Feminists of the Month

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SARAH BRABANT SERENA LUCE CASTALDI JEAN FAUST SARAH BRABANT LILI FOURNIER - Feminist of the Month - June 2011 RIANE EISLER - Feminist of the Month - May 2011 JUDITH S (JUDY) WEIS - FEMINIST OF THE MONTH - MARCH 2011 Patricia Budd Kepler - Feminist of the Month February 2011 LEAH MARGULIES Feminist of the Month January 2011 KAPPIE SPENCER - A GREAT PIONEER FEMINIST NAOMI WEISSTEIN - Feminist of the Month November 2010 DAISY FIELDS, VFA FEMINIST of the MONTH Oct. 2010 PATRICIA HILL BURNETT ON HER 90TH BIRTHDAY! DR. BARBARA J. BERG Feminist of the Month, August 2010 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

SARAH BRABANT - NOTED WRITER/EXPERT ON GRIEF MANAGING FEMINIST/COMMUNITY ACTIVIST I was born in LaGrange Georgia (November 18, 1932) into a deeply bereaved family. In 1929 my mother's beloved aunt died during surgery following a car accident and her father died from suicide two weeks later. In 1931 my sister died from cancer of the liver the day before her second birthday. I was born the next year. Death and grief were central to my life. As a child I spent a lot of time visiting the cemetery with my mother. She made certain that holidays were festive occasions. I have few other memories of her. For the most part I was raised by caring African American women who were strong women and became my role models. I also spent a lot of time riding with my father (Enoch Callaway, a pioneer oncologist) as he made house calls to his cancer patients. When I was in my early teens I started working with him at his cancer clinic. My childhood was quite different than that of my friends, but it afforded me experiences for which I will always be grateful. As a child I questioned many things that my friends took for granted. My father taught me to question racial inequality. I learned about gender inequality on my own in church. I wanted to carry the cross, not just sing, but was told by my priest that it was too heavy for me. I practiced on my own and one day showed him that I could do quite well. It was then that I learned there was another reason; I was a girl. I never seemed to fit in. I thought my marriage in 1953 would be the answer. I would be a wife and mother; life would be simple. By 1962, however, it was obvious that my husband, a bi-polar, could not support me and my three children. To gain earning power, I entered Memphis State University in Tennessee. Four years later I completed the bachelor's degree program that I had abandoned when I got married. I wanted to continue to work on a master's degree in social work but a woman with three children was persona non grata at that time. I scored well on the Graduate Record Exam, however, and a new graduate program in sociology at Memphis State was happy to have me even if I was a "non traditional" student. Upon graduation I was offered an instructorship. The highs and lows of living with a manic depressive husband and the accompanying physical and emotional abuse continued. After years of hoping he would change or someone would rescue me, I decided to get a divorce. I thought my married life was hell; I was to enter a new hell-the legal system. Space does not allow me to tell all my story. It is sufficient to say that my father was dead, my husband was from a prominent family, his cousin was a senior partner in the most prestigious law firm in the city, and my lawyer had been selected by them. Yes, I was that naïve. After a brutal legal battle, I finally received a divorce at the cost of accepting the minimum child support possible. I was far from free, however. My former husband tried to get me fired, stalked me, at one time attempted to car-jack me, and set fire to my house. My department head urged me to continue my education and I applied and received a National Defense Education Act Fellowship from the University of Georgia, one of the first women to do so. My ex-husband's lawyers took me to court to prevent me from moving. Their argument was that I already made more than a secretary. Why would I want to take my children away from their "loving" father"? How I managed to get permission to leave is a story in itself. Suffice it to say that I played the role of the helpless woman longing to be nearer her mother. My ex-husband's failure to pay even the minimal child support was never mentioned at the hearing. My attorney did not want to bring it up since it "might complicate things." At Georgia I became acquainted with the feminist movement through a fellow student,, Shirlee Owens, and joined NOW. I believe it was Robin Morgan who said that feminism was another name for a scream. I had needed to scream for a long time. At last I had permission to do so. I received my doctorate in 1973. To this day I say that I owe my Ph.D. to my first husband who called me "stupid" and "pea brain" one time too often. Affirmative action resulted in my receiving quite a few job offers but the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (then the University of Southwestern Louisiana) was the only one that wanted me because of my credentials not my gender. It was a great place for me. First, it offered Wilmer MacNair, one of my former professors and soon-to-be husband, and me the opportunity to be employed at the same university in the same department. This was almost unheard of at that time. Secondly, I was able to engage in my three loves: teaching, research, and community activism. Finally, the feminist movement was alive and well in the area. Louisiana was a pivotal state in the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment. I was privileged to meet courageous activists for women's rights, e.g., such women as Ollie Osborne, Fran Bussie, Pat Evans, and Sylvia Roberts. There was even a local chapter of NOW. I went to a few meetings, but found that the members wanted a place to scream. I was glad they had the opportunity but I was done screaming. I wanted to do something. My course assignments included Marriage and the Family and Social Problems as well as Introductory Sociology, areas I found fascinating. My research at that time focused on gender studies. My articles appear in several issues of Sex Roles, as well as the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Sociology and Social Research, Sociological Spectrum, Wisconsin Sociologists, Free Inquiry, and the Journal of College Student Personnel. It was interesting research, but the opportunity to work with a colleague on oil and gas impact grants paid and enabled me to put my three children through college. Articles in the Journal of Applied Sociology, Sociological Perspectives, and Impact Assessment not only added to my resume but were far more valued by my university than "women's journals. I was deteremined to climb the academic ladder to the top. Even more important, however, was my goal to reach out to women who were going through what I had been through. I found other women who shared this goal: Jessie Taylor, Isabel Gant, Doris Bentley and Margaret Gimbrede. Taylor and Gant worked for the city, Bentley was a colleague at the university, and Gimbrede was active in both the Association of University Women and the League of Women Voters. Two of us were African American; three were white. Together we proved to be a formidable force. We founded the Mayor's Commission on the Needs of Women and designed and developed both the first battered women's shelter and the first rape crisis center in the area. The oil boom had turned to a bust and I was privileged to serve as president of the Board of Faith House, a shelter for homeless women. I taught about sexism (and racism) in my classroom. I was asked to present workshops on gender issues in the community. The prevailing literature on why women remained in battering situations or got raped (masochism and sadism) infuriated me for it revictimized the victim. My search for a better model led me to the emerging death, dying and bereavement literature and the models of loss. My mother's death in 1980 prompted me to offer a one-time seminar in Death and Dying. Three years later I was asked by students to repeat the seminar and in 1985, again at student request, the course became part of the regular curriculum. I had come full circle. I taught this course as part of my course load each semester until I retired as Professor Emeritus in 2001. I continued to teach it as an adjunct until 2006. As a result of this course my community involvement shifted from programs for raped, battered, and homeless women to death and grief related programs. I have served as a support person for Compassionate Friends, Acadiana Chapter since 1983, counseled Persons Living with AIDS through Acadiana CARES since 1988 and was appointed to the faculty of the Delta Region AIDS Education and Training Center in 1990. I was one of the founders and also served on the Board of Directors of The Grief Center of Southwest Louisiana (now Healing House), a local program for bereaved children and their care givers. My research interests changed as well. My publications on death and grief related issues appear in Omega, The Hospice Journal, Association of Death, Education, and Counseling Forum, Illness, Crisis & Loss, Teaching Sociology, International Journal of Addictions, Death Studies, Clinical Sociology Review, AIDS Patient Care, and Journal of Gerontological Social Work as well as a number of chapters in edited books. In 1996 I wrote Mending the Torn Fabric: For Those Who Grieve and Those Who Want to Help Them and have presented numerous papers, workshops, and lectures on death and bereavement related issues at the local, state, and national level. At 78, I am still engaged in research and community activism, e.g., developing programs for low-income women. My husband of thirty-seven years has long been a member of NOW; my son and daughter-in-law are both pro women's rights. All three have supported my activism. At some level my two daughters have resented my social activism. I regret that I was not the stay-at-home mother they seem to have wanted me to be. I did not have that choice. Regardless, I would not change my life, neither the bad times, nor the good ones. I am who I am today because of all my experiences. I still don't "fit in," but I like being who I am. Contact Sarah Brabant: sbrabant@bellsouth.net Comments: Jacqui Ceballos jcvfa@aol.com Back to Table of Contents

NOTE: Languages such as Italian use certain gender-specific words, but English doesn't, and bilingual people may occasionally run into translation roadblocks (i.e."al femminile"). Serena's created her own way of expressing her thoughts, sometimes taking liberties with grammar (i.e. "Women is beautiful"). She likes the original way she uses words, some of which have even drifted into the general parlance. SERENA LUCE CASTALDI - A FOUNDER OF THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT IN ITALY Serena Castaldi The youngest of four children, I was born in 1943 in the North Italian countryside, where my family had escaped the city bombing and lack of food during the war. Soon after, we had to move back to Milano, where my father Enrico was an electrical engineer, and my mother Matilde attended to the many family needs. I remember my family as quite unhappy--people who didn't get along were stuck together, and strife and resentments ran deep. Everybody tried to escape, and my mother found a more rewarding work environment teaching French in middle school. When I was about 10 my parents separated; my father and two brothers moved out and I remained with my mother and sister. While more peaceful, our family life was not my idea of fun, and I spent as much time as possible outside of it, with friends and schoolmates. The school discipline of sitting still for hours did not suit my vivacious nature, and besides the social aspect of it, in class I was mostly bored. Yet I still had to follow my father's decision that humanistic education was best, and attended a classical high school steeped in Latin and ancient Greek. From childhood through high school my best friends were twins, Giovanna and Giulietta. Our trio coalition provided my growing years with female solidarity and unwavering support, emotional intimacy, fun, strength and a good deal of freedom of movement. Together we discussed our family lives, relations, how being female proved to be a social disadvantage, how to best protect ourselves from unwanted attention and be able to take part in the many stimulating things city life had to offer: movies, concerts, debates, museum visits. Very early I became aware of the disrespect that often followed the start of sexual contact with boys. Also I did not like being a sexual prey, exposed to inappropriate touching on the bus, men exposing themselves in the streets, or following me with lurid comments when I walked. Reflecting on all this, I concluded that I could be considered either a female or a person. I chose to be a person, rejected most sexual advances, and cultivated friendships with both boys and girls. Around 1964, following my family's intellectual tradition, I enrolled in the State University of Milan, where I eventually graduated with a degree in philosophy. Around that time my father, the authority that had determined much of what I was allowed to do, died, leaving me an economic independence that gave me a new freedom of choice. I quickly put it to use to start fulfilling my desire to travel, a part of my life that is still important to me. While on vacation in France I met Agathe, who invited me to visit her in Paris, where she lived with her sister. We developed a close friendship; each winter I visited her and in the summer she joined me at my family apartment in the Italian Riviera. We became fluent in each other's language, and by mixing the two created our own secret dialect. Living with her in the Quartier Latin, I had a chance to experience a lifestyle quite different from the more conservative Milano. After Paris, the swinging London of the Mary Quant era offered me another opportunity to plunge into another culture, with unconventional and colorful images of femininity. In 1967 the student movement came to my university. For the first time I got involved in politics, participated in meetings and occupation of the university, and by 1968 I was fully engaged in a Marxist-Leninist branch of the student movement. Another central woman in my life was Anna, my beloved sister-in-law and best friend until her death in 1977. It was with her that I went to New York in 1970, where I was introduced to the women's movement. While living there I met Anselma Dell'Olio and Diana Alstad and had the opportunity to speak with them in Italian about the developing women's movement. This allowed us a much more fluid and deep communication and the connection with Diana proved very significant, as it inspired me to look more closely into the Movement's philosophy and goals. As I considered writing my doctoral thesis on this subject, I visited groups and collected documents that I brought back to Milan. Back home, needing to create a social environment consistent with my new feminist inclinations, I started a women's consciousness-raising group, L'Anabasi (Ascent). It was the first group in Milano open only to women, which at the time proved to be a revolutionary and scary proposition. In September 1970 while I was in Rome, accidentally through a magazine interview, I learned Anselma was in Rome and contacted her. Diana also happened to be there with two feminist friends; she also saw that interview and called Anselma. We all reunited, and activated by this amazing synchronicity, we engaged in a campaign to spread the word about the women's movement. We talked to women, met with members of the new group Rivolta Femminile (Feminine Revolt), and did interviews for various media to give the issue maximum visibility. Then Diana and I went to Paris where we met the first French feminists. To keep spreading the Liberation vision, I translated many of the documents I had collected and in 1972 L'Anabasi published them independently under the title "Donne e' Bello," which translates as "Women is Beautiful." The grammar is not correct, but sometimes when I write I stretch the language to precisely express the meaning I want to convey, and in the process create new expressions. That same year L' Anabasi published a small collection of our own material: "Al Femminile," Femminile (feminine) is a word to indicated gender; here this gender connotation is used to indicate that one's perspective is marked by gender. This idea was so successfully communicated that the expression al femminile was promptly adopted by the media, has since been used in all cultural fields, and has became part of common language. L'Anabasi lasted five years during which--besides regular consciousness raising meetings--it instituted Soccorso Femminista to listen to and counsel women in distress; organized feminist vacations; out-of-town gatherings with women from all over the country; and contributed to shaping the collective debate in the growing Italian Women's Movement. In 1974 a publisher invited me to write a book on Women's History in Modern Times, to introduce this new topic in high schools. I accepted and with a woman in my group, Liliana Caruso, wrote "L'altra Faccia della Storia, Quella Femminile" ("The Other Side of History, Herstory;" 1975). This book was also a "first" and inspired further historical research on women. It was fascinating to reflect on how to define women's history and what to include in its account. The idea of looking at "the other side of history" has caught on and the expression has been adopted by many others to present their particular point of view on certain events. I made my most theoretical contribution in the thesis I wrote for my philosophy doctorate, which was published in 1978 as "Femminile Pateriale" (Paterial Femininity). Pateriale means generated by the father (pater), like materiale (material) is related to the root word mother (mater). In this philosophical and anthropological essay, among other things I discuss the fallacy of the idea of the existence of a matriarchal stage in the evolution of society, and the origin of the values associated with femininity, which, I assert, have been generated by a male culture that has attributed to itself the exclusive power to define reality. I then affirm the necessity of moving to a "different mode of history." In it, the universality of the male culture is abandoned, replaced by the recognition that males and females both have essential roles and experiences providing them with different points of view needed and valuable, and females are encouraged to discover, embrace and shape their own identity. It seems to me that the value of the fundamental role of women in reproducing and maintaining the species (a prerequisite to the existence of any culture and society) is still largely relegated to the society's unconscious, invisible and taken for granted, as the Earth itself has mostly been. In 1975 I retired from L'Anabasi, and to find new tools for deepening the exploration of who we women are, I hosted two new small groups. In Gruppo del Carattere we used various structures to broaden our perception of who we are and shake our self-images. For example, in turns one of us was silent, while the others would talk about her as if she weren't there, letting her hear what was previously unspoken. The other group was dedicated to Danze Interiori (Interior Dances), and was conducted in collaboration with another feminist, artist Nilde Carabba. Here the center of attention moved to the body and its expression through spontaneous movements that let the unconscious emerge. One or at times two women lay down in the center with eyes closed; then from a place of deep relaxation she let the movements spontaneously come, while the group was witnessing and making sure she remained safe. This was followed by a time for comments and a potluck. Diana Alstad and Joel Kramer In 1976 I accepted the invitation of Diana Alstad and her partner Joel Kramer to visit them in Bolinas, the village where they live on the California coast, and in 1979 I ended up moving here. As leaving Italy meant I largely lost the possibility to communicate in my native language, in Bolinas my focus shifted toward the exploration of the mind-body relations, yoga, the healing arts, creativity through dance and the performing arts. Eventually more confident in my English, I returned to writing, contributing articles to the local papers and also experimenting with performance--poetry, theatre and more personal texts, a choice of which I collected in a sort of autobiographical testimony to my first 50 years: "Seeds of Wholeness" 1995), which I self-published. Over the years I progressively stopped using my patronymic, Castaldi, in favor of a variant of my first name, Serena Luce (Serene Light). After much thinking, studying, talking and reflecting with and about women, I am firmly convinced that the essence and deepest meaning of the contemporary international Women's Liberation Movement is the individuation of the female spirit, she coming into her own and finding her voice and means of expression. More then ever our specie's survival is in danger. No solution to the current planetary challenges will be possible unless the 'other' half of humanity, the human female, becomes a fully empowered participant in society, and her contributions are respected and valued. As Carla Lonzi, a major art critic and one of the founders of the feminist movement in Italy, said : Il destino imprevisto del mondo è nel ripercorrerlo con la donna come soggetto." The future of the world rests on women becoming fully individuated and empowered. When, from being objects of definitions by the male discourse, women become subjects who define their experience of themselves and the world around them, culture goes from being a male dominated monologue to a dialogue between the two genders, each able to contribute their different point of views and values in the process of creating a new, more wholesome society. TO REACH SERENA serena@serluce.com Comments to: Jacqui Ceballos - jcvfa@aol.com Back to Table of Contents

JEAN FAUST - FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE FIRST CHAPTER OF NOW, NEW YORK CITY NOW Jean Faust I was born in Tarboro, North Carolina, March 19, 1930, at the height of the Great Depression. My father, George Dewey Satterthwaite (named after Admiral Dewey), was a tenant farmer who augmented his income by going around the area with his toolbox doing carpentry jobs. FDR signing New Deal Act 1933. Picture from FDR Library, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration. Our family was saved from poverty by the Roosevelt New Deal, specifically the Resettlement Act which leased abandoned farms on long-term mortgages to families who needed a boost. Eight of nine children born to my mother, Hattie Lee Bradley Satterthwaite, survived to become prosperous citizens. The little boy just before me died of pneumonia when I was an infant. My father tried several locations in the resettlement program and then settled into a farm on Blue Sky Road near Halifax, NC. The whole family worked very hard. Children who could not do farm work took care of smaller children and helped around the house, brought water, etc. On Blue Sky Road, we had a cooperative system of working on crops like tobacco that were very labor intensive. One day we would work at one farm, another day we would go to a neighbor. The whole area was like a big family; all the boys were like brothers to me. Farm work was extremely boring and repetitive, but the worst part was that we had to miss weeks of school in the fall to help with the harvesting. We grew corn and peanuts; the peanuts required a lot of handwork. We went to school for the first six grades in Halifax, NC (historically interesting for the Halifax Resolutions, a precursor of the Declaration of Independence). There were two classes in each room, but the teachers were dedicated and anyone who worked could get a good education. (I found later that I had learned by the fifth grade all the grammar that I would ever need.) For eighth grade through twelve, we went to Weldon, NC, a few miles away. During my first several school years, in Tarboro, we walked to school; I remember carefully stepping into my older siblings footsteps when there was heavy snow (no colorful boots for children in those days; one wore the same shoes year-round, usually handed down from older children). For Halifax and Weldon schools, there was a bus, but we missed a lot of school because the bus couldn’t navigate the country roads when there was snow. In Halifax, the majority of children were from neighboring farm areas (the town was very small). The highest grade was sixth, so the children hadn’t developed the attitudes that I would later experience in high school. Between 10 and 11 years old, I had a growth spurt that changed me from the smallest child in the class to the tallest. During outdoor recess, the girls got angry because I played fullout. When we played softball, I knocked the ball out of the play-yard, across a ditch into a field. The girls would complain, refuse to go after the ball, so I would run around the bases, then run to get the ball. When I pitched, the girls couldn’t hit the ball. The girls complained to the teachers and they found a solution. They took me over to the boys’ area and asked the boys to let me play with them. That worked out so well the best boy player and I became unofficial co-captains and planned all the games. Mostly we would each choose a side, which provided for more balanced play; however, sometimes we would play on the same side and the others didn’t have a chance. Mostly, we were fair, making sure the poorer players were distributed so that they wouldn’t be a drag on either side too often. (There were some boys who should have played with the girls.) I was allowed to play any position I wanted, even to pitch. I tell this story at length because I believe this early experience in equality started the spark of feminism in me. One who is treated equally with other humans will later chafe at the slightest inequality. I also extended this fairness (there was no feminism then) into my family. When I was big enough to work in the fields, I did that and then, at the house, because I was the oldest girl at home (the older sisters left as soon as they finished high school), I helped my mother. Many times I would be ironing while my father and the other children relaxed. I simmered in this situation for a while, then one day I announced that I would do all housework during hours when everyone was working; thus, I did washing (with tubs and a scrubbing board and hanging clothes on a line outside), ironing, cleaning and any other household tasks while the others worked in the fields. For seventh grade to twelfth, I transferred to Weldon, a bit larger town. There I ran into prejudice against children who came on the bus; the town children felt very superior and did not associate with us. There was even a more serious problem; in the fall, farm children were kept out of school for weeks to help bring in the crops, especially the peanuts which had to be handled by hand. It broke my heart not to go to school, but as soon as I could go back I would get all my assignments from the teachers and catch up as soon as possible. But I was completely surprised one day when a teacher drew me aside and asked if I could manage to get a white dress, that I was number one in the junior class and thus was to be the grand marshal at graduation, leading in the seniors. I had learned to sew in Home Economics class so I just needed material. I had been carrying eggs to sell to the school cafeteria for my mother (a story in itself: think of the other kids teasing me while I sat on the bus protecting the box of eggs). She let me keep enough money from egg sales to buy material to make a dress. The next year I was valedictorian and had to make a speech, a very painful experience since I was extremely shy and knew the other children didn’t want to hear a word from me. Woman's College of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC I had not even thought of going to college, as I knew there was no money. Again, a teacher helped; she gave me a check for $200 and said “some citizens of the town” were proud of me and wanted to give me a start for college (I was never to know who they were); she gave me all the materials to apply, as well as applications for scholarships. I had attended Girls State at Woman’s College in Greensboro (later University of North Carolina at Greensboro), so I applied and was accepted. I decided I could work at school and summers as a waitress at beach resorts, and make it somehow. Waitressing was the hardest job I’ve ever done, exhausting, low pay, nasty bosses; but because it was for college I could do it. Before I went to college, I gathered all my childhood things: papers, valentines, letters, etc.—everything that pertained to my childhood, took them out into the yard and burned them. While they were burning, I told myself I was leaving the old life and all its slights and difficulties behind; I forgave all insults, slights and indignities, whether from family or outsiders and consciously began a new life. College was my element; studying and learning were heaven; I couldn’t take enough classes, even had battles with deans and advisors who called me in to say I was taking too many classes. I was a double major in English and Drama with a minor in Education. I also wanted to take Art classes because it would be valuable for some of the work in Drama courses; there were huge objections—only Arts students could take Art classes. I spent my graduating summer, 1952, on staff at the Burnsville School of Arts, near Asheville, NC, working on every aspect of play production and helping with the students. The teachers were top grade; for instance, in music, John Cage; dance, Merce Cunningham. But my favorite was the Arts Director, Dr. Gregory Ivy; I used to discuss with him wanting to go for higher degrees but not having money; he told me to skip the degrees and just keep reading, that I could do well on my own as rules for degrees would limit me. (His art class was one that I had had to fight to take, as I wasn’t an art major; he had agreed to let me in.) My drama teacher at Greensboro got a job for me at Kannapolis, NC as English and Drama teacher; he had a theatrical business and had just shipped them a huge amount of equipment, the latest in lights, etc. and he had taught me to operate them. When I got there, no one had touched them; no one knew how to put a backstage area together; the principal borrowed some technicians from town businesses and I showed them how to set up all the equipment and started planning for play production. That part worked out fine; the students were excited and receptive and some of them benefited greatly from the experience. The classroom was another matter; the students were well behaved but totally uninterested in school, in learning; they did the least they could do to get by. Some of them even turned in papers on plays they hadn’t read (I suppose they thought I hadn’t read the plays or maybe wouldn’t read their papers). The principal was surprised when I didn’t renew my contract. One of my friends from drama classes in college, a girl from New Jersey who was living in New York trying to get acting jobs, invited me to visit her; I came to NY in October 1953 expecting to stay a few weeks, see some plays and go back home and look for work. During this period, I went to a Christmas party hosted by an interesting young man named Irvin Faust, who was studying acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse. We began to see each other. Elizabeth Arden. The Canadian-born Arden opened a New York salon on Fifth Avenue in 1910, installing the trademark bright red door to make her shop distinctive. To maintain myself in NY, I took a temporary job at De Pinna, a department store at 52nd Street on Fifth Avenue. After Christmas, I registered with a temporary agency and worked at various businesses; when I worked for a few days at Elizabeth Arden, I was offered a permanent job. As was common for women in those days, I was paid very little and not offered advancement (later found that my immediate boss had not passed on to me promotion offers from the executive staff); later, I went to Mark Cross as Director of the Mail Order Department. They advertised in the Times, “Call our Miss Satterthwaite for all your gift orders.” After a couple of years, I was promoted to Buyer. However, the unrelenting long hours (sometimes even on Sunday) of retail work wore me down and in 1962 I retired to have a rest and recover my health. On August 29, 1959, I had married Irvin Faust. Having housewife duties added to my fulltime job had proved to be a strain as well. He had changed his career to Counseling, earned his Masters and Doctorate and gone from teaching to being Guidance Director at a Long Island High School. His doctoral thesis had been published by Teacher’s College and his counselor told him he should write. So at night he worked on short stories. All the work of our life together, maintaining the apartment, paying the bills, taxes, etc. was left to me, as was the typing of his stories. After some of them were published, he began to get calls from publishers asking if he had a book. When it was time to prepare a manuscript of a book of short stories, there was no way I could do that and continue in my demanding job. I thought he was an original and authentic talent, so I resigned and applied myself to helping him with his manuscripts. Those were days of great political turmoil, especially on the West Side of NYC where we lived; the Reform Democrats were replacing the old clubs. I joined one of the Reform clubs and quickly found that reform had not extended to equal rights for women. All the work of the club, especially mailings, was done by the women while the men stood around talking. Presidents were always men; secretaries were women. I watched these unreformed practices for about a year and then started talking to the women. I set up a committee on women’s rights. We Jean Faust (plaid dress) handing out flyers for Congressman William F. Ryan elected a woman as president and I was elected treasurer (having refused to run for secretary). Some of the men were furious about my activities, some were amused, a few were understanding, even sympathetic. A few women were active supporters, but many were reluctant, afraid of the men’s disapproval. One day during an election campaign, a man walked into the club and yelled, “We need a pretty girl to hand out literature.” I went over and reproved him and suggested he should have said, “We need a person…” He countered, “No, we want a pretty girl; people are more likely to accept flyers from a pretty girl.” I saw I couldn’t convince him, but I accepted the assignment so I could see how the campaign was going on the street. That proved to be lucky for me, as after meeting Congressman William F. Ryan I became an aide to him on Environmental matters, which was quite new then as an area of interest—about 1963. The public was not much concerned and even most of his staff thought it was a waste of his time. I don’t know how I was on the list, but I got a postcard for the first meeting of NOW in NYC and couldn’t wait to attend. It was a small group and we were asked to stand, give our names and occupations. Probably because I worked for the congressman, I was asked after that meeting to form the first chapter in NYC and act as first president. Our first NOW meeting was February 6, 1967. As organizing president I prepared the Chapter Kit, held Chapter meetings; answered mail, sent mailings—all without benefit of office space, equipment, supplies—or secretary. Any available area of our small apartment was “office”; our phone was NOW’s phone. Equipment and supplies were cadged where members worked; only stationery, stamps and paper were purchased. We had no expense account. Later, as we gained membership, there was limited reimbursement. My husband suffered many inconveniences because of my work with NOW—and paid for it, both in money and inconveniences. He also paid for my trips to meetings and conventions.) Besides chapter meetings, committee meetings, projects and demonstrations, I spoke to women’s groups and to schools and wrote articles for local West Side paper. I handled mailings on NOW proposals for New York State Constitutional Convention (up to 10 pages, 200 packets—no copying equipment, no Xerox machine) to all delegates—about six times. I made appearances at hearings, did mailings to women’s groups asking support for proposals. (In those early days, little support was forthcoming from women’s groups; their causes were peace, anti-nuclear efforts and social issues such as care of children & poverty; they did not comprehend that there were women’s issues.) I met with newspapers, asking them to organize classified ads by job category rather than sex; organized demonstrations and work with EEOC and Human Rights Commission to persuade newspapers and led a demonstration against Nat’l Assoc. of Newspapers pub. because they appealed EEOC ruling in our favor. In fall of 1967 I helped organize an action for Pauline Dziob, stewardess for Moore-McCormack Lines who had been denied job as yeoman because “it’s a man’s job”; she had done all the work while the man was ill. That November I helped organize the NY chapter push at the National Conference for a strong stand on ERA and abortion rights. That December I helped organize a demonstration againstthe EEOC for failing to act on women’s problems and for denying permission to me and Betty Friedan to speak at New York hearings. In January of ’68 I picketed and attended EEOC hearings every day where I had to listen to claims that they were unable to find “qualified” women to testify. All that year we were supporting the women who were suing Colgate-Palmolive, and, led by Barbara Love and Anselma del Olio, we worked all year to organize a touring demonstration with cars and signs, feminist filibusters and street theater, calling for boycott of C-P products. In September of ’68 I was alerted by Sonia Pressman, who worked at the EEOC that the Senate Finance Committee sneaked an amendment onto a soil conservation bill that would allow large companies to treat men and women differently in retirement policies. Thus I made many phone calls and wrote letters to Finance Committee, senators, and congressmen to object to this attack on the rights of working women. (The real purpose was to allow companies to force women to retire earlier with fewer benefits.) At request of Exec. Committee I led a debate against a change in NOW’S by-laws (a small group was calling for participatory democracy, rotating officers, etc.) and, also at request of Exec Comm., resumed presidency when NYNOW’s second president, Ti-Grace Atkinson resigned. I then organized a mailing to assure national officers and other chapters that NOW-NY had not “split” as rumored, that work was continuing. This effort to replace the structure of NOW-NY with an unworkable, though idealistic, system was misguided and unfair; some members didn’t seem to understand that holding office was work and responsibility. By the end of 1967, I was exhausted mentally and physically, from the strain of running an “office” singlehandedly, writing (and typing—no word processors then) statements and correspondence—for two jobs. 1968 was an even bigger strain because of the small but energetic movement for changes in structure. But I was exhilarated to be working on the problems that blocked women from self-realization. In February of 1960 during National Public Accommodations Week I demonstrated against For Men Only Restaurants and Bars. (What a good feeling that it now seems quite ridiculous that restaurants catering to businessmen once barred women.) Also in February NOW joined the suit of stewardesses against United Airlines; we picketed with them in Chicago in a bitter wind; one girl whose supervisor objected to her small afro fared much better than her windblown sisters. In March we demonstrated in front of Governor Rockefeller’s office to support the Cook bill on abortion. I lectured at Hunter College on The Contemporary Woman and Her Impact on the Contemporary Male. Insisted both sexes would benefit from ending the oppression of women. May of that year was Freedom for Women Week (Motto: Rights not Roses). We demonstrated at the White House in blistering heat—why did we always have extreme weather for demonstrations? Some women were terrified at taking this action, particularly lawyers and other professionals, for fear it would affect their career, but most of us were bothered by the men in dark suits carefully taking our pictures. We’d heard the FBI made files on anyone who picketed the White House. In August I testified in Washington at Dept. of Labor hearings on EEOC Enforcement Act. As a result of NOW’s (and other groups) efforts, EEOC decided that Title VII supersedes State’s Protective Legislation. (Dept. of Labor issued a similar ruling.) (State “protective” legislation had been designed to “protect” women from getting many jobs, thus protecting men’s rights to keep them . I pointed out that women regularly lifted 20 pounds and more in the form of babies and children and asked him if he’d ever lifted a squirming 20-lb baby from a bath.} Several times in 1969 I was asked to prepare materials for various media people who wanted to do articles or shows on women. All media continued to present feminists negatively.The jokes were contemptuous and threatening at once: Will women use Men’s Rooms? Will men become Playboy Bunnies? Women leaders are described as “tireless talkers”. A favorite tactic was to use famous women against feminists, usually women whose marriages had conferred position upon them or whose success rested upon approval by men. (For instance when I was speaking on a radio show, Claire Booth Luce called in to ridicule me; I’m sure it had been planned.) At the end of 1970, WNEW-TV presented a program called “Women are Revolting”; when I wrote to protest the double meaning, I was told the show was intended to provide entertainment, not information. Working at two jobs and running a household proved to be too much for my health; I had contracted tuberculosis while running congressman Ryan’s local office for a few weeks while he was seeking an office manager; I spent two years coughing and running a fever, went to doctors who treated me for sinus problems. No one thought of testing for TB, since it was supposed to have been eliminated. I also have a form of anemia that can’t be treated and an underactive thyroid, which doctors were unwilling to treat at that time (I later found one who treated it). Other health problems plagued me and in 1970 I found I had to retire from all outside work. For a while, I had no activities except running our household. I had been going to performances of the New York City Ballet since it was formed and ballet had become a passion second only to my devotion to my husband. One night, around 1982, I found a note in the program that asked for volunteers . I called and started working a couple of days a week, doing various tasks, from data entry and filing to working the information tables during performances. Around 1988, I moved over to the School of American Ballet, where most of the performers were trained, and was assigned many tasks related to data entry and maintaining student files. I loved watching the students progress; it was pleasant to work while hearing the music from various classes and peeking into doors as I passed along the halls. I worked there two days a week until 2009, when Irv fell and cracked a disc in his back. I had to stay home and take care of him. He had other falls and other illnesses (strokes and a seizure) and became so weak that I have continued to stay home and care for him. Contact Jean Faust: jeanfaust@nyc.rr.com Comments to: Jacqui Ceballos - jcvfa@aol.com Back to Table of Contents

SARAH BRABANT - NOTED WRITER/EXPERT ON GRIEF MANAGING FEMINIST/COMMUNITY ACTIVIST I was born in LaGrange Georgia (November 18, 1932) into a deeply bereaved family. In 1929 my mother's beloved aunt died during surgery following a car accident and her father died from suicide two weeks later. In 1931 my sister died from cancer of the liver the day before her second birthday. I was born the next year. Death and grief were central to my life. As a child I spent a lot of time visiting the cemetery with my mother. She made certain that holidays were festive occasions. I have few other memories of her. For the most part I was raised by caring African American women who were strong women and became my role models. I also spent a lot of time riding with my father (Enoch Callaway, a pioneer oncologist) as he made house calls to his cancer patients. When I was in my early teens I started working with him at his cancer clinic. My childhood was quite different than that of my friends, but it afforded me experiences for which I will always be grateful. As a child I questioned many things that my friends took for granted. My father taught me to question racial inequality. I learned about gender inequality on my own in church. I wanted to carry the cross, not just sing, but was told by my priest that it was too heavy for me. I practiced on my own and one day showed him that I could do quite well. It was then that I learned there was another reason; I was a girl. I never seemed to fit in. I thought my marriage in 1953 would be the answer. I would be a wife and mother; life would be simple. By 1962, however, it was obvious that my husband, a bi-polar, could not support me and my three children. To gain earning power, I entered Memphis State University in Tennessee. Four years later I completed the bachelor's degree program that I had abandoned when I got married. I wanted to continue to work on a master's degree in social work but a woman with three children was persona non grata at that time. I scored well on the Graduate Record Exam, however, and a new graduate program in sociology at Memphis State was happy to have me even if I was a "non traditional" student. Upon graduation I was offered an instructorship. The highs and lows of living with a manic depressive husband and the accompanying physical and emotional abuse continued. After years of hoping he would change or someone would rescue me, I decided to get a divorce. I thought my married life was hell; I was to enter a new hell-the legal system. Space does not allow me to tell all my story. It is sufficient to say that my father was dead, my husband was from a prominent family, his cousin was a senior partner in the most prestigious law firm in the city, and my lawyer had been selected by them. Yes, I was that naïve. After a brutal legal battle, I finally received a divorce at the cost of accepting the minimum child support possible. I was far from free, however. My former husband tried to get me fired, stalked me, at one time attempted to car-jack me, and set fire to my house. My department head urged me to continue my education and I applied and received a National Defense Education Act Fellowship from the University of Georgia, one of the first women to do so. My ex-husband's lawyers took me to court to prevent me from moving. Their argument was that I already made more than a secretary. Why would I want to take my children away from their "loving" father"? How I managed to get permission to leave is a story in itself. Suffice it to say that I played the role of the helpless woman longing to be nearer her mother. My ex-husband's failure to pay even the minimal child support was never mentioned at the hearing. My attorney did not want to bring it up since it "might complicate things." At Georgia I became acquainted with the feminist movement through a fellow student,, Shirlee Owens, and joined NOW. I believe it was Robin Morgan who said that feminism was another name for a scream. I had needed to scream for a long time. At last I had permission to do so. I received my doctorate in 1973. To this day I say that I owe my Ph.D. to my first husband who called me "stupid" and "pea brain" one time too often. Affirmative action resulted in my receiving quite a few job offers but the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (then the University of Southwestern Louisiana) was the only one that wanted me because of my credentials not my gender. It was a great place for me. First, it offered Wilmer MacNair, one of my former professors and soon-to-be husband, and me the opportunity to be employed at the same university in the same department. This was almost unheard of at that time. Secondly, I was able to engage in my three loves: teaching, research, and community activism. Finally, the feminist movement was alive and well in the area. Louisiana was a pivotal state in the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment. I was privileged to meet courageous activists for women's rights, e.g., such women as Ollie Osborne, Fran Bussie, Pat Evans, and Sylvia Roberts. There was even a local chapter of NOW. I went to a few meetings, but found that the members wanted a place to scream. I was glad they had the opportunity but I was done screaming. I wanted to do something. My course assignments included Marriage and the Family and Social Problems as well as Introductory Sociology, areas I found fascinating. My research at that time focused on gender studies. My articles appear in several issues of Sex Roles, as well as the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Sociology and Social Research, Sociological Spectrum, Wisconsin Sociologists, Free Inquiry, and the Journal of College Student Personnel. It was interesting research, but the opportunity to work with a colleague on oil and gas impact grants paid and enabled me to put my three children through college. Articles in the Journal of Applied Sociology, Sociological Perspectives, and Impact Assessment not only added to my resume but were far more valued by my university than "women's journals. I was deteremined to climb the academic ladder to the top. Even more important, however, was my goal to reach out to women who were going through what I had been through. I found other women who shared this goal: Jessie Taylor, Isabel Gant, Doris Bentley and Margaret Gimbrede. Taylor and Gant worked for the city, Bentley was a colleague at the university, and Gimbrede was active in both the Association of University Women and the League of Women Voters. Two of us were African American; three were white. Together we proved to be a formidable force. We founded the Mayor's Commission on the Needs of Women and designed and developed both the first battered women's shelter and the first rape crisis center in the area. The oil boom had turned to a bust and I was privileged to serve as president of the Board of Faith House, a shelter for homeless women. I taught about sexism (and racism) in my classroom. I was asked to present workshops on gender issues in the community. The prevailing literature on why women remained in battering situations or got raped (masochism and sadism) infuriated me for it revictimized the victim. My search for a better model led me to the emerging death, dying and bereavement literature and the models of loss. My mother's death in 1980 prompted me to offer a one-time seminar in Death and Dying. Three years later I was asked by students to repeat the seminar and in 1985, again at student request, the course became part of the regular curriculum. I had come full circle. I taught this course as part of my course load each semester until I retired as Professor Emeritus in 2001. I continued to teach it as an adjunct until 2006. As a result of this course my community involvement shifted from programs for raped, battered, and homeless women to death and grief related programs. I have served as a support person for Compassionate Friends, Acadiana Chapter since 1983, counseled Persons Living with AIDS through Acadiana CARES since 1988 and was appointed to the faculty of the Delta Region AIDS Education and Training Center in 1990. I was one of the founders and also served on the Board of Directors of The Grief Center of Southwest Louisiana (now Healing House), a local program for bereaved children and their care givers. My research interests changed as well. My publications on death and grief related issues appear in Omega, The Hospice Journal, Association of Death, Education, and Counseling Forum, Illness, Crisis & Loss, Teaching Sociology, International Journal of Addictions, Death Studies, Clinical Sociology Review, AIDS Patient Care, and Journal of Gerontological Social Work as well as a number of chapters in edited books. In 1996 I wrote Mending the Torn Fabric: For Those Who Grieve and Those Who Want to Help Them and have presented numerous papers, workshops, and lectures on death and bereavement related issues at the local, state, and national level. At 78, I am still engaged in research and community activism, e.g., developing programs for low-income women. My husband of thirty-seven years has long been a member of NOW; my son and daughter-in-law are both pro women's rights. All three have supported my activism. At some level my two daughters have resented my social activism. I regret that I was not the stay-at-home mother they seem to have wanted me to be. I did not have that choice. Regardless, I would not change my life, neither the bad times, nor the good ones. I am who I am today because of all my experiences. I still don't "fit in," but I like being who I am. Contact Sarah Brabant: sbrabant@bellsouth.net Comments: Jacqui Ceballos jcvfa@aol.com Back to Table of Contents

LILI FOURNIER - A WOMAN ON A MISSION GLOBAL GATHERING OF WOMEN --- EMPOWER WOMEN AND CHANGE THE WORLD! "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now." - Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe I have lived my life by Goethe's dictum. I thought if I worked hard enough and long enough my dreams would come true. I have not wavered from my mission to realize the dream of Women's Day Live, an unprecedented global gathering of women. The confluence of world events at this time marks a historic milestone for women, giving us a once in a lifetime opportunity to invigorate a global movement to empower women. Living on the edge is not always a comfortable place to live but it's the only way I know how, though I wouldn't recommend it to most. So how did I get to this place? I was born in Transylvania, Romania, and grew up under communism for a good part of the 1950s, until we emigrated to Israel. The first memory I have as a child was attending a parade in honor of Stalin's funeral. Growing up I lived three simultaneous identities. On the street I was Hungarian, at school I was Romanian, and at home I was Jewish. The only thing the Hungarians and Romanians hated more than each other was the Jews. So I learned early how to dance on my feet and to get along with and respect different cultures. I also learned about man's inhumanity to man at this time, when I asked why I had no grandparents or family like other kids. Both my parents were survivors of the Holocaust, and had lost everyone in Auschwitz and similar unfathomable places. My mother was lucky to have discovered an older sister who survived and managed to find refuge in Canada. She used to send me chocolate, a great luxury, which my mother kept for me, never succumbing to selling it on the black market. My father was one of the last to keep a private business, before he was forced to work for the state bakery. I'll never forget the day I decided to go visit him there, as it became a defining moment, in retrospect. I mustered up all the courage of a 7 year old to steal a loaf of bread and put it inside my coat and calmly walk out. When I got home I presented this to my mother as a surprise, telling her I had wanted to save her from standing in line for hours. She nearly fainted. She explained that if I had been caught my father would have been sent to prison in Siberia. When I was seven we left Romania for Israel. I found the freedom of Israel thrilling, never having to look over my shoulder again, and be afraid to speak up. I loved the bonfires, singing and dancing. One of my proudest moments that I remember is that the school principal chose me to welcome Prime Minister Ben Gurion when he came to visit our school. When the papers to leave for Canada arrived, I was nearly ten, and was devastated. We moved to Toronto. On my first trip to New York on my own, at 17, I fell in love with a soccer player, a Robert Redford type, who was born in the same place. Ours was a tumultuous relationship amidst adventurous romantic New York weekends. He thought we should get married and have kids, so why did I need a university education. Just like my Dad. In the end I realized that with the power and control issues between us it would have been akin to marrying my father. So goodbye to the Long Island country club life. Then as now, I believe that everyone regardless of gender, race or whatever has the right to have a dream and pursue that dream in freedom. I cherish my freedom of choice above all else. I went on to enrol at York University and the following year met my husband-to-be purely by accident. He was visiting his alma mater for lunch, having just returned from a year travelling in Europe. He was striking, witty, talented, and he let me be me. Trouble was I had to do the unthinkable and marry outside my faith, but I knew I'd never meet such a beautiful soul again. He turned out to be the love of my life, my pillar, my strength. Not to mention the best father in the world. A few weeks after our wedding we left for a trip around the world, gloriously rock bottom all the way, that lasted 14 months. We were footloose and great adventurers, going wherever the spirit led us. I fell in love with so many cultures and the women especially, who did so much with so little. We ended the trip in Japan when the first oil crisis hit, which we sadly called "The Day the Music Died", because it was the first real act of international terrorism, and marked the end of this carefree style of travel. I graduated in town planning but got a job at a Television network, and soon left after my training to work on numerous TV series and major Hollywood movies. In those days on a big crew of 100, five would be women. In the late 70's my daughter was born, which rocked my world. It was the happiest time of my life. When she was six weeks old I took her on location to film a Christmas special, and hired a nanny there. Nobody had heard of this before. In the early 80's I became a lifestyle columnist for one of the newspapers and a lifestyle expert guest on TV and radio shows, started the best gourmet shop in town, and got into investment real estate. I was offered the Associate Director position on Pygmalion, a major multiple camera drama for Twentieth Century Fox starring Peter O'Toole. I couldn't turn it down. So at one month of age my newborn son accompanied me on location to Ireland, which almost got me fired. We were planning to film a pilot show in India and were scheduled to go as guests of the Indian Tourist office. They over-booked; we were knocked off the flight because we were journalists travelling for free. This deep disappointment soon turned into a miracle from our point of view - the plane was blown up over the Irish Sea by terrorists! This was a huge turning point in my life. In gratitude for being alive to raise our children, I vowed that I would find a way to create television with substance, television that mattered. So I quit being a cog in the wheel, an exceptionally well paid one. In 1992 I produced the By My Spirit concert celebrating the Quintincennario (1492-1992) with Zubin Mehta and Placido Domingo in the presence of Queen Sofia of Spain, with thousands of people and world dignitaries on the hilltop fortress in Toledo. At the same time I managed to also shoot a documentary, filmed on three continents, called "Expulsion and Memory," which featured the historic reconciliation, marking the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, represented by the King of Spain and the President of Israel. The Concert and Universal Spiritual Gathering were broadcast internationally, a tribute to peace and co-existence. Everything I care about. I had risked everything to make this happen. I hosted and produced a two hour special on Women in the Media, featuring stars like Sharon Stone, and Oscar winning Hollywood Producers intercut with a live panel for the Toronto Film Festival and Women in Film, which aired on Cable TV. I was not surprised to discover that women still only made up less than 10% of directors, given my challenges as the first female assistant director in Canada. At this time I launched the highly successful mentorship program for Women in Film, while I spent two years trying to raise broadcast support for The Quest. I was consistently turned down, so I decided that I was not taking one more rejection. At that moment of commitment and conviction, everyone I needed showed up, all the biggest names in the human potential movement. I mortgaged my house, and took another leap of faith, the first of many. Quest: Discovering Your Human Potential aired on PBS and was critically acclaimed for pioneering spirituality on the airwaves, the mind/body concept being revolutionary at the time. The trajectory of my life changed once again when I produced, hosted and directed a 2 part special called Women of Wisdom and Power which aired on PBS. In the making of it, I discovered that it was the severe subjugation of women in many parts of the world that kept poverty in place. I had lived with these women in villages all over the world. Why had I not realized this core issue before? At the time the Taliban were stoning women. The world did not speak up. The world was outraged when some Buddha statues they didn't even know existed were blown up. Where was the outrage about stoning women? I couldn't sleep or eat for months, and felt enormous guilt that this was going on, and I was not doing anything about it. It was like the question I asked as a child, how could the world stand by and let the Holocaust happen? At this time I was shocked to discover that my shows had received half the broadcast carriage that my other shows had, which had successfully raised millions for PBS's fundraising efforts. I soon discovered why. One of the programmers told me that she had scheduled my new shows, as she always did, but her boss said "who is going to watch a show all about women", so I got pulled from the schedule. At this time I learned that in 2000, the "World March of Women" marched in over 150 countries around the world on International Women's Day and it barely made the news. I thought how could this be? A sucker for punishment, I decided I would make another hour, called the Power Within, featuring some of today's most fascinating women, from Jane Goodall, to Alanis Morissette, Erica Jong, Gloria Steinem, to Shirley MacLaine and I would put this World March of Women, and International Women's Day on the Map. So I called every PBS programmer city by city, to ensure that I was going to have a prime time broadcast for Women's History Month. The effort had paid off. At this time I also did a live 2 hour pledge special out of WLIW in New York celebrating women's leadership, featuring Erica Jong, Lynne Twist, and myself in studio, giving us a five hour broadcast in New York City. The trilogy aired prime across the country in most of the major markets in March 2005. We received a sensational response from women across the U.S. saying how profoundly the shows had effected and changed their lives. So I thought that's the answer, the media. Now the "World March of Women" planned to march again in 2005, in 159 countries. I offered to help reach out to all the networks. Despite the promises, it did not make the news. It's as if it never happened. Why? I made a vow, a decision right then and there to commit to producing Live AID for the Women of the World, a global benefit concert to broadcast worldwide. I shared this mission with Anita Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop, and she thought it a splendid idea and sent out letters on my behalf. I loved her gutsiness. A true woman of vision and action, one who walked her talk. She died all too soon. She had a great line about people asking what difference can one person make, and she'd say "then you've never been to bed with a mosquito". I remain grateful for her mentorship, and all the great women who have helped along the way, most especially Marilyn Tedeschi. It's taken every ounce of courage, life energy and all my resources to honor my fierce determination to use the power of media to accelerate the advancement of women's equality and human rights and to keep going - bringing reality every day one step at a time to meet my vision. I realized that I needed a powerful ally if I had any hope of producing Women's Day Live (WDL). I got a phone call from a committee chair to attend a fundraising dinner for Hillary Clinton at Ron Burkle's house in L.A. I called the airlines and there was one seat, leaving in two hours, if I was going to make it. I asked Gerard if he could drive me to the airport. He asked "when?" I said "now". He said "let's go". That's my man. I don't think anyone else could have survived me all these decades. I walked into the tent in L.A. as dessert was being served. It was like a candy store with every major star and producer in attendance. My focus was in meeting President Clinton. I mustered up all my courage and went up to share my vision. He invited me to make WDL a Clinton Global Initiative commitment. I then spent ten minutes alone with Hillary Clinton as she was changing outside the tent for the concert right after, and she said "Absolutely brilliant, let me know how I can help." That September of 2006, I attended CGI, and was not able to rouse any funding, but had started building strategic alliances. Chris Grumm, head of the Women's Funding Network was the first to come on board, followed by the Global Fund for Women, Women for Women International, et al. Helene Gayle, CEO of CARE, lent her support as Honorary Co-Chair, as did Musimbi Kanyoro who was then head of the World YWCA, and is now the newly appointed head of the Global Fund for Women. Nyaradzai Gumbonzvanda, the General Secretary of the World YWCA, joined us as Honorary Co-Chair last year. I realized that I was becoming an obsessive about this mission, yet the idea, though gaining support, was not moving. So having let my business go, I went back to making another PBS special, Quest for Success, which featured some of the world's foremost spiritual and business visionaries from His Holiness the Dalai Lama to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Sir Richard Branson, Russell Simmons to Stephen Covey, on what it takes to achieve a life of authentic success. They truly ignite your spirit and passion for what is possible. I believe we each have to find the courage to take what mythologist, Joseph Campbell, referred to as the Hero's Journey. So this is what my philosophy of life is. This is not a dress rehearsal of the movie called 'Your Life' where you sit back and wait to see how it turns out. This is it. You are the star, the director and the writer, so make it epic. Make it count. What you do matters. I've lived a rather tumultuous life, seemingly always on a mission, passionately committed to helping people realize their potential, and to stand up to injustice. I've been called many things, from infamous, to who does she think she is, to she is not one of us, to a spiritual revolutionary. I have taken enormous risks all my life, always taking a stand for what I believed in, because it was the right thing to do, and never more so than now when so much is at stake. Some things are worth fighting for. We must not fail to open the heart of humanity to the plight of women now, no matter what the sacrifice. As I look back over my life, I can see the major turning points that led to my current leap of faith to take on this big bold and ambitious mission to gather the women in every city and town around the world to celebrate the women of the world and over 100 years of progress on International Women's Day, March 8th, 2012. The benefit concert will capture the worldwide media to galvanize a global movement to alleviate poverty by empowering women with education, technology and economic opportunity, the key to meeting the millennium development goals. At its most ambitious trajectory, Women's Day Live will have multi-venue concerts from Washington Mall, Washington D.C., to Mumbai, Rio, London and Kigali, and maybe even China. International Women's Day is a national holiday in 30 countries, including China, Russia, Rwanda. The past year there were 1000 self created events in over 100 countries. Imagine the excitement! The biggest multi-media digital hook of women in history, which will result in a global communications Network for the Women of the World. Think Live AID. Global Impact. Lasting Legacy. Last year Michael Olmstead and I presented to the Global Partnership Initiative of the State Department, who expressed interest in partnering with us. Despite all the efforts in reaching out to global brands, and all the interest, funding did not come through. I decided to sell my luxury office condo to keep going. I thought I would be devastated, but a few days later my son was hit by taxi. Living in eternal gratitude that he recovered, after that I never gave it a thought. This year marks the 100th Anniversary of International Women's Day. World Nations have come together this year to create a new powerhouse called UN Women, and have pledged their commitment to champion the cause of women's advancement worldwide. This is the cause of our times. We can't just be paying lip service anymore. Women are key to many of the critical issues facing humanity, from ending poverty to spreading democracy around the world. The Inaugural Women's Day Live Celebration will put International Women's Day on the map in 2012, and every year thereafter. In 2015 we can be ready for the next World Congress of Women, to be held in Mumbai, given we successfully lobby the UN. Most important is to put women front row center in global consciousness. This past January my team said it was time to give it up. Given that the world is experiencing famine and the worst humanitarian crisis in modern history, my conscience wouldn't let me quit. I thought one more try. I would fly to the historic launch of UN Women at the UN Assembly and share this with Michelle Bachelet, the Undersecretary General of the UN. She said, "I got it", and agreed to a partnership in principle with UN Women, given that I got her team's approval. I filmed the event and made a short trailer, which you can see below. My patron, Archbishop Desmond Tutu filmed an intro for me in South Africa, his last recording, God bless his heart, before retiring. I flew back to N.Y. the next month, with my team, to present to a meeting convening women leaders and the UN Women team. Their concern is the risk, and they are right; there is no guarantee of how much money we would raise. However, I think the greatest risk right now is not to take one. We have sourced a stellar team who can deliver an epic event, including a powerful advocacy and global media team who recently did the Tck Tck Tck, Copenhagen Climate Campaign aggregating 17 million sign ups. The major portals expressed interest in launching the "heart in action" humanitarian campaign. They reach more people worldwide than all the networks combined. The "Heart in Action" campaign would allow every Charity to promote their brand and engage their community in taking action. We have encountered two global brands interested in spreading financial literacy and literacy to women, so we believe the potential funding is there. What we need is an enlightening lightning rod, and the funding to be able to engage the team and have all systems go now. The men did it. They pulled off Live AID in six weeks, because they had the will. We have 7 months and Washington Mall, Washington, D.C. on hold. Imagine this iconic moment in history as hundreds of thousands of American women come together on Washington Mall to celebrate women's global leadership, kicking off the International women's day celebrations in capitals around the world! Streamlined if need be, we could do it as a Google-You Tube concert, linking up digitally with women's events around the world. The Women's Day Live platform offers incredible convening power to bring together visionary world leaders, celebrities, governments, corporations, NGO's and multi-media platforms in a unifying moment for humanity - to champion the cause of women's advancement planet wide, the key to global economic growth. I met with the head of UN Partnership, the President of the UN Assembly, who all said WDL clearly fits everyone's mission, including that of the Secretary General Ban Ki-moon who is passionately committed to the success of UN Women. Chef de Cabinet, Ambassador Armin Ritz, said they could engage world leaders at the UN Assembly to support this global celebration of women and humanitarian campaign in their countries given Michelle Bachelet's initiative. It simply ignites the imagination! On this coming International Women's Day, women's vital voices will ring out around the world. I have to believe that something extraordinary is possible. We need each other to energize each other. We cannot do it alone. We invite all the powerful women in media, and visionary women and men everywhere to join us in a dynamic partnership to realize this bold vision. Just like our brave and dedicated sisters did a hundred years ago in challenging the status quo, forcing the world to see women and their worth in a totally new and daring light, so we must stand up for women and girls the world over. We stand poised at a pivotal moment in history. It is up to us now. see Women's Day Live interim video featuring Patron Archbishop Desmond Tutu http://www.womensdaylive.com/IntroFaces_Globe_WDL/index.html Contact Lili Fournier: lili@womensdaylive.com Women's Day Live Website: http://www.womensdaylive.com Back to Table of Contents

RIANE EISLER - NAZI SURVIVOR, FEMINIST LAWYER AND THEORIST, AUTHOR OF THE CLASSIC "THE CHALICE AND THE BLADE" AND OTHER BEST SELLERS, GLOBAL AMBASSADOR FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS, VFA FEMINIST of the MONTH MAY 2011 Riane Eisler receiving Peace Leadership Award in 2009 I was born in Vienna in 1931 and lived there the first seven years of my life. When Austria was annexed by Germany, I began seeing abuse and violence. Then on November 9, 1938 came Kristallnacht (Crystal Night), so called because of all the glass shattered in Jewish homes, synagogues, and businesses on that first night of official terrorism against Jews. A Gestapo gang broke into our home and I watched in horror as they dragged my father off. But I also saw my mother display great courage when she recognized one of the Nazis as a young man who had worked as an errand boy for the family business, and furiously upbraided him for so treating a man who had been kind to him. She could have been killed that night, but by a miracle she was not. By another miracle she later obtained my father's release, and a short time after that we fled Vienna in the middle of the night, taking with us only what we could carry. With what money they had left, my parents purchased a visa to Cuba, the only place other than Shanghai open to Jewish refugees. I spent the next seven years in the industrial slums of Havana. Even after my parents again prospered, they did not move from the slums; for them Cuba was a temporary anteroom while they waited for entry into the Promised Land. From the beginning, they scraped together enough money to send me to good schools; as they became more affluent, I ended up attending one of Havana's best schools. I commuted by streetcar, experiencing a kind of daily culture shock because of the difference between that part of the city and the dirty tenements where I lived. Riane, age 7 We were admitted to the United States in 1946, and after two years in high school I enrolled at the University of California at Los Angeles, majoring in sociology and anthropology, then attended one year at the UCLA School of Law until I got married in 1953. In those years, it was understood that girls went to college to get their Mrs.degree. My parents, for whom my education had been a top priority, also assumed this. So I quit law school and moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, with my new husband. Except for the birth of two lovely daughters, it was not a successful union. I was expected to be the "little woman" behind the important man, a role I tried to fulfill but could never adjust to. So in 1963, I again applied to UCLA law school and in 1965 obtained my JD degree and passed the California bar. I was part of the group interviewed by top law firms. Though most rationalized their failure to make me an offer on the grounds that I wanted to work only part time, it was clear the real reason was that I was a woman. Still, I managed to get a part-time job with a Beverly Hills entertainment law firm, and worked there for a couple of years. Then, within three months I quit my job, my marriage, and smoking. This was in the late 60s, and with thousands of other women I awoke as if from a long drugged sleep to realize that many problems I had thought were just me were actually social problems I shared with many other women. I had already been involved in the civil rights movement, but now I threw myself into the women's movement. I incorporated the Los Angeles Women's Center, the first such center on the West Coast, and founded the first center in the United States on Women and the Law. Riane in 1953 At that time, the notion was that discrimination against women was "just the way things are." Want ads were segregated by sex. In rape cases, the victim was essentially on trial for prior sexual activity, and even in community property states like California, control over marital property was exclusively the husband's. The purpose of the Women's Law Center, accredited as an internship program at the University of Southern California School of Law, was to fight against this, as well as to provide free legal services to low-income women. In 1969 we filed a Friend of the Court brief with the Supreme Court in a case involving extreme gender discrimination, proposing the then radical idea that women should be considered persons under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment - which the Court rejected until a few months later finally it struck down a grossly discriminatory law on that ground. I was also specializing in family law on my own, drafting egalitarian pre-nuptial agreements. I was by then speaking about women's rights at many platforms, including the California bar. I was invited to offer courses on Women and the Law at UCLA, and later to initiate its Women's Studies program-the latter ending in a disastrous (but unfortunately all too common) attack on me by "sisters" who, disagreed with my mainstreaming approach, and took over the program. This was a difficult time for me. I was exhausted and discouraged. I was still practicing law, lecturing on women's rights, traveling, trying to raise my children, working to make a living. After the sudden death of both my parents, I became very ill. And it was then I began to reflect on what I wanted to do with my life. So I gave up my law practice and began writing. My first book was Dissolution, No-Fault Divorce, and the Future of Women.** It predicted what later became known as the "feminization of poverty. My second**was the only mass paperback on the proposed Equal Rights Amendment: The Equal Rights Handbook: What ERA Means for Your Life, Your Rights, and Your Future. But it came too late to expose the lies about this simple Amendment, and when ERA failed to obtain the needed number of ratifying states, I realized that as important as it is to change laws, we have to change the underlying culture that condones injustice. Thus began my return to a question that had begun in my childhood: Is insensitivity, injustice, and violence human nature, or are there alternatives, and if so, what are they? It was this question that eventually led to my multidisciplinary cross-cultural study of society. The first book out of that research was The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. It introduced two new social categories: the partnership system and the domination system. It showed how conventional categories such as right or left, religious or secular, capitalist or socialist fail to show the importance of how society structures gender roles and relations. It also proposed that evidence indicates the status of women was higher in the earliest centers of civilization, which oriented more to the partnership side, until during a period of great disequilibrium there was a shift toward the domination side, a theory since supported by others. My next book was Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body, showing how both sex and religion have been distorted by the misogynism inherent in domination systems. This was followed by Tomorrow's Children: A Blueprint for Partnership Education in the 21st Century, laying out a gender-balanced approach to education; The Power of Partnership: Seven Relationships that Will Change Your Life which won the Nautilus award as the best self-help book of the year; and The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics proposing a new approach to economics that gives visibility and value to the most essential work: the "women's work" of caring for people, and caring for our natural environment. I have also written over 300 articles in different publications, spoken at over 600 events, given keynotes to national and international conferences, and lectured at universities, corporations, religious institutions, and governmental and nongovernmental agencies. I believe that my most valuable contribution to the empowerment of women has been identifying the underlying social patterns that show that raising the status of women is key to a better future. This is a recurring theme in my writings as well as my social activism. For example, I introduced a new model for human rights that fully integrates the rights of women - starting in 1987 with the first article in The Human Rights Quarterly on what has since become known as "women's rights as human rights." My work to expand the scope of human rights theory and action continues most recently with a chapter for a Cambridge University Press book that urged the inclusion of horrendous, widespread, often legally condoned, discrimination and violence against women and children. I also helped organize international conferences. I have devoted a great deal of time and energy to the Center for Partnership Studies (CPS), a nonprofit research and education public service organization I co-founded in 1987. CPS has many achievements to its credit; for example, I directed our pioneering statistical study showing that the status of women can be a better predictor of a society's general quality of life than Gross Domestic Product (GDP). CPS currently focuses on two major programs in which I am deeply involved: The Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence (co-founded with Nobel Peace Laureate Betty Williams) to engage leaders in speaking out to end traditions of violence against women and children. SAIV offers practical resources for clergy and lay people, including its acclaimed Caring and Connected Parenting Guide. The Caring Economics Campaign, designed to help build a more equitable and caring economic system, has three major components: 1. ON-LINE LEADERSHIP TRAINING to develop a cadre who show the need for, and benefits of giving real value to the work of caring for people and nature; 2. Our WEBSITE http://www.partnershipway.org offers a wealth of materials on caring economics; 3. Our PUBLIC POLICY initiative is designed to give more visibility to gender, race, and other social categories, as recommended by the CPS-commissioned Urban Institute Report The State of Society: Measuring Economic Success and Human Well Being, released in 2010. These recommendations have been endorsed by leaders representing over 30 million people, and are the basis for the CPS proposal of Social Wealth indicators to the State of USA (the new Congressionally-backed project to develop key national indicators in addition to GDP). If accepted for development, these Social Wealth indicators will have a major impact on changing the unconscionable fact that poverty in our wealthy nation (and worldwide) disproportionately affects women, largely because the "women's work" of care giving is paid very little, or not at all. Besides my organizational and educational work as president of CPS, I teach Partnership Studies at the California Institute for Integral Studies graduate program on Transformative Leadership. I also continue my research and writing, as well as speaking nationally and internationally, including recently at the United Nations GENERAL ASSEMBLY in New York. David Loye and Riane Eisler in 2008 Yet even with my outspoken feminism, I have received numerous honors from non-feminist organizations, including honorary PhD degrees, membership in global councils that include mainstream figures such as the Dalai Lama, and awards for my work for peace and human rights. There have been times of setback in my life, but on the whole I consider myself blessed that I have been able to make a contribution to a better future for women, blessed by my daughters and grandchildren, and by my relationship over more than 30 years with my second husband, Dr. David Loye, a brilliant social scientist and the author of many important books. David and I have a true partnership, and have shared many exciting experiences. When David came with me to the UN Women's Conference in Nairobi in 1985, he spoke on What Men Can Do to Advance Women. And that is just what David has done in supporting and at times joining in my work, and in speaking out for the feminist movement. I am still sometimes haunted by my early experiences, and by the fact that most of my relatives were murdered by the Nazis. I am haunted by all the unnecessary suffering and misery caused by a system where difference is equated with superiority or inferiority. Yet it is my hope that as more of us connect the dots between "women's issues" and an equitable society, we will resume our movement toward the partnership future. *Riane's books *are available at: www.partnershipway.org; www.amazon.com; www.iuniverse.com and most bookstores. Riane's websites are: www.rianeeisler.com and www.partnershipway.org Comments to Jacqui Ceballos: jcvfa@aol.com Back to Table of Contents

FEMINIST OF THE MONTH - MARCH 2011 JUDITH S (JUDY) WEIS - SCIENTIST, EDUCATOR, ACTIVIST… FOUNDER OF ESSEX COUNTY, NJ NOW I was born in 1941 in New York City. Although I grew up in the city, my parents rented places in the country during the summers. When I was seven we were at the seashore, and I loved looking at shells and other things on the beach. One day I found a hermit crab crawling around in a whelk shell covered with barnacles, seaweed and boat shells; I thought it was a marvelous thing, though my mother and cousin did not share my enthusiasm. Another summer we lived near a pond, and I collected and raised tadpoles to watch them metamorphose into frogs. My parents, Saul and Pearl Shulman, a lab technician and a housewife, encouraged my scientific interests and put no limitations on my goals. This was rather unusual in the 1950s, when so many girls were told they should become nurses, schoolteachers, or housewives, and it was probably due to my being an only child. I think if I had a brother, it would have been very different. My scientific interests were fostered by frequent visits to the American Museum of Natural History, and later by attending the Bronx High School of Science, where it became clear that my major interest was biology. The school offered many advanced courses in the sciences, though most students there attended because of the general high quality of the school, rather than a strong interest in science. Having an atmosphere where the other students are bright and interested in learning was very important to me. Speaking now with contemporary female graduates, none of us can remember any incidents of put-downs of female students or any disparaging remarks by teachers or guidance counselors that were very common back then in other schools. I think I was non-perceptive and oblivious (in a good way) and managed to be somehow unaware of societal pressures and expectations for women's roles; I just barreled ahead doing what I was interested in. I attended Cornell University 1958-1962 where the freshman Zoology course seemed designed to "turn off" as many students as possible, and where female scientists were non-existent. I, nevertheless, persisted in my interests. After my sophomore year, I planned to volunteer at the AMNH doing research and found myself being interviewed by a female (!!) scientist who would be spending the summer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Cape Cod MA, and needed a part time lab assistant and part time baby sitter. So I didn't spend my summer in the city after all. I studied fish schooling in the mornings and babysat at the beach in the afternoons. And I saw that women could indeed be biologists, although my mentor, Dr. Evelyn Shaw, was from a generation that had faced even more barriers entering science and was a rather tough cookie, not an ideal role model. I hoped I would not have to become exactly like her. I spent the following summer at Woods Hole also, taking the Marine Ecology course. I met many other young people with a similar passion for marine biology, including Pete Weis who eventually became my husband and frequent collaborator. We got married right after my graduation in 1962, so rather than attending graduate school at Yale, I settled for NYU so as not to have a commuting marriage. The NYU Biology Dept. had one "fish guy" who was the only suitable mentor for someone with my interests. He had never had a woman student in his lab before and didn't know what to do with me-he apparently thought I'd melt if I got wet or pulled nets in the water. Not being able to confront him on this, I agreed to do lab-based research, and since the lab was full of fish that were breeding, got interested in fish embryology. So I ended up with a dissertation on fish development with most coursework in ecology, oceanography, marine biology, and fisheries. I defended my dissertation while seven months pregnant, and our daughter Jennifer was born the day after graduation - planned parenthood in action! I had been job-hunting that semester, and in 1967 interviewing while obviously pregnant was not an advantage. Nevertheless, I was hired at Rutgers Newark as a developmental biologist, given a salary that turned out to be far lower than others, a lab that was far smaller than others, a small startup package, and told "Welcome to Rutgers. Publish or perish." Nevertheless, I was happy, used my time efficiently, published and succeeded. There were already three women in the department, all supportive. A couple of years later we had our second child, Eric, who was planned to come during intersession, although he came early during final exams.Being able to balance work and family was due to my husband Pete playing an equal role at home, and having a wonderful nanny. In the early 1970s I got involved in the women's movement at school, and in the outside world through NOW. I had not previously been aware of women's issues and had felt that since I had a career, the women's movement was not important to me. I had a conversation with a contemporary male colleague in my department, who expressed the opinion that women faculty should not coordinate a large freshman course because they could not get the respect of all the graduate students who would be teaching assistants, and they could not do the administrative work needed to run a large course. This was the "click experience" that instantly raised my consciousness and sent me to NOW. I attended a meeting that weekend in NYC, picked up hundreds of flyers, bought a lot of books and suddenly my life was changed. Finding no NOW chapter in Essex County NJ where I lived, I started one, recruiting women friends and acquaintances. We filed lots of complaints about the segregated help wanted ads, filed some of the early Title IX complaints about the tracking of boys to shop classes and girls to home economics. In 2004, retiring Judge Sylvia Pressler sits on the bench on her final day listening to oral arguments at the Bergen County Courthouse in Hackensack. photo:John O'Boyle/The Star-Ledger Before the government could get involved, just about all the school systems in the county made both classes mandatory for all students. Our action that got the most press attention was the Little League case that eventually won the right of girls to play in the Little League; this was my 15 minutes of fame in the women's movement. The presiding officer in the case was the late Sylvia Pressler, whose quote that the Little League is as American as apple pie and motherhood and should not be denied to girls - was the quote of the day in the NY Times. At Rutgers, a women's faculty organization at Newark obtained data from the Dean showing that women were getting lower salaries and slower promotions than men with comparable seniority, productivity, etc. The group filed charges, using the names only of tenured women in public documents. This protective action, led by the late Professors Helen Strausser (Zoology) and Dorothy Dinnerstein (Psychology) probably saved the jobs of those who were untenured; women at other universities involved in similar activities often found themselves out of a job later. Eventually, we won the case that was not a lawsuit but a complaint to the then-Dept. of Health Education and Welfare. We got salary increases plus back pay. After a few years, my research moved back into a more environmental direction. Learning about harmful effects of contaminants, I became interested in policy, particularly after seeing the distressing environmental policies of the Reagan administration. I spent a year in Washington as a Congressional Science Fellow sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Society of Zoologists, working for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on issues including drinking water, pesticides, and hazardous wastes. That experience opened my eyes to the fact that science is only a small part of what goes into decision-making. Since then, I have spent additional years in Washington at the National Science Foundation and Environmental Protection Agency. I thought briefly about a career switch, but opted to stay in academia and influence policy through advisory committees. I have served on many advisory committees to EPA, to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NJ Department of Environmental Protection, and the National Research Council. I also became involved in professional organizations, and was president of American Institute of Biological Sciences in 2001. I initiated efforts to combat the increasing influence of creationists in the schools. I have also been active in the Association for Women in Science and served on their board. At Rutgers I particularly enjoy mentoring graduate students; in the early years, mostly men, but in the later years mostly women. I am the Newark co-coordinator of a university-wide NSF "Advance" grant for supporting women in science. In this project, we are focusing most of the attention on junior women science faculty who have not yet gotten tenure. Our children did not become scientists, although they appreciate science; they became a travel writer and a trail planner. Science, feminism, and the environment are not my whole life. I am also very interested in music and participate in choral societies and light opera groups. I also love swimming and traveling. I am particularly happy spending time with our three granddaughters, two of whom live in California and one in Rhode Island. It distresses me to see that the aisles in toy stores are still labeled "girls toys" and "boys toys." There has been a fair amount of backsliding since the 70s - something I didn't think would be possible at that time. But certain important things that we accomplished are irreversible and have greatly improved women's lives and status in our society. But there is still an enormous amount of work to be done before we achieve true equality. Contact Judy: jweis@andromeda.rutgers.edu Comments to Jacqui Ceballos: jcvfa@aol.com Back to Table of Contents

Patricia Budd Kepler - Feminist of the Month February 2011 A LIFETIME SPENT CHALLENGING SEXISM IN RELIGION AND LIBERATING GOD FROM A PATRIARCHAL BOX Patricia Budd Kepler It is 1973 and I am at the National Meeting of the United Presbyterian Church where I am serving as staff person for the Church’s Task Force on Women, the group giving leadership to feminist issues within our denomination. Wilma Scott Heide ( NOW’s third president) is scheduled to speak at our breakfast and I receive a call the day before, saying that she has pneumonia and cannot come. I remember that day as if it were yesterday. Wilma was a dear friend and knowledgeable, creative, dedicated, effective, and a noted feminist. We so wanted her to be with us, cherishing her depth of understanding of feminist issues and the integrity of her commitment to justice and compassion. Desperate, the task force asked me to speak. I entitled my hastily written speech “The Liberation of God.” Being forced to step up to the plate enabled me to put into words some thoughts that had been brewing inside me for some time, and continue to evolve to this day. My work in the feminist Movement led to my understanding that our perception of the nature of God was Wilma Scott Heide evolving along with our perceptions of the nature of women and men, and, as our relationship to one another was changing, so was our relationship to God. We were liberating God from a patriarchal box at the same time that we were liberating ourselves. We were dealing with both simple, immediate justice and the complex justice that changes worldviews and internal landscapes. The Presbyterian Church was one of the first denominations to develop a feminist agenda during the Second Wave of the Feminist Movement. I myself cannot claim any credit for this. I fell into the role as staff for the task force when I was serving as General Secretary for United Presbyterian Women in the national Board of Christian Education. I was not yet a self-conscious feminist when staff responsibility for women’s issues in our church landed in my office, but I was a fast learner. The first year that we reported to our General Assembly, the commissioners laughed. They didn’t laugh the next year. That first year of laughter awakened many of us to the seriousness of sexism and the need for transformation in the church. A vision of a social order beyond patriarchy began to grow in us as we worked with others in the Movement. The Women’s Movement allowed many of us to finally give voice to what experience had already taught us. For some of us, our participation in the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-War Movement provided important lessons on how to work for change--in ourselves and our world. I was privileged, as I worked with the Task Force on Women and United Presbyterian Women and traveled across the country to meet and engage with people of all ages, races, and ethnicities. But I began in the middle of my story. Looking back on my early life, there is nothing remarkable to report. My father grew up in a small coal mining town and was raised by a widowed mother and older siblings. Though poor, they were respected members in the community. That small town and coal mining history is in my blood. My father was the first in his family to finish college. He went on to earn graduate degrees, in law and in political science. My mother, an immigrant from Germany, came to the States alone when she was seventeen. Her mother followed later, and lived with us. My parents lived in Lancaster, PA when I was born. Two years later, my sister Mary came along and much later, my brother Harold and my sister, Theresa. We were a close knit family. My mother focused on her children and my father’s career. Over the years, she proved to be a very strong woman. We later lived in Philadephia where my father practiced law and taught at Drexel. Mary and I attended a magnet school for girls. My siblings and I went on to earn Bachelors degrees from Drexel. I then went to Princeton Theological Seminary where I earned two graduate degrees. I was one of three women in a class of about 200. In addition to education, faith was an important part of my family’s life. Our church community, St. Paul Presbyterian Church, nurtured me and encouraged my leadership. My religious experiences clearly influenced my choosing Ministry as a career. All along I was being formed by strong women and men who had faced and overcome challenges. people who had a natural, inherent strength, not one that came from position or money or other outward signs of power. When I began to address feminist issues, I did not see women’s attaining power or wealth in societal or intuitional terms as the only source of desired power. While we clearly worked for equality between women and men and helped open doors for women in economic and political leadership, we also cared about women’s right to exercise ethical and spiritual leadership in the whole society. I treasured compassion with justice, civility with equality and relational integrity along with equal rights in marriage. I also learned some rudimental things about international liberation theologies. I met Thomas Kepler in Seminary. We married before our senior year and I was pregnant with our son when I graduated . My husband and I were the first clergy couple in the United Presbyterian Church. The year before I graduated, women’s ordination was approved in the United Presbyterian Church. After Seminary my husband became the pastor of a church in New Jersey.. Thirteen months later our second son was born and I was still fixed on being the best homemaker I could be. By the time I was pregnant with our third son two years later, that wasn’t working out too well. Being a Minister’s wife was more challenging than I had ever imagined. For me, being a Minister was easier. When an opportunity to serve as the Pastor of an African American church nearby was offered to me, I accepted and never looked back. After eight years and a brief teaching stint with my husband in Florida, we moved back north to Lansdown, PA. where I became staff for the national Presbyterian Church. Later I accepted a job at Harvard Divinity School as Director of Ministerial Studies, and we moved to the Boston area. Before leaving the Board of Christian Education I became involved with our nation’s Bi-Centennial Commission and the birthing of the Women’s Coalition for the Third Century - which brought together women from many organizations, secular and religious, of all different persuasions to celebrate women’s contributions to American life. Eventually, I became President of the Coalition. We drafted a Declaration of Interdependence and I was privileged to write the first draft. In 1776 our nation had adopted The Declaration of Independence and in 1876 had been presented with a Declaration of Women’s Rights. In 1976 it was time for women and the men and children who wanted to join in, to call our country to interdependence. When we ratified our Declaration, we added Declaration of Imperatives, a document spelling out our commitment to women’s equality in an interdependent society. After Harvard I become Pastor of Clarendon Hill Presbyterian Church in Somerville, Massachusetts and faced the challenge of putting into practice in community context the feminist principles and issues I had dealt with so long on a national scale. This was the real test! And in that Pastorate of over seventeen years, I continued to be drawn into international interests. especially in the Middle East and Africa. After retirement, I went on to serve as Interim University Chaplain at Tufts and with my husband, served in two Interim Ministry positions. We became more involved with homosexual rights in the church. One of the primary issues I have struggled with all my life is the challenge of combining a career with marriage and parenthood. In some ways this remains at the root of feminist issues for many of us. I finally had to write a book that addressed those issues. “Work After Patriarchy: A Pastoral Perspective” was published in 2009. Before taking on that subject I wrote “Life Lessons from my Dog,” a somewhat fanciful book with serious theological reflection. I am very aware as I write this, that I am not so much writing about my life, but the lives of all feminists as they are set in historical and environmental perspective. The lives of feminist activists are intertwined. Everything I am, everything I did, and anything I will continue to do has come from my relationships with others. We veteran feminists pass on our experiences to the next generations -- among them our daughters and sons and their children. whose lives grace ours and who will be called upon to make their own contributions. Contact Patricia Budd Kepler: Pbuddkep@aol.com Back to Table of Contents

EMINIST OF THE MONTH - JANUARY 2011 LEAH MARGULIES - CIVIL RIGHTS, FEMINIST AND ANTI-CORPORATE ACTIVIST, FOUNDING MEMBER OF THE NEW HAVEN WOMEN'S LIBERATION ROCK BAND AND MOVEMENT, LAWYER, SINGLE MOTHER I was born in New York City on April 12, 1944 into a Socialist family. When I was three we moved to a rural town in Massachusetts where we were the only Jewish family. It was right after the war and news of the Holocaust was emerging, so early on I was aware of the deadly aspects of discrimination. My family moved to New Rochelle, NY in 1950. When I was nine I had a life changing experience. It was 1953 and we drove through the Jim Crow South to Hollywood, Florida . I was overwhelmed by the poverty—black people living in shacks with newspaper walls and corrugated iron roofs, tilling fields by hand or with a mule. The “whites only” gas-station toilets and water fountains shocked me. This experience influenced the rest of my life. When I was 15, I went south with the American Jewish Society for Service to work at what had been a school for blacks after the Civil War in the the Georgia Sea Islands. It was 1959; soon it would be too dangerous to send NY teenagers into the South to work for integration, but I ended up spending the 1960 summer as a Junior Counselor for a tiny Quaker camp in the mountains of North Carolina. We were part of a small group of children (12–16 years old) that integrated (temporarily probably) the local movie theater—we walked in all holding hands. When I started college in 1962 girls weren’t allowed to wear pants except in 15 degree or below weather. By that time I was an activist and before long became a feminist but didn’t really know it. In sophomore year, along with 22 other women at Boston University. I lived in the French Dorm. It attracted, a group of girls who wanted to speak French as part of dormitory life; we were not interested in sororities and fraternity parties but in civil rights, student rights, and later antiwar demonstrations. Being part of a group of strong, defiant women was what I wanted, but it still didn’t have a separate consciousness for me. So, what does a girl without any real direction do after college? In 1968 I got married to someone who was a draft resister and draft counselor. By this time, one of my friends from BU graduated and moved to NY where she got involved with "Citywide," one of the first women's liberation groups in NYC. She tried to recruit me but I was leaving for New Haven—my husband was starting grad school at Yale. I went to my first consciousness-raising meeting there in December ’68 and talked about the time a boyfriend in high school told my mother I should be a lawyer because I argued so strenuously. My mother’s response: “That’s ridiculous, she’s going to be a housewife!” When I got home from the CR meeting I woke my husband. “This is where I’m going to be for the rest of my life,” I said, “and I want to play flute!” Later, a small group of us began to jam. By September ’69, the first group of women came to Yale, bringing Kit McClure, a real rock musician. Florika, a child prodigy violinist ready to play bass, was already in New Haven. Judy literally needed to play drums and Ginny was a skilled horn player. I was a rank beginner, but with several others we started the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band. Over the next four years we played in front of the Capitol for the first National Abortion March; at Niantic Prison where the Black Panther women were in jail. We played at Cornell—and needed a police escort out of Ithaca because the men were furious that the women wouldn’t let them come into the dance. Often we would lead workshops—why we needed to change the misogynistic rock world, and we would teach rudimentary skills to demonstrate that any woman could learn to play. Together with the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band, we recorded an album, “Mountain Moving Day.” At the same time, my political education expanded. The husband of one of my friends was a political economy professor at Yale. In mid ’69 he called my house to offer a researcher job to my husband. I answered the phone, and I told him —“That’s so sexist, offering the job to my husband; he doesn’t want or need a job but I do!” I was hired on the spot. Thus began my education about multinational corporations, their global reach and transcendence over nation-states. After forming a research collective and producing a reader on corporate expansion (this was later “appropriated” by the Institute for Policy Studies into their book, “Global Reach”), Judy and I started the Women’s Research Project. We led workshops, created slide shows and wrote articles about everything from the way advertising socialized and portrayed women to the global expansion of consumer markets into Third World countries—controlling political revolution through the consumer products revolution. As a result of all of this, my marriage split and Kit McClure and I formed the first all-women’s living collective in New Haven. In 1974, a group of us left the band and moved to NYC to join an alternative lifestyle community which developed a political theatre company, where I continued to play rock music. Also that year I was hired as a fact checker for “Hungry For Profits,” a book of case studies of exploitation by food and drug corporations in Latin America. Here I learned for the first time about the deadly marketing practices of the baby formula companies in Third World countries. " In March 1974, the CWLU helped organize the"Economic Justice for Women" demonstration advocating equal pay and day care." "Economic Justice March," The Chicago Women's Liberation Union Herstory Web site Gallery; available from http://www.cwluherstory.org Soon after, I was hired by the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility to develop programs around world hunger. We challenged the marketing practices of the US-based infant formula companies and soon we were in a lawsuit against Bristol Myers, makers of Enfamil. (The problem: infant formula companies aggressively market powdered formulas in Third World countries to mothers who can’t possibly use it safely since you need clean water, refrigeration, know how to sterilize, etc. The result—infant malnutrition and death.) Nestle was the biggest offender, so in summer 1976 I proposed to the European activists a boycott of Nestle—they said No, you have to do it in the US. I recruited a few other believers, started INFACT, and Infant formula Action Coalition. and in July 1977 we launched the Nestle Boycott. That resulted in the UN adopting a code of marketing (WHO/UNICEF International Code of Marketing of Breast Milk Substitutes) to attempt to control this industry. The boycott in the US ended in 1984, but It continues to this day in many parts of the world. My work on the Code resulted in my decision to go to law school, defying my mother’s prediction. After graduation in 1985 I became a legal aid lawyer (5 years); helped start an Environment program at the UN Centre on Transnational Corporations, and started a legal office at UNICEF to put into national law the Code of Marketing adopted in 1981. By this time, despite never marrying again, my greatest desire was to become a mother. I decided to adopt and in September 1991 my dream came true. I had put an ad for a baby in a college newspaper and 3-½ weeks later my son was in my arms! His birth mother and her sister chose me over several married couples because they had boycotted Nestle as children. Ryan is now 19, and an accomplished drummer, artist and skakeboarding videographer. The VW bus is the New Haven Women's Liberation Rockband, circa 1972 In 2000, a group of us got together and planned a reunion of the New Haven Women’s Liberation Movement; 92 came from all over the country for a nostalgic weekend. It was during this period that we learned about and joined VFA. In 2006 I was hired by a consortium of legal aid organizations, pro bono groups and Bar associations to lead New York State’s legal aid Internet portal, LawHelp.org/NY. We have grown enormously, serving hundreds of thousands of low income New Yorkers. By the end of 2010 we had about 465,000 visitors viewing 3.5 million pages of civil law information such as how to fight an eviction case, get an order of protection in a domestic violence situation, or challenge a default judgment in a consumer credit lawsuit. Because of this work, I was honored in November 2010 as a Purpose Prize Fellow for being a “social entrepreneur” as a senior. I remain active in challenging corporations—I’m on the Board of Corporate Accountability International (formerly Infact), and we are currently challenging big tobacco, working to ensure public funding for our public water systems and challenging corporate control of food. (We helped the San Francisco Supervisor win the vote in early November to end toy giveaways for children’s fast food meals.) And I’m a member of the Program Committee of the American Friends Service Committee’s Nationwide Women’s Program. In October 2010 I joined the Brooklyn Women’s Chorus, led by Bev Grant. with whom the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band performed in the ’70s. To put it mildly, my life was transformed by the Women’s Liberation Movement, by feminism. I am living proof that Sisterhood Is Powerful. Contact Leah Margulies: leahmargulies@gmail.com Comments: jcvfa@aol.com Back to Table of Contents

KAPPIE SPENCER - A GREAT PIONEER FEMINIST - December 2010 I was born in Owatonna, MN on August 3, 1925, the fourth of five siblings, and "another" girl. With but one brother, my parents were encouraged to "try again" for a boy, who arrived when I was six. The message I received was that there was something wrong with being a girl. But I remember how proud my mother was on every election day because she voted! She never missed a vote in her lifetime--nor have I. Together my parents laid the groundwork for my devout feminism. I didn't understand the Depression but never felt deprived because everyone was poor. We played softball with a cracked bat and a ball with the stuffing coming out. At seven I joined the Brownie Girl Scouts and learned girls were as good as boys. That created a lifelong challenge in a friendly rivalry with my older brother, which I won as often as not. Yet it rankled when my Dad took his sons hunting and fishing while his daughters stayed home to can tomatoes and varnish the dining room floor "so it would look nice when Daddy and the boys carne home." Then came WWII, with my wonderful brother in Patton's Third Army serving as a Scout ahead of the front lines. One day he was machine-gunned and left for dead in an open field. He lay there until dark, when he could sneak into the forest and make his way back to his own lines. In 1946 I learned to fly an Ercoupe, the world's safest, "spinproof" plane, and soloed on July 5 that year. When I took my cross-country flight test, I landed in Mankato, MN, headed for the flight shack for verification and was met by some very surprised men. "It's a girl!" they shouted. I graduated from Grinnell College in 1947, where I had met my husband Mark Spencer. We were married in September, and that was the end of my flying. As all dutiful wives did, I followed Mark as he took helicopter training in New York, then entered FBI training in Quantico, VA, assignments in Savannah, GA, Florence, SC and finally Washington, DC, where I found my niche--politics! Yet Mark’s mother coerced him back to his hometown, and we were back to the "dutiful wife" bit in Afton, IA. But bear it I did--for 15 rotten years. I had a fourth child, and became a Cub Scout Den mother, taught bible school along with substitute teaching and adult education. After sending two sons to MN for the last two years of school so they would have a chance at college, I rebelled. We moved to Des Moines, where in 1969 Mark became a financial planner. My mother had died in 1965, and her will stipulated her estate was to be divided into five equal parts. One trust was set up for "Daughter A," another for "Daughter B" and a third for "Daughter C." The next line said "and my sons will be given their inheritance outright." The daughters would be "given" their money for expenses for themselves, their children, and their "last illness and burial." When the wills were written, my sisters were 28 and 29 and I was 20; our two brothers, deemed capable of handling their money immediately, were 14 and 21. Further, if my parents had another son by birth or adoption, that child at any age would be eligible for his share immediately. But that was the conventional wisdom of the day. Congresswoman Louise Slaughter That's when I wrote "Whose Money Is It Anyway?" a 16-page exposé of those practices that I distributed widely through the financial planning industry. I have continued to distribute it at conferences and other venues. Based on my story Congresswoman Louise Slaughter sponsored the "Fair Treatment of Women by Financial Advisors" bill which passed the House unanimously, was revised in the Senate, and incorporated into the Financial Services Bill of 1999. After moving to Des Moines I continued my work in Girl Scouting, and was horrified when a small group of businessmen decided to build a hog confinement just south of our new open-air units and dining room. I mobilized farmers and others who had made odor complaints, and we requested a hearing at the Department of Environmental Quality. We lost that battle, but I learned valuable lessons -- including the art of lobbying and using governmental units to apply pressure when needed. I also discovered that women were routinely ignored for appointments on those boards and commissions. I had joined the American Association of University Women in 1975, and when I decided to run for the Iowa Senate in 1976 I also joined the National Women's Political Caucus. I ran as a Republican against the Senate Majority Leader in a district with only15% Republican registration. I ran a campaign on a shoestring and lost of course, but again found the cards stacked against women. (above, left to right) Bella Abzug, Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford, Lady Bird Johnson, Linda Johnson Robb, Maya Angelou, and Coretta Scott King recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the 1977 Houston Women’s Conference. Photo: ©Jo Freeman We could not even be found in the telephone directory! In 1977 as an elected delegate to the National Women's Conference in Houston I was inspired by Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem and all the Big Wheels in the women's movement. In 1978 I became the Legislative Chair for Iowa, and by 1980 had been appointed to the national Legislative Committee for the American Association of University Women. Then in 1982 I became the National Legislative Chair, followed by two terms as AAUW Director for Women's Issues. At the same time I served on the Board of Directors for the NWPC. First it was in Iowa, when phone companies began soliciting married women's names in their directories, I something they had fought for years. With my testimony at an IA Commerce Commission hearing I convinced them they were actually losing revenue by this exclusion. That battle was won and soon the practice spread nationwide. Next it was the fight to get newspapers to list mothers of the bride as something other than "Mrs. Him," followed by listing women by name in anniversary notices. The obituaries were sexist as well. One example from my files says, for example, "Ronald Jones lost his wife when she was killed by a car on Thursday. He was .... " and the rest was about him. My husband, Mark who had always supported my work. died in 1986. Probably my most important gift to women was the National Gender Balance Project which I founded in1988 based on an Iowa law made mandatory in 1987. I created a packet and blanketed the U.S. with those packets containing a complete battle plan for getting the law passed in any state, and by 1995 it had already been passed in at least 15 states. Most recently it was brought down to the local level in Iowa--again the first in the nation. I also distributed them at state and national conventions, and even in Europe and Asia. I did a two-hourworkshop in Huairou, China at the Fourth World Conference for Women. One result was the formation of the Florida Women's Consortium. I used the networking system on a number of issues, and created packets for targeted mailings. In 1992 the Christian Action Council threatened a boycott against Pioneer Hi-Bred Seed Corn International for having supported nine Planned Parenthood Clinics in Southern Iowa (none of which offered abortion services). Pioneer buckled and withdrew their $25,000 annual contribution. I immediately produced a 20-page "Operation Red Alert"--another "How To" piece. I mobilized women farm owners nationwide and sent the packet to women's health networks, women's agenda networks, and presidents of national women's organizations. We got results! The mother of the CEO, who had been a founder of Planned Parenthood in Iowa, sent $25,000 to Planned Parenthood. Other companies and individuals sent gifts and the health clinics survived. I have attended countless ERA Marches, Marches for Women's Lives, rallies, and presented workshops in Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, and China. Among issues I have fought for or against are Comparable Worth, The Railroad Retirement Act, Unnecessary Prophylactic Mastectomies, RU486, Industrial Homework, Title IX, Affirmative Action, Reproductive Rights, the Lilly Ledbetter Act, Female Genital Mutilation, and the ERA--always the ERA. Today I live in Sarasota, Fl. I am a life trustee for Grinnell College, and the 2010 recipient of their honorary Doctor of Laws degree. This year I met with two classes at Iowa State University on Women in Politics, and with one at Grinnell on Social Justice Activism. In February 2011 I will be doing a special presentation on the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) for the young women of UNIFEM, who will be walking in Sarasota to create an awareness of Violence Against Women. I will be there walking with them. I am a volunteer/member/supporter of Planned Parenthood (Iowa and Florida), Girl Scouts (Iowa and Florida), American Association of University Women, Women's Resource Center, United Nations Fund for Women (UNIFEM), National Women's History Museum. I furnish monetary support for the Center for the American Woman in Politics, Iowa State University Carrie Chapman Catt Center, and the Iowa Women's Archives, which will be receiving all of my papers. For fun, besides music and art I enjoy my four children - Greg, Gary, Dane and Carol; my 8 grandchildren and 3 great grandchildren. I am still writing Letters to the Editor, writing to my Governor, Congressional delegation, and to special legislators in many states. I have written special handouts for national and state conventions, among them "It's a Man's World Unless Women Vote," "Women Power: It's a Capitol Idea," "Don't Leave It All To The Experts," and "Iowa Equal Rights Amendment: Test your Perceptions.” Much of my work was painstakingly done on an old Royal Portable. An electric typewriter eventually made life easier, and then the computer, and now the Internet. But even without all the latest conveniences I would still be making waves. SAD NEWS: Kappie was full of life when we talked about her bio a few weeks ago. After the holidays I tried reaching her for a final edit, but she didn't answer emails or phone calls. I thought perhaps she was traveling, but why wouldn't she respond to emails? I called Sonia Fuentes, also a resident of Sarasota. Sonia learned that Kappi is gravely ill. Sudden pains turned out to be an especially virulent lung cancer. I'm in touch with her daughter, Carol, who says it is just a matter of time before Kappie leaves us. VFA is glad to pay tribute to Kappie while she is still with us. As we salute another great pioneer feminist we also remind all of you how important it is to leave instructions to your family to notify your friends in VFA when you are unable to do so yourself. Bon voyage, Kappie. We thank you for your great contributions and assure you that your work will forever be appreciated. Jacqui C. COMMENTS: Jacqui Ceballos jcvfa@aol.com Back to Table of Contents

"Evidence and reason: my heroes and my guides." Homage to Naomi Weisstein. Naomi in 1969 at a Chicago women's liberation conference Naomi Weisstein was involved in NUC organizing, and partnered with the Women's Union for a forum discussion on women in academia (a panel discussion still run on the UChicago campus by the Feminist Majority, an offshoot of the Women's Union). The Chicago Women s Liberation Rock Band. Left to right: Pat Miller, Naomi Weisstein, Sherry Jenkins, Suzanne Prescott, Fanya Mantalvo. Below: Susan Abod. Credit: Photograph by Virginia Blaisdell. "Except for their genitals, I don't know what immutable differences exist between men and women. Perhaps there are some other unchangeable differences; probably there are a number of irrelevant differences. But it is clear that until social expectations for men and women are equal, until we provide equal respect for both sexes, answers to this question will simply reflect our prejudices." NAOMI WEISSTEIN - A LIVING LEGEND. Feminist of the Month November 2010 AUTHOR, KINDER, KUCHE, KIRCHE AS SCIENTIFIC LAW: PSYCHOLOGY CONSTRUCTS THE FEMALE"; COFOUNDER, AMERICAN WOMEN IN PSYCHOLOGY AND CHICAGO WOMEN S LIBERATION; ORGANIZER, WOMEN S LIBERATION ROCK BAND One of the most brilliant and fascinating of the early radical feminists is Naomi Weisstein, probably best known for her pioneering 1967 essay, Kinder, Kuche, Kirche ( Children, Kitchen, Church ), which started the discipline of the psychology of women, and has been reprinted over 42 times in six different languages. Besides her scholarly talents and achievements Naomi is an actor with a great sense of humor. She was one of the early feminist stand-up comedians, and in the 1970 s took part in Eve Merriam s Off Broadway One Woman Show. Also musically gifted, she organized the Chicago Woman s Liberation Rock Band in 1970 "to shake up the sexist world of pop music." (Her story of that experience is included below). She has been ill for many years with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and is bedridden, so was unable to write her bio. However there is much about her on the web, which we have excerpted here. But in no way can it describe the impact she s had on the new feminist movement. Naomi was born in New York City in 1939 to Mary Menk and Samuel Weisstein. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wellesley College in 1961 and by 1963 was a socialist, a civil-rights activist and a member of the New Haven Congress of Racial Equality. From there she went to Harvard to earn her Ph.D. Naomi says she encountered sexism at every turn, as a student and when she applied for teaching positions. While at Harvard her feminist militancy was sharpened by experiences in male-dominated science and by the treatment of women students. One day she was denied entrance to the library because, she was told, women distracted serious scholarship. That evening she and friends, dressed in skin-tight leotards, met in front of the library and with clarinet, two tambourines and an old trumpet serenaded the scholars and shouted, You want distraction, we'll show you distraction! The library changed its policy immediately. Sexism in her own department made it necessary to spend a year at Yale to complete her doctoral research because the psychology department at Harvard would not let her use the tachistscope, which was essential for her research. During this time she met and later married the radical historian, Jesse Lemisch, currently professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In 1965 she took a post-doctoral fellowship at the Committee on Mathematical Biology at the University of Chicago. In 1967 she was a founding member of the Chicago Women s Liberation Union and American Women in Psychology, now Division 35 of the American Psychological Association. Naomi taught at Loyola University in Chicago, and at the State University of New York at Buffalo until the early 1980s. She has been a pioneer in Vision Research, writing over 60 articles that were published in Science, Vision Research, Psychological Review and Journal of Experimental Psychology. She has served on the boards of Cognitive Psychology and Spatial Vision and has held fellowships with the Guggenheim; the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and the American Psychological Society. We include Naomi s Statement and Quotes, you can see both on the web. STATEMENT In Chicago, one cold and sunny day in March of 1970, I was lying on the sofa listening to the radio. First, Mick Jagger crowed that his once feisty girlfriend was now under his thumb. Then Janis Joplin moaned with thrilled resignation that love was like a ball and chain. I somersaulted off the sofa, leapt up into the air, and came down howling at the radio: Rock is the insurgent culture of the era! How criminal to make the subjugation and suffering of women so sexy! We've got to do something about this! We'll organize our own rock band! Why not see what would happen if we created visionary, feminist rock? Not only did every 14-year-old girl in the city listen to rock, but also every feminist did. We all identified with the counter-culture; rock was considered Our Music :dangerous, sexy, and our harbinger of the social changes to come. No matter that rock assaulted women more savagely than anything in popular culture before it. The task would be to change the politics while retaining the impact. And so I organized the Chicago Woman s Liberation Rock Band (CWLRB). My goals were much too ambitious a common problem at the time but the band turned out to be remarkably successful in achieving many of the goals. We grew into a distinctive group of hip, talented, if inexperienced musicians. We were explicitly, self-consciously political about our performances, while avoiding leaden sloganeering. We were an image of feminist solidarity, resistance, and power, and audiences loved us. Everywhere we went, we would be mobbed at the end of a performance, with the audience hugging the band and other members of the audience. The band lasted three years and then broke up, reflecting all the problems that were at the same time devastating the radical women s movement. Conflicts that once seemed easy to resolve, such as those of lesbians versus straights, began to feel insurmountable, and we started arguing too much and rehearsing too little. The movement s utopianism included the belief that there should be no leaders. We soon learned this ideal was untenable, but we persisted in thinking that if we were good enough feminists, we could function without any hierarchy. Amidst the appearance of structurelessness and leaderlessness, however, I was clearly the theatrical director, theoretician, healer of wounds, spiritual leader, and, if only by dint of a slight chronological advantage, mother to the band. When the women s movement started trashing its leaders, the band turned on me for all the roles I had played. And three months after I left Chicago, the band dissolved. Despite the CWLRB s flaws, the band succeeded in conveying celebration and resistance. Its performances deliberately set up a politics of strong, defiant women, absolute democracy, and an intense desire for audience participation. Through the intensity of the medium, through our bad-ass revolutionary poetry, we shouted the news: we can have a new world, a just and generous world, a world without female suffering or degradation. It is an irony that the utopianism that had destroyed us was the same ingredient that made our performances so powerful. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship and has been a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Psychological Society. "Psychology has nothing to say about what women are really like, what they need and what they want, essentially, because psychology does not know." Naomi's papers are in the Schlesinger Library. Here's a link to the finding aid: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:RAD.SCHL:sch01270. Naomi's audiovisual collection also at the Schlesinger Library: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:RAD.SCHL:sch01300 (One collection is a set of her papers, and the second consists of 110 audiotapes, 5 videotapes, 1 phonograph record, and 2 CDs.) Comments: Jacqui Ceballos jcvfa@aol.com Back to Table of Contents

DAISY FIELDS   National Association of Women Business Owners The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Federally Employed Women In 1968 I became a founding member of Federally Employed Women (FEW) National Women's Party I served on the board of several organizations: Federation of Organizations for Professional Women; National Association of Women Business Owners; National Council of Career Women; National Woman's Party; VP of the Women's Institute and Managing Editor, Women's Institute Press. Women's Institute NATIONAL WOMAN"S PARTY BANNER October 2010 DAISY FIELDS, VFA FEMINIST of the MONTH Young Daisy Fields in her office - 1978 to 1985 "Days, nights, weekends where I spent my time writing newsletters, training programs , and running my business. Daisy Fields, Advocate For Equal Rights for Business Women, Author of A Woman's Guide to Moving Up in Business and Government. Founder/President of a Human Resource Company Specializing in Women's Career issues. The first dozen years of my life were on a roller coaster. I was born in 1915 in Brooklyn, NY, and by the time I was six we'd moved to Warren, Ohio; then four years later to Goldsboro, N.C., and two years after that back to New York. With the help of family, my parents bought a house in the suburbs of Long Island, our home until I was 21. Shortly after my thirteenth birthday I was looking forward to high school, but my parents, living on a shoestring, worried about having enough money for my carfare to school. It was 20¢ a day. One day I had an inspiration. I had a neighbor who worked in the Five and Ten Cent store. I pinned my long hair up in a bun, daintily applied some lipstick borrowed from my mother's dressing table, dressed up in what I believed to be grown-up looking clothes and went to the store to ask for a Saturday job. The manager said he could use some help but I would have to get my working papers. He suggested I get them and come back next week. Having no idea what working papers were I asked my cousin, five years my senior, what they were and how to get them. He insisted I tell him why I needed to know. I told. He laughed and said you had to be 16 to get working papers. Disappointed but not discouraged, I went to the store the following week and explained that too much school work kept me from getting the papers. He shrugged his shoulders and said I could start working right now and to bring the papers next week. He put me on the cosmetics counter, showed me how to work the cash registers and left me on my own. I never got the working papers. I worked in that store every Saturday until I graduated from high school, earning two dollars a day for a 10-hour day. It was exactly what I needed for transportation to school. Funds for college tuition were out of the question; my father had had a stroke and was incapacitated for months. So off I went to Macy's in Manhattan to apply for a sales clerk job. After a long wait in the broiling sun on a scorching hot day in June I was among the block-long line of eager high school grads in need of work. After hours of waiting I was hired. Earning $15 a week enabled me to attend college at night and help feed my family. Living on Long Island it was an hour's subway trip to my job at Macy's, then another short trip uptown to Hunter College. Classes ended about 9:30 P.M. and it took me another hour to get home. I would do some homework on the way, but I fell asleep for the last half hour, yet instinctively awoke when the train stopped at my station. The four block walk to my house got me fully awake. This was the beginning of my adult life. About a year or so later my long-time boy friend graduated from Columbia University with a Master's in Psychology. He applied for a government job, was hired, and took off for DC and urged me to join him. So in 1936 at age 21 I married and moved to Washington. For the next 30 plus years it was a journey through the federal government in progressively more responsible positions for both of us. In 1942 his job was transferred to Norfolk, VA. I followed, transferring to a job with the Army Air Force (as it was known then) as civilian personnel officer. As WWll raged on my husband applied for a commission in the Navy. Before we realized it he was off to war on a destroyer in the Pacific. I remained in Norfolk until 1945 when the war was winding down in the area my facility serviced. It was time to make another move. With my husband at sea I decided to try to get a job as close to NY and family as possible. I wound up in Philadelphia in a field office of the Dept of Agriculture as assistant personnel officer. About a year later the war was over and my husband was discharged from the Navy. He was offered an opportunity to take over management of a mining venture, which meant a move to Nevada. We were intrigued by the project, so off to Nevada we went. In less than a year out there in the desert the mining venture failed because of long-term strikes at smelters. So it was back to Washington where my husband reclaimed his government job. That was 11 years after we married. All our friends were married with children. We decided to join them and in 1947 we welcomed an adorable baby girl. Today that baby girl is a grandmother and for the past 20 years a police detective. For one whose life had been a whirlwind of activity, being a stay-at-home mom was stressful. My daughter was two years old when I decided to pick up where I left off--back to the pressures of the working world. I loved it. Fortunately my husband was cooperative in tending to our child when my work demanded overtime and travel. In 1954 I was offered a position as assistant personnel officer with a small federal agency and continued in that position for four years. Then my boss, the personnel director, decided to leave for another job. I was summoned to the agency head's office where I was sure he was going to offer me the director's position. Instead he asked my assistance in recruiting a replacement. The shocked look on my face prompted him to explain that a division director had to be a man, but it was fine for a woman to be an assistant. He urged me to remain in my present position. I made no promise; I was too surprised and too angry and hurt to respond. I rose from my chair and walked out of his office. That was my wake-up call. It was 1960 and my initiation into the women's movement. I returned to my office and promptly started making phone calls to friends and colleagues in the business, seeking a new job. Shortly thereafter I transferred to NASA, the space agency, and spent the next seven years in the most interesting job of my career. Believing I could do more for the movement as a free agent, I retired from government and founded my own business, Fields Associates, a human resources company specializing in women's career issues. In 1968 I became a founding member of Federally Employed Women (FEW). In due time I became national president, executive director and for 16 years edited its eight-page monthly newsletter. In 1983 Prentice Hall published my book, A Woman's Guide to Moving Up in Business and Government. I served on the board of several organizations: Federation of Organizations for Professional Women; National Association of Women Business Owners; National Council of Career Women; National Woman's Party; VP of the Women's Institute and Managing Editor, Women's Institute Press. In the latter capacity I edited and published Winds of Change: Korean Women in America by Diana Yu. All these activities and many others consumed my life for 20 or more years. By age 85, nature made me slow down. Today at 95, I am no longer able to drive, need a four-wheel walker to get around and have to rely on my daughter for transportation once in a while. My husband at 97 has dementia, so I am also a caretaker. After 74 years of marriage it seems the natural thing to do. But what I haven't forgotten is how exciting those years were, and as I look around now and see women in head positions everywhere I rejoice at all the gains we've made. Where once there were no women in the media, today there are many anchor women, and women heading programs; and though we still don't represent half of the country there are many women in Congress and in Senate, and we now have three Justices of the Supreme Court! There are several women governors and a woman ran for president of the United States, and one day soon, we'll have a female president. Women are everywhere and the challenge of the next generations is to assure that the women who are running our government and representing us are feminists -- as well as the men! There is still much to do, but we've accomplished so much in such a short time that I can't help but be upbeat about the future . * Founded in 1968 FEW, Federally Employed Women is a private, non-profit membership organization ... Comments to jcvfa@aol.com. Or Daisy Fields dazybe@gmail.com Back to Table of Contents

Patricia Hill as Miss Michigan 1942. She was first runner-up in the Miss America pageant that year. Patricia H. Burnett at the First International Feminist Conference in Mexico 1975 Her work appears in galleries in the United States and in London, Paris, and Rome. She was commissioned to paint a 20-painting series of living women of achievement for the Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls. VFA CELEBRATES BOARD MEMBER PATRICIA HILL BURNETT ON HER 90TH BIRTHDAY! In 1969 Patricia Hill Burnett, an accomplished portrait painter, was asked by the man she was painting to please sign her initials to his portrait rather than her name, so no one would know a woman was the artist! Patricia said she glared at him and scrawled in huge letters at bottom of the painting PATRICIA HILL BURNETT. Then she picked up the phone and called Betty Friedan, whose book, The Feminine Mystique, had moved her greatly. She told her story to Betty, who congratulated her and immediately named her chair of the non-existant Michigan NOW. Patricia went on to organize Detroit NOW and was president from 1969 to 1972. A member of NOW’s national board, she chaired International NOW, convening affiliates from 21 countries. In 1972, she was appointed to the Michigan Women’s Commission and served four terms, two as its chair. She also chaired the National Association of Commissions for Women, and is the cofounder of the International Women’s Forum in Michigan. She additionally served as co-convener of the Michigan Republican Women’s Task Force. Patricia's colorful background includes the title of Miss Michigan and runner-up to Miss America 1942, where she earned the title “Miss Congeniality,” which she most certainly deserves, as her feminist cohorts all agree. Noted for her art, her work appears in galleries in the United States and London, Paris, and Rome. She has painted not only her mentor, Betty Friedan, but Indira Gandhi, Joyce Carol Oates, Martha Griffiths, Valentina Tarashkova, Betty Ford, Margaret Thatcher, Corazon Aquino, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her 20-painting series of living women of achievement is exhibited at the Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls. Patricia was chosen to occupy a studio in the Scarab Club in Detroit, the first woman to be recognized by that all-male artists' club. She then served on its board of directors for two terms. She is a lecturer for the U.S. State Department and also serves on the board of the Detroit International Institute. She has been honored by many organizations. Northwood University recognized her in 1977 as one of the world’s Ten Distinguished Women. She was presented the Silver Salute Award for outstanding achievement in community leadership by Michigan State University in 1976; NOW Women chose her as Feminist of the Year in 1974. Patricia Hill was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1920. Her parents separated when she was a baby, and until a teenager she grew up without many luxuries in a single-parent home in Toledo, Ohio. Later, a rich grandparent made their lives easier. When her mother married a well-to-do physician on the staff of Henry Ford Hospital, they moved to Detroit. At the age of fourteen, she launched her artistic career by selling portraits for $25 in her home town. She graduated with a degree in Fine Arts from Baltimore's Goucher College and continued her graduate study at the Instituto d' Allende in Mexico and Detroit's Wayne State University. After a brief unsatisfactory marriage to a surgeon, she wed businessman Harry Burnett. "Everyone thought I was blissfully happy. I had a nice husband, beautiful house, four children," she said. "A perfect Stepford wife, and then one day I realized how angry I was with the way society treated women." While her husband indulged her, he treated her in many respects like a child. She decided she'd had enough. She read The Feminine Mystique, and the rest is herstory. Still full of life and enthusiasism today, Patricia is active in the community and busy painting portraits. At the moment she is painting Lisa Ederley from Kelly services. VFA joins her children, Bill, Barry, Terrill and Hillary, her eight grandchildren and the 130 friends who will be with her on September 5th in celebrating her remarkable life, and wishes her many more wonderful years. To send birthday greetings to Patricia: jcvfa@aol.com Back to Table of Contents

AUGUST 2010 FEMINIST of the MONTH DR. BARBARA J. BERG As a child I'd heard the stories of my Great Aunt Rose's twelve year old passage across the Atlantic Ocean with her younger sister, (my Grandmother Gertrude), their faces turned away from Odessa and memories of the Easter Pogrom which killed their parents and every last vestige of childhood. Thick plumes of smoke were billowing out of the eighth floor window of the Triangle Shirt Waist Company, the floor in the same factory where until that very morning they'd sat at sewing machines. People were yelling to the girls hanging out the windows, But all the doors had been locked to prevent the workers from taking breaks. That day when my Great Aunt and Grandma stood in horror as 146 of their friends and co-workers perished hideously formed the master narrative of my family. Aunt Rose became a factory inspector, focusing on the terrible conditions of female operatives, and later an officer of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union I started graduate school at the City University of New York in 1971. The Vietnam War was raging and I joined the CUNY anti- war group. Working on my doctorate was the fulfillment of a long time dream, but it was a tough time personally. My marriage was unhappy and I experienced a hefty dose of gender discrimination at school. I started teaching women's history at Sarah Lawrence College with Gerda Lerner, a pioneer in the field. Sarah Lawrence was the first school to offer an MA in Women's History. Gerda Lerner with landmark sign designating Sarah Lawrence College the home of the first graduate program in women's history. Photo: Courtesy Gerda Lerner I took a fulltime job at The Horace Mann School in Riverdale New York, in 1991 and started a women's history program. The school had been coed for twenty years but in many ways it retained the feel of an all boys' school. DR. BARBARA J. BERG, HISTORIAN, WRITER, SPEAKER, ADVOCATE FOR LANGUAGE EQUALITY, ABUSED WOMEN AND CHILDREN, WOMEN PRISONERS. My life was shaped by the women of my family who struggled against the privations of their sex. As a child I'd heard the stories of my Great Aunt Rose's twelve year old passage across the Atlantic Ocean with her younger sister, (my Grandmother Gertrude), their faces turned away from Odessa and memories of the Easter Pogrom which killed their parents and every last vestige of childhood. The sisters were taken in by cousins on Bayard Street in New York. Within a week they were working in a factory twelve hours a day, followed by night school to learn English. When classes became more demanding, they asked their foreman if they could leave an hour earlier one evening. He refused, but they left anyway, thinking they could make up the time. The next morning the factory door was shut in their faces. They immediately began looking for jobs in the neighborhood. Later that afternoon they were swept up by a crowd shoving them towards the intersection of Green and Washington Streets. Thick plumes of smoke were billowing out of the eighth floor window of the Triangle Shirt Waist Company, the floor in the same factory where until that very morning they'd sat at sewing machines. People were yelling to the girls hanging out the windows, "Get to the stairs." "Go up on the roof." But all the doors had been locked to prevent the workers from taking breaks. That day when my Great Aunt and Grandma stood in horror as 146 of their friends and co-workers perished hideously formed the master narrative of my family. Aunt Rose became a factory inspector, focusing on the terrible conditions of female operatives, and later an officer of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. She trained as a social worker and joined the Jewish Board of Guardians helping young women acclimatize themselves to America. Gertrude married a young union rep, a fiery The International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU Local 25) began a strike against the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Most of the workers were young Jewish and Italian women. orator, who ran for Alderman on the Socialist Party ticket. His proudest memory was carrying Eugene V. Debs' suitcase. While other children learned Itsy-Bitsy Spider, I learned Union Maid and other songs of my mother's youth. And I understood why to look for the union label and why we needed Solidarity Forever. My parents met in the library of Columbia University. My mom, a history major at Barnard College, worked nights at Macy's to supplement her scholarship, and my dad was getting his doctorate in psychology at Columbia. Their relationship was forged in the fiery caldron of progressive policies of the 1930s. From my earliest days, I received the traditional 1950s- white-male-power-kind of education at public schools in Brooklyn, and the untraditional all-inclusive-struggles of the powerless-kind from my own family. Did my grandparents and parents use the term feminist? Probably not, but the injustices against women were an ongoing theme of my informal lessons. Every summer, with twelve other families, we vacationed in Vermont on the shores of Lake Champlain. College professors, school principals, teachers, created an idyllic equalitarian community. Families lived in small cabins with ice-chest- refrigerators, kerosene stoves, no telephones-and shared chores and much of the childcare. During those years I experienced a gender-blind world and saw first hand the artificiality of sex-linked roles. Then illness upended our summer vacations and all else in our lives. I came home from school one day to dreadful news. My 46 year old father had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. "I wish it were me, I wish it were me," my mother kept sobbing. I didn't understand. Why in the world did she want to be the sick one?" "Because Daddy would be able to take care of you and Lucy (my older sister)," she explained. "What will I be able to do? I have no job, no income. How will I get him the best treatment? How will I support us?' Then she looked at me gravely and said, "You must always be able to work? Do you understand what I'm telling you?" And I did. My mom became a history teacher, then school librarian, taking care of my sister and me and getting my father into the first clinical trials in the country for L-Dopa, the then new miracle drug which kept him mobile until his death at age 73. Like my mother, I studied history in college and worked. I found a job as a waitress; most of my co-workers were older than I and their stories dramatized the cultural noose ghettoizing women into the low-level positions. I knew then that my future would be dedicated to trying to improve women's lives in any and everyway that I could. Before I'd graduated from the University of Rochester, I decided to go on for a doctorate in history, but I needed to save money first. Married to my college boyfriend, who was in dental school, I taught for two years at a junior high school in Brooklyn while doing my first 30 credits part time. What sad lives my students had! Not having enough food to eat on a routine basis, girls 15 years old and younger were taking care of 3 or 4 siblings and frequent "catting out " (riding the New York City subways all night). I set up small mentoring groups to help them and met my students during free periods several times a week. When the girls told me that riding the subways was a way to avoid physical and sexual abuse at home I sprung into action, notifying the school administration, the Board of Education, social services. The only way I could protect some of my students from abuse was to have them sleep on the pull-out in my living room for weeks at a time. Domestic violence wasn't acknowledged as a problem then, and only later, when I became involved in the Women's Movement, did I learn that there were others who had also set up shelters for the abused women. I started graduate school at the City University of New York in 1971. The Vietnam War was raging and I joined the CUNY anti- war group. Working on my doctorate was the fulfillment of a long time dream, but it was a tough time personally. My marriage was unhappy and I experienced a hefty dose of gender discrimination at school. My contributions weren't taken as seriously in seminars and I had to put up with comments from male colleagues who'd say things like:" What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?" It was the same attitude in the Anti-War Movement; no matter how much women contributed, no matter what risks women endured, we were still "chicks and babes." In 1970 a woman I'd worked with asked me to join a Consciousness Raising Group, Supported by other women, I finally had the courage to leave my husband and although it meant taking on more teaching assignments, I had greater emotional energy to devote to my studies. Researching and writing my doctoral dissertation in those heady first years of the Women's Movement joyfully directed my attention to the lives of nineteenth century women. My dissertation and first book, The Remembered Gate: Origins of American Feminism established a nascent, but vibrant feminism in the earliest years of the New Republic among urban women who banded together to help the downtrodden of their sex. Signing their letters, "Thine in the Bonds of Sisterhood," they advocated for female prisoners and prostitutes at a time when these women were considered barely human. . My book documented a feminist consciousness in America years before it was thought to have originated, among groups of women who didn't yet have any connection to abolitionism. It stirred controversy, but became a standard text of women's history courses. In 1971, I married Arnold Schlanger, an attorney and a wonderful man, who shared my passion for social justice and women's rights, and had a delightful 3 year old daughter. I started teaching women's history at Sarah Lawrence College with Gerda Lerner, a pioneer in the field. Sarah Lawrence was the first school to offer an MA in Women's History. Our days were filled with teaching, conferences, mentoring students, working on policy papers. I threw myself headlong into the Women's Movement, joining just about every women's organization I could find. Then a personal loss. Before I'd started at SLC I'd suffered a miscarriage (a baby girl) in my fifth month of pregnancy. I became pregnant again, but learned in the seventh month I'd have to stay in bed until I delivered. The school bused my students to my house twice a week until the end of the year. My husband carried me from the bed to the sofa (I felt like a nineteenth century invalid); the experience bonded me even closer with my students who made the baby a patchwork quilt of women's history. Then, without warning I went into labor at the end of my eighth month and delivered a baby girl, stillborn. I was devastated and disturbed by the callous treatment of the male-medical establishment. As for the hospitals, they were in the Dark Ages in dealing with women who lost babies. I took a leave from SLC and began to research medical textbooks to see if I could understand what had gone wrong, but also to get a sense of what doctors were learning. And I got it, all right. The books contained egregious sexist language and sentiment, mortifying and dismissive to women about what went on in our own bodies. Now I had two projects: Having a family and trying to change the medical culture. My approach to the latter was through writing, speaking and teaching: My second book Nothing to Cry About, (the title taken from the insensitive comment my doctor made when I burst into tears during my miscarriage at the news it was a girl and she was perfectly normal) was an indictment of the medical profession's treatment of women. I was invited to talk about the subject on television talk shows, radio, and at perinatal bereavement conferences. We adopted an infant girl when I was pregnant again (seven months in bed, the last three in a hospital this time), and with the birth of a healthy baby boy we now had two children less than seven months apart! When my children were babies I wrote about health, women's in particular, for The New York Times' Magazine; M.; Parents, and many other publications. I started the course Medicine and Literature at Mount Sinai Hospital to teach medical students to become more sensitive to their patients. A large part of the curriculum focused on women. I ultimately taught the course at Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, Yale Medical School and The Academy of Medicine. One of my most enduring connections-going on now for thirty years- was to become a member of the Mount Sinai Community Board whose mission is to bring quality health care to the East Harlem community. We've held conferences on domestic violence and parenting skills, sponsored women's health days, and raised awareness about breast cancer, diabetes, hypertension and obesity. As a working mother with two young children at home, I was experiencing some of the difficulties confronting other women: lack of affordable quality childcare, bosses (in my case editors and department chairs) who made no allowance for sick children, workplace harassment and lower pay than my male colleagues. Still I was one of the fortunate ones. What about women across the nation? What were their difficulties and struggles? I sent out a questionnaire, received nearly 1,000 responses, then interviewed several hundred more women. The results formed the basis of my book, The Crisis of the Working Mother. I traveled across the country speaking and holding workshops on the difficulties women, especially mothers, faced in the workplace and how to tackle them, and I began to push for reformed government and corporate policies. I used my writing as a platform for my views, my articles appearing in magazines like Working Mother, Working Woman and Savvy-in one piece (1986) I called for an end to the "Mommy Wars." In the late 80s, my husband lost his position as General Counsel to a corporation, and, like many Americans then was having difficulty getting a new one. I took a fulltime job at The Horace Mann School in Riverdale New York, in 1991 and started a women's history program. The school had been coed for twenty years but in many ways it retained the feel of an all boys' school. My second year there I became a dean of students in addition to my teaching. The first thing I did was have male language "as we men go forth etc…" in the school Alma Mater changed, then I took on sexual harassment which had been going on unchecked for years. Convincing the rest of the administration that we needed a policy was no easy matter; but finally I prevailed as long as I was willing to write it. I did and served as a point person for eight years, successfully overseeing several complicated cases. At many high schools, young women suffer from lack of self-esteem, eating disorders, risky behaviors, and subtle forms of discrimination. Horace Mann was no different. I started a Women's Issues Club where we could address these issues and founded periodical Folio 51 (which has won several national awards) to remedy the male bias of the school newspaper. Every year the Women's Issue Club sponsored a Christmas Party for Sanctuary for Families' domestic violence shelter. My revelations of discrimination at HM led to my appointment as Director of Co-Education K - 12 for three years. I looked at everything from the kindergarten play area to elementary school readers to the songs at commencement to the number of times girls were called on in classrooms compared to boys; my report was used as a model by other high schools. During that time I was the recipient of numerous grants to make high school curricula more gender neutral and wrote The Women's Movement and Young Women Today to remedy the lack of books on this topic for middle schoolers. In 1995 I received The Distinguished Teacher Award (one of 50 nationwide) from President Bill Clinton. I left HM , with regret, to spend more time with my mom who was becoming physically frail and to dedicate myself to writing, but I was asked by the school to devise Leader Training Seminars for young women, so I had an opportunity to continue some of my work with the female students. In 2009 I wrote Sexism in America: Alive, Well and Ruining Our Future to debunk the myth that we are a post-feminist society. Starting a with an account of the second wave women's movement, the book draws on medical research, legislation, movies, television shows, advertisements, and hundreds of interviews to reveal the extent to which misogyny is the new Come-Back-Kid, even considered cool and camp in many quarters. It tells the stories of women who faced discrimination in school and at work, thinking they were the only ones. The success of a few women seduce us into thinking that all the battles have been won. In reality, sexism insidiously, but pervasively has short-circuited the legacy of the women's movement in every aspect of our lives. My book also provides a blueprint of what we can do to secure our rights. In addition to my work at Mount Sinai as co-chair of the program committee, I'm a vice president of the New York Correctional Association, the oldest prisoner-rights organization in the nation and one of two with a mission of prison-oversight. My work is largely around issues concerning incarcerated women, visiting them, holding focus groups to ascertain their needs and advocating for policy change. For example, when it became apparent that the healthcare books in the prison libraries were woefully out of date, we organized a book drive and added to the collections of all seven female correctional institutions in New York. I am also on the board of the National Women's History Project which is responsible, not only for Women's History Month, but for keeping women's history a vital part of the curriculum at schools across the nation. I wrote Sexism in America as a wake up call. We all can envision a more equitable world for our daughters and sons than the one we are living in. Now we have to make it happen! (pictured left: Barbara and Family enjoying a day at the beach) Barbara J. Berg's website is www.barbarajberg.com Comments: Jaccqui Ceballos: jcvfa@aol.com Back to Table of Contents

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