THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Alice Kitchen

“My whole life, being around strong women is what has shaped me, made me, and nourished me through the years. Wherever I have been, that has been the heart and soul of who I am now and have been shaped by.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, November 2024

AK:  My name is Alice Kitchen. I was born here in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1942.

JW:  So briefly, tell us about your childhood. Was there anything specific that you think led you to the path you took?

AK:  I was the last of four. I think that was a great place to be. I felt loved. I had people to play with, and I enjoyed growing up. My parents were basically middle class in a middle-class part of the city, in Kansas City. We went to a public grade school, learned a lot. My parents, having historically been Catholic, decided we should go to Catholic school. So, we went to Catholic school, and there I was introduced to the social world, the educational world, and religious women that I admired.

And my teachers were great about the social justice gospel that is inherent in my faith. So, after that, I decided marriage was not for me. I didn’t see any good examples around. I decided to enter the convent in 1960. It wasn’t unusual, many young women did that, or they went to the Peace Corps. So, there was that spirit of being beyond yourself. I was in the convent for nine years. I don’t know if you want to go any further there.

JW:  Well, it’s up to you. What do you think you learned there?

AK:  Well, I was around strong women. Strong women with a passion and an understanding of community and public service. My whole life, being around strong women is what has shaped me, made me, and nourished me through the years. Wherever I have been, that has been the heart and soul of who I am now and have been shaped by.

JW:  You came out of the convent then when you were how old?

AK:  I was 29, and I was in LA, Los Angeles. I went to UCLA and got a master’s degree in social work in community organization. Then I traveled the country and the world, looking for adventure, and came back to Kansas City and worked for legal aid as a project officer for Young First Offenders [ok?]. That catapulted me into being chief probation officer for the city of Kansas City. Then that led me into community development as a director of a community organization that looked at human needs and tried to find ways to fulfill them. So, that was in Kansas.

JW:  I see. Now we’re in the ’70s, it sounds like. So, what got you into the women’s movement?

AK:  Well, first of all, being around all these strong women, it was just inevitable. I was appointed to the Commission on the Status of Women in the early ’80s and ended up being the co-chair of that. We had a report. We had 19 subgroups that met and came up with recommendations for the Metropolitan area. Those recommendations would seem strange, archaic, and hard to believe today, but that does signal progress.

JW:  Can you give us an example?

AK:  Well, at that time, women could not sign mortgages. They had to have their husband sign a mortgage. So that led into credit and so forth, and then the laws changed. And now we can buy houses, and sign our names, and go into debt on our own, or have our own financial stability. That was really good, and it helped in so many ways. But that was just an example in other areas with disability and women in prison systems and so forth. So, we need to do an update of our plan of action with all of our reports.

JW:  Yes. Which ones were you specifically involved in?

AK:  Interesting you asked that, because nobody would take insurance. I thought, Insurance is boring. I got into it, and I loved it. That directed me in future ways. Discrimination in insurance was evident and prevalent. What that did was it got me deeply interested in it, and I ended up coming to DC and working with Char Mollison [ok?] as a member of the Women’s Equity Action League Board. We worked on discrimination in insurance, and at that time, women’s insurance costs, health care and otherwise, were different than men, based on premises that were questionable.

There have been great reforms, thanks to the Affordable Care Act where it just eliminated that, and it took away pre-existing conditions. I think that I still am very interested and curious about insurance, and work with the Missouri Foundation on Health in monitoring how Medicaid expansion is going on in Missouri.

Because I was a member of WEAL, and because of my work in Kansas and in Missouri getting laws passed – this is pre-Affordable Care Act, getting midlife women coverage for health insurance mandated to be offered by both states – and because of that, I was invited to testify before the Senate Finance Committee and talk about uninsured midlife women who are left uninsured due to death, divorce, disablement or imprisonment of their worker spouse. That ended up coming into the COBRA Bill, which pre-exists the Affordable Care Act. But it was a stepping stone, and for some people, even today, it still is the link to health insurance coverage.

JW:  What did you do after this commission?

AK:  Well, after the commission; and I’m thinking of what year we’re talking about, but in the ’80s, that was when I was doing all the work, doing research on uninsured people in general. I went to work for Children’s Mercy Hospital as the Director of Social Work and Community Services. In that vein, I was a co-founder of Amethyst Place, which is a residential program, a home for women recovering from drugs and alcohol, with their children.

That was 24 years ago, and it now has three buildings and a large and strong program. Then, part of that was the creation with several other people of the Child Protection Center. Which is for children when they’re interviewed, to reduce the number of times that they’re interviewed and to have it in a court setting, and to reduce the time that the child is traumatized.

JW:  What do you mean interviewed in what capacity?

AK:  When the child protection agency or the law enforcement go to pick up the child, they don’t do the official interview at the time. They make an appointment. They get the caregivers connected to the child protection center, or take them there. They’re interviewed on tape by a sophisticated, skilled interviewer, that is able to get the information that can be used in court and the process can proceed with minimal re-trauma to the child and clear information. Because what we found before we created the center, was that there was as many as 35 times that the child was interviewed. There’s no way any of us remember the same thing that many times. So, the information was better, it was correct, and it was, I think, useful.

JW:  I’m interested in what you saw as the issues that you were most interested in your accomplishments. Can you talk to that?

AK:  Yes. I think it’s been a journey that has evolved and one thing led to another. You’ll see that I have a great many interests. Everything from gun violence in my city, working on legislation at the state level to get gun control passed and then to have the legislature go back and undo that. Working in the hospital and seeing children come in, either because somebody in the family had a gun and the child picked it up, or they were in the community in the wrong place, unfortunately. That was one thing.

I’ve worked for low-wage workers helping them to get a union, and I’ve been a part of Stand-Up Kansas City and Justice for probably 20 some years. That meant going on protests, speaking out, going to council meetings, getting behind the people who were affected. It meant getting arrested three times, spending some time in jail.

These are the things that matter because people need to have decent jobs, and protection on the job, and security. These workers, the fast-food workers, the home care workers, the gig workers, et cetera, don’t have those protections and there’s so much that works against them to get that. We’ve been to McDonald’s in Chicago, we’ve been on busses to make our point, but always with the worker who has been experiencing it.

JW:  I assume most of these workers are women. Is that right?

AK:  Most of them are, and most of them are dramatically affected. For example, if you work at most fast-food places, you don’t have maternity insurance. So you go to work, you’re pregnant, you today, would have had the Pregnant Worker Fairness Act to give you what you need, which is time off, or a decent parking space, or water when you needed it, or time to go to an appointment. But before that, they did not have time off with pay. They just had to lose income. When they had the baby, they were at home, no income, no medical care, nothing. And you know that it’s not good for a healthy birth.

JW:  Well, I want to go back a little bit to WEAL because you touched on it, but that’s how I got connected to you. How did you get involved with WEAL? Can you go through that again?

AK:  Well, working in Kansas and Missouri on the healthcare laws that we got passed, first in Kansas; that’s what got me to the Senate Finance Committee, but the second one in Missouri, because they saw that it made such sense it was passed in one year. Working on that, what we did was, we found out the need; how many people were affected, we went to the state legislatures and made the case, and then we had leaders in the assemblies that led the challenge and got it passed.

So, WEAL was the one that funded us to do that. We wrote letters to all the little newspapers all over Kansas. We got letters back, we took them to the legislature, we read them. That’s how I got involved with WEAL. Then I became a member of the board and worked on many different issues at that time. Then later, I went on the National Board of the National Catholic Social Justice Lobby. Both organizations are strong for social justice, and WEAL, in particular, their background on the finance side, has meant so much. They were part of so many legislative pieces that matter today and can stand being enhanced.

JW:  Right. So, tell us a little more about that trip to the Finance Committee.

AK:  Because I was a director at UCS and I had some board members that were into research, one of my board members worked with me and she was a statistician, mathematician, et cetera, and we looked up the data on uninsured. I was able to provide all of that. I think because Jan Meyers was the woman who got our bill passed in Kansas, and she was aware of what we were doing, I think that she got that word to Senator Dole. I think they were looking for something to appease women. That was how I got there. I went and I testified and gave them all the data that I had. It was true all over the country, but we were just able to talk about it in Missouri and Kansas. Since Dole was a senator at the time, he was key in general in the senate.

JW:  Well, that sounds wonderful. What are you doing right now as an activist?

AK:  Well, a number of things. I’m working with the city of Kansas City. I am a chair of the Gender Equity Task Force, which is part of the Kansas City, Missouri Human Rights Commission. We’re in the department that does the inspections on MBE, Minority and Women’s Business Contracts. I chair a committee of women who are representatives from women’s organizations in the Metropolitan area. We represent diversity in ethnicity, and in age, and backgrounds. We look at issues that affect women in the city and in general. We follow the international treaty outline for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls in all forms. That is CEDAW, and we have been working to implement inside the city of Kansas City, those benchmarks.

The benchmarks that we follow are women in decision making roles and in an elected and appointed office. We look at public safety, and domestic violence, and sexual assault. So, we’ve been able to measure those things and recognize and applaud, and then comment where things are difficult. We have noted to the city that the environment for women in appointed office has been very difficult. We named specific cases. That’s not exactly comfortable.

Our role isn’t to make things easy and comfortable. Our role is to point out what is missing, what could be done better, and why. Lawsuits are so prevalent in our city, and we’ve written a report. We’ve looked at the question of gender dominance in the workforce and why is it that two-thirds of the workforce are men? But now I’m working with the women in the trades, and the women in the trades are trying to increase the number of women in the trades, as well as the prevention of gender-based violence in that.

My next meeting is with the Women’s Bureau on how we’re going to do that in Kansas City in a workshop that says, “What’s the problem? What’s the scope of it? Define it. What does sex abuse look like?” And harassment and bullying. All of those. Name those names. And then, “Who’s doing what now? What needs to be done next? And how are we going to get there? And who’s responsible?” Many of us worked on Amendment 3. I was on the steering committee for the state, and I was one who wrote an op-ed, why I, as a Catholic former nun, choose to vote on amendment three, yes.

JW:  Explain what the amendment is. I know, but our audience may not.

AK:  It is, eliminate the total ban on abortion in Missouri. We had one of the most severe bans on abortion in Missouri. And so, what we did was we got 350,000 signatures. We only need 170,000. We got that many, and we got it on the ballot. We fought all the way through. The lawyers and different opponents have been out there at every step, and the church and other groups have been opposing it. However, we did get it passed. 51% voted for it. I was working on jobs as justice, and actually was part of a League of Women Voters. I led this study on paid leave. That was on the ballot, and minimum wage, and we got that passed, too.

Now, in Missouri, we are a fully red state. A super-majority at every single level. Now what we are facing is they’re trying to push back on those and undermine what we have done with the voice of the citizens. In terms of state representatives, we did prevail on some good people who were incumbents, and they won. We lost one that was really bad, and we have another battle to fight, and it’s going to be difficult. They’re trying to take away our citizen ballot initiative, which is our ability to put laws on the ballot. A precious, precious gift in Missouri. Kansas did not have it, but we have it in Missouri, and they’re going to try to make it too hard, too costly, and too rigorous to make it happen. That’s number one on their agenda.

JW:  It’s interesting that you wrote this as an ex-nun. Did you get backlash?

AK:  I got lots of comments from people who weren’t Catholic. They just said, “It’s nice if somebody on the inside knows the problem.” But then, yes, a number of people who I didn’t expect. A couple of my classmates who I thought would be ashamed, or embarrassed that I did that. Of course, there are many people in my surrounding area and family that are totally opposed. It didn’t say anything that was surprising. It just elevates them as women, and being recognized. When you talk about a church that doesn’t recognize women at the level of decision making, I mean, how can we feel good about that? How can I feel good about a country that has not put equal rights for women in the Constitution?

JW:  I would like to go back to your time as a nun. I’m not sure we covered why you went in and then why you decided to come out?

AK:  Well, I went in because I was inspired by the women who were nuns. The atmosphere all around was positive. I mean, there were a number of young women. Nobody from my school went into the convent, but it wasn’t unheard of. But the other thing is that I didn’t see marriage as a possibility. My parents were not happy together. Why would I want to do something that I don’t see any good examples out there? So, I didn’t see it as a possibility.

I was there in the convent for nine years, and I worked and learned a lot. Great education, strong women, and they had us doing all kinds of work. Summer camps and parish work, knocking on doors, visiting parish members and providing education. We were not teachers. We were more in the line of social workers working in Catholic charities and in social services in general.

I was very fortunate. I was surrounded by people from around the country and other countries. I learned a lot. I learned to respect silence, and deep thought and reflection, which is a deeply instilled value that I cherish. I left because I could see inside of me the desire to have a personal relationship with another person. I tried to figure out how I could make it all work, but I didn’t.

I actually went to a psychologist with the permission of the superior and she did one of those studies on the MMP or whatever you call that, psychiatric or psychological examination, and she said, “There’s nothing wrong with you. You just need to make up your mind.” I left, and I hope I brought what I learned there. Then, a number of years later, I did get married. Ron and I were married for 21 years here in Kansas City. We didn’t have children but we had a number of foster children, and he died in 1997.

JW:  So, you’ve had a full life is what you’re telling me in many respects.

AK:  Yes. Part of what has made me a stronger person is that I’ve traveled to many countries on many different human rights exchanges. From that, I’ve learned that there’s many ways to worship a spirit or whatever. I’ve been into Iran and Bhutan and those countries, and in China, and that’s given me a greater sense of the world. I recommend it for everyone to have a greater understanding that we’re not unique or special, but we are a part of a larger expression of culture and ways to live.

JW:  Do you want to add anything else?

AK:  I am also an educator. I am a social worker by training, and so I have students, and I’ve taught classes, and I’ve done research. I think that right now I’m working most of my time, beyond being the chair of the state American Association of University Women Public Policy Committee, on the National Policy. Working on public policy in Missouri, and then how it affects the country. However, where I’m finding the hardest work to be done is domestic violence and sexual assault.

Yesterday was the day of recognition of the elimination of discrimination against women and girls in the world, and the whole report on all the femicides, and deaths – it’s so prevalent. And now it’s become even socially acceptable. If we can have leadership that has been tried and convicted of abuse and neglect and harm, then how is it we can have representatives that represent women and appreciate women? So, trying to get survivors to speak up and be strong.

I don’t see any hope in the criminal justice system, police, law enforcement. The courts just are cyclical, they all reinforce each other. They all have jobs to do and they carry their jobs out. Nobody is working on the survivor. They’re just sort of intermediaries. Everything that happens, even an order of protection, doesn’t protect you, it just gives the police something to give to the prosecutor to say they violated it. So, what we’re going to have to do is become equal, and we’re going to have to stand up for ourselves, get funding, and say, We’re not going to take it any longer. This is not acceptable. And the penalties need to be severe and enforced. And enforcement is the weakest part of much of what I see. But acting and sheltering women is the last thing that’s important, but we got to stop it at the front end.

JW:  I thank you for all your work.

AK:  Thank you.