THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Arlene Herman

“My whole life has been about working with women. The defining feature of my life is having an automatic gender lens on absolutely everything.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, November 2023

AH:  My name is Arlene Herman. I was born in Philadelphia, PA, November 16, 1949.

JW:  Great. Well, tell us a little about your childhood.

AH:  I absolutely think my childhood impacted a great deal in my life. I was an only child born to a Jewish couple. At the time that I was born; I was born in Philadelphia, but shortly thereafter, probably when I was six years old, we moved to rural New Jersey. And we moved there because my parents and grandmother were told it was going to be kind of a new, upcoming, Jewish neighborhood. I think they were sold snake oil, but they moved out there. It was very rural, and we were, like, the third little house built. Right after they moved out there, the Catholic Church was erected and there were no other Jewish families.

How did that shape my life? Well, my parents were very concerned about how other people would respond to us being Jewish, and rightly so. At that time, there was a lot of antisemitism in the area. We had swastikas painted on our car. I was called, “Dirty Jew.” We were stoned. Our car was stoned. Our house was stoned. I think it didn’t happen right away, but it did happen.

There’s a lot more I could say about that, but I think the most important thing, is that experience of being the “other”, being different, really shaped me profoundly. Of course, I rebelled against my parents, who basically said to me, “We don’t want you to have any non-Jewish friends.” Well, that was impossible. But overall, it sensitized me to being on the outside of the mainstream. To being different. To being in what I call, “unsure territory.”

The other factor that shaped my life was that my mother, which is somewhat surprising since she was the primary breadwinner; we were a working-class family and my father was in and out of employment; they felt really strongly that I had no need to go to college. That I should just become a good secretary. They wouldn’t sign the papers for me to go in the academic stream and my Guidance counselor said, “Oh, Arlene, I need to meet with them.”

So, I’m really grateful that he did, because he basically told my parents, “It would be a waste of my mind to be in a clerical program.” So, I went in the academic stream and I think clearly, that was very important for me. My early life was challenging. Being Jewish in an all-Christian area, was challenging. So, the ability to go to university and develop my life was very important.

JW:  Was it challenging to be Jewish in school as well as at home?

AH:  The school where I went was in my area, so yes, it was. I would have kids come up to me and say, “Oh, Arlene, we’re so sorry for you.” And I would say, “Why?” And they’d said, “Because you’ll never get to heaven.” And then I’d have people say, “Come on, come on, show us, show us.” And I would say, “Show us what?” And they’d say, “Your horns. Jews have horns.” I was a bit of an oddball, intellectual type. Part of the unpopular group, very, very much so. There were three of us, and it really shaped a lot of my path.

JW:  It’s very scary hearing this given the situation we are in now.

AH:  For me, actually, it has resurrected some of those early experiences which were very profound, because I was often frightened of people in terms of how things would work out.

JW:  So, college was different?

AH:  College was very different. I went to a school in Philadelphia, Temple University; great sea of diversity. Left home, worked and put myself through school, had some scholarships, lived communally, and became very active in left wing politics. Everything from SDS to Workers League, to the Progressive Labor Party. And I chose as a major, not surprisingly, social work, because I was interested in social justice.

I blossomed in university because I think I found my people. And I’m not speaking about other Jewish people, although I did meet other Jewish people. It was just other people who were concerned about the inequities in the world, the war. I had solidarity with quite a number of people. And that was kind of the beginning of my awakening.

I guess I’ll just move along here because it flows, I became a social work major. One of the great things about social work at that time, is that you had a field practicum. I was fortunate enough at that time to have my first field practicum with Women in Transition. Women in Transition was a feminist organization. Three women in the basement of a church, working with women who were going through separation, and divorce, women who had been abused.

It was a small organization. As I said, there were three or four of us. I had a practicum there, but more importantly, I ended up working there post-graduation, and that experience was profound in shaping my feminist lens.

But I was moving towards that direction even within left wing politics. Because what I noticed in all the left-wing political parties that I joined and subsequently left, was that most of the leaders were men, and most of the doers were women, and I felt like we weren’t capitalizing on women’s brains. So, everything worked out as it should, because I ended up at Women in Transition, or as we refer to it, WIT, which I love that. And that experience shaped me profoundly. And, I can go into that.

JW:  Yes, tell us an anecdote or something that you did that was important to you at that organization.

AH:  I guess there are a couple of things I want to say about it. I did a variety of different projects there. I had a Get Out the Vote project, we developed also another project, all these were funded by small grants for women who had been recently widowed. We kind of fashioned our peer support groups for them, after what we had done with women who are going through separation and divorce, women who are abused, basically the principle being peer self-help, women helping women.

And that experience of co-facilitating those groups, being a part of that, was very profound for me, because what I witnessed, and what I experienced there, was the magic of women helping women. Women understanding that much of what they were experiencing wasn’t unique to them. That it was in part, a result of the ghettoization of being a woman, both in our brains and in our lives. And that kind of magic really shaped me a great deal.

The other thing that, corollary to this, and this isn’t something I want to speak at length about but I think it’s important to say, when I was in those circles I kept on hearing about the word survivor. And I said to myself, “Survivor of what?” That’s when the whole coming out of the closet around sexual abuse was happening, childhood sexual abuse. And I was a survivor. Though by that stage I had shared it with maybe one or two people, I never really worked on it. I never really understood the impact of it on me. So, that was also very profound, and still is.

So, many things at Women in Transition were meaningful to me, personally and professionally. And then watching women grow in these peer-self-help support groups was phenomenal. There was a woman who I worked with in the group who was extraordinarily shy, barely could speak, very hard for her to be present.

And then over the eight weeks, she started coming out of her shell, and that was a beautiful blossoming. To make a long story short, Alma, who became one of our staff people, over the years moved from an incredibly reticent, self- deprecating woman, to a very strong, articulate, helpful person. And it was just a great honor to witness that. I witnessed that in so many different ways, but not quite as profoundly.

I had a lot of respect for our organization because we were predominantly White women in Philadelphia, which was a predominantly African American city. And when we went for what we called, the big grant, “the dirty money” which came from government; because at that point we had all private foundation grants and we were awarded a very large sum of money under the displaced homemaker legislation. We went from six women in the basement of a church, to thirty women with two satellite campuses. So, that was completely profound.

I think what was also challenging, at that stage of my life, I actually left Women in Transition after about five years, a year after we were fully receiving that funding, because I was moving to Australia. But we went from five White women, and we made a commitment to hire all African American or Hispanic women. And that actually happened. It was very amazing.

I moved to Australia and was there for seven years. I never moved back to Philadelphia, so I never really reconnected with them. But that whole experience really shaped me professionally and personally, and I thank God that I ended up there in my field practicum.

JW:  Were women treated differently in Australia?

AH:  Well, let me say this. When I arrived in Australia, the headlines of the Sydney Morning Herald said, “Mums Take Jobs from Sons.”

JW:  Oh, I see. Okay. That answers that question.

AH:  Well, no, I do want to say, I seemed to be in the right place at the right time, because at the same time that was the headline, I was in the state of New South Wales. And New South Wales just had an election, and the new premier of New South Wales, Neville Wran, was a feminist. His wife was a very strong feminist and I think had a great deal of influence. So, one of the things that happened during that time was, in every major government department, whether it was industrial relations, or childcare, or education, in every major government department, they appointed a women’s policy advisor.

There were about 15 of these women, and the term was coined, I didn’t coin it, but I certainly looked into it a great deal; Femocrats. Feminists in the bureaucracy. It was wonderful, except over a period of time, the question became, was it, and I taught about this a little bit, was it the fematicrazation of bureaucracy, or the bureaucratization of feminism?

However, I was doing work in Australia with immigrant women, and with some of the women’s organizations on the ground, and their job was to maintain liaisons with these women in positions of power. So, there was a grassroots movement. And to the extent that the women on the ground were able to maintain dialog and connection with those women in government, there was a lot of progress. To the extent that they were not, there was less progress.

I would say that’s an important lesson I learned. Advancing movement issues can’t solely be done by women in the bureaucracy, or women in government. Women in government have to have a connection to women on the ground, to the movement, and sometimes, as you know, that dissipates. So, I landed in Australia at a very interesting time and did a lot of interviews of the Femocrats at that time, to unearth what their challenges were.

JW:  Is that why you went?

AH:  No. Both my husband and I at the time, we got married, and then we went and we both ended up teaching at the University of Sydney. So, I went because he got a job, but also, I was a person who was very much interested in living outside the US. I was quite happy to go and quite happy to have this amazing experience. And it was an amazing experience. My first son was born there, my first introduction to how the world sees women as mothers, and how we see ourselves as mothers.

So, it was great being there on multiple levels. I enjoyed teaching. I enjoyed the work I did in the community. It really did spark a long-term interest of mine, which is women in leadership positions, and the extent to which they can be impactful to the movement and how challenging that becomes.

JW:  Do you have any examples of how the women on the ground affected the woman in power, or helped the woman in power to make a particular change?

AH:  I will say this, when relations broke down, that was when things became really problematic. There was a lot of pressure. The women’s collectives that I was connected to, were lobbying very forcefully around childcare issues and that was an effective partnership. In other areas where there was less cohesion in the movement around a particular issue, then there was less impact.

I was more interested in the experience of Femocrats themselves, and what changed for them when they were in the bureaucracy. Many of the women who were appointed, actually not all, but some, came from the movement, and many did not. It takes a long time to shift a bureaucracy. It takes a long time to bring about legislative change or funding changes.

I was very interested in how the women themselves managed within that patriarchal environment because I think that was also challenging. And the extent to which sometimes they were connected to the movement, did not necessarily put them in a good position vis-à-vis, other bureaucrats. So, it’s a complicated dance, and I saw it as complicated. I was hoping to do my thesis on this, but I didn’t finish that work. But work on the Femocrats has been published, so it’d be interesting to take a look at that.

I came back to the US. and I ended up in California. There, I did a variety of things, but I was largely based at a community college. During my tenure at the community college, I was the director of a large re-entry program for people coming back to school. That was predominantly 85 – 90% female students, and they were students who came back to school for a variety of reasons. Mature age students. They came back to school for separation, divorce, disability issues, for re-training.

That was work I really enjoyed. And part of that work, I had a gender equity grant during that time from the state, and was looking at women again in nontraditional fields. Seeing what the challenges and issues were and how we might adapt some of our educational programs to address those. I began to see that these kinds of challenges for women who were re-entering education, or in many respects trying to re-make their lives, was a statewide issue.

So, I launched a statewide conference that happened every year until, actually I left, called, Women Making their Own Way. It’s an event that I’m very proud of, that was incredibly well attended from women across the state, and it really was an empowerment conference for women who are trying to make changes in a whole variety of areas of their lives and providing some resources, support, dialog around that.

So that was something I felt very proud of, and I loved the name so much that I copyrighted it because I thought I might want to do something around that. But I didn’t, because then I ended up moving to Canada. I had been moving around a great deal in my life.

JW:  Any particular example of a story you could remember about a woman who was making her own way?

AH:  Hard to single out any one woman, but I would say two areas really come to mind. Older women, who had been in relatively long serving marriages and then all of a sudden were independent, or were no longer with their partners, and reentering the workplace. Many women had not been working women.

One woman in particular, it’s amazing that she even came to the conference and then later enrolled in our program, but she had such low self-esteem, such a sense that she had very little value. How could she start all over again? How could she become employable? How could she manage in the world? And to make a very long story short, she came to our conference.

She then decided to go back to school, one course at a time. And it was wonderful to see her blossom. And then this is also someone who lacked self-confidence, didn’t think that the experiences that she had were of any significance. And then two years into this program, she ended up working for my department as a peer counselor. That was a great blossoming.

But I saw many, and my whole professional life I have seen women go from having such poor self-esteem, to better self-esteem, to trying new things, learning about themselves, trusting themselves. I’ve seen this process, this metamorphosis, many, many times, and it’s been inspiring to me and inspiring in my life. I’ve seen women who’ve gone into leadership positions, from starting out going back to school, getting a degree, then getting another degree, and then becoming leaders in their own right. It’s been a wonderful thing for me to be a part of that.

JW:  A phrase just popped in my head that I remember from maybe the ’70s. Displaced Homemaker.

AH:  That’s the grant that enabled women in transition too – that was the money that enabled us to go from three women in the basement of a church to about twenty-five women with two satellite campuses. So, yes, Displaced Homemaker. When we went for that money and received that money, all of us were not particularly liking the basket that came in, and what that meant. But it enabled us to do some very important things.

And for a lot of women, throughout my life, when I’ve seen women who’ve come out of bad relationships and start to enter the world of work, they do feel displaced. They’re in new territory. But those were those times.

We have many more women working now than we did before. They were very, I would say, hopeful, inspiring times. I feel very fortunate to have been a part of feminist work in a variety of different places. In Canada, I’ve done some interesting work with immigrant women. Looking at their experience in leaving their home countries and coming into Canada and looking at the impact of the change on their roles as women.

I had a huge research project in Toronto looking at Somali women and Latin American women and what happens when they leave their home country in those traditional roles and come into Canada. It’s a real upheaval.

JW:  Are you still in Canada?

AH:  I’m still in Canada. I am retired, but I’m still in Canada.

JW:  I didn’t quite get when you moved to Canada. And you continued the same kind of work?

AH:  I continue the same kind of work in Canada. When I came to Canada, I enrolled in the first PhD program in women’s studies in Canada, and did lots of different work, a large part of it focusing on women, and immigrant women. I was in Toronto for about seven years. I completed all my coursework. I did my doctoral exams. You’re looking at an ABD. I am, all but dissertation.

But then I went through a divorce myself, moved up to northern BC in a remote First Nations area. I have been always looking for new learning, new experience, and so I did a lot of work with Indigenous communities, Indigenous women, but I decided after many years of being in the academy and teaching, that that’s not where I saw myself. And so, completing the PhD,  I wasn’t motivated to do it.

JW:  What did you do with Indigenous women?

AH:  I was located in a completely Indigenous area of northern British Columbia, and when they hired me, they hired me to build relations with Indigenous communities, to enable Indigenous people to come into the social work program.

JW:  What university was it?

AH:  University of Northern British Columbia, UNBC. Most of the people that I interacted with in First Nations communities, the educational liaison people, were women. And most of the students that came into my program were women. At that point, I hadn’t made a decision about whether or not I was going to finish my doctoral work, and I became interested in the role of First Nations women in Indigenous communities. And so, I did a lot of liaison work with those women.

All my students were women but I didn’t formally do any research. I just was very interested in the matriarchal structure of many First Nations communities and the extent to which that impacted the policy and planning in those communities. I think women are very powerful in First Nations communities. However, most of the formalized leadership positions were held by men when I was there. That’s changing.

JW:  Is it?

AH:  Yes. Slowly, that’s changing. Is it possible, even though I know this is about you asking me questions, but might I ask you one?

JW:  Sure.

AH:  So, I think we’re the same age, more or less.

JW:  I was born January, 1947.

AH:  Yes. So, we grew up in that second wave, and we’re very active in that second wave. And I’m wondering, because I now have a granddaughter who’s two, and I think a great deal about her and her future, and I think about how feminism will shape that, or won’t. I’m curious how you see the movement now.

JW:  I do a lot of lecturing about women’s progress. Particularly, interest in reproductive health, and you may understand that women always try to control their fertility. My lecture starts in 3000 BCE and goes forward. I would say one of the things I say, is in terms of our progress, I had a pin in the ’70s that said $0.59 cents. And in the United States that was how much women made. It was a dollar for men, on average.

Now we’re up to $0.84 cents. So, it’s taken like 50 years to go part of the way. Now, I have been lucky to work with a lot of women who are younger than me, and I do feel like there is a zeal, and a passion, and an understanding about what still needs to come.

AH:  Well, I’ve met a lot of very compelling young women as well, and I think for me, I really would like us to build solidarity. I know this has happened with men, and solidarity that makes us speak jointly about these issues, and that’s what I’m really hoping for.

JW:  Yes, absolutely. Well, let me go back to one more question. At the beginning, you talked about how your feeling of “otherness” shaped your life. Can you elaborate a little in terms of what you’ve told us you do, and you’re working with women? How did that affect your life’s work?

AH:  I haven’t just worked with women. I’ve worked basically with people who have been disenfranchised, people who have been marginalized, people who have not had the same kind of advantages that everyone else has had. I think I’m always looking for the information that’s missing. I think that comes from being an “other.”

I’m always looking at the people who are missing. I’m always trying to create a wider dialog. I’m always interested in building solidarity in unlikely places. I think it has profoundly shaped who I am. Profoundly. How I live, and my ability to be comfortable with very disparate views. It’s very easy to talk to people who are like you. It is completely different to talk to people who are fundamentally different.

I find interesting now, because many of the people who historically we would have seen as being in positions of power, now feel like they’re the “other.” So, it’s very interesting how that shapes up. I think it’s impacted how I live my life and the kind of dialog I’m able to engage in. That “otherness” is always with me. I don’t feel part of the mainstream in many ways, I never have. There are some good aspects to that, is what I would say. It also gives me a great capacity to be empathetic with people who experience the kind of extreme discrimination and violence that they have.

JW:  Any other thought before we close.

AH:  I remember as a feminist, coming into feminism and coming into my political life, I was preoccupied with gaining power, and now I’m preoccupied with sharing power. And now I’m preoccupied with what I call, “compassionate power.” Because as a species, I feel like we are not doing very well in terms of seeing ourselves in the “other,” seeing that we have a common stake in our future.

One of the things about growing up in the United States, it was very important, even if you weren’t sure you had anything to say, to put your hand up, because you wanted to be noticed. Rampant individualism. Very important. When I moved to Australia, they have this expression which I loved, called, “cutting down the tall poppy.” That means, you don’t want to stand out in a crowd.

They value what they call, the “quiet achiever,” so they viewed Americans as a little too assertive. When I first was there, I organized this huge conference, and in the debrief, I wanted people to talk about the next one. And their whole thing was, “Hey, we can rest here.” My boss pulled me over at the time, he said, “This isn’t the US. We don’t keep marching. We take a break here.” I have been very conscious of, not just how we’re doing as a species, how women can shape that as well, in terms of our capacity for what I call, “a compassionate use of power.”

JW:  Fascinating. Well, this has been super great. I appreciate it so much. I’m so glad we did it.

AH:  Yes. And I thank you again. One hopes that this comes across in the way it’s intended, but it’s been a pleasure to be able to reflect on all this.

JW:  That’s great.