THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Andy Epstein, RN

“I do everything with a feminist lens.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, December 2025

AE:  I’m Andy Epstein. My given name is Adrian, but I go by Andy. I’m in Brookline, Massachusetts.

JW:  And when and where were you born?

AE:  Brooklyn, New York, March 29, 1945.

JW:  Okay. And so briefly, tell us about your life as a child, before you were involved in women’s issues. Your siblings, your family outlook, whatever you think stuck with you.

AE:  I have a twin sister who’s been in touch with you. She lives in Manhattan. My father was an immigrant. We grew up rather modestly. I went to City College, Erasmus Hall High School, City College. I was born into feminism. My mother was in Women’s Strike for Peace. And my dearest father, an immigrant, was a real feminist.

JW:  Really?

AE:  It was quite lovely.

JW:  What kinds of things besides that do you think enforced your view of feminism?

AE:  I do everything with a feminist lens, but my work has been feminine in public health and in international work around HIV-AIDS. And my husband and I lived in Mozambique for two years. We traveled all over the world. So starting now with feminism, I worked on the Elizabeth Warren campaign, supported [it], you know.

JW:  Well, how did you first get involved in the movement?

AE:  With a consciousness raising group that included Barbara Ehrenreich, Leslie Kagan, many others. It took place in Greenwich Village, on Waverly Place, in a friend’s house. And it started from that consciousness.

JW:  Well, I’ve heard of her.

AE:  Yes of course. But basically, I was married at the time at the consciousness group. And you’re supposed to be smashing monogamy. Do you remember that part? And so I wasn’t smashing monogamy. I was married very young and had a child, pretty young. We traveled around the world, brought our kids. I have a daughter, Jessie, who lives in Jamaica Plain. She’s got one daughter. She did a project on second wave feminism, my granddaughter. And she went to the Judy Chicago exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum and did a whole poster about it.

JW:  Well, tell me what some of the things were that you did in the earlier days after around consciousness raising.

AE:  Our bodies, Ourselves, that collective. Because by then I moved to Massachusetts. Just various International Women’s Day demonstrations, organizing that and then moving back to Massachusetts with stops in various places. San Francisco for a while. My husband was an intern at Kaiser. He was a family medicine doctor, tropical medicine. And actually in later years he started the center for Health in the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School. Besides being a primary career doctor, he also was an activist around climate.

JW:  What were the issues of greatest concern to you?

AE:  It was social justice. It was ending the war in Vietnam. It was moving to East Boston to do community organizing during the war. East Boston was an Italian neighborhood in Boston. Paul worked at the health center and I went to nursing school at that time. And then we lived in a commune. Very rare, but, you know, [I] was a doctor’s wife living in the commune. It was amazing. And we had some very interesting roommates. John Sayles, who’s a filmmaker, and Maggie Ramsey. We had a lot of community activists who moved specifically to East Boston to do organizing against the war.

JW:  And what sense did you have about the women’s involvement in those things?

AE:  I sensed a lot. There was a lot of feminist action among military people as well. Women military people. All the work I did, even though it was, say, social justice or anti racism, it was all through a feminist lens. And that was my perspective that way.

JW:  So what do you mean by that?

AE:  Well, it’s hard to separate. We took over the building at 77707 Memorial Drive. We wanted Harvard to grant us the building to build a women’s center. And of course they threatened to arrest us. So we slept over for a few days and then the cops came. And so we proudly marched to Harvard Square and declared victory, which was not the case. But early on, doing stuff to represent women in a way that gave people a space to do work also through public health.

The American Public Health association had workshops on feminism and mainly about knowing your body. Even when I lived in Mozambique, a lot of it had to do with women’s rights and was pretty brutal. Women would be forced to deliver babies on the bedpan because they didn’t want them to bloody the sheets. We were there in ’78. Independence from Portugal was ’75. So it was very early on when Mozambique was developing its work. But so we got there very early and also through HIV-AIDS and recognizing women at risk for infection. And so all the stuff I’ve done, that’s what I mean by doing it with a feminist lens.

JW:  It was broader issues but always looking out for the women’s point of view.

AE:  Yes, yes.

JW:  Interesting. Do you, do you have any major accomplishments you want to brag about?

AE:  I worked for 17 years at the state health Department in Massachusetts. I was special assistant to the first director of HIV services for the state, making sure that women were represented in all the groups we had. We organized a group of clients or consumers, and most of them, a lot of them were women, and we would meet once a month. They would come to the health department and have a smaller caucus about what to do with women.

I also organized visiting nurses to work on home visits. So a lot of my work had to do with patient care and treatment around HIV-AIDS, but also substance use disorder as well. So I brought Narcan to the state. We got it approved to have distribution of needles and Narcan to reverse the overdoses. We went to the prisons and jails, we trained people because prisoners were very vulnerable and went to the women’s prisons to try to get the health service there to issue methadone for incarcerated women. Yeah, so that’s what I mean. Everything I did had to do with prioritizing women. I did a lot of hiring because I was in charge of a lot of units and I would always prioritize women and nurses.

JW:  And that worked out, huh?

AE:  Yes, well, yes and no. It worked out. It did. A lot of our work was successful. This is a terrible time, as we know. And basically I’m really very upset about this MIT professor who got murdered in Brookline, and he has three children. They’re preschool, you know, elementary school age. It’s tragic. Tragic. So this, you know, this is a difficult time, as we all know. The thing is to keep going but it’s very difficult to stay optimistic.

JW:  I saw the play Suffs, which was about the suffragists.

AE:  Yes, I heard it was good.

JW:  It’s Wonderful. It’s wonderful. So, so, you know, they get the right to vote. And their last song is Keep Marching. Keep Marching.

AE:  Yes.

JW:  Your ancestors are all the proof you need that progress is possible, not guaranteed. Keep Marching.

AE:  I’m concerned about young people who are totally disillusioned with life and despondent and you know the stuff with the, with Trump, what he’s undoing. And, and it just seems there’s so much coming at us at this time. But you’re right about keep marching. You keep doing, but it’s not easy.

JW:  It sounds like your family were active feminists from your beginning. And I wondered if anything in the second wave in particular stands out to you – we considered the second wave like mostly the 70’s – that has affected you going forward.

AE:  Well, it started with the consciousness raising groups and Our Bodies Ourselves and the feminist literature and you know, being part of that movement. So it’s, it was everything. And Alice Wolfson, who had Off Our Backs, was one of the journals. Yes, she was my friend. She’s in San Francisco. So a lot of that Off Our Backs and Our Bodies Ourselves, which was key to doing this work. And that was a Boston based group. I’m sure you found people from there.

JW:  Yeah, yeah, definitely.

AE:  Joanne, worked on the revision to upgrade.

JW:  Oh, did she? That’s your sister.

AE:  She’ll tell you all about it.

JW:  Yeah, I, I communicated with her. We’re going to do this in January. So I’m going to assume you continued to be involved in the movement.

AE:  Yes.

JW:  What have you done more lately?

AE:  Lately I went to no Kings Day in Portland, Maine. I, you know, supported Kamala Harris. I give a lot of money. Paul and I, that was my husband, the American Jewish World Service, which was working in Mozambique to, to deliver medicines and we did that. I worked in Mozambique, not only living there for two years, but also keep consulting on HIV-AIDS, particularly around women. We went to South Africa, I went to Mali, I went to Angola. I did a lot of work. And also El Salvador, Nicaragua, all the disaster places. But, you know, that’s what I’ve done. I’ve had a good time and I feel lucky to have been born when I was born.

JW:  Oh, I say that too. I definitely say that. I’m pleased to hear you say that.

AE:  And to actually have a granddaughter who’s, you know, a feminist and, and doing projects on this.

JW:  Amazing. How old is she?

AE:  She’ll be 13 on March 20th. And I have a son who lives in New Orleans. He has three children, so I have four grandchildren. So my older one is mixed race, African American. And Ben, who’s a redheaded white Jewish boy. And he, he does a lot of political activism in New Orleans around racism. He’s in a PhD program working on, you know, the trauma associated with, you know, race and using spoken word and poetry to address the issues.

JW:  Oh, wow.

AE:  And my daughter’s a filmmaker that made many famous films with New Day Films. She did some short films that won Sundance. Yeah, she’s… So it continues.

I don’t know what else to tell you other than there’s a lot to be done. These are difficult times, and we just have to, like you said, keep marching.