsuit broke the dress code at SMTC. In the fall of 1970 I became the swimming director at the YWCA in Portland. For nine years I taught hundreds of children and adults to swim until I became bored and discouraged by the low pay. When I started college I'd been a math major, and I've always been fascinated by math. I talked the Y into letting me help do a cost analysis of the agency and taught myself social service management in the process. They sent me to a very good training for staff with executive potential, which was helpful in many ways. NOW COMES INTO MY LIFE In 1971 I was an activist looking for a movement. On November 13 Wilma Scott Heide, newly elected president of NOW, spoke at the then University of Maine at Portland/Gorham. My life has never been the same. Her inspirational and somewhat foreign words and ideas have stayed with me. NY lawyer Brenda Feigen w. hand raised arguing about candidate support while MS editor Gloria Steinem (L), NOW Pres. Wilma Scott Heide (C) & feminist/author Betty Freidan (2R) look on, during meeting of Caucus's National Policy Council. In this photo: Gloria Steinam, Brenda Feigen, Wilma Scott Heide, Betty Friedan. Photo: Leonard McCombe June 01, 1972 The next day we had a meeting of people who were interested in starting the first Maine chapter of NOW. We had the ten people required. I volunteered to be treasurer, and for 16 years I was in a NOW office-as State Coordinator for three years, then running Maine NOW out of my dining room. In 1976 I was elected to the national board. At a women's conference at the University of Maine in Bangor in 1974 or '75 we refused to allow male reporters to attend, which created quite a stir in the press (there was then only one woman reporter in the state). At the first session a woman in the audience stood up and said, "You know, there is a real problem in Maine. When women are hurt and they have to flee their homes there is no place for them to go. So if you're willing to take somebody into your home in those circumstances, sign here." And so I signed and I sort-of feel like that was my signature into the battered women's movement. In 1983 I was elected Vice President Executive of NOW and moved to Washington in January 1984. I hated Washington--it was unbearably hot and way too big--and to give up the ocean for any amount of time was difficult. On a positive note I was able to work with Ellie Smeal, who has the most incredible insights and political mind of anyone I've been around. For domestic violence-related concepts, Phyllis Frank later was my mentor. I was reelected in a rancorous election in 1985 and served until 1987. I left Washington in 1989. During those five years in D.C. I worked my butt off, four years with NOW and one as the Deputy Director of the Human Rights Campaign Fund, a political action committee I cofounded in 1980 to lobby for gay and lesbian rights. I worked 80 hours a week and was exhausted. I had disengaged from the Family Crisis Shelter in order to give the directors who followed me full reign, but on my return to Maine I was asked to come onto the board of directors. I was on the verge of applying, when the agency director resigned, and I applied again once again to be Executive Director. So began my second tenure at Family Crisis Services in 1990. John Lewis, U.S. Representative from Georgia’s 5th District, who once marched his heart out with Dr. Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery, and who was viciously beaten by police (left) for doing so, was once again victimized last week. On his way into the Capitol, Tea Party members demonstrating against the soon-to-be-voted on health care bill yelled, “Kill the bill, nigger.” I returned to what was clearly my life's work, and frequently took the words of Representative John Lewis to heart. Clearly now, it was "time to get in the way" of those who would oppress victims of violence. Often called "one of the most courageous persons the Civil Rights Movement ever produced," John Lewis has dedicated his life to protecting human rights securing civil liberties, and building what he calls "The Beloved Community" in America. His dedication to the highest ethical standards and moral principles has won him the admiration of many of his colleagues on both sides of the aisle in the United States Congress. In March 1998 I was inducted into the Maine Women's Hall of Fame for my work in the battered women's, general feminist and lesbian/gay rights movements. In a bit of clairvoyance, I wrote 20 years ago "The convergence of the advances in reproductive technology and the emerging conservative consensus on the Supreme Court may soon bear restrictive and tragic consequences for American women." In my life as a feminist, whether talking about the Equal Rights Amendment, reproductive rights or domestic violence, people always knew where I stood, and I never played games with anybody. It hasn't always been easy. I have always felt that if we were going to get to where we needed to go, we needed men with us. I think it is important for people to see both faces; those who have been harmed by this crime, and those of us who have been fortunate enough to not have such a harsh experience. I have been able to say to men, "I know you believe this is wrong. I know you want to help. I know you're terrified that you're going to say the wrong thing and upset someone. So tell me what the law ought to say in order to do what we want. But let's do this together." We need men with us, not to bolster us, but to stand beside us and to use their power to get this work done. My work over the last decade, whether with the Performance Council of the Courts, the Justice Assistance Council, the Maine Commission on Domestic Abuse, the Homicide Review Panel or the Maine Criminal Justice Academy Board of Trustees, has been building bridges between the domestic violence movement and those with the power to make change for victims and survivors of violence. One of my proudest moments was sitting in the gallery at the Governor's State of the State in 2000 with First Lady Mary Herman, and hearing Governor Angus King declare violence against women and children Maine's Public Enemy Number One - and knowing I had been a part of the movement that made that declaration possible. New York: American Feminist leaders hold a press conference 7/15 to tell what "really happened" at the International Women's Year Tribune in Mexico City. Betty Friedan (2nd left), founder of the National Organization for Women said the "women of the world did unite" but the union was not accomplished until the Tribune overcame an organized plan to frustrate their means of communication. Other leaders who spoke at the news conference are; Dorothy Haener (L), of the United Auto Workers; Carole DeSaram (3rd left), Pres. of N. Y. Chapter of NOW.; and Wilma Scott Heide, (R), director of NOW. advisory council And so we have grown from a $75,000 budget and five staff people to a $1.4 million budget, 30 staff people, three outreach offices, a residence, an education and prevention initiative and myriad programs for elders, people with disabilities, incarcerated women and new Americans. The greatest challenge has been to maintain a cohesive agency in seven different locations, and to find an effective structure that can support so many people doing such intense work. My main focus remains supporting the mission of the agency: providing programs that focus on individual advocacy for battered women and their children, institutional change to assign responsibility for battering to the perpetrators, and community education on the abuse of women. I have also been privileged for the last two years to be the President of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. I see my role as a consistent, visible face and voice in the community for the Family Crisis Services. I'm the lead fundraiser and the lead money manager and the one who makes certain that we do what we say we're going to do with the money we raise. And I'm a dreamer for the agency. Family Crisis Services has been the constant thread in my life now for more than 30 years. I was born to do this work and I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity. I am still working as Executive Director of the Portland - based agency. In the last six months I have managed to purchase a new and beautiful six-bedroom emergency shelter for women and children fleeing domestic violence. Purchase price was $526,000 and we are within $60,000 of paying for it. We continue our groundbreaking work. I just turned 65--although I am not sure how that happened. My new left knee is one year old and doing fine - as am I, despite a multiple sclerosis diagnosis nearly 20 years ago. I'm president of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. My partner, Lyn Carter, and I were desperately upset when Maine voters denied our right to a wedding in 2010, but we persist. Lyn has two wonderful daughters and we have three grandchildren. In the great drama and occasional comedy that has been and is feminism in America sometimes I've had bit parts, and sometimes I've been one of the lead players. My entire adult life has been a tablet on which NOW and domestic abuse has left its mark. The experience has been sometimes joyful, sometimes painful-but never ever dull. In my view, one of the great historical movements of our time is and has been what each of us as activists has chosen to make it. Yes, the world has assaulted us with its own agenda, but when we have been faithful to our vision of the world, the promise that is truly in the ideals of feminism--if not always the practice--we have succeeded. And ultimately we will triumph. Please send your comments to jcvfa@aol.com and Lois_R@familycrisis.org Back to Table of Contents

DIANE POST FEMINIST OF THE MONTH, APRIL 2010 FEMINIST LAWYER, AROUND THE CLOCK ADVOCATE FOR BATTERED WOMEN AND CHILDREN, CIVIL RIGHTS, WARRIOR WOMYN, ETC ETC, ETC I was born a feminist. At least that’s what my mother said. Well, she didn’t exactly say that. She said I was the most stubborn, obstreperous and independent kid she had ever seen. She had six so she ought to know. (pictured right: Dianne as Susan B. Anthony in a one woman show she wrote, acted in, produced and directed.) I was born in 1947 and grew up in Muscoda, WI. When I was growing up, my first-grade teacher told me that she had been worried about how I was going to manage, because she asked what I wanted to be when I grew up…. I said President of the United States. She said girls can’t be President so pick something else. So I said okay then I’ll be a doctor. She said girls can’t be doctors, so maybe you can be a nurse. I don’t want to be a nurse I said, I’ll be a race car driver. She was totally exasperated and said, “Dianne, girls can’t be race car drivers.” My final word was well then, I’ll become President and change that. Out of the mouths of babes! In 8th grade, I was sent to high school for part of the day to give me something more appropriate to my intellectual level. So what did they send me to? Typing and shorthand, the skills a woman needed for “something to fall back on” should her husband not prove up to snuff. I still am a whiz typist. Once I dropped into the *Off Our Backs" office in Washington, DC to volunteer and they gave me a stack of typing. In about an hour I was finished. They offered me all the volunteer work I could do. At the end of 8th grade, I signed up for high school English, history, math, chemistry and shop. When I arrived in the fall, I was enrolled for english, history, math, chemistry and home economics. My protests did not avail, but I caused extreme despair by winning the Betty Crocker Homemaker of the Year award in 1961 though I was completely inept. It was a math test – if you bought this refrigerator at this down payment with this interest over these many months or that one for that, which is cheaper. That I could win. But at the regional contest, I had to cook and sew, and I was out on my ear. I was elected president of my class my sophomore year and every year after. I wrote a political column for the school paper – once. It was about the failure of the state legislature to pass a fair housing law. The principal told me that I was too young to be talking about civil rights. But I had gone to Chicago with a church youth group when I was 16 and lived in the ghetto for two weeks, where we marched daily for civil rights actions. I told him it was our job to speak up, which is what education was for. He didn’t agree and my column was axed. Since the junior president had always been Prom King, what to do, what to do. So I was Prom Queen and I picked the King. As it should be. In my senior year I was already in the college prep track, but they found that I was very fast with my hands (120 wpm typing), so advised I should work in a factory. I was valedictorian, National Honor Society member, president of my class for three years, AND winner of the Bausch and Lomb science award. Yet he suggested I should work in a factory!! I asked him if he would recommend that to a boy with my record. He said no, but I was just going to get married and pregnant anyhow so what was the point. It was 1965. My father had the idea that going to college was a waste of time and money – mine, as he never paid a dime. Years later when I was nearly graduated from law school, he changed his tune and told everyone his daughter was going to be a lawyer. He died one semester before I finished. During college, I participated in few activities other than work and studying. I had a work/study job plus a job off campus because I needed the money. I had several scholarships and had to keep up my grades to keep them. My last years I participated in some anti-Viet Nam war actions and some feminist meetings but hadn’t much time. After college, I went to California and got heavily into the anti-Viet Nam war actions but only slightly into the drug culture. I read Betty Freidan --- recommended by a boyfriend of all things! First, I was a parole officer for California Youth Authority, and then went to graduate school at San Jose, again while working full time. I thought with a psychology degree I would understand why people did the crazy things they did. Now I know better. It seems the older I get, the dumber I get, because I don’t understand anything anymore. By 1976, I was back in Wisconsin in law school. That was the way, by golly, to fix the system – go to law school. Yup, you can see how that worked! But to keep my sanity among that lot, my first year I joined the National Lawyers Guild, Lesbian Law Students, and Women Law Students. My second year, we hosted the national Women and the Law Conference and I was co-chair. Through that, I met many of the pioneering women lawyers who are icons today – one of them on the Supreme Court. When I started law school, I wanted to be a criminal defense attorney, but I went to hear Louise Trubek speak about her organization, Center for Public Representation, and the rights of women, and that was it. I wanted to be like her. So I switched to all things women and started working at the Dane County Advocates for Battered women. I also worked on some women and alcohol issues, women in prison, and disability issues with the newly passed Rehab Act in 1973. After law school, I skedaddled to a warmer clime and ended up in Arizona, because they had not passed the ERA, and I reasoned they needed me. I was right. Within months, I had become the state chair of the ERA Initiative and shortly thereafter organized a group to sue the state of Arizona, because it donated $10,000 of taxpayer dollars to the Mountain States Legal Defense Fund to stop the ERA, and Arizona had not even ratified it. The lawsuit died when the ERA did. During the 1980’s, I was very active in Women Take Back the Night and in the early 90’s set up a women’s radio show. All the while I was representing battered women and children in family and juvenile court for my daily bread – and it was just barely daily bread. In the mid 90’s, I began to get more involved in the LGBT movement. By 1998, I broadened my career into international human rights law, an area I always craved. I went to Moscow, Russia for two years as a volunteer gender specialist for the American Bar Association. I organized 44 seminars in 30 cities in 24 months–a busy schedule by anyone’s measure. I trained women’s groups, psychologists, teachers, lawyers, prosecutors, judges, and police – all on gender based violence (GBV). Along the way I trained the best of the attendees in interactive techniques to take over my work. At the beginning I was doing the entire seminary; by the end, I had found Russians to replace me. In addition, we organized a social advocate program (like our para-legals) that continues to this day, and a legal literacy program that also continues. I then returned to Arizona for three years working for the Arizona Coalition Against Domestic Violence as Public Policy Director. But the international bug had bitten, and when I got the chance to go abroad again, I did. This time it was Cambodia to train legal aid lawyers especially those working in family law and those representing women. With local staff, I visited rural villages and asked the women what their needs were. Without fail, their first question was about violence in the family. They wanted information on their legal rights though most could not read, and access to free legal information and advice. So we produced a simple booklet that could be read by their children. That book is still in use today. Hungary was the next stop to work with the European Roma Rights Center supervising the legal department. Loved the job, didn’t like Hungary. But I made some lifelong friends and learned a lot about the Roma. I started a case for Roma IDPs in Kosovo who were living on lead poisoned dump sites since1999 though promised removal in 45 days. It is 2010 and they are still there. The case is still going on (when I left the organization did not want to keep it so I took it with me). but it is very difficult to hold the UN responsible when they are the culprit. Back home again, I did some short term consulting primarily for an Albanian organization on their newly-passed domestic violence law. The legislature wouldn’t pass one so the people collected over 15,000 signatures, and all the politicians jumped on that bandwagon and it passed. But much work remained to get it enforced. I worked with local groups to organize community coordinated response teams, drafting protocols for all sectors on how to work together – police, prosecutors, judges, medical workers, psychologists and NGOs. Later I returned to train court constables. On Mother’s Day in 2007, I filed a complaint against the U.S. at the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights on behalf of battered women and children . Then I returned to Russia but this time to Vladivostok. I liked it much better. Itwas more progressive, better weather and great people. With a few thousand gallons of paint and some cable cars, it could be San Francisco. There I worked with the local bar association to set up training for lawyers on GBV issues. The IOM and U.S. State Department were opening a shelter for victims of trafficking so our attorneys came up with a protocol about how the government would work with the NGOs – normally they don’t. The protocol has now become a model in Russia. From there, I moved to Algeria. I could sit on my balcony and watch the ships glide in on the blue Mediterranean waters. The project was to train 60 young lawyers--preferably women--on women’s rights and domestic and international mechanisms for enforcement. The food was marvelous, the weather magnificent, and the people magnanimous. Though it was clear I was an American, they were as gracious as they could be. (pictured: Dianne with 2 Algerian friends.) I returned to the U.S. in July 2009. Since then (besides looking for a job), I am a volunteer with the local Volunteer Lawyers Program of legal aid and the NAACP weekly, where I am on the Board. Some years ago, we had established It’s Your Choice, a fund to help poor women pay for the abortions they badly needed. No Medicaid or other state assistance is available in Arizona. The fund had gone moribund but is now revived. So far we have aided a 17-year-old rape victim, two fleeing battered women, and three others – just since July. My phone number was on the web for one week, and I was inundated with calls so now we only work through established relationships with doctors. The need is great but the resources meager. The Arizona Historical Museum is opening a new exhibition on women next year, and I have been assisting with that. Demonstrations for Code Pink or NOW or for decent treatment for immigrants keep me hopping. Our chapter of World Peace Through Law is preparing presentations on humanitarian law and a resolution against our locally elected sheriff, (Joe Arpaio the new Bull Conner) and Andrew Thomas, county attorney (it’s hard to know what to call him), for their pattern of abuse of law and discrimination. I do a lot of speaking to young lawyers handing over that still-blazing torch. The Future?.... For my 60th birthday I gave myself a stunt flight in a fighter jet. For my 70th, I think it will be a trip to the international space station. And for my 80th birthday, what the hell, they say women are from Venus so maybe I'll go home. * Off Our Backs was a feminist newspaper published from 1970 to 1988 Contact Dianne: postdlpost@aol.com Back to Table of Contents    WINNIE WACKWITZ WINNIE WACKWITZ Feminist of the Month, March 2010 A lot of water has passed under the bridge since I was born almost 85 years ago in Grosse Tete, Louisiana, a small town in the bayou country. My mother seemed happy in her typical housewife role of cooking, cleaning and keeping my two older sisters and me in line, but I sensed a resentment in her. Maybe it was the scowl on her face whenever she observed my father raising me as the son he never had. I didn’t mind. I learned survival skills from him that have served me well all my life. I grew up believing I could do anything—not just things considered proper for females. My father took me to an air show in Baton Rouge when I was five years old. The large, beautiful birds that roared over our house had always fascinated me, and now I could actually touch those wonderful creations. I knew then that I would fly someday. My only childhood playmates were three male cousins. We would roam the bayous in a pirogue, rehashing tales of a mysterious monster that supposedly lived in the bayous and attacked invisibly beneath the surface of the murky water. This monster would shred fishing nets and gobble up the catch of the local fishermen. I used that adventure as my story line in a children’s book I wrote, The Creature of the Lost Bayou. Having been raised as my father’s son, when I reached high school I became keenly aware of the educational advantages given to the boys in my classes, who were steered toward careers such as engineering, chemistry and medicine. They always got extra help in math and science if needed, while we poor girls had to fend for ourselves. We were expected to choose between home economics and stenography for our careers. In spite of the feminist movement, things hadn’t changed much in some areas. In the late 1970s, my daughter needed tutoring in math. I asked her teacher, who happened to be a man, for help. “She’s a girl and doesn’t need to learn math,” he said. My husband agreed. “She’ll find a man to support her.” B-17 Flying Fortress I longed to go to college to study art and industrial design, but my father didn’t place much importance on education for girls. Besides, he simply couldn’t afford to send me. My sisters went to business school, but that wasn’t for me. I found out that Boeing Aircraft was recruiting men and women to build B17s and B29 bombers in Seattle, and that was exciting, never mind getting paid for it. Finally, I could explore the world while pursuing my dream of one day flying an airplane. This child of the Great Depression would have the money she needed to turn this dream into a reality. Thirty-five hours of logged flight training were required before I could join the Women’s Air Force Pilot Training program -- I had heard about on the radio. By the time I logged the required training time at my own expense, atom bombs were dropped on Japan and WASP was disbanded. I got my private pilot’s license, however, then my commercial license, and added a Flight Instructor’s rating in the years that followed. As GI’s returned from the war, they enrolled in colleges in droves. I took a job as Flight Instructor at Louisiana State University, which helped pay my way through college. Soon I, a 23-year-old freshwoman, was teaching battle-hardened ex-GI’s to fly airplanes! Wasp Flight Crew Wartime society had become used to women doing all kinds of work once considered impossible for females. The veterans saw nothing unusual about a female flight instructor. My proudest accomplishment was taking over two problem students from a male instructor, soloing them and giving them their cross-country training. Jobs became scarce for women in 1952, the year I graduated college. I worked as a camp counselor in upstate New York and afterward on the assembly line at Emerson Electronics in New York City. Managing to save enough to travel a little, I joined a college friend who was returning to her home in Brazil and boarded a small Norwegian freighter in the Port of New Orleans that was bound for Rio de Janeiro. It took 18 days to get to Rio, but the cute Norwegian sailors helped to pass the time. My friend, Luba, and I got jobs working for the Brazilian Air Force, she as a chemist and I as a draftsperson. My main assignment consisted of drawing three-dimensional pictures from blueprints of a converter plane being developed for the purpose of opening up the interior of Brazil. These drawings are now in the Brazilian Air Force Museum. Luba and I met our Dutch husbands in Brazil. In 1956 my husband and I returned to Baton Rouge where I supported him and our son while he studied engineering. After he graduated from LSU he worked for Texas Instruments in Plano, Texas, where our daughter was born in 1961. Now I was a full time suburban homemaker, wife and mother of two. My husband made it clear that he wanted a “stay at home wife,” which was fine with me. I imagined unconventional projects where I could use my talents at carpentry to keep me interested. Was I ever naive! My husband considered that sort of work unsuitable for a mother and homemaker. Perhaps that explains why the first stirrings of rage against the patriarchal world entered my consciousness. I had never heard the term “feminist,” let alone knew what it meant. I was ironing when I heard the news about a new organization in Dallas called Women for Change. As I ironed and folded my 2,560th starched white shirt for my husband and planned my 3,160th evening meal—numbers based on ten years as a housewife—I wondered if there was anything I could do to alleviate my situation. And then one day my husband told me that every day was a holiday for me, that I was getting a “free ride through life.” I didn’t walk, but ran to the first meeting of Women for Change. Hundreds of women just like me were in the audience. It felt good to know that I was not alone. This problem without a name was a taboo subject until Betty Friedan burst upon the scene with her earth-shaking The Feminine Mystique. As that book took off, so did a rush of others aimed to keeping women in their homes. Fascinating Womanhood, published by the Mormon Church, was designed as a course to teach women to use feminine wiles and make themselves sexually exciting to entice their husbands to grant their wishes. The classes were taught in public school facilities. Nothing I knew of was produced by anyone in the feminist movement to counteract these sexist books, so I decided to. I researched the influence of religious teachings and its oppressive effects upon secular laws affecting women. Using the same Mormon teaching methods to educate women about feminism—and to work out my own frustrations—I compiled and published a counter course entitled Fantastic Womanhood. The course was offered primarily to women’s social and church groups. By this time the Plano NOW chapter I had helped organize was involved in many issues, such as working on ratification of the ERA in Texas. We also campaigned to get radio and TV networks, which considered female voices “too high pitched,” to hire female announcers. Perhaps our greatest contribution was helping organize the critiquing of 400 textbooks and testifying before the state Textbook Commission. Changes were made in textbooks that improved the status of females as a result of our findings. With the realization that more work was necessary if women expected real changes in their lives, in 1970 I collaborated with a friend in the production of a small newspaper, The Feminist Echo, which gave the news and activities of the Women’s Movement in the Dallas area. Our newspaper also reviewed feminist books . I found out that there was a Texas law requiring husbands to support their wives, but district attorneys never enforced it. To secure my future I filed for divorce. The law at the time required wives to be married to their husbands 25 years before qualifying for social security. (Thankfully, that law has changed!) I stayed married until my 25 years were served. Meanwhile, I drove a school bus and began to build houses on our four-acre property with the aim of renting them out for additional income. This proved to be a successful enterprise, especially since I did the upkeep myself. Family responsibilities and lack of resources had grounded me from the air for over 20 years. I itched to get back to flying. I saved enough from bus driving to buy a vintage 35 years old two place Cessna 140. A friend from the National Flying Club and I left for the experience of a lifetime, each in our own Cessna 140. Two vintage grandmas flying side by side flew our puddle jumpers to Alaska, a 4000 mile trip over gorgeous rivers, valleys and mountains. I sold my Cessna in Alaska and returned to Texas to fly the little open cockpit Bower’s Fly Baby I had devoted seven years to building, and I flew it until arthritis made it impossible to climb out of the cockpit. Winnie and Daughter Dina Memories of my flying years are precious, but my fondest memories are of the years spent in the feminist movement. Many young women have no clue what we made possible for them and future generations, though much remains to be done. I feel gratified that I’ve contributed to the greatest movement of all time. NOTE: Winnie Wackwitz has been an active member of VFA since1994 and a board member for the past few years. Her books, The Creature of the Lost Bayou and The Mystery of the Swamp Lights can be purchased from VFA for $8.00, which includes mailing. She will be honored at the March 19th VFA event in Dallas. For information on Dallas event: contact Bonnie Wheeler bwheeler@smu.edu Be Sure to Read About All VFA's Past Feminists of the Month: CLICK HERE MURIEL ARCENEAUX, FEMINIST OF MONTH, FEB. 2010 ROXANNE BARTON CONLIN - FEMINIST of MONTH JAN '10 BARBARA BERGMANN - FEMINIST OF MONTH - DEC.'09 ELIZABETH SHEPARD, FEMINIST OF MONTH, NOV. '09 BARBARA LOVE, FEMINIST of MONTH -- OCT. '09 DANIELA GIOSEFFI - FEMINIST OF MONTH, SEPT. 09 ALICE ROSSI, FEMINIST of MONTH AUG. '09 SHEILA TOBIAS on ALICE ROSSI KAREN SPINDEL, FEMINIST OF MONTH, JULY 2009 Comments: Jacqui Ceballos jcvfa@aol.com Back to Table of Contents MURIEL ARCENEAUX, FEMINIST OF THE MONTH, FEBRUARY 2010 MURIEL ARCENEAUX FROM CAJUN LAND IN THE DEEP SOUTH SOCIAL WORKER, TEACHER, FEMINIST ACTIVIST I was born in Wainwright, Alabama to Muriel Swanson and Dennis Daniel Dees on February 18,1926, the eldest of five children. My mother was a community activist and my father a farmer. Times were good until the great depression of 1929. Our white neighbors were in great stress due to the unreliable market for agricultural products, and our black friends were more or less dependent on my father for their sustenance. My mother taught women mattress-making, so many of her neighbors slept on beds rather than cornhusk mattresses. She also taught them how to pressure-cook and can home grown vegetables to relieve some of the malnutrition rampant among the children. Some of my earliest memories were of two “spinster” aunts--one a seamstress, the other a schoolteacher--who were always sought out to solve problems. I remember my mother and aunts discussing issues at meals and gatherings. They were glad to get the vote in 1920, yet they were firmly grounded in what everybody’s place was or should be in the family and society. In 1931, I was enrolled in grade school, but the following February the school closed because of lack of funding. My mother placed me in the Monroeville Elementary School, and I moved in to live with my aunts. In the following months, their brother and his family moved in. My father, who had been hospitalized for tuberculosis, moved in so the aunts could care for him. Scenes of the overcrowding, the conflicts, and make-do solutions still flash through my mind. Several months later my father, who had been misdiagnosed, returned home and the brother and family moved out . In fifth grade, I returned to my family in Wainwright, and with my two sisters rode the unheated school bus twenty–five miles each way to elementary school. Union Theological Seminary, NYC In my senior year in high school, I experienced grand mal epileptic seizures. Still, I gave my senior piano recital and graduated with honors, earned a music scholarship to the Alabama College for Women at Montevallo. The seizures escalated and it seemed best for me to focus on studies requiring less strenuous preparation. In 1944, I attended Union Theological Seminary in New York City where my outlook was greatly influenced, and my father was apprehensive that I would become a socialist or, God-forbid, a communist. In 1947, I earned a degree in sociology and psychology, took education certification courses from Florence State Teacher’s College, and received my Master’s Degree in Education from Nicholls State University in 1972. I then completed postgraduate work in the humanities and special education for the gifted. My father, who’d thought my education a waste of money as I would just get married, said toward the end of his life that it had been the best investment he‘d ever made. After college, I was a caseworker with the Alabama Welfare Department and quickly added to my father’s misgivings by marrying a law student. Three years and two children later, I returned to work as a social worker and later, because the school schedule lent itself better to raising children, I became a schoolteacher. The marriage was troubled. Subject to emotional and physical abuse I warned my husband to not sleep with both eyes closed if he ever hit me again. Three-and-a-half years later I divorced and moved four hundred miles away. I did not ask for alimony but requested child support. It was never forthcoming, but I didn’t have the time or money to fight for it. In those pre-feminist days, redress for injuries to a woman’s emotional and physical wellbeing was unheard of and besides, no woman wanted to air her marital problems! Despite these stresses I traveled around the county demonstrating self-exams for breast cancer prevention, helped organize and was president of a women’s study group and, as most of the young married women of my set did then, I played a lot of bridge. As I looked for more professional opportunities I saw that women were at a distinct disadvantage. I was refused a job as an editor for the U. S. Government even though my test scores were at the top of the list. In 1959, I got a job with the Federal Government in Tyler, Texas and was later transferred me to Houma, Louisiana, a Cajun town on the Gulf of Mexico. There I married Louis Arceneaux and we had a daughter. For ten years I worked, reared my children and directed a church choir, while my husband held and lost ten jobs. I developed a severe anxiety neurosis and took residential treatment for six months, coming home only on weekends. By now I realized I had to take control of my life, so I decided to get a divorce. But Louisiana’s Head and Master laws, which gave a husband final say on all decisions about jointly owned property without his wife’s knowledge or consent, were hardly congenial. This time I pressed for child support. Fighting anxiety on every front I learned how to drive again, to answer the phone and sit through a meeting. I bought a small house, and now was “head and master.” I got a job as a substitute teacher and took courses to upgrade my Master’s Degree to increase my salary. Then my son was assigned to Vietnam, my elder daughter enrolled at LSU and I was alone with my ten-year-old daughter who was hurting over the family disintegration and frightened to be alone with a mother who was not always on an even keel. In the late 1960’s women were meeting to discuss the new women's movement, and I had to get involved. It seemed best to go through respected organizations in Houma rather than join the radical NOW, so I became involved with the Terrebonne Business and Professional Women’s Organization. The BPW women had very little information about the laws that governed their second-class citizenship, so I published a newsletter to make the members aware of what was going on in Louisiana and in the movement countrywide. I invited Baton Rouge activists Karlene Tierney and the late Marcella Matthews to talk to about ERA United, and Roberta Madden of the Women’s Political Caucus to conduct a political action workshop. With a few BPW and other local women I organized a branch of ERA United, serving as a board member for the state ERA United and as the first president of Terrebonne ERA Coalition. Members of these organizations formed writing groups, made lobbying trips to Baton Rouge, attended meetings of women around the country, and raised money for representatives to go to wherever demonstrations were taking place. I participated in the 1980 Chicago parade to ratify ERA, organized and served as moderator of forums in Terrebonne Parish during elections and addressed groups to promote the advancement of women. In attempting to get women in other organizations involved in the Equal Rights movement I encountered outright opposition among many to the idea of women’s equal rights. A great deal was made about going braless and other such nonsense. I served on the Louisiana conference-planning committee and the Houston Conference for International Women's Year as a Louisiana representative. From 1973 to 1985, serving in various capacities at the local and state level of BPW, I pictured: 1977 Houston Conference published a bulletin to inform women of political and other issues, pressured Congress for federal laws to remedy injustices toward women and assisted in drawing up a proposed legislative platform to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. I organized workshops to teach women how to work through government processes, to lobby, to assess the effects of legislation, and contributed articles to the media and made speeches on issues affecting women. I was a board member of the YWCA for eight years, during which the Y developed a counseling program for battered women and trained the police in handling domestic disputes. A women's shelter was established, but after ten years lack of funding and internal dissention closed all the Y programs, some of which were taken over by other groups. A major contribution was developing a workshop dealing with parenting. The Junior Auxiliary was attracted to this idea and paid for a consultant to establish and run a parenting center. There were many bright moments during these extremely active years. I met Bella Abzug and other feminist icons at the Houston Conference. I have a special memory of an evening spent with Gloria Steinem and others in a black church, where she gave an inspirational talk. There wasn't a question she didn't answer brilliantly. Elected to the Louisiana Democratic State Central Committee, for four years I assisted in the election of Louisiana women, among them Senator Mary Landrieu and Governor Kathleen Blanco. As a member of the library board I founded Friends of the Library and may have been the only board member who actually read. Always called down for my "radical" statements, I eventually was kicked off by a man on the board. In Louisiana I was always in trouble for my "radical" views. I was a docent of the Terrebonne Historical and Cultural Society for many years and served on the Arts and Humanities Board of Directors and on the Parish Literacy Council. All this after a full day's work and fulfilling my responsibilities to my home and children. After the last vote in the Louisiana legislature on an Equal Rights bill, the work seemed to be at an end. In 1990, I retired after 40 years in social work and teaching and moved to Vicksburg, Mississippi, to be near my daughter Denise. In 2000 I donated my papers to the Newcomb Archives at the Center for Research on Women at Tulane in New Orleans. After years of activism there is joy in reading about what is happening and not running around making it happen. I am proud of my children. My son is an Appellate court judge in Tennessee, my elder daughter a lawyer in Jackson, MS. My younger daughter has an M.S. in statistics and is manager of the computer division of a Canadian Bank. People comment that the South has changed since the Civil Rights Movement, but I say it hasn't changed enough! This goes for every state in our great union. There is still much to do. My message to young feminists: It is now up to you. Recognition Muriel has received many awards, among them the Veteran Feminists of America's MEDAL OF HONOR in 2002 at Newcomb College in New Orleans. *Karline Tierney, and Robbi Madden are well known feminist activists and members of VFA. Comments to VFA jcvfa@aol.com and to Muriel, 502 Warren St, Vicksburg, MS 39180-6045, Ph. 601-638-6030, or by email to her daughter, Denise billanddenise@gmail.com Back to Table of Contents ROXANNE BARTON CONLIN - FEMINIST of the MONTH - JANUARY 2010 ROXANNE BARTON CONLIN CIVIL RIGHTS LAWYER, FORMER PRESIDENT OF NOW’S LEGAL DEFENSE AND EDUCATION FUN, AND CANDIDATE FOR U.S. SENATE One of the One Hundred Most Influential Lawyers in America...National Law Journal I was born in Huron, South Dakota on June 30,1944. When I was a little girl, probably inspired by Roy Rogers and Sky King and the other Saturday afternoon movies, I wanted to be a cowboy and a pilot. It was easy for me to see who had the power and what could be done with it. My best friends were boys and I could run as fast and climb as high as they. I wasn't exactly a tomboy though, because I loved pretty things and nice dresses and shiny shoes. I went to Catholic schools so the gender lines were pretty clear. I just ignored them. By junior high, I had decided to become a movie star. My homeroom teacher, Sister Mary Katrine, was appalled. She was the first to suggest that I become a lawyer so I could use my flair for the dramatic as well as my brain. So I agreed to do that first, and then become a movie star. I was able to enter college at 16 through a special program based on test scores and grades. All I needed was a recommendation from my high school principal. She refused because I was such a rebel and she wanted another year to try to straighten me out. By rebel, I don't mean anything serious, but for example, I refused to button the top button of my uniform blouse and spoke up in class more than was ladylike. My little Irish mom went to see the principal. I don't know the content of the conversation, but afterwards, the principal consented, though she did tell me that I would never make it and she was not sure she would take me back when I flunked out of college. I am forever grateful to her for that. Nothing is more motivating to me than for someone to tell me I can’t do something. I sent her my report card from my first semester at Drake University. I was definitely not flunking out. I then went to law school and finished my last year of college at the same time, graduating with a BA at 19 and from law school at 21. Law school was horrible. There were only three women in my class and the other two were returning students much older than I. There was open discrimination by the professors who wanted nothing more than to see us fail and did everything within their power to make that happen. I married James Conlin in March of my junior year (1964) and spent the first semester of my senior year pregnant. That was a first for the law school. No one called on me for fear of upsetting me and causing me to go into labor. More seriously, I was not permitted to interview for jobs in my “condition." I graduated near the top of the class. In 1963, I read Betty Friedan. I realized I was a feminist and always had been. Like so many other women I was relieved that there was a name for my unshakable belief that women were equal and entitled to equal rights. In 1968, I gave my first speech on Women and the Law to a church group. I am lucky I didn't get stoned on the spot. Looking back, almost everything I advocated in that first speech and thousands of others has come to pass. In 1971, I founded and was the first chair of the Iowa Women’s Political Caucus. I wrote the first law protecting the privacy of rape victims and managed its passage in February 1972. I wrote many other laws and corrected code references, tried the first sex discrimination case in Iowa in 1972 and hundreds of others over the years, and moved the law forward in many areas by litigating individual cases on behalf of individual clients. TODAY: For several months, party leaders in Iowa asked me to run for the United States Senate against Senator Charles Grassley. Grassley has been in the Senate for 30 years and in public office for 50 -- a popular politician in Iowa with a reputation as an independent and a caretaker of taxpayer dollars. I didn’t think I could win. But in August, he came home to Iowa and spoke at Town meetings. During one meeting, he told a questioner that we should be very afraid that the government would decide when to "pull the plug on Grandma" and assured his supporters in a fundraising letter that he would never vote for "Obamacare." In Washington, he was pretending to negotiate in good faith toward a bipartisan bill, but in that he committed the cardinal sin for Iowa leaders: hypocrisy. His favorability ratings plummeted. I began studying his record and saw that he voted wrong on nearly everything -- including the Lily Ledbetter Equal Pay bill and the minimum wage bill on 4 separate occasions. So, on November 9, I filed my papers with the FEC and officially became a candidate. As a veteran feminist, I fought the early wars. I got knocked down hundreds of times and always got up. I was criticized, threatened and even fired from a job because of my outspoken advocacy for reproductive freedom. I wrote the first law in the nation to protect the privacy of rape victims and got it passed by the Iowa legislature and signed by the governor in 1972. Dozens of other pieces of legislation I wrote or had a hand in also passed in that and later years. I brought the first sexual harassment lawsuit and hundreds more over the years. I won the first state Supreme Court decision declaring discrimination based on pregnancy was discrimination based on sex and therefore illegal under Iowa law. We need more senators who will speak to issues of equality and fairness, and I will be such a senator. I hope you will get excited about my candidacy. Please visit my campaign web site: roxanneforiowa.com - watch my video and check out my law firm website, too: roxanneforiowa.com. And please register and make a donation or offer to help if you can. We are on FaceBook at Iowans for Roxanne. Roxanne Conlin for U.S. Senate, P.O. Box 876, Des Moines, IA 50304. IMPORTANT INFO ABOUT ROXANNE’S CAREER: Roxanne was born to Marion W. and Alyce M. Barton on June 30, 1944 in Huron, South Dakota. The family moved to Des Moines, Iowa in 1958.. She is the oldest of six children and the family struggled to make ends meet. She went to work at 14 and worked her way through college and law school. She attended Drake University in Des Moines, earning a B.A., J.D. and M.A. in public administration. She married James Conlin in 1964 and has four children. She served as Deputy Industrial Commissioner in Des Moines from 1967 to 1968, then Assistant Attorney General for the state of Iowa for seven years (1969-1976). She headed the Civil Rights Section of the Iowa Department of Justice. Jimmy Carter appointed Conlin United States Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa in 1977, one of the first women ever appointed as a U.S. Attorney. Roxanne served as the first female president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA). She also founded and was the first chair of the Iowa Women's Political Caucus and was president of NOW's Legal Defense and Education Fund. Conlin has been involved in the Democratic Party and ran unsuccessfully for governor of Iowa in 1982. She is now a candidate for the United States Senate. Contact Roxanne Conlin: rconlin@roxanneconlinlaw.com Back to Table of Contents Dr. BARBARA BERGMANN - FEMINIST OF THE MONTH - DECEMBER 2009 Dr. BARBARA BERGMANN ECONOMIST, WRITER, LECTURER, SENIOR STAFF MEMBER OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S COUNCIL OF ECONOMIC ADVISORS I was born Barbara Berman in Bronx, NY in 1927. My father was a union typesetter and earned a good wage all through the Depression of the 1930s, so we were not in want. However, the terrible state of the populace was obvious, even to a child in elementary school . My grandparents had come to the United States from Eastern Europe in 1914, fleeing anti-Semitism. Neither of my parents finished high school, because their families needed whatever they could earn. But my generation was expected to succeed financially. The hope for a boy was that he would become a lawyer or a doctor, and for a girl , that she would marry a lawyer or a doctor. I became an atheist at age four, when I failed to receive a favor I had prayed for and believed I deserved. I became a feminist at age five, when it became obvious to me that you needed your own money to be an independent person, which was what I wanted to be when I grew up. My Depression childhood left me a strong believer in having government provide help when people face problems beyond their power to control. There was a brief period, at age 17, when I hated the idea that the riches I felt sure to earn during my glorious future career might be taxed away and transferred to those less talented and hardworking than I. It soon passed and I have been left of center in my politics ever since. However, I never became an advocate of getting rid of capitalism. That I probably owe to the a sixth grade teacher, who was a fanatical admirer of Stalin’s Russia and on the slightest pretext dragged Russia into our lessons on all subjects. Our class was taken to the New York World’s Fair in 1940. The most popular exhibit was put on by General Motors, showing the marvelous capitalist world of the future, an auto-dominated landscape, all in miniature, through which one rode, seated on a moving sofa. The Russians also had a huge exhibit, and our teacher saw to it that our class spent much of our time there. In one corner of each room of the Russian exhibit building was a mammoth piece of agricultural equipment. Most of the rest of the space was devoted to the iconography of Stalin. He was depicted in paintings, in bas reliefs, in busts and in full-length statues. There were plates and cups with Stalin’s picture, spoons with his picture on the bowl, and others with his picture on the handle. Spending a school year in the class of that teacher inoculated me for life against admiring any such regime, and taught me to beware of fanatics. I applied to MIT, but was rejected, probably because my ambition to become an engineer was thought ridiculous. I won a scholarship to Cornell University and majored in mathematics. While in college, I read Gunnar Myrdal’s book An American Dilemma, which presented the racial regime that prevailed in the southern part of the United States. The book sparked a lasting interest in racial discrimination, which later extended to an interest in sex discrimination. I graduated from Cornell with a BA in 1948, and went back to living with my mother in New York. She was quite angry at me for not having “caught” a husband, and told me so frequently. My mother didn’t like the fact that it was a man’s world, but she felt that for a successful life one had to conform. “You’re nothing without a man,” she said to me, which further strengthened my feminist propensities. It was the midst of the first post-World War II recession, jobs were scarce, and there was discrimination against Jews. And, the Help Wanted ads were segregated by sex. All of those for women were for maids, salesladies, and clerical workers. I looked for a job in the male category, but never got a nibble. In desperation, I took a job typing names and addresses, but couldn’t endure the boredom for more than two days. Luckily, I had applied for a job with the federal government, and that finally came through. I was taken in on the lowest professional rung at the New York office of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, where I was part of the unit that answered inquiries from the public. After a year I was the head of the inquiries unit. At BLS I found that racial discrimination was not confined to the South. There was just one black employee there, Harvey Purdy, who ran the mimeograph machine and distributed the mail. Our unit had a vacancy, and I got him appointed to it. But it was decreed that he couldn’t sit with the rest of us, where the public could see him. He had to sit next door in the stock room and take inquirers’ phone calls. It was soon decided that somebody else was to have that job, and so he was sent back to the mimeograph machine. My attempts to get him a job visiting employers and collecting wage data were unsuccessful. I was told that BLS couldn’t send a Negro around to employers; that employers would not cooperate with such a person. In 1962 I was working in Washington. The Civil Rights movement had been in progress for a decade. I visited the wage survey branch in the central office of BLS and told everyone Harvey’s story, expecting to hear that those things were no longer tolerated. To my surprise, these very nice people told me, with no sign of guilt , that they still “needed” to follow the same practice. The experience of working for the Bureau of Labor Statistics left me with an otherwise good impression of government employees and operations, and of the capabilities of government agencies. Years later, in the early 1980s, while teaching at the University of Maryland, I was writing a monthly column for the New York Times Sunday business section and wrote in one of them that many government workers were capable, hard-working people. The young Times editor who checked my columns said I should omit that. His impression was that government employees were stupid and loafed all the time, an anti-government attitude that was becoming widespread. Based on my own experience with BLS and other government agencies, I believe it is in many cases based on false impressions. Unfortunately, it feeds the reluctance to use government as a means of providing needed services. While I was working for the BLS office in New York a visiting economist asked me whether my job left time for “doing my own work.” I hadn’t the vaguest idea what he meant, and he explained that he was talking about the economic research he assumed I would be wanting to do. He said I ought to apply to graduate school, and after thinking it over, I did. My BLS boss wrote a letter of recommendation saying I was “a young lady of culture and refinement.” I don’t know whether that helped my chances, but probably thanks to my math degree I was admitted to Harvard. At Harvard I wasn't allowed to be a teaching fellow at first, but after a few years they relented. Although I was a star pupil , I didn't get any offers of academic positions. However, my attitude has always been that anger is bad for the career. My future work at Harvard was influenced by Guy Orcutt, who introduced economists to computer simulation. Later, when teaching at the University of Maryland, I coauthored a book A Microsimulated Transactions Model of the United States Economy, in which simulated individuals, businesses, governments, and banks make trades of commodities and capital instruments for money. The lesson of scepticism I learned from my professors enabled me to apply to Econimist Gary Becker’s theory that race and sex discrimination in employment could not long persist. Becker claimed that any employer who discriminated would be driven out of business by competitors who didn’t and who would be able to hire labor cheaper, and produce the product at a lower price. Becker’s theory gained wide acceptance, and continues to be quoted with approval today. Most economists are not capable of seeing that wage setting and other employment practices were and are affected by societal systems of status differences, whether in the harsh regime of the pre-civil rights South, or in the subtler regimes of race and sex favoritism that are still in force everywhere today. At age 38, I married my husband, a microbiologist, whom I’d met on a blind date. We had a daughter and a son, both feminists, of course. Pushing for women's equality is not a big thing in my husband’s life, but he is a very fair person. He has always done half of the housework and child care, and with his support and aid I was able to produce books on issues of social policy mostly concerning race and gender. We are still married after 44 years. I've been a member of the NAACP since 1945 and very much regret not having taken part in activism for civil rights. And I’ve been a member of NOW from early on. I went only once to a local chapter meeting. In recent years, I have tried to interest NOW in getting local chapters to lobby for more money for government child care programs, by emphasizing the existence of waiting lists. However, I have not made any progress with it. My book, The Economic Emergence of Women explains why sex roles have changed so greatly in the last century, and what policies are needed to accommodate that revolution. In Defense of Affirmative Action explains why discrimination and exclusion by race and sex won’t go away without quotas. Saving Our Children from Poverty: What The United States Can Learn from France shows what a country that is determined to give every child a decent upbringing and education can do, and what the budgetary cost of doing it in the United States would be. I teamed up with an artist to put together Is Social Security Broke? A Cartoon Guide to the Issues. The answer to the question, contrary to what the politicians of both parties have been saying, is that Social Security is not broke, and does not now need fixing. The most recent book I have published, America’s Child Care Problem: The Way Out labels subsidized child care as one of the country’s chief needs, and proposes a $50 billion a year program of government subsidies and quality regulations. I would like to write one more book -- on the decline of the institution of marriage, which has meant the decline of male support in money and services for the raising of children. (Every year in the last three decades, the proportion of the married population drops. Gay marriage, believe it or not, is really not the most important marriage issue we face.) The solution is not abstinence education, but turning the country into Sweden -- lots more public spending on health care, childcare, education, housing. ____________________________________________________________ NOTE: In the early 1970's Barbara testified on a case involving pension inequities by TIAA-CREF, a pension management company for teachers and nurses not covered by state plans which were sending pension checks amounting to only 80 percent of what men received on the grounds that women lived longer. That fight went all the way to the Supreme Court, where women won. Also in the 1970's, as an advisor to the US Census Committee, she persuaded the Committee to collect data on child support, and to stop designating the husband as the "Head of Household." She has served numerous government positions, including that of Senior Staff Member of President Kennedy's Council of Economic Advisors. Please send comments to jcvfa@aol.com and/or to Barbara Bergmann: bberg@american.edu Back to Table of Contents ELIZABETH SHEPARD - NOVEMBER 2009 Feminist of the Month Elizabeth Shepard SUBURBAN HOUSEWIFE/MOTHER “WOMENS LIBBER”, NONOGENARIAN NOVEMBER 2009 Feminist of the Month Elizabeth Shepard with husband, John. I’ve lived two lives, says Betty Shepard, today of Naples, Florida. When the feminist movement began I was living in the suburbs of New York, caring for my husband and children and involved in community affairs. I never thought of myself as deprived in any way -- until 1970, when, as a lark, I took part in the march for Equality on Fifth Avenue in New York and was awakened to the inequities and discrimination towards the female sex. To start at the beginning: I was born in Beloit, Wisconsin October 7, 1918, the only child of Hungarian immigrants. My parents, Louis and Elizabeth Vigh, named me Elizabeth Louise for both of them. I was supposed to be a boy, but they loved me, and I knew it. At age seven, the day we moved to Elkart, Indiana, I explored my new neighborhood and found a tennis tournament being held for local children. Someone asked “Do you play ?” I didn’t, but I would like to. I wasn’t wearing sneakers, so was told to remove my shoes and a tennis racket was put into my hand . “All you have to do is hit the ball over the net and keep going,” someone said. I won the match from a little boy, and I was hooked. From then on much of my youth was spent playing tennis. I met my future husband John Shepard on the courts at the University of Wisconsin where I entered college in 1936. My dad didn’t know why women wanted to go to college, but I had to go, though I hadn’t the foggiest idea of what to study. My father had ulcers, so I chose a career in dietetics to find out why. But when I graduated his ulcers had healed. I met John Shepard, again in New York City, where he was studying at Cornell Medical College and I was in the first class Cornell held for therapeutic dieticians. My first job was at Carle Memorial Hospital in Urbana, Ill. I returned to New York and married John in 1942. I worked as a therapeutic dietician at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic and later, at the Good Housekeeping Magazine Bureau as a chemist. This was during World War II, and John was soon conscripted . Now, with a salary, we could afford the baby I so wanted. When my son was born I worried that I couldn’t possibly love another child as much. But as soon as I saw my daughter, who was born in 1947, I knew I could. I learned then that love is never limited, but extends to take in all those that we can. After the war we moved to Manhasset, Long Island, where John entered private practice. Now I was a suburban housewife. Volunteering became a big part of my life. I was president of the PTA and active in local politics. I liked being a mother. I think I said no to my children 3 times -- once to my son when he wanted a motorcycle, to my daughter when she wanted a horse, and no to any fighting before breakfast. And I said no to myself when I was asked to run for NY State Congress. How could I have two teenagers at home and a husband who rarely was. I never thought of myself as deprived in any way until August, 1970 when a friend called to tell me that NOW, the National Org for Women was going to have a march down 5th Avenue for equal rights. “Let’s go” she said. “Oh Maggie, I said.... we’ve just been thru the Civil Rights and the Peace movement, and now this movement of kooky women? I’m not sure I want to go.” “What else do you have to do?,” she asked. But the time of the march was 5 o’clock. “That's the time I prepare dinner, I said. I’ll check with John.” “Oh John won’t care”, she replied. And of course he didn’t. A few hours later I was marching on 5th Avenue with thousands of women I had never seen before, many who were older than I, some nicely dressed, and some I would have liked to neaten up a bit. The sidewalks were filled with on - lookers. People were pouring out of offices staring at us. “Betty Shepard , what on earth are you doing here?” I thought. As I marched so many emotions were pouring over me. I couldn’t sort them out. The march ended at the Public Library Park where we heard speeches by Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Flo Kennedy and many others . The word I kept hearing was equality, equality, equality… and I thought, “I don’t feel unequal in any way.” Then I heard that the march was on August 26 , 1970 because it was the 50th anniversary of suffrage, the amendment that finally gave women the right to vote . “ My goodness, I thought. In 1920 I was two years old and my mother couldn’t vote!” We were given a flyer which stated the reasons for the march. The first was educational opportunities, the second was equal pay for equal work, the third was childcare. I had trouble with this one, as I felt strongly that women should take care of their children. The fourth was reproductive rights -- all reasonable demands. These were definitely not kooky women! I decided I ‘d better look up this NOW. The next week I joined the Nassau County chapter. The members, mostly housewives, were so smart. I paid dues, but there were scholarships for those who couldn’t afford to. You had to be active at least on one committee. I looked at the numerous committees and thought, I need to learn about consciousness raising. And I’ve done lots of public speaking, so I should be on the speaker’s bureau. There was one called female sexuality. What did that mean? Then there was a media committee. I joined them all. Thus began 15 years of almost around the clock work for women’s rights -- speaking, lobbying, organizing, doing surveys. I spoke at churches, women’s groups, men’s clubs…I especially enjoyed speaking to high school kids. In the school’s hallways I’d hear. “We’re going to hear a women’s libber.” And when I faced the students I could see the disappointment in some. “Hum, you were expecting a young woman in a T- shirt and jeans and no bra”, I’d say, not an old grey haired woman. Then I’d begin my spiel. The kids were intrigued. After the lecture many, mostly boys, would stay to talk to me. I remember one boy saying, “I know what you’re talking about.” “Oh, is your mother a feminist?” I asked ? “ No, he said, but my father left us and my mother had to go to work, and she gets so mad because men doing the same work are getting a lot more money.” “Your mother is a feminist,” I told him. Then there was lobbying in Albany and in DC. Once in DC in the corridor of the capitol I bumped into a group of teen age boys add - from Catholic High Schools. “Are you here to study legislation ? ”I asked them. “No, they said, to lobby against abortion.” Suddenly I was steaming, but I made myself cool it. “Do you have sisters?” I asked. Most said yes.“ Do you love them?” “Yes.” “Supposing your sister is gang raped and becomes pregnant and she doesn’t want to have a child by a rapist. Would you want her to go thru that?” Well, they’d never thought of this. “And furthermore, it could happen to your mother as well" I said. I left them looking puzzled, but thinking. One day I ran into one of my senators in the hall at the capitol. I stopped him and, in a rather controversial way, I have to admit, I asked …” How are you going to vote on the abortion legislation? Are you going to vote as your constituents want you to, or your religion ? He would vote his conscience, he said, and he turned and walked away from me. Before I knew it my hand had caught his shirt tails , and I was demanding of him….” I want an answer! “ I was so enraged that I didn’t hear his answer. I learned then that anger is not only blind, but deaf, and realized that if I was to be persuasive I had to control my anger. She was born handicapped. She was born female In 1971 word came that Midge Kovaks of New York City NOW’s Image Committee was organizing a national campaign aimed at the sexist media. The idea was to stop the portrayal of girls and women as silly, immature nincompoops. We were given a record about sexism in the media, along with several wonderful posters, which I later learned were made by Anne Tolstoy Wallach of the J. Walter Thompson Ad Agency. One poster of a sweet toddler, a little girl who looked perfect in every way, really got to me. The caption said, “This healthy, normal baby has a handicap. She was born female.” This was incredibly heartbreaking. I had to spread this around. I called the local radio station, got an appointment to see the director. We talked about the rampant sexism in the media. “Would you NOW women like to do a public broadcast?, he wanted to know. “ Do I hear you correctly? I asked in disbelief. I’ll ask our board.” But the board had no idea what to do. A month later they hadn’t come up with anything, so I realized I would have to do it. I decided I’d create a program rather than give a lecture, so I took a crash course in Communications at Hofstra U, then developed the program. Called SPEAKING NOW I presented it on local radio for five years. My husband was retiring and we were moving to Florida, so I turned it over to the chapter. It ran for another 19 years, and then I lost track. The Nassau Country Medical Auxiliary, to which I, as the wife of a physician, belonged, asked me to speak to them about SPEAKING NOW. I would rather do a program about doctor’s wives -- about you, I said.. and suggested they let me interview them. They agreed. It was a real eye opener for all of them. One doctor’s wife was a doctor herself, but most were, like me, more or less happy housewives. The program broke all attendance records for the Auxiliary. Now they asked me to do another on female sexuality. That one blew their minds and they insisted their husbands needed to hear this. Soon I received a call from the president of the medical society asking me to give the lecture I’d given his wife. I said yes, but the women wanted the same lecture I’d given them for their husbands. How was I going to do that? And there was no way I could adapt it. I told my husband he didn’t have to attend, but he insisted, so I had not only to talk to husbands of my friend’s about female sexuality, but to my own husband. It was the last and most important meeting of the month. Standing before this prestigious group I told them that I was nervous, but as I looked at that sea of male doctors (and about 4 female doctors) I realized that in this case I was the professional. I began by saying that I was exceeding my own comfort level and if I exceeded their’s , to feel free to leave. Then I began to explain that female sexuality meant everything about women -- how they wore their hair, how they walked and particular how they talked. And I spoke of those body parts that we had no terminology for. I told them that I’d asked women how they referred to those secret parts and got more than 26 astounding names. Most women called them simply “my privates’, or “down there,” But the ones I found most interesting were “tinkalinkee” and, can you believe, “Christmas.” The breasts were most synonymous with food items, everything from walnuts to water melons. “No one has ever talks about the clitoris, I told them: the organ that provides orgasm for women.” I went on to explain different ways women can come to orgasm. After the lecture a doctor stood up and said he’d come only because it was the last meeting , and he couldn’t believe all he’d learned. There was a wonderful round of applause. No one had walked out. For many years John and I attended golf tournaments in Pine Needles, N.C. By now I’m known as “that women’s libber.” Once a man came in and addressed John, ”God damn, all we hear today is women’s lib" .. then he said approvingly, “That’s some kind of a wife you have.” My husband replied, "Yes,she’ll nail you to the cross every time with her truth.” So I lived the feminist movement with a feminist husband. As I was beginning to understand this new anger within me I was no longer the Betty my husband and friends knew. But as I liberated myself, my husband, too was liberated. Its just a happy and exciting place to be . I enjoyed both my lives -- that as a housewife/mother and that of a social revolutionary. The early feminist movement was a time of constant, intense work with many set backs and frustrations, but we accomplished so much, and, looking back I see that, in spite of the negatives, it was probably the most joyful and fun revolution of all time and I was fortunate to be a part of it. -------------------------------------------- Elizabeth Shepard received the VFA medal of honor in 2002 at a VFA event held with West Palm Beach NOW and Florida Atlantic University. She and her husband have lived in Naples, Florida since 1985. Dr. John Shepard was a noted neurosurgeon. Their son, Dr John Shepard Jr, is a doctor at the Mayo Clinic in MN. Daughter, Judy is a speech therapist in California. Contact jcvfa@aol.com for comments. Back to Table of Contents BARBARA LOVE BARBARA LOVE, FEMINIST of the MONTH -- OCTOBER 2009 FEMINIST AND GAY RIGHTS ACTIVIST, CHAMPION SWIMMER, JOURNALIST, FORCE BEHIND FEMINISTS WHO CHANGED AMERICA – 1963-1975 If Second Wave activists were graded according to their contributions, Barbara Love would be in the top ten. For more than 40 years she’s never wavered. When one door closed, she opened another–-and if there was no door to open, she’d cut one out of the wall of sexual bias and create a new venue to fight for women’s and gays’ rights . So when does one realize that one is a feminist, that one is different? For Barbara it was at a very early age. At home in Ridgewood, NJ, she wondered why women had to be in the kitchen while men were in the living room discussing things of world import. She felt she was a disappointment to her mother, an important woman in town, important the way women could be in those pre-feminist years. Head of the Debutante Cotillion, president of the Women’s Club and other clubs, Lois Love hoped her daughter would follow in her footsteps and make her proud. "I thought the Cotillion stupid, degrading and a waste of money." Barbara admits. “Not only that, I hung out with the poorer kids, rather than the ‘club set’ and that was radical.” She felt she didn't "fit in" during her childhood, but her one joy was swimming. “When I was three years old,” she relates, “I had to swim across the pool with my five-year-year-old brother at an event at our country club. After that, I swam all summer, entered swim contests and won many NJ state championships. A headline in the New York Times lauded me with an article titled Love At Thirteen Is Good. Today at 72, Barbara swims in Master’s competitions, competing in the most demanding events. She often wins because, she explains, “I am the only one in my age group, so winning five gold medals isn’t so impressive, as most of the time I have no competition.” Barbara realized early she was gay. She remembers having a crush on her third grade teacher. In middle school she had crushes on girls, but never spoke about this (there was no one to talk to anyway). Later, as a journalism student at Syracuse University, she learned that lives of gays were sad and often perilous. Women were thrown out of college for being gay. After college she spent two years in Europe. In Italy she taught at an American school. On returning to the U.S. in 1961 she went to gay bars, which she found degrading. There was no gay movement and gays could be arrested for whatever reason. Barbara learned about NOW from radio host, Long John Nebel, whom she had interviewed as part of her job as a journalist. Nebel recommended she talk to a feminist friend of his, who introduced her to Muriel Fox, a NOW founder. Muriel sent her to Dolores Alexander, who had joined NOW after interviewing Betty Friedan for The Long Island Press. At the time NOW was only a national board and a small New York chapter, which met at Betty’s apartment in the Dakota building. Preparing for the first meeting, Dolores gave Barbara a recipe and told her to cook a chicken for the board of directors. She says, “ I couldn’t believe I’d joined the women’s movement to cook!” She found Betty harsh and demanding so kept her distance. But there was much activity in the chapter and a passionate group of young activists, including Kate Millett and Rita Mae Brown. There were demonstrations against Colgate-Palmolive, and the New York Times; against hotel and restaurant men-only dining rooms, some of which Barbara helped organize. In 1970, because she realized the importance of providing a resource on women by their abilities and professional accomplishments, she compiled, edited and published Foremost Women in Communications. Meanwhile the lesbian cause was the main topic of conversation, and many “straights” were thrown off kilter. Some NOW members weren’t even aware that some of their closest cohorts in the movement were gay. Betty Friedan herself freaked out and began to portray the lesbian presence as damaging to NOW, which inspired Barbara to respond publicly. “My life had gotten better since I’d joined NOW and even better when I joined the women forging the beginnings of lesbian liberation,” she recalls. “I stayed with NOW to work with others to gain acceptance of lesbianism as a feminist issue.” Our efforts were successful in that at the national conference in California in 1971 NOW passed a resolution spearheaded by Arlie Scott proclaiming lesbianism a feminist issue. In 1976, at the historic International Women’s Year conference in Houston, Friedan publicly endorsed the resolution of lesbian rights. With Morty Manford, a leader of the Gay Activist’s Alliance, and their mothers, Barbara started Parents of Gays, today a nationwide organization. She says proudly, when in 1968 I finally had the courage to tell my mother I was gay, her response was ‘First to thine own self be true.’ She joined me in the 1970 Gay Pride march in New York." Barbara was also one of the founders of Identity House, a free walk-in center for gays and their families still active today.” (pictured right: Barbara Love and her mother at a Gay Rights March, June 29, 1974. Photograph by Cary Herz.) Nineteen-seventy-one saw the publication of Sappho Was a Right-on Woman, which she co-authored with Sidney Abbott. It was the first nonfiction book with a positive view of lesbianism and it is still in print. Though involved in her career as a writer/editor, for the next few years Barbara continued her behind-the-scenes activism. In 1998, inspired by the founding of VFA, which was organized to document the history of the Second Wave and honor all who made it happen, she began a monumental mission: to record the bios of the pioneers who led and made the revolution. Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975, published by the University of Illinois Press, is a masterful work that belongs on the table of everyone involved in the Movement. Barbara credits VFA members who helped accomplish this reference work documenting the contributions of more than 2,200 feminists. She is now working on a next edition/supplement so as to include many who missed the first go-round. Not only is she still involved in collecting and writing up bios of pioneer feminists, but she often travels around the country to introduce the book at VFA and NOW events, which she sometimes helps plan. She’s been to Denver for one planned by Ellie Greenberg, to Los Angeles where Zoe Nicholson’s NOW chapter gave her an outstanding welcome. She starred at the 2007 VFA conference that introduced the book at Columbia and Barnard, and in March 2009 she and Eleanor Pam held a powerful event in Pompano Beach, Florida. She will consider going anywhere in the country to help you celebrate your local heroes. If you were active between 1963 and 1975 and are not in the book, contact Barbara at BJLove@msn.com and ask for a questionnaire. To buy FWCA, get a 20 percent discount by contacting the distribution center at 800-621-2736 and asking for the discount ($64 instead of $80) because Barbara Love told you it's available to feminists who ask for it. We appreciate your comments. Please send to jcvfa@aol.com. Jacqui Ceballos Back to Table of Contents DANIELA GIOSEFFI DANIELA GIOSEFFI - BIRTH-DANCING ACTIVIST, AMERICAN BOOK AWARD WINNING AUTHOR PIONEER FEMINIST OF THE MONTH SEPTEMBER 2009 Daniela Gioseffi's feminist awakening began in 1961. As a civil rights intern-journalist in Selma, Alabama at WSLA-TV, she appeared on an all black Gospel television show announcing freedom rides and sit-ins, was arrested, taken to a jailhouse by a deputy sheriff of Montgomery County,and raped. The rapist, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, threatened her with death for her civil rights activism. In 1966, at age 24, she had a second awakening. She almost died in childbirth when her doctor refused to respond to her complaints about a high fever, deciding she had a urinary tract infection. The fever was septicemia, or childbed fever. Born in 1941 in Orange, New Jersey, Daniela grew up in Newark. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Montclair University, and an MFA on scholarship from The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, C.U.A., Washington, D.C., then toured as an actress in classical dramas with The National Repertory Company out of Washington. She later moved to New York City with her husband and daughter, where she taught Communication Arts and Creative Writing at various institutions in the metropolitan area and gave readings and talks on her feminist poems during the late 60's and early 70's, often with other feminist poets like Audrey Lorde, Alicia Ostriker, and Marge Piercy. Her writing began appearing in feminist poetry anthologies and in the earliest issues of MS. magazine She joined New Feminist Talent (a feminist speakers bureau founded by Jacqui Ceballos, Jane Field and Dell Williams), and lectured and performed on college campuses and in theatres, around the country, giving many readings to women who identified with the themes in her poems. She presented a one-woman show titled: The Birth Dance of Earth: A Celebration of Women and the Earth in Poetry, Music, and Dance, wrote a treatise on The Birth Dance, otherwise known as the belly dance, to explain that the dance of birth and fertility in ancient cultures was an ancient form of Lamaze exercise for preparation of the body for birthing, as well as a dance of life in celebration of the female's magical ability to bring life forth from her womb. The belly rolls of the ancient Mid-Eastern dance represented birth contractions. The so called� "belly dance"� had become a form of burlesque women were forced to perform for sexist society. The quintessential female dance of life was originally the female counterpoint to the typical male dance of the hunt and war, but it had been degraded. In 1980, Daniela's book, Earth Dancing, Mother Nature's Oldest Rite was published, illustrated with many ancient artifacts to demonstrate how women's rituals had been co-opted by sexist society and turned into burlesque spectacle. Daniela toured the country giving feminist performances in which women would join her in their ancient Dance of Life, which was featured as The New Dance of Liberation in a centerfold of MS. magazine, 1976. Her book of poetry, Eggs in the Lake, which celebrated women's freedom and erotic power, won a grant from the New York State Council for the Arts. Her drama The Sea Hag in the Cave of Sleep, an homage to the crone figure of feminine wisdom, was produced at the Cubiculo Theatre in Manhattan and won a multimedia grant award from The New York State Council for the Arts. In 1979, her satiric, feminist novel, The Great American Belly, was published by Doubleday in New York and the New English Library in London, as well as in Serbo-Croation in Zagreb. It told the story of a woman who survives divorce by birth dancing across the country while raising a child alone. Though fiction, it is roughly based on the author's life. In 1979, Daniela toured England speaking on BBC stations from London to Oxford to Brighton on her feminist theories of dance and ancient culture. She later joined a group of feminists in Brooklyn Heights who worship the Goddess principle using dance as ritual. Published in 1980, Earth Dancing, Mother Nature's Oldest Rite, was illustrated with many ancient artifacts to demonstrate how women's rituals had been co-opted by sexist society and turned into burlesque spectacles. She authored Women on War in1988, which became a women's studies antiwar classic and won an American Book Award in 1990. Reissued in 2003 by The Feminist Press, it expounds on the devastation of women's lives by war and a militarized economy. It has been translated into German, published in Vienna by a feminist press and been in print for over 25 years. In 1993, Daniela edited On Prejudice: A Global Perspective with an introduction on the dynamics of prejudice from sexism to racism to xenophobia. It won a World Peace Award from the Ploughshares Fund and was presented at the United Nations by The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. "It was translated into Japanese and published in Tokyo." Recently she was given the $1,000 John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry; a Lifetime Achievement Award from The Association of American Educators, and the a N.Y. State Literary Award. Her recent book of poetry is Blood Autumn, and she just completed a biographical novel on the life of Emily Dickinson. Titled Wild Night, Wild Nights after Dickinson's poem, it dispels myth that has surrounded the iconic American poet, bringing her to light as a full-bodied woman of strong and rebellious intellect. In 2002, Gioseffi's verse was chosen to be etched in marble on a wall of Penn Station's 7th Ave. Concourse with that of Walt Whitman. She is currently working on a memoir of her life as a feminist activist. (left: close-up of Penn Station Wall) E-mail her: daniela@garden.net Website: www.Gioseffi.com PEN AMERICAN CENTER: www.pen.org PODCAST: The Poet and the Poem, Library of Congress Radio Show Back to Table of Contents ALICE ROSSI, FEMINIST of the MONTH, August 2009 ALICE ROSSI, FEMINIST of the MONTH, August 2009 In the years before the founding of NOW, no matter how brilliant, educated and ambitious they were, women were expected to be wives and mothers only. But not Alice Rossi (activist, left). She was out in the world working, studying and active in political causes. Yet she wasn't really aware of feminism until she was in her 40's, she says, when she became an enthusiastic proselytizer for women's rights. Always politically active for the socialist cause, Alice finally awoke to sexist discrimination: she and other women were doing all the work and the men were getting all the credit. "That's when I began to write and talk about women's rights." In 1964 her groundbreaking article "Equality Between the Sexes: An Immodest Proposal" appeared in Daedalus and was reprinted the following year in Women in America. Not content to simply define sex equality, she proposed implementing a program to achieve it: First was the provision of a network of childcare centers. Second --- and remember, it was two years before the founding of NOW --- was equality between the sexes, not yet a widespread societal goal. Her third, anticipating the day when feminists would force the declassifying of "work," was to understand how and why girls and women prepare for and choose careers. "My theme was simple enough," she says. "I wrote that motherhood had become a full-time occupation for adult women, and motherhood was not enough. For the psychological and physical health of mother and child, and for the progress of society, equality between men and women was essential and inevitable. "My argument for equality was mild indeed, but the reaction of traditionalists in 1964 was not. I was considered by some a monster, an unnatural woman, and an unfit mother. My husband, also a sociologist, received an anonymous condolence card lamenting the death of his wife." By now Alice was highly respected for her writings and speeches in that small world of aware women. In 1966, Katherine Clarenbach, head of the Status of Women Commission, urged her to attend their national conference that June in Washington DC. There she met Betty Friedan who --- after the resounding success of The Feminine Mystique, was being pressured and was pressuring others to start an NAACP for women --- was at the conference urging attendees to leave the Status of Women Commission to start an activist feminist organization. Pictured: NOW Organizing Conference, Oct. 30, 1966 - Alice Rossi is seated front row, fourth from left, Betty Friedan first at right. www.now.org/history Katherine, still hopeful that the Commission would include her women's rights agenda, at first refused to go along with Betty. But it became clear that the Commission had no plans to go beyond its limited docket, so at the closing luncheon on the final day of the conference she, with Alice, Gene Boyer, Mary Eastwood, Catherine Conroy and a few others joined Betty at her table and while the luncheon speaker droned on, planned the organizing of NOW. Alice recalls that there were hours of discussion later as to whether it should be the National Organization OF Women, or FOR Women, and she was adamant that it should be FOR Women. "If men aren't included," she reasoned, "we'll not be paid attention to." She helped write the Statement of Purpose, and was not only in that historic founding group, but also served on the national board for four years. Editor of the acclaimed Feminist Papers featuring works from Adams to de Beauvoir, Alice also wrote The Family with Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan and in 1973 Academic Women on the Move. She founded and was first president of Sociologists for Women in Society and in 1969 an organizer of the Women's Caucus, ASA, and chair of Women in Academe AAUP. In 1977 she was appointed a Commissioner of IWY by President Carter. Born Alice Schaerr in New York City in 1922, she grew up in a Jewish neighborhood. Her mother was the traditional housewife and her father, a German/Lutheran, was a stern man and an alcoholic, whom she was a little afraid of. However, she knew he was very proud of her and instilled in her the idea she could be anything (though to him a woman's anything was being a secretary or a teacher.) Alice attended Brooklyn College and during World War II worked in the War Manpower Commission, the Lend-Lease program and as an Air Force base special-order clerk. Alice's first husband was Jewish and she converted; however they chose to have no children. That marriage lasted nine years. In 1951 she married Peter Henry Rossi and they had three children, Peter, Kristin, and Nina. Alice earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1957 and was a research associate at Cornell and Harvard Universities while pursuing her doctorate. She was a lecturer at the University of Chicago and a research associate in the Departments of Anthropology and Sociology. In 1964 she was on the university's National Opinion Research Center and Committee on Human Development. Later she was a research associate in the Department of Social Relations at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Her next post was as Associate Professor at Goucher College in Baltimore, becoming in 1971 professor and chairperson in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. In 1974 she became a member of the Social and Demographic Research Institute and the Harriet Martineau Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, a position she held until 1991 when she retired and was named Professor Emerita. Throughout her career, Alice has insisted vehemently that women have the right to control their bodies and has made many referrals for those seeking abortion. She has received countless awards and honors, too many to include here, but you can read about her extensive career on the Web. Alice Rossi is one of the greatest of our early heroes, paving the way for the feminist movement. VFA has awarded her a special medal of honor and she's in our Hall of Fame. Peter died in 2006 and today, suffering from emphysema, she lives in Boston near her daughter Nina, with whom she has been recording a video memoir about family work and politics. --- Jacqui Ceballos and Joan Michel To reach Alice: asr@sadri.umass.edu Back to Table of Contents ALICE ROSSI - Scholar, Teacher, Mentor Excerpts from a Invited Lecturer Honoring Alice Rossi given by Sheila Tobias, in September, 2008 at the Univ. of Mass.-Amherst with Alice Rossi in the Audience. I The Daedelus Article: An Immodest Proposal Alice Rossi With her stunning 1964 article," Equality between the Sexes: An Immodest Proposal" published in the prestigious Daedelus Magazine, Alice Rossi put the "E" word -- "Equality" -- into the conversation about women. It may be hard to believe - given that it was already 1964, just two years before the founding of NOW, -- but "equality", no less "equality between the sexes" was neither a presumption nor yet a goal for a lot of well-meaning scholars and politicians, even as late as 1964. Rossi didn't use the term "sexism". But she might have, because her article was intended to shift the focus from a "woman's problem" to a problem of a male-dominated society, unable and unwilling to accept women as equal to men. That's what made her article so radical and why it has never in the 45 years since it was published ceased to inspire and astound all who return to it. More ground was broken when Rossi, defined "androgyny" in that same article and insisted that "women participate on an equal basis with men in politics, occupations, and the family." She went on to write: "Just as tenderness needs to be cultivated in men and boys, achievement needs, workmanship and constructive aggression should be cultivated in girls and approved in women" Her sense of urgency appeared to be in response to the then dominance of psychoanalytic thinking which was making women more than before, as she put it, "prisoners of their sex and sexuality." Also by her observation that - and this was extremely radical for its time -- "continuous mothering, even in the first few years of life, does not seem to be necessary for the healthy emotional growth of a child." This Truth could be simply stated but it was hardly "simple" in its wide-ranging implications. Rossi was not content simply to define "sex equality", she offers a three-pronged program to achieve it: First was the provision of a network of child care centers and not just for those in the working class (as was done during WW II on a modest basis by the Federal Government). Her second "lever" was to alter the residential pattern of the American middle class, still in 1964 making their move to the suburbs. She wants to shrink the geographical distance between work and home. And her third, anticipating much of the early work of second-wave feminists (most especially Lenore Weitzman's Images of Males and Females in Elementary School Textbooks (1974), is to de-sex-link [her term] occupations and to focus on how girls and women make occupational choices. This, she fully anticipates, will involve re-socializing children's views, eradicating stereotypes as to who belongs in which occupations, starting in the earliest grades. And in her conclusion, she touches on what second-wave feminists would develop in full (though with only modest success in implementing) namely the role of the father in parenting: She writes: …unless the man can make room in his life for parenthood, he should not become a father. Amen. II Rossi's Historical Studies Rossi's Daedelus essay started with a quotation from John Stuart Mill about equality between the sexes, so it is not surprising that her work in the next decade should return to print a number of antecedents in the historical debate on sex roles with impassioned Introductions and Commentaries. The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir published in 1973 retrieved for many of us re-discovering our antecedents, a set of essential essays by 24 men and mostly women whose lives spanned the period 1744 to 1972- with long Rossi introductions to each! It's interesting that she calls these writers "feminists" when the term actually came into common use in about 1911. But what she really wanted to document was their diversity (except on the issues of women's value to society), perhaps reflecting her concern with a growing intolerance of diversity among "second wave" feminism which, by 1973, was beginning to show fissures (over abortion, over lesbianism) and with the arguments about essentialism just over the horizon. III Rossi's Political Activism Rossi was not just a scholar observer but an activist in her own right. She was one of 66 women who co-founded the National Organization for Women in 1966. In time, NOW would grow to 400,000 members but in 1966, it took insight, courage, and commitment for a woman of Professor Rossi's stature to sign on. From 1969 to 1972, academic women were "on the move" (the title of another of Rossi's many books.) In professional societies ranging from Modern Languages to Philosophy, (and eventually physics, chemistry, microbiology, and computer science), women scholars interested both in their status within their professions and in the emerging field of women's studies, formed so-called "women's caucuses" in their disciplinary associations. Rossi took the lead in sociology to form a women's caucus which, over the next decades, would significantly expand sociology's research focus as well as the proportion of women among the leadership. Just as Rossi's scholarship fueled her activism, her active participation in the women's movement finally gave rise to a scholarly study: the participation and the change in attitudes of the thousands of women who participated in the 1977 International Women's Year Conference in Houston. The analysis published as Feminists in Politics would be of special interest to social psychologists who study attitude formation and to political sociologists concerned with the structure of beliefs associated with political movements. IV The Essays on Sex Equality There is no "typical" piece of work in Rossi's rich and varied scholarship. But there is one book that epitomizes what she did for feminism and what she cared most about. That book is Rossi's 1970 re-issue of John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill's Essays on Sex Equality, including, "The Subjection of Women," "The Enfranchisement of Women" and the Mills' jointly written early essays on marriage and divorce. [1] Rossi had long revered the Mills' work on women originally published in 1861. She considered The Subjection of Women the first of only three landmark works on "the long history of the women's movement for political and economic rights, and of intellectual analyses of sex roles and relations between the sexes. The others are Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women and Economics (1908) and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1948). [2] Thus, when asked by the University of Chicago Press in 1969 to supervise a reissue of the Mills' essays on sex equality, she enthusiastically dug in to the history surrounding the remarkable relationship between the co-authors and the origin and impact of their work on women. Were it not for Rossi's new edition, my generation might not have had ready access to the essays; nor to the rich interpretation offered in her 63-page introduction to the book. The reason: Mill's collected works since his death in 1873, though often reissued and reviewed, tended not to include, "The Subjection of Women". And so while it was oft cited and known in general to students of women's history, it was not readily at hand. And how impoverished we activists and women's studies teachers and scholars would have been without these gems: This one: "What is wanted for women is equal rights and equal admission to all social privilege, not a position apart, not a sentimental priesthood." [3] Or this one: "High mental powers in women will be but an exceptional accident until every career is open to them and until they, as well as men, are educated by themselves and for the world, not one sex for the other." "Women are wives and mothers only because there is no other career open to them." John Stuart Mill & Harriet Taylor How to reconcile marriage with intellectual independence - with an intellectual life altogether - had been Harriet Taylor's personal challenge. John Stuart Mill was more reconciled to women's need to be married than Harriet Taylor. So it was he, more than she, who tried both to define and to live an egalitarian marriage. Alice Rossi in an egalitarian and intellectually productive marriage of her own would certainly have resonated with this. And with this: "We have had the 'morality of submission' and 'the morality of chivalry' and the 'morality of generosity.' It's time now for the morality of justice." Amen. Another reason for the especial appeal to Alice Rossi of the Mills' Essays on Sex Equality is that: "They are not burdened by the dead weight [her words] of psychology and social science theories. They were written pre-Darwin, pre-Marx and pre-Freud and, for that reason, (she writes) are even more relevant today." Let's give Alice Rossi the last word on Mill and on women's liberation: "To the generation of the twentieth century who have seen tyranny and suppression of human liberty in all forms of government, John Stuart Mill's invocation of the rights of men and women to liberty and justice have a strong continuing appeal. And to the women of the twentieth century who have seen very little difference in the actual conditions, if not the formal rights of women under any existing form of government, The Subjection of Women continues to serve as a resounding affirmation of women's human right to full equality and a sophisticated analysis of the obstacles that bar their way to it." Thank you, Alice Rossi, for your love and leadership. Contact Sheila Tobias: SheilaT@SheilaTobias.com Back to Table of Contents KAREN SPINDEL - PIONEER FEMINIST OF THE MONTH - JULY 2009 KAREN SPINDEL PIONEER FEMINIST OF THE MONTH JULY 2009 This article and picture appeared in the July 1968 issue of The Bent of Tau Beta Pi. I received a Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society Women's Badge my Junior year at GWU. If male, I would have become a member but in 1968 they didn't allow women. Instead they gave us badges and printed our pictures in the magazine. A year later, during my Senior year, Tau beta Pi voted to accept, rather than except, women; and I had the pleasure of becoming the first female inductee from GWU. - Note: Tau Beta Pi was founded in 1885. When I earned the Women's Badge in 1968, I became the 573rd women's badge holder in 83 years since Tau Beta Pi's founding. That gives you an idea of how hostile the profession was toward women both at the university and employment levels. Karen Spindel was a full-time female undergraduate mechanical engineering student at George Washington University in the mid 1960s. In 1969, her senior year, Karen went with her Student Chapter of the Society of Mechanical Engineers on a tour to Bethlehem Steel in Sparrows Point, MD. When she arrived with her male classmates, Bethlehem Steel personnel prohibited her from touring the plant because she was a woman. They positioned an armed guard in the seat next to her on the bus while the rest of the students toured. In 1968, Karen earned a “women’s badge” from Tau Beta Pi, the Engineering Honor Society, which at that time did not accept women as full members. A year later, when the rules changed, she became the first woman member of Tau Beta Pi from GWU. After her graduation in 1969 Karen faced and fought rampant job discrimination against women, and finally became an engineer for Robins Engineers & Constructors in Totowa, NJ. One of her first assignments was to design overland conveyors for Bethlehem Steel. In the mid 1970s she organized a protest at the Passaic Public Library, demanding that women be allowed to get library cards in their own names. “Prior to that protest, women had to declare their marital status and use Mrs. followed by their husband’s name on their library cards!” In 1972 she joined Passaic County NOW, served as membership coordinator for 20 years, and is still active today. She has lectured on the ERA “at any location that would invite us”. Says Karen, “During my 30 years-plus of activism, I have organized marched and rallied in New Jersey and DC and written enough letters on topics such as equal rights, sex discrimination and gender stereotyping to fill a book.” Karen lives in Clifton, NJ where she is completing and seeking a publisher for her chronicle of growing up feminist and frustrated in a sexist society. She is also a partner in a clinical quality software company, Database Place LLC which is in its infancy. Karen is the proud mother of two feminist daughters. Samantha, 37, has a masters in counseling and runs an "I can problem solve" program for at risk students in Paterson, NJ. Rachel, 20, is a Junior at Smith College majoring in politics. (September 1986, in Seneca Falls! One of the best gifts I ever received was being honored by daughter Samantha with a page in the Women’s Hall of Fame Book of Lives and Legacies for my 50th Birthday.) Contact Karen -- kspindel@optonline.net Back to Table of Contents