THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Ann Shalleck

“Looking back at these early years, at the second wave – the kind of activism, thinking, connections, self-discovery, the ways we were all placed in a time of change and ferment – has been so instructive and moving for me; to go back to those times and think about what the second wave means and what it’s done.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, July 2024

JW:  Good afternoon. I’m Judy Waxman in DC, and it is July 2, 2024, and I’m here with Ann Shalleck. Hi, Ann. Let’s start with you giving your full name and when and where you were born.

AS:  Ann Celia Shalleck, and I was born in New York City on August 10th, 1949.

JW:  Great. Tell us a little about your childhood. What in your background led you in the direction you ultimately went.

AS:  Well, my early childhood was in New York City. Then, like many, particularly White middle-class people of that era, there was the migration to the suburbs. I was part of the 1950s migration to the suburbs on Long Island. When I was eight years old, we moved to Roslyn. That’s where the rest of my growing up was done through high school.

JW:  Okay. Well, tell us about your siblings, your parents, ethnic values, anything else about what led you to be who you are?

AS:  My father was the only one of his siblings who was born in this country. He was born in 1896. A Jewish family from the area in Eastern Europe which was sometimes in Poland, and sometimes in Russia, depending upon what was going on in that part of the world at that period in history. He was the last of six siblings, the rest of whom were all born in, as they say, the old country. And so, he was very active in Jewish immigrant life and politics.

He eventually became a judge in 1929. He was the youngest judge to be elected to the judiciary in the city of New York. It was part of the immigrant culture in New York City, the ways different immigrant communities got access to public life. He was very active in Jewish democratic politics in New York City, as was his older brother. His older sisters and his mother supported the family through having their own garment business. They weren’t in the industry, but they did custom design for people. So, his life developed that way.

He became increasingly active, particularly in philanthropy in the city, working on a lot of Jewish philanthropic activities. He was a wonderful speaker, and was always the emcee for everybody’s event. Everybody wanted him on their boards, because he was really good at that stuff. He considered that his really important work; a Jewish camp for underprivileged children, as they called it back then, the whole thing. And then, an organization that funded those organizations called the Young Men’s Philanthropic League.

So, He was very active in that, and then did a lot of work before the war, and during the war, on raising money for Jews in Europe to provide help. And then the whole Jewish effort that was connected to the war effort to stop the Nazis and to stop the slaughter of Jews. He was really active in those activities. So that’s my father.

My mother was 24 years younger than he was, and she was Presbyterian when she met him. Her family came to this country early on, way before the Revolution, and they settled in Western Pennsylvania as part of the land grant to William Penn. So, her history was very different. My parents came together because her family was deeply affected by the Depression. Her father was an electrical engineer for the Pennsylvania Railroad; was stationed in New York City at that time, working for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and they were deeply affected by the Depression.

She developed a career in merchandising. She was a buyer for department stores and worked her way up to being the head buyer of Macy’s for women’s sportswear in all of their out-of-town stores. She’d been a model before that. My father had many friends in the garment industry who were Jews who had businesses, so that’s how they came together. She converted when they got married. I was raised Jewish. But there are these two different branches of my family.

JW:  Very different. Wow. Did you have siblings?

AS:  I had a younger brother who recently died, but there were two of us. It gave me interesting insights into a lot of different things. Moving us forward here, I’d say that my own developing identity as a person involved in social justice and political work, partly came from my father and lots of his activities, but it also came from my education. Education was very important in my life. The schools where I went in New York were outstanding. It was a liberal community and very attuned to the developing social activism and political activism of that period.

I graduated from high school in 1967. I was there from ’63 to ’67. It was the development of the very, very early anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, and my high school was a site of student activity. For example, the student groups had Judy Collins, who was an early folk singer doing a lot of anti-war and civil rights singing, and Dave Van Ronk, too. They both came and sang in the gym of my high school early in their careers. We invited Norman Thomas, who was the leader of the Socialist Party and a very big anti-war and civil rights activist, to speak. And so, my activities as a student were formed there as well as my intellectual life.

I had wonderful teachers there, too. So, a sense of the importance of the civil rights movement, the importance of anti-war activities, were already a part of my mindset. There was a women’s movement at that moment, but we didn’t know about it at Rosalind High School. It hadn’t spread that broadly throughout society yet, but I was primed for it.

Looking back, and something that I’ve learned from going to some of my reunions over the years, is just how White my community was. Of course, there was no segregation, people were liberals, people were doing all those social justice and racial justice ethics, but the school itself and the community itself, were almost all White. So, there was that kind of residential segregation. And we know now, how much residential segregation in the suburbs was designed to be racially segregated when we didn’t even know it.

JW:  I will say that even where I live in Woodley Park, in the city, in DC, there were racial covenants when my house was built in 1925. I would say it’s like 100 years later, and it’s starting to be more integrated. It takes a long time.

AS:  It’s a long time and a lot of damage done over those years.

JW:  So, when did you get interested in the women’s movement?

AS:  My active self-conscious identification in the women’s movement didn’t begin until I was in college. I went to Bryn Mawr, which was an all-women’s school. Most of the schools I applied to were all women’s schools. Many, as we know, because of the era we were in, many of the elite private institutions in this country were sex-segregated at that moment. Most of the Ivy League was; not all of it, but most of it was, so that those schools weren’t accessible to me. Most of the really intellectually interesting places to be, were the women’s colleges at that point, that provided a small setting for intense intellectual activity, and that’s what I was looking for.

So, I ended up at Bryn Mawr, but the schools at that point were not self-consciously feminist. Feminism had not yet hit what we then called, the Seven Sisters Schools, or other institutions at that period. The ethos was, This is a women’s institution, and if you’re a woman, you have to be twice as good, at least, as the men. And so, we’re going to be really, really tough on you to make sure that you can be better than all the men you’re going to be competing with. So, they were interesting, demanding, sometimes uncomfortable places to be, because of that ethos. But that’s where I was.

In my junior year, which was the year of 1969-1970; which is a critical year in terms of American history, a group formed called the Women’s Studies Association. At this women’s college there were no women’s studies courses, because the ideology of the importance of focusing on gender had not yet embedded in academia. Feminism was in activism, but it wasn’t really yet embedded in academia. The students were leaders in that movement, and so we formed the Women’s Studies Association to get the first women’s studies course. There were, of course, individual professors who did what we now call women’s studies.

There was a critical one who was there who served as something of a mentor to me, whose name was Mary Maples Dunn, and she was in American History. She studied colonial history, and she looked at women in colonial history in the United States. After her time teaching at Bryn Mawr, she became a dean there. Then she went on to be the first woman President of Smith, and she really transformed Smith in terms of vastly increasing the diversity of that institution and changing Solita [campus]’s profile.

And then she went on to become the head of Radcliffe, what was then called the Schlesinger Library. Radcliffe had ceased to exist as a separate educational institution within Harvard, but it had a library devoted to the history of women. She was the head of that library. And she became the acting dean of what became the Radcliffe Institute, which studies women and gender.

JW:  I’ve been to that library. It’s amazing.

AS:  She was formative in that. We had her early in her career, but she was an isolated person within Bryn Mawr. It was a comfortable place for her to be. She was there as a presence for me. But in addition, we united with an organization called the Black Students Association.

JW:  There were Black students at Bryn Mawr, then?

AS:  Yes, there were Black students, not very many, but they were there, and they wanted an African-American studies, Black studies. At that point, the terms were changing. As you all know, the language over our histories changes as our consciousness and understanding of what we’re doing has changed. They wanted a course, and they wanted a whole department. We jointly had a sit-in at the President’s office. It being Bryn Mawr, the President served us tea.

JW:  How many people were sitting in? I’m just curious. What would you guess?

AS:  My guess is about 40. I don’t know, I can’t decide if I’m overestimating or underestimating or I’ve got it right.

JW:  But it filled the office. That’s what I was curious. How crowded were you? And you were full, it sounds like.

AS:  Full, and there was enthusiasm. There was a sense that we weren’t on the fringe. We were leading a wave or riding something. We didn’t feel like we were outsiders. I mean, we were outsiders, but we felt like we were expressing a broad need, and I think we were. So, we got the courses. They got approved eventually. And so that was going on in the year 1969-1970.

I’ll come back to that course, because that course that we did get was important in my own development. But I come back to the context we were operating in because this is so much of my memories anyway, of the early days of the women’s movement. That it was not separate from other social movements in my experience. So, for example, working with the Black Students Association, but also, this was a year of critical anti-war activism. This is the year that Nixon invaded Cambodia, the year of Kent State and the killing of the students there. And it was the year of the student strike that spring, at Bryn Mawr and at Haverford, which was a companion institution.

Classes were shut down, people went to Washington, or did local work, or went to demonstrate. There were no exams, there were no papers. The schools were really turned over to anti-war activism. It was a Black Students League at Haverford that had its own demonstrations there. The President of Haverford was very active in the moratorium. It was a time of intense ferment and activism and a sense that we could change things. In that sense, optimistic.

As terrible as things were, as awful as the bombing was, we didn’t know the war was going to end. We were trying to end it. But a sense of movement and excitement and dynamism and the potential for change. So that’s the context of getting this course, that the creation of academic work focused on gender was part of a broader effort to bring about social and intellectual change.

JW:  I’m curious as to what the course was? Was it the history of women in this country or what was it?

AS:  Let me explain that through what we did once we got the course. Okay, we’re going to hire somebody to teach this. We don’t know how to teach it. All the questions you’re asking, nobody was asking. So, an ad was posted. And somehow, I don’t even remember how this happened, our Women’s Studies Association, we were active in both the recruitment and the interviewing of candidates. So, one of the people who applied for the job was a graduate student finishing up her thesis, and her name was Kate Millett.

JW:  I’ve heard of her, she had a notion of how to put it together, I bet.

AS:  Yes, but then she was just a graduate student. Nobody had heard of her.

JW:  Of course.

AS:  But we recommended her, and she got hired. That summer, the summer of 1970, her picture appeared on the cover of Time magazine because her book had come out. Norman Mailer was furious. There were debates between Mailer and Millett all over the place, and that’s who we had. So, Kate Millett was quite a figure and knew so many people who were active in the women’s movement. She was situated in New York but had a national profile.

And so, the course suddenly got hundreds and hundreds of students. There was no classroom at Bryn Mawr that could hold the course, so it was held in the theater at Bryn Mawr. A beautiful, beautiful room. It’s not at all what we had expected when we were demonstrating for our women’s study course. We expected a little seminar, and suddenly we got the largest course in the history of the college, probably. Except back in the days when they made all first-year students take the same course or something.

She brought in leaders of the women’s movement.

JW:  Really? Who came?

AS:  Shirley Chisholm. It was just one wonderful lecture after another. I didn’t go to college for big lecture courses, but this world was suddenly opening up with all these activists, women activists, who were challenging restrictions on pornography. It was a kind of issues and high-profile activism course. It was wonderful. That course was important to me in my own development for a couple of reasons that are really apparent.

Looking back, is the importance in academia of having many courses, having programs, that focus on gender. One of the things we got, because this course was so successful, was a course in the spring on Women in Literature. Women authors were starting to publish wonderful work, and one of those women authors was Lila Karp, who’s done an interview for you. She was writing, and she came and taught that course for us.

I read many, many, many of those early women writers with their first books, and it was enormously exciting. So, the importance of seeing the breadth of gender studies and of women. Gender was every place. Women were every place. Once you looked, there was history, there was literature, there was economics, it was every place. And so that got imprinted on me, and my later work came back to that. And then there was another thing. We each had to write a paper. This is in the spring of junior year. It was 1970. I did my paper, which was Oral Histories of Bryn Mawr Students Who Had Had Abortions.

JW:  Oh, my gosh.

AS:  Yes.

JW:  That was incredible.

AS:  It was incredible.

JW:  And they were actually willing to speak up?

AS:  They were willing to come forward. I put the word out through various student organizations and through people I knew. One of the nice things about Bryn Mawr being a small place, was that it wasn’t hard to get the word out.

JW:  But the fact that in 1970, when it was still illegal and women were willing to come forward and personally tell their stories and have them recorded is really phenomenal.

AS:  I was able to say to them that as part of this, I would be telling my own story of getting an abortion when it was illegal, and so that was part of it. And then there were these other oral histories and having them written down and sending them to people to review. Like I said, I think it was a period where people were beginning to feel the power of things changing.

And so, for these women, there was something wonderful about going back and thinking about what was going on that they got pregnant? What was the matter with birth control? What was the matter with relationships? What was the matter with social expectations? What happened when you got pregnant? How it was viewed, how you felt? And so, to have a place where they could come talk about it, I think, was important.

I of course, promise them confidentiality, which I have been scrupulous in maintaining. Even under very, very, very difficult, challenging circumstances where compelling reasons for identifying the people were present and just knowing that it’s a promise that you don’t break to people. So, I never did. And of course, it was incredibly important to me, having gone through my own experience being so lonely and feeling so isolated.

JW:  Let me ask you, did you feel it was dangerous at the time, or you were okay? That you were safe I mean, in your own situation.

AS:  Well, I was quite fortunate because in the late 1960s, there was a significant movement among doctors and among clergy. It was Clergy Consultation Service, and there were doctors’ organizations that were devoted to getting abortions for women. I was able to get an abortion at Johns Hopkins Hospital through a doctor who was beginning his own advocacy as an abortion activist. He became head of ACOG, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

He was extraordinary, and he was doing, under a small exception in Maryland law to preserve the serious health of the mother, and interpreting that generously. And then there was a network of doctors who were able to do referrals to provide him documentation that the abortion could come in through the exceptions. And so, I was able to tap into to that network. It was still quite a horrific experience.

JW:  Oh, scary, I’m sure. I’ve done this talk since I taught reproductive health, about how women have always had abortions. My talk starts with 3,000 BCE, evidence of recorded abortifacients. In general, if you had the resources, and the knowledge of where to go, then you could get an abortion. Which was true then, and now.

AS:  I was also close to going to Puerto Rico for an abortion. I went to Puerto Rico, and they were mostly quite dangerous, and it would have been terrible for me if I had done it. As it turned out, for those people who know abortion, I’m O-negative blood type. Which means that for future pregnancies, it would have created great danger having the abortion because of the RH factor. And so, the fact that I was in Hopkins; it was in the early days of they had just developed a medication for women who are O-negative to protect against the formation of antibodies and I was able to get that, so my future pregnancies were protected.

But if I had gone to any old place? To Puerto Rico, it was, Meet this cab driver on that corner, and he’ll take you to this place, and don’t ask any questions, and you’ll get the address. I was so young, and so naïve, and so scared, that I don’t think I had much time to be really scared about it being illegal. Like so many other women, it’s just what you needed to do. And you did it one way or another. So that experience was formative for me.

And then the other thing in my education that was formative and I was very lucky for, and when I look back on my whole career, was particularly fortunate that at Haverford, there was a wonderful philosophy department where people did critical theory. And although none of them were women at that point, they were very, very open to my efforts to take feminist insights and feminist advocacy and think about them as a serious critical theoretical project. Which, of course, has been a really, really important part of the development of academic feminism of people who have done critical theoretical work.

There’s a wonderful woman, another Bryn Mawr student from before my time, who did that even earlier than I did. Her name is Nancy Fraser, who studied with the same person at Haverford, who I did, Richard Bernstein. He often talked about her to me as kind of a model. Then that department, particularly Dick Bernstein, brought in wonderful people; so Hannah Arendt came to our seminar, Jürgen Habermas came to our seminars. So, I got an introduction to the importance of serious systematic thinking that linked theory and advocacy. That they weren’t two separate activities, they were united activities, if you did them both right. And that was what I was kind of raised on. I was very lucky.

JW:  Well, you went to the right place, it turned out.

AS:  Who knew? Sometimes we’re just lucky in the blind choices we make. Or in the uninformed, I won’t say blind, the uninformed choices that we make. Or maybe it was informed because I wanted to go to a women’s institute.

JW:  There you go.

AS:  So, all of that led me to life after college, which took me to Philadelphia. It took me from the suburbs of Philadelphia where Bryn Mawr was, into the heart of Philadelphia. I became part of a collective household of people who were doing social activism in different ways in Philadelphia. We had a house in Southwest Philadelphia and so in my first year in that house, ’71, ’72, I linked up with a Philadelphia Women’s Center, which was opening at that time in Philadelphia, right around the corner, a couple of streets over from the house we lived in.

So, there was a women’s center there, and at that women’s center there were a bunch of projects going on, and it became a site for early women activists just to have a place that women activists around the city could come to. And one of those projects was a pregnancy counseling project. Abortion was definitely still illegal in Pennsylvania at that time. It had recently been legalized in New York, but it was still before Roe, and it wasn’t yet easy to get an abortion in New York even though it had been legalized. It takes a long time from the legalization of something, to actually having an infrastructure for providing the health care.

We started this project, and we took calls. We got our number out there. We took calls from anybody who found our number to give them information about where they could get an abortion within Philadelphia. We had some local doctors who did abortions at that point, and information about how to link up with organizations in New York, kind of parallel organizations to ours who were doing abortions in New York. Then we would do lots and lots of just education and counseling. What is an abortion? How does it happen? What instruments do they use? What can you expect? What are the dangers?

JW:  Who knows? I mean, young women, who’s going to know what it is, really? That was crucial.

AS:  I didn’t know about what dilating the cervix was. I don’t think I knew what a cervix was at that point.

JW:  It’s so true. Took a long time to learn those words.

AS:  But at the Women’s Center, there was another project of people doing work on health care, and they were doing work on women health care workers. I was connected to that work, too, because somebody in the collective household I lived in had a job at the Health Information Project, which was a health advocacy and education organization, which was situated at University of Pennsylvania, headed by Ed Sparer, who was a wonderful early health care advocate, poverty law advocate. He was still there teaching at Penn, and he was a giant, with work on women, and work on health care, and work on abortion. So, he was there, and they were overseeing this project. And the person in my household, he worked there.

Then a woman who we worked with, Sarah Furnace, was in this other health care workers project working on that. The two projects came together, and we merged and formed the Philadelphia Women’s Health Collective. That collective went on for years and continued to exist until pretty recently through many people’s life cycles as a collective organization working on health care. And that health collective was so formative; foundational in my own development. And it was also situated, again, within the whole social and racial justice community, which was very active in Philadelphia at that time.

For example, Philadelphia was a site of much, much, much activity around police brutality, which is what it was labeled back at that time. Frank Rizzo was the police commissioner, and he was known nationwide for the incredible brutality and racism of the police department. They were criminals. And there was a very, very broad organization advocating against Rizzo at the level of community organization, and active legal groups bringing police brutality actions against them.

Some really notable early civil rights firms litigating police brutality cases and some of the leaders of our own feminist movement were lawyers there. Holly McGuigan, who recently died, was a lawyer at that firm with Keri Swodowski and McGuigan, and she did a lot of work. And so, the police brutality work and the state violence work that she did, then overlapped with her own development as an activist, and then an academic in creating the domestic violence movement, and in particular, the Battered Women Who Kill, that was her. She was there. Then there was enormous anti-war activism in the whole Philadelphia area. Partly situated by Quakers who had been very active in the anti-war movement, the break-in at the draft board at Media, Pennsylvania, the fallout from all the files that they got out of that.

JW:  You were part of that, you’re saying?

AS:  I was not, but I knew people who were. And of course, they maintained the secrecy of their identities at the time, but they were the activists in other aspects of the broader political movement in Philadelphia at that time. So, the Health Collective was developing in that context. It was just such a dynamic, important place to be. It felt like the work you were doing was fulfilling with people who were so smart, and so much fun, and so committed in these diverse areas, that the Health Collective was just a really wonderful place to be situated.

The work of the Health Collective at that period, I’d say, falls into three overlapping categories. One was one that we know well, which was outreach and education. Our Bodies, Ourselves was just getting going as a collective. They hadn’t yet published their famous Our Bodies, Ourselves; or they were only publishing the very early forms of it, which were sort of accessories to community organizing about women’s bodies.

We didn’t know about the women’s cervix. We didn’t really know what a menstrual cycle was. We had periods, but we didn’t know what a menstrual cycle was. And so, The Boston Free Press put out a newsprint paper addition of the early Our Bodies, Ourselves, and we would get piles of them, and we would take them and we would go to community groups, labor groups, religious groups, anybody who would have us come, talk about what women thought about their bodies.

What were their feelings about them? What did they want to know about them? What was going on around them? And how did the health care system treat them when they get to take care of their bodies? What were those early birth control methods like? All the dangerous things that were done to women. Even when we were there. When we were activists, that’s when the Libby’s Loop was put in. All of that was going on, and we were actively involved in that aspect of outreach and education.

And then the second one was Abortion and Reproductive Justice. So, we continued that part of the Women’s Pregnancy Counseling Project. One of the things that had happened with abortion, at least in Philadelphia, was that the district attorney in Philadelphia wanted abortion legalized, but he couldn’t legalize it. He said, quasi-publicly, that he was not going to prosecute anybody who did abortions, and so there started to be some abortion clinics that were starting up in Philadelphia at that time.

They were starting up in this political atmosphere, and so they had patient advocates. I was a patient advocate at one of those for a while. That the notion that women going through an abortion, even a first trimester abortion; because they were only doing first trimester abortions, needed counseling, needed support, needed an advocate for them. If they couldn’t ask questions themselves, to ask questions. So, we were active in that.

And then we were also active in issues of sterilization. I’m partly coming out of this focus on the dangers of untested birth control methods. An awareness that reproductive freedom also meant being able to have reproduction, or not have it. To be able to choose that and to not have forced sterilization, which was, of course, being done on poor women and a lot on what was being done in Puerto Rico. And so, Puerto Rican activists in this country, in the local community, were very attuned to sterilization abuse issues. And so, while we were pushing for legalization of abortion, we were also pushing for regulation of sterilization so that there was not forced sterilization. And so, we did some programs around that.

And then we got involved totally in about 1972, so maybe a second year into our existence. Into a terrible situation which highlighted the dangers of illegal abortions at that time; because they were mostly illegal around the country, and illegal abortions were prosecuted in most places. It wasn’t like in a prosecution free zone that we had in Philadelphia.

So, the Women’s Center got a call from an activist who was operating in Chicago about a bunch of abortions that were going to be done in Chicago, but then it turned out they were too dangerous to do there, by somebody who was a promoter of his own methods of abortion called Harvey Karman. He was doing something called the super coil abortion, which was his own technique for doing second trimester abortions.

He was going to do these second trimester abortions the next day when we got the call on this group of what he said were 40 women. Turned out to be a much smaller group. But when we got the call, it was 40 women. He was going to do the initial phases of the second trimester abortion in Chicago and put them on the bus to have the second trimester abortion completed in Philadelphia. And would we, as the Women’s Health Collective, provide house housing for these women who were going to show up on a bus ready to deliver their fetuses?

JW:  I see. He was doing some kind of dilation or something, and then they were going to be okay until they traveled all those hours to Philadelphia.

AS:  Right. So, he was going to do the dilation by inserting a laminectomy into their cervixes, which, I mean, you go back to ancient abortion techniques, laminaria were one of them. Which is still used to this day, I have discovered, as something that you could place in a cervix and it would absorb water and therefore slowly open.

JW:  Of course, you don’t know how long in any individual woman.

AS:  And of course, it’s a dangerous period because you’re opening up the cervix to infection.

JW:  Right. And you’re on a bus. Who knows what kind of infections could start. Okay. So, take it from there.

AS:  Harvey Karman was going to show up in Philadelphia to train two doctors from Philadelphia who had done first trimester abortions in his second trimester technique. His technique was what he called the super coil abortion, and that involved inserting three or four coils through the cervix into a woman’s uterus, and that those coils would trigger the uterus to contract and to expel the fetus. He was going to teach the doctor this technique. And we, the Health Collective, tried to find out, Who is this Harvey Karman?

They brought with them a film crew from WNET in New York to film it, which was supposedly a film about how difficult it was for women to get abortions. Turned out to be a film to promote Harvey Karman’s technique, but we tried to find out about that, and we were told, Well, whether or not you do it, we’re going to go ahead with these, and so provide housing if you can. Perhaps stupidly and naively, we went about providing.

We decided that it was very dangerous for the women to be spread out in individual homes where they couldn’t be monitored, so we found a location for them to all be in. We got bedding for them, and we got some people with medical skills to be there to get the women to hospitals if they were in danger. So, they were all in one place, and as one might predict, it went badly, with one of the women ending up with a perforated uterus, several women ending up with serious infections. A number of the women who came weren’t even pregnant, but they had been given these laminaria.

So, we provided help through recruiting medical students who were concerned about helping out with abortions, and afterwards, we became very involved with efforts to hold Harvey Karman to account. And there were many of those. The district attorney decided to prosecute him for what he’d done, and we cooperated with the district attorney about all the information we had leading up to this.

One of the medical students who was involved testified at the trial. We wrote about it for what was then the major feminist, alternative newspaper. I mean, there was Ms. which was much more prominent, but in the activist community, it was Off Our Backs, which was very, very vibrant. So, we did an article for Off Our Backs. It was then reprinted, which I had totally forgotten about until I was thinking about this, in a journal called Science for the People; they reprinted the article.

And we cooperated with the Centers for Disease Control, who did an after-the-fact study. They were charged with doing studies of morbidity and mortality related to abortion when it was illegal. And so that was at least a year long project in cooperating with the CDC and the wonderful officer who did the medical work on that. And then we wrote about it to say that, Exploitation of women can happen from many quarters, even people who present themselves as alternative hip, as Harvey Karman did. Hip practitioners who were anti-medical establishment, the dangers of exploitation of women were every place, and that the lesson, We have to have control over it. So, we followed up. We didn’t just go through the horrible process of helping those women through a terrible, terrible experience.

JW:  I was just going to add a personal experience because, well, I don’t know if you would call this exploitation, probably not, but I mentioned that I had a Dalkon Shield. For those who are listening, it was determined that it caused infection because the string would hang out of the uterus and it would potentially get infected. When I learned of this, I went back to my well-established obstetrician and I said, “Well, I think I want this out. I’m reading all this stuff. Should I go back to the pills?” And he says, “Well, it’s up to you. Either one could kill you.”

AS:  Which, of course, is true.

JW:  Which, of course, was true. But I mean, I don’t know if you call it exploitation or what, but couldn’t they come up with something that wouldn’t kill me, that would still work? I will say I went to a diaphragm for me after that, and it did generally work. I mean, it did work for me, but it’s clearly not as effective as other things for many, many women.

AS:  Of course, as the women’s health movement taught us, the early history of experimentation to the development of the birth control pill was done primarily in Puerto Rico. The doses of the hormones that were given in those early iterations of the pill were enormous.

JW:  Yes, I had that, too. I had a very high dose. I guess that’s why he said, “Well, either one could kill you.” It was just a very difficult time. Very, very difficult. That’s all.

AS:  One of the ways – going back to Our Bodies Ourselves – that Our Bodies Ourselves was so important, was because they made the diaphragm an acceptable method of birth control. Again, not ideal, but all the chapters on, I still remember them because I taught them a lot, were about how one could integrate the diaphragm into sexual activity.

JW:  Right. It didn’t have to be weird. I wasn’t going to do either of those other things that were more effective. I mean, happily, there are now better methods that will not kill you. But it took a while.

AS:  And they’ve gotten more control over the research and more active effect on how it was done with the importance of women’s advocacy groups over the years continuing to work on these critical issues.

JW:  Well, at some point you went to law school, right?

AS:  Right. And we also did this project on women health workers because that was so important, and having women doctors, and having women’s physicians’ assistants and legalizing and elevating the status of midwives and nurses. Anyway, it was wonderful. So that took me to law school, which I never thought I would go to when I went to college or when I graduated from college. But I thought this was a place to continue in the women’s movement doing legal work, because I could see by that time that legal work was really a fundamental part of developing the women’s movement. For this, I went to Harvard, which was, after my early educational experiences, a complete shock to my system. I was there from 1975 to ’78 when I was in law school. It was not the earliest period where the most elite law schools were horrible to women. The early women who went were phenomenal – Barbara Babcock, and just so many.

JW:  I’m reading a book by Elizabeth Holtzman, who was an early congressman in the ’70s. She talks about Ladies Day, where the few women had to stand up and be barraged by the professors.

AS:  Those women, it was just incredible what they went through. When I went, it was 19% women. Harvard thought they were the heroes of the universe by having 19% women. The Harvard faculty was enormous, and there were very few women. When I entered in ’78, there were two women on the faculty. One was somebody who was virtually retired, Elizabeth Alden, who’d done trusts and estates; was a noted scholar in that. And a very young woman named Sally Neely, who was just out of law school. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. A couple of years later, Elizabeth Bartholet came, but there were almost no women on the faculty.

Having gone to Brynn Mawr or even Haverford, it was like, women did things. Then, of course, in the sections, there were a bunch of women, but it was pretty isolated. It was one of my experiences of going, Oh, yes, I’m hitting a wall. This is just unbearable. So, I went through law school mostly angry. I had Sally Neely in my first year. She was a very creative teacher, very smart, doing, as I understood later, very innovative legal theory within her teaching, and the students were just cruel to her. They were just cruel. It was like watching somebody get demolished in front of your eyes.

JW:  Really? There was not respect for the professor?

AS:  No. So, she left after, I think, three or four years on the faculty. She was one of a string of women who were brought in to be on the Harvard faculty and were demolished one way or another. Herma Hill Kay came as a visitor, and Herma was like a giant of legal academia. Wrote the first textbooks on women in the law, was doing the most kinds of creative legal thinking, became dean at Berkeley, and she was deemed not good enough for the Harvard faculty. There was woman after woman after woman who was brought in for all those years. So, it took a bunch of years before they actually got women on their faculty.

I can only imagine what a terrible experience it was for Professor Neely, and she then went back into practice and had a very distinguished career as a practitioner. There have been books written on all the women who were brought in to Harvard and were treated terribly in the process. One of them was a good friend of mine, Zipporah Wiseman, who was a brilliant legal thinker and was treated terribly by the Harvard faculty when it came to the decision about whether or not to appoint her to a regular position.

JW:  What did they do when you say she was treated horribly?

AS:  Well, Zipporah’s area of study was secured transactions. And so, she wrote important work on Carl Llewellyn, who, of course, was an important theorist of contract law and how contract law then should be rooted in actual experience in the world. He was a legal realist. And his wife, Soia Mentschikoff, was a very important legal thinker, and Zipporah was doing work on the thinking of Soia Mentschikoff.

And Zipporah wrote about the important theoretical work around contracts and secured transactions, and it was never recognized by the people who evaluated her scholarship for the importance of her own thinking or the importance of Soia Mentschikoff, who she was writing about, who was an important legal theorist, along with her husband, Karl Llewellyn, but Karl Llewellyn was the guy. So, they ignored her work.

She then left. She had then, a distinguished career of her own. She went to Northeastern, and then she went to the University of Texas, and she was a tenured, chaired, distinguished professor there. She survived because she was so brilliant and so wonderful, but she was one of many, too. Claire Dalton was another one who was denied tenure because her work wasn’t recognized.

JW:  I was one of her students.

AS:  So, you know how wonderful Claire was.

JW:  Yes, she was amazing.

AS:  She sued Harvard and got a wonderful settlement and then took that money from her settlement and set up a fantastic program at Northeastern. But anyway, I was a student in the early stages of this, watching the destructiveness of a quintessentially patriarchal institution. But as with all of us, we found ways to have solace and support. Because that’s part of the brilliance of the feminist movement, of creating sites where women support each other and help each other. Feminists, and other people who were supportive of women.

So, my own space that I found was at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, which was the student organization that did representation of people in poverty law cases, which at that point was being folded into the work of a developing and very early iteration of a clinical program at Harvard, which Gary Menlo was instrumental in informing. So, I did that, I joined the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, I became an Associate Director of it. We pushed for affirmative action in getting students into the bureau so that there would be racial diversity among the students because there was a big push for racial diversity as well as gender diversity.

We worked on getting law reform projects integrated with individual advocacy, and I started to focus on family law issues there. Which, as always, because it affects women and because women do it, family law is among the least prestigious and respected areas of practice and academic study, or had been. It’s now changing, but it’s only taken many, many years.

It was really a site where I could find that poverty advocacy, gender advocacy, and racial advocacy could come together, because the clients who come to a legal aid office, those are the people who come. And so, the issues that they are dealing with on an individual level, reflect really important structural systemic issues and if you think about your legal work as integrating those things, it was a wonderful place to forge a career. And so, it created that for me.

And then summers, I went back to Philadelphia. I was an intern at the Women’s Law Project there, and then I was an intern at Community Legal Services, which was the Legal Services program in Philadelphia for my next summer. The activism there, was in the early creation of statutes focused on violence against women; on domestic violence. So, some of the very early creation of civil protection order statutes, which hadn’t existed in law, they were a creature of people’s advocacy. That work was being done at Community Legal Services then, and I was in an office doing that work.

I came there for summers, and that then led to my work after law school, which was going to Community Legal Services to continue with that work. And it was really a model legal services organization, again, at a vibrant time for the expansion of legal services, which is, of course, one of the issues that Ed Sparer, who had been at the Health Information Project. He was an important force in developing legal services nationally, as was Gary Bello, who was at Harvard developing the clinical program there.

And so, it was a place where you could do both serious work on individual advocacy with a concern for providing the highest level of representation to poor people. It was a second-class legal experience. You were getting the best. Also, with an attention to creating social change that was coordinate with individual advocacy.

Community Legal Services was a place where I was able to do it in two different important domains. One, again, was domestic violence. We were just beginning to do the legal half of statutes creating remedies if somebody was being abused in a relationship. Which back then was called wife abuse, and then it was called spouse abuse, and then it was called domestic violence, and then it was called violence against women, and then women were called battered women.

But it was ways to capture the experience of intimate violence in relationship. That it is such a part of women’s lives, going back again centuries, eons. And so, starting to make that real in the legal system. Because now, there’s a form, and you go to a particular court, and you file for a civil protection order, well, none of that existed in those early days. You had to go get an injunction and file a pile of papers, and find a judge who would be sympathetic to you.

JW:  It was very frowned upon, socially. Not that it’s looked highly upon now, but it’s changed. It’s gotten more visibility and more understanding, I think.

AS:  Yes, but still not enough. As with reproductive justice, there’s a long way to go.

JW:  Right, I don’t want to overstate.

AS:  But it really is. It’s a world of difference than what the feminist movement has been through in thinking through how to address domestic violence, making mistakes along the way, or generating intense debates. To what extent in domestic violence do you cooperate or seek out state-sanctioned remedies for domestic violence? Putting people in jail, or do you keep it out of jail because of the racial justice harms that are done when you go through a punitive criminal justice?

JW:  Or as came up this week, do you take away the abuser’s guns? Only this week, that came out of the Supreme Court. I mean, we’re talking about 50 years later.

AS:  Fifty years later. When I started teaching family law many years ago, it was still legal in a marriage in Virginia for there to be domestic violence. For a husband to beat up his wife. But I was also able in that period to be involved in structural issues, and that was something, again, I’d started in Philadelphia in one of the other collective households I lived in. One of the people who I lived there with was a woman named Peggy McGarry, who started Women Against Abuse in the early ’70s in Philadelphia, which was one of first shelter organizations, creating shelters for abused women in the country. It started out on the second floor of the Germantown YWCA, Young Women’s Christian Association.

We found housing for women who were escaping from relationships and developed it into a shelter, and then the shelter provided services. And so, I got to join the board of the shelter and work on developing the legal remedies that were parallel to the shelter remedies. Because not all women who came to the shelter wanted a legal remedy, and not all women who wanted a legal remedy needed a shelter. It was a place for me to continue in grassroots activism and think about what the law contributed and where the law could be a problem, or wasn’t relevant to creating change.

And then the second thing I did at Community Legal Services which only in the last five years has become resurrected, was work on child abuse and neglect, and the destruction of mostly Black families through the child welfare system. We developed a dedicated unit to representing parents whose kids were being taken away from them.

Wonderful academics and activists have done work over the last 25 years on identifying the confluence of poverty and race and gender that occurs when children are removed from their families. Dorothy Roberts is, of course, the star, the leading person who has worked for years and years and years, but many, many, many other important younger scholars, Kiara Bridges; there’s lots of wonderful work on this.

We were doing early work back then. We were bringing challenges in federal court to the removal of children on specious grounds. I got up to the third circuit and won with an opinion from Judge Higgenbotham. We set up at Legal Services, not only just representing the individual parents, which was incredibly complicated and wonderful legal work to do, but also set up an organization called Parents United to Prevent Separation, to bring parents together who were suffering. I mean, it’s the worst thing that can happen to have a child taken away.

So, I got to do that at Legal Services, and then connect to national groups who were working on harms in the child welfare system. The Children’s Defense Fund, they were working on creating better federal laws having to do with this. There was a statute in the 1980s, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of the 1980s, which sought to provide more preventive services.

So, if a family was in trouble, rather than taking kids away, providing them food and shelter and clothing, and the things that most kids are taken away for. Not for any physical abuse, it’s all just surrogates for poverty. So, I got to work with them and then that laid the groundwork for my entering academia, which was totally serendipitous. The last thing I could imagine was teaching in a law school since I had hated my law school experience. Why would I go back?

JW:  Make it better for other people.

AS:  That was it. I saw an ad to create a women’s law program, at American University, Washington College of Law. And I learned then, that it was the only law school in the world created by women to provide a legal education for women. In 1896, they took men as well as women. What they didn’t do, and is so connected to the history, the mixed and complicated and contradictory history of the women’s movement, particularly in the progressive era, but in many eras. Where although one of the two women who formed the law school had gone to Howard to get her law degree and Howard accepted women, and was, of course, part of a historically Black university, they turned around and wouldn’t admit African-Americans to the early classes. The first nonperson of color wasn’t accepted until 1926. that was a Native American, and the first Black person wasn’t admitted till the 1950s.

JW:  That’s amazing.

AS:  It is amazing. But that’s the history we live with, and that’s the history we have to seek to change and take what is powerful about it and continually do transformation of our movement, which is one of the very exciting things about being a feminist. That transformation is in our blood. You know, that criticism and self-criticism, dynamism, spirals of development, you get back to the same place, but it’s different.

JW:  And that is where we are now. In many instances, we’re back many years, but we will get out of it. It’ll just take a lot of work.

AS:  One of the places to do that work is in academia. And so, I established as part of the founding of the Women in the Law program, involved the founding of a Women in the Law Clinic, which is, of course, now called our Gender Justice Clinic. Because we all understand gender, the concepts of gender and womanhood and maleness and binaries and the complexity of sexuality and sexual identity much more than we did at the time. But we created a program where people were representing clients and learning to be lawyers through the representation.

JW:  Oh, really? Wow. I mentioned this before, but I’ll say again, that I went to American University. And when I started in 1973, although it had been the first law school created by women, when I started, it was all men faculty because I guess after World War II, men just took over. The year I started, ’73, was the year the first woman was hired as a professor, and she was wonderful. But also, the only club that existed for women was the Law Wives Club.

We had to create a women’s organization, which we did; the Women’s Collective. And it was just nascent, but we got a lot of attention for talking about language, as you said, and now how issues about women should be addressed. It was the nascent start of activity that led, obviously, to this wonderful program you got started.

AS:  Well, going back in your whole project here to these beginnings and see how our beginning instincts were so connected to a really broad harm. And so you begin with language and you discover through language, that there’s a whole structure of harm and oppression and exclusion that’s behind that language. And when we think about history, yes, it’s the postwar period, but it’s also the period when the original Washington College of Law, which was formed by women and had all women deans, merged with American University. So, merged with a big institution, and after the merger, all the deans were men.

JW:  There you go.

AS:  There you go until quite recent in our history. And then again, transformation. We had a woman dean, an African-American woman dean, and then an African-American male dean. We constantly have to continue to examine ourselves and to recognize things where we’ve gone wrong, where there’s a contradiction in what we’ve done and try to change it and know that it’ll need to be changed again because we’re not going to get it right again.

JW:  Or it’s going to go backwards, as we’ve seen.

AS:  As we’ve seen. So anyway, I got to start this Women in the Law program with a clinic, but also going back to an early theme to change our entire curriculum, to have a curriculum at the law school that both focused on gender and that’s in both our JD program and in our LLM program. We’ve created specialized degrees in gender studies, in comparative and international law, and specializations within other areas, and then specialized degrees. We have, for a long time, the only degrees of people specializing, so we get these fantastic people from around the world who want to get advanced degrees in studying gender. And then making it part of the whole curriculum, so making gender not just specialized courses, which are great.

Feminist jurisprudence, I got to teach that. Reproductive justice, we have that. Domestic violence, we have that. Women in employment, we have that. Sex-based discrimination; so we have all of those specialized courses, but also to integrate it into studies in other areas. Studies in intellectual property, studies in environmental law, studies in any area you look at. Just as we knew from the beginning, if you look to see what’s going on with gender or the intersection of gender, race, and poverty, you will find the legal system either having a bad role that needs to be changed, or the potential for generating good change. And so, we’ve done an enormous amount of work on our curriculum, and then just supporting students.

As you said, without the organizations, without other people, without opportunities for students to come together to think about their careers, to get help developing their careers. What if I want to be a health law practitioner? Where can I study gender? Because gender is not often in the name of the places that you can study gender. For years, we had a program for about the first 14 years of our existence, nationally, trying to encourage people to bring gender into the curriculum in law schools around the country.

And then, partly, our success put us out of business. Not put out of business, but the need for people to come together every year at the annual meeting of law teachers, it had to be regionalized because there was so much going on, and we had great people who worked on that. So, it’s been a great place to have this part of my career where activism is part of it, thinking critically and teaching students critical thinking skills is part of it, figuring out what it means to be a lawyer, a practitioner who’s attentive to these issues is part of it. I just feel so fortunate, so fortunate to go through all these changes over all these years.

JW:  I often have said I was lucky for when I was born. If I was born 10 years earlier, I would not have had this life. Being born when I was, it helped. I could be part of this, and it’s been amazing. Any other closing comment?

AS:  Well, I want to thank you and your project for doing this. Looking back at these early years, at the second wave, the kind of activism, thinking, connections, self-discovery, the ways we were all placed in a time of change and ferment, has been so instructive and moving for me to go back to those times and think about what the second wave means and what it’s done. When I look at the list of the people who you’ve interviewed, the diverse fields that they’re in and the diverse kinds of work they’ve done and the ways things have changed over time.

But because I teach and taught feminist theory and its development, the second wave gets a bad rap, by and large, at least in legal feminism, because it’s seen as, Oh, that’s the era of equality. You all believe that equality was going to solve the problem. And when you go back and you look at the actual richness of the second wave, when there wasn’t much law out there, equality was an aspiration. It was not much of a reality.

You see so many of the precursors of different strands of feminism and activism that have grown and matured and changed over the years. So, I just think if you’re doing this with that piece of our history, is both fun – we all know how to have fun and know how important fun is to having a good movement – and nurturing, how important that is. But also discovery. And so, it’s been personally very exciting for me. And I think [it] has this important contribution to make to our understanding of our collective history.

JW:  I do believe it will be inspirational for the advocates that are coming down the road. That is a big part of why I think it’s important.

AS:  Also, we never know. Being in education, you never know what ideas – it’s just a side thought that you’ve had and some student comes back later and says, Do you remember when you said, Mmm-mm? It so affected me. I go, I said, that? That sounds like something I would say.

JW:  That’s great. Well, thank you. This has been wonderful.