THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Dr. Sally Herman Lunt

Dec. 24, 1929 – Aug. 10, 2016

“We have changed the landscape of the world, and it will never look the same again.”

[Remarks of Dr. Sally Herman Lunt at the VFA event, Publication Debut of Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975, Columbia University Faculty House and Barnard College, New York City, November 13, 2006]

I’ve been told that if I speak longer than a minute, I’ll be given the hook. So I have a short speech here.  I just want to respond, actually, to a remark that Gloria Steinem made this afternoon about how our daughters don’t pay attention to us or do not support the work that some of us have done.

When I was clearing out the drawer of my daughter’s desk after her College graduation, I found a piece of paper that was caught in the back of a drawer, and it was the title page of my daughter’s senior thesis. And the dedication on that piece of paper was, “To my mother, who fought for me”.  I’m sorry, Gloria isn’t here to hear this, but I now the daughters of many feminists with whom I have worked who have followed in their mother steps.

And I also want to tell you that my mother told me that genetically I was a feminist in the womb because she marched for the the vote and worked at a Margaret Sanger clinic.

I’m second generation my children, two daughters. I wouldn’t have men of children. I told my husband that if I had boys, we give them back. So we had two daughters, Elizabeth the First, and Catherine the Great. I did a terrible thing with them. I told them all the time that they were perfect and they had now way to go with that, except to be perfect. So they turned out to be perfect. And they are now mothers themselves. I have five grandchildren, three of whom are “baby women”. Some of you may remember that term, and they will be the fourth generation feminists.

I have one extra thing I want to say. Our movement has been characterized as being the Second Wave. I don’t think of it as a Second Wave. I think of it as a kind of eruption, volcanic eruption that resulted in what I call a lava flow of activity by all of us here, and many of the women who have gone and are not here. So I think that some of us are still marching. As Florynce Kennedy once said, “It ain’t a movement, unless everybody moves”.  Some of you may remember that. I think that we’re still moving, that lava flow is still moving. We have changed the landscape of the world, and it will never look the same again.