| 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
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to Table of Contents |
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| 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
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| Dr. BARBARA BERGMANN - FEMINIST OF THE MONTH - DECEMBER 2009 |
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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
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| ELIZABETH SHEPARD - NOVEMBER 2009
Feminist of the Month |
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Elizabeth
Shepard
SUBURBAN HOUSEWIFE/MOTHER “WOMENS LIBBER”, NONOGENARIAN
NOVEMBER 2009 Feminist of the Month
Elizabeth Shepard with husband,
John.
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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.
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|
|
| BARBARA LOVE, FEMINIST of the MONTH
-- OCTOBER 2009 |
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 marches with her mother for gay rights)
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
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| DANIELA GIOSEFFI - PIONEER FEMINIST
OF THE MONTH - SEPTEMBER 2009 |
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 calledť "belly
dance"ť 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
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| 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
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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
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| 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
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