THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Barbara Mehrhof

“The women that I met in the women’s movement were incredible. They were brilliant. They were creative and imaginative. They were funny. They had a sense of themselves. They were competitive. Sometimes they were insufferable. I’m very proud and grateful that I was there. That I took part in this. That I knew those women. And I have that fond memory, that we made history. We changed the world.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, January 2025

BM: I’m Barbara Mehrhof.  I was born April 20, 1942, at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, New York where I grew up.

JW:  Tell us a little about growing up. Various things, your siblings, your parents, your ethnicity, your neighborhood. Stuff you think that maybe influenced you to become the person that you are.

BM:  I grew up in a part of Brooklyn called Borough Park in a lower middle-class neighborhood. Most of the people there were either Jewish or Italian. My mother’s parents came from the Austrian and the Russian sectors of what had once been Poland. They had six children. My grandfather was a baker. He also used to buy an apartment house, live there with his family, have tenants, sell it, buy another apartment house, and so on and so forth.

The last house he bought was a six-family house in Borough Park. That’s where I grew up with my parents. I was an only child.  My two aunts and their husbands also lived in the building, and they each had a single child too. So, I grew up with my two cousins. Unfortunately, my grandfather was hit by a trolley car and he died shortly after he bought the house. In those days, the area wasn’t farmland, but it wasn’t built up. When I was growing up it was fully developed.  The neighborhood contained a mix of four-family apartment houses and single residential homes.

My father’s parents were Irish and German. That was a very popular combination around the turn of the century, or a little bit later in New York City. They were both born in the United States. My mother’s family spoke Polish at home, so she and her siblings knew Polish. We grandkids never learned it. Growing up, I went to public schools. I played handball in the alley. I did love to dance. I liked ballet, so I took ballet and tap-dancing lessons.

In 1940 my family decided to go into business together. My mother and her sisters and their spouses bought a 22-room house on 25 acres in a hamlet called Slate Hill in upstate New York. They had a boarding house for two years, but then WWII came. So that was the end of the boarding house. We used to go up during the summertime for vacation and it was absolutely wonderful to get out of the city. It was warm in the day, cool in the night, and we all loved it very much.

Then after college, I went to Europe for two and a half months with my friend. We toured primarily, of course, Western Europe, and came back, and she and I became social workers. Not what we went to school for, but it was tough to find a job. How many words do you type?  When I first got into the women’s movement, I was a social worker at the Bureau of Child Welfare, which was a city agency.

The last thing I did at BCW was license daycare homes for children whose parent needed someone to look after their children while they worked.

JW:  So, you said that was when you got in the women’s movement, and how did that happen? 

BM:  I worked with Sheila Cronan, and she was from California. We came into BCW at the same time.  I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but we met this woman who was in NOW, and she told us about a demonstration that NOW was having at the headquarters of Colgate Palmolive, regarding discrimination against women.

I had read Betty Friedan’s, The Feminine Mystique. I had read de Beauvoir’s, The Second Sex, and I had also seen an article in the Sunday Times a couple of months before this, and it was titled, “What Do These Women Want?” And it was a whole article on the women’s movement of that time. So, it had a lot on NOW, and it had something on Women’s Liberation. So, we decided we would go. Maybe we would get involved.

JW:  Can I ask you what year that was?

BM:  This was, I think, September 1968. We went on our lunch hour. There was a picket line. I recognized some of the women on the picket line because I had read this article. I recognized Ti-Grace Atkinson. I recognized Anselma Dell’Olio, and it was pretty exciting. We joined the picket line, we gave out flyers, and then we had to go back to work. However, we saw someone on the side, another young woman, she was giving out flyers. We went over to her, [thinking] we might as well take another flyer, something I think about abortion. We didn’t know, but it was Cindy Cisler, and abortion and bibliographies were her forte.

So, we’re reading it, and it mentions a meeting of New York Radical Women. And I asked Sheila, “Did you ever hear of that?” And she said, “Yes, I heard it on WBAI,” which was a Pacifica station in New York City at that time. I said, “You want to go?” She said, “Sure.” So, we went. I think it was that Thursday. They were preparing for Miss America. We did not look like the women in the room because we were in dresses with small heels, maybe lipstick, I wore eyeliner, had a pocketbook. Other women were in dungarees and T-shirts, and if they had long hair it was parted in the middle.

The meeting was being led by Kathie, at that time, Amatniek. She actually had a jumper on, and a blouse. I looked around, it was at the SCEF offices on, I think, 11th Street in Greenwich Village. And unbeknownst to me, a woman by the name of Carol Hanisch was working for SCEF, and they allowed us to meet there. I looked around, I saw something, a bunch of papers uncollated, and something that said, Notes From the First Year. I didn’t know what that was. It was by another pamphlet by Lenin, What Do Women Want? 

There was going to be a demonstration in Atlantic City that Saturday, so that was basically what they were talking about. I couldn’t go. I was working, but Sheila went, and there she met Pam Kearon. And Pam Kearon, Sheila and I, for the next year or two were together in the same groups. And we were like the three, not the three musketeers, but we were comrades. Or, worked together. Let’s put it that way.

JW:  Comrades is good.

BM:  Yes, we were. We kept going back. After Peggy Dobbins – who was then in an organization called W.I.T.C.H; I think it had already formed – got arrested in Atlantic City, at the next meeting, she came in and everybody applauded. “Peggy, what happened? What happened?” So, she told us the story. I think she got a fine.

JW:  Can I interrupt you one second? I just realized for our audience, they may not know what Atlantic City was.

BM:  Atlantic City was the Miss America pageant. Every year, young women – you had to be single – would enter in a contest in their home states, and someone would win. Bess Myerson, who was famous, she won from New York State in the ’40s. So, you would be Miss New York, Miss California, so on and so forth. You would go to Atlantic City, and women would have to compete against each other. They would have a talent. Maybe somebody was a soprano, a dancer, recited poetry. They also had a bathing suit parade that they would do. And then someone would be picked Miss America.

So, the protest against Miss America was really about the objectification of women, the using of women as mascots for the boys fighting for the American woman at home. This was the height of the Vietnam War. And so, the idea that a woman is only as good as she is beautiful. It was what you looked like. I know the idea was Carol Hanisch’s, and it was very effective. It got a lot of play. Women’s liberation, everybody knew about NOW, I think, in the United States by that point.  But this was really the introduction to the Women’s Liberation Movement.

In the beginning, we were covered by the media, because, of course, it was a great story, women rebelling. But they also ridiculed us. They were sarcastic about us. They didn’t take us seriously, as in the term, “Women Libbers.”

Then we began going to New York Radical Women meetings regularly. There was a Conference on Thanksgiving Day weekend. It turned out to be the last, but it was the first National Conference on the Women’s Liberation Movement. I think it was organized by Marilyn Webb, who was someone in The New Left, and others.

It took place in Valhalla, Illinois.  We stayed at a YMCA camp. Sheila and I went out by plane. For me, I was naive. I had not been in the Civil Rights Movement. I had not been in The New Left. So, I didn’t really understand everything that was going on. Kathie Amatniek, at that first meeting I went to–I had read de Beauvoir and gotten the idea of Subject, Other. And I thought, “Well, yes, that     kind of explains where women are at.”  But Kathy, in talking; she was leading the meeting, she threw out a line about, “Women are oppressed. They’re oppressed by men.” She said it just like we all know that. And I heard it, and I thought, “God, that is it.”

When I got out to Chicago, the big thing was a paper by Anne Koedt–[she] was someone I guess originally in New York Radical Women. By that time, Ti-Grace Atkinson had left NOW. She had formed with other people, the October 17th movement. They had left NOW over issues of democracy and how you organize groups and things like that. And Koedt had written a paper called, The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm. It just rippled through the whole Conference.

I mean, people read the paper, which said basically that women’s sexuality is located in their clitoris. Now, these were the days when the word clitoris was never said. There were many people who called it cli-TOR-is. They didn’t call it clitoris. And at the end of the paper, she suggested that since that was the case, maybe women should think about other ways of exploring their sexuality, maybe with other women and so on. At this point, as far as I could see, the movement was heterosexual, and we were white.  It was a white, straight movement. On the surface, it was straight. Later on, lesbians were able to…but we’ll talk about that later.

So, then we were going to come back by plane. Instead, I think it was Ti-Grace Atkinson [who] asked Sheila whether or not she would like to come back with her and a few other women by car, because some people that they had come out with were going home a different way. We said, “Sure.” Now, this was a little car. There were six of us. And only two in the front, four in the back. Cold, no heater. But the people in the car were Ti-Grace Atkinson, Anne Koedt, Shulamith Firestone, and a woman by the name of Margaret Polatnik. And so,  Shulie started talking. And she was a little discontented with New York Radical Women because there was too much consciousness raising.

Consciousness raising was, you have a question, you go around the room, everyone speaks about their experience regarding that question. Say the question is, “Do you want to get married? When do did you lose your virginity?” It was very personal stuff. A lot of it was around the female body and body image. A lot of it was around your interactions with men. So, men were very prominent in these conversations. Shulie wanted action, and she said that there was an opportunity for us to have an action.

There was going to be an anti-inaugural protest organized by an ad hoc organization. I think MOBE, M-O-B-E and it stood for, National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.  There were going to be a lot of leftist organizations there. I think there was a representative of the Chicago 7. So, we said, “Sure.” But Shulie said, “But we need an action.”  Margaret Polatnick came up with this idea and we all agreed to it, men were burning their draft cards, we were going to give back the card we had, that said you’re registered to vote. We were going to give back the vote.

Okay, we went back to New York Radical Women. We told people, “Anybody interested in the action, come to our meetings.” Well, we started working, making placards, banners. We had a big, tremendous banner. And I don’t know, there were about 10 or 12 of us. At that time, Ellen Willis, who was a music critic at the New Yorker, had started to come to New York Radical Women. She was interested. Shulie of course, me, Sheila. There were other women, Barbara Kaminski, Helen Kritzler, Linda Feldman. There was going to be a march and a rally, and we were going to speak at the rally.

At that meeting in Valhalla, I had heard Peggy Dobbins talking with some people–again, I was naive yet– about how there was a split in the movement in New York City. Some people thought capitalism was the enemy, but then there were “man-haters”–Dobbins’ phrase–who thought it was men that were oppressing women. So, at this rally, they were going to stand with this banner, which they did. And Marilyn Webb was going to give one speech, and she was going to talk about women being part of the New Left but wanting to be able to express themselves and have their issues dealt with, and Shulie was going to give it to the Left.

Well, we were the last people to speak.  It was raining. The audience, many of them were men, and they were just restless and started to get noisy. And Marilyn Webb came to the microphone and started talking. And at some point, she said, “Women will take to the streets.”  Meaning, we’re going to be like the women in Russia who paraded in 1905 and 1917 and started the revolution. Oh, my God. pandemonium ensued. The men started jeering, they were saying, “Take her off the stage and fuck her. Take off your clothes.”  She soldiered through, and then it was Shulie’s turn.

By that time, I couldn’t hear a word that Shulie said, but she also soldiered on. Next to me was Ellen Willis. And we were horrified, of course, because we were around the stage. She turned to me, and apropos of what I was talking about, who was the enemy, she said, “We have to go back to New York. We have to have an independent woman’s movement.” And I thought to myself, “I thought we had that already.” I didn’t realize the attachment so many women had to the New Left, were part of the New Left, etcetera.

So, we did go back. We had a meeting. I think it was in Shulie’s apartment, and we went to New York Radical Women. We said, “Anybody want to join our group? We’re going to have a new group.” And that was the beginning of Redstockings. Shulie suggested Redstockings as the name. In the 19th century, there were intellectual women, they were called Blue Stockings. “Well, we were intellectuals, too,” said Shulie. I didn’t know that, but okay. “We’re radical, so we’re going to be Redstockings.” So that was great.

And then we needed an action. Shulie had written an article about how we shouldn’t be a one-issue movement, and that one issue should not be abortion. But we decided we were going to do an action on abortion. She came up with the idea of women testifying about their abortions, in public. I believe that’s the first time it ever happened in the world. We had the “Speak Out on Abortion” at Washington Square Methodist Church, I believe.

We had a couple of hundred people, and we had twelve women who agreed to testify. Several of them were in Redstockings. It was absolutely amazing. Susan Brownmiller was there because she had come to New York Radical Women, and she was a journalist. She wrote a story for The Village Voice, and it was very favorable. And I believe Gloria Steinem has written that going to that abortion meeting really set the click off in her head about what her direction was going to be.

Dr. Rappaport was there, and he was someone who had performed illegal abortions. He had spent many years in prison, about nine years altogether. He got up at the end of it, and everybody clapped because he was a hero, but he started talking down to us. He was patronizing. He was telling us, “It’s   about time that you women were doing something like this.” Anyway, Ellen Willis was across from me, and she got up. I don’t remember what she said exactly. She was angry, and she basically said, “Listen, this is our night. We’re talking. Everyone has to listen to us. You don’t have to tell us anything.” It was very important. I really thought it was great. She was not disrespectful, but it was just, “Wait a minute. You listen to us.”

JW:  Wow. That’s an amazing story.

BM:  We were in Redstockings, and at this point, New York Radical Women was limping along, but it had reorganized itself. In the meetings there wasn’t room for everybody. People would come to a meeting but not come back. There was a reorganization plan presented  by Judy Gabree, who had been in New York Radical Women for a long time.

We divided up into three groups. We met monthly, and you could be in Redstockings if you wanted to. You could be in THE FEMINISTS, you could be in WITCH, but you came back as New York Radical Women. We had business meetings. We had a newsletter – we had about seven, I think, newsletters that we published. We had orientation meetings for new people. We had mailings and we were able to answer the mail. I don’t think we had a bank account because we didn’t pay dues or anything. We didn’t have much money.

But then in the spring, Carol Hanisch had gone down to Florida to work, I think, with SCEF. We still kept the space, but there was a kerfuffle with the woman’s caucus in SCEF, and Hanisch wrote an essay that got her in trouble, and she got fired. And so, we lost the space in New York. In the meantime, Redstockings had its own storefront. One thing we did with the money we got at the abortion action, is we rented a storefront in the East Village. There were a lot of meetings that were always held in people’s homes, in tiny apartments. We didn’t have a public space, so here we had the storefront in the East Village. One little room, but it was ours.

In the meantime, in Redstockings, after the abortion action, we decided we would drape a banner off the Statute of Liberty that said “Free Abortions for Women.”  . And the group approved it. So we began with this big sheet, sewing on felt letters. We had meetings at the same time. Kathie had been away for a while. She hadn’t actually been a member of Redstockings. She was still hanging on to New York Radical Women.

She knew things were floundering. She wanted another group. She came to us and said, “I like this group. I like the people. But it’s not the group for me.” She went to Florida and when she came back, she started coming to Redstockings meetings, and she started pushing for consciousness raising and writing a manifesto. So, we continued working on this banner, but we kept having these votes about whether we should do the action, not do the action. And at some point, people started slipping away. I know Shulie slipped away, I think Ellen was going to go to Colorado. Pam and Sheila and Linda started going to THE FEMINISTS and eventually, the action was rescinded. I left too and said goodbye to Redstockings.

JW:  And around when was that, would you say?

BM:  This was about the summer of ’69. Actually, when you think about it, you think, “Well, it must have been a very long time,” but these events were all very compressed. Everything that I’m going to talk about happened in a very short period of time. So, I took the summer off, but I decided to go to THE FEMINISTS, too, because supposedly it practiced participatory democracy, which is not something we had in Redstockings. There were some people who were more influential than others, but there was no accountability. We didn’t really determine the direction the group was taking, and we thought there should be a much more democratic process involved.

The groups were small. They should have been able to handle the democratic process. THE FEMINISTS were known for using the Lot System and having a packet in which they had an analysis, and a structure for the group. We thought that would be fine for us.

Their first action was a marriage action, which I came in just a little after that. They went to the marriage license bureau and announced why they were against marriage, what marriage was about. I know Sheila wrote the flyer. Asking questions, “Did you know that rape is legal in marriage”? Because it was at that point. And “Did you know that you can’t divorce a man because he doesn’t love you?”  That, “He can divorce you if you don’t do housework, because that’s what your role in marriage is.”

Sheila had researched it, and it’s a contract, but it’s not really written down anywhere and the terms of it come up when you get a divorce. And then the judge tells you, “Well, no, he doesn’t love you, so what? As long as you’re doing the housework.”  So, it was consciousness raising. It got, again, it got a lot of publicity.

JW:  We have come a ways, but we still have a ways to go, right?

BM:  Oh, my heavens, yes. And because of the Trump administration, now there’s a backlash, really, all of us are feeling it, right? So, in THE FEMINISTS, they had rules about speaking, and one thing was, you put in a chip each time you speak. Well, that didn’t work because some people, by 10 minutes into the meeting, all their chips were all gone. So, we had to get rid of that. But we still had this thing about a creative lot.

Ti-Grace’s thing was, “Every revolution needs a mimeo machine.” We wrote a lot of articles. We got a second-hand mimeo machine, so we could print our own literature. We have a literature list. And the idea was, people in a revolutionary group, everyone should be able to learn many things. Everyone should be able to do several tasks such as speaking and writing. Everyone should be able to participate in decision making.

We went to the two Congresses to Unite Women, and we had other actions. Ti-Grace had a special relationship with the group in that she did feminist activities outside of the lot.  She was an independent person as Ti-Grace Atkinson, and so she could do press, for example, as herself. And then she was out of the creative lot in the group, because she had her speaking engagements. But as an independent person you can express things that are not group policy.

It was a small little world. Maybe nobody on the outside noticed it, but people within the movement noticed it. We said, “Ti-Grace, you got to be in the lot with us, and that’s it.” And we discussed it with her, and she didn’t see it that way. And so, we didn’t kick her out of the group or anything, but she did say, “I have to leave then.” So, at some point, she did leave.

We went to other groups’ conferences, and we joined with other groups in holding conferences.  We had a Prostitution Conference, which ended up not so good, but we tried to tackle all the different issues. For example, Anne Koedt called us and said, “I need an article on rape for Notes.” We had contributed to Notes from the Second Year.  Pam Kearon and I wrote “Rape: An Act of Terror” for Notes from the Third the Year.  New York Radical Feminists had a conference on rape. They had many conferences. And so, we wrote the first article in the movement on rape. Susan Griffin, out in California, is a feminist writer. She had written an article in  Ramparts on rape. Excellent article. But ours was the first within the movement.

JW:  And what was the prostitution meeting?

BM:  Well, we had workshops. It was like there was a certain, I guess, structure to what we did. We had conferences. Sometimes we had speak-outs. And at the conferences, whoever was giving the conference, there would be speeches. And each conference was kind of like that. And then at the plenary, at the end, there would be an open mic, when people could ask questions. Of course, in the workshops, they could ask questions. So the Prostitution Conference was along those lines. Kate Millett spoke, Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin was there, I think. I mean, a lot of different people came and either spoke or did workshops.

But there were a couple of women who came, and they just disrupted the proceedings. They told us we were funny-looking, we were envious of prostitutes, we didn’t know anything about prostitutes. They were prostitutes. Now, these were not prostitutes who were on the street. Someone said they had their master’s thesis. Another one was a call girl.

Robin Reisig, who was a feminist and a journalist, wrote a series of articles for the Village Voice and  Pam Kearon wrote an article in response to one by the prostitutes.  And this went on for weeks. And then there were letters to the editor, and it just came off that we, because we weren’t prostitutes, supposedly we couldn’t discuss this. We couldn’t talk about the issue. And of course, that was wrong.

There was an article in the newspaper about a man, he was a German government official, and he had been robbed in New York at three o’clock in the morning outside of a hotel. And then an Italian industrialist had been murdered outside another midtown hotel. Supposedly, prostitutes were responsible. So, we demonstrated. A convention was coming to New York and city officials started talking about “cleaning up the streets.”

They photographed women in Times Square. They didn’t know they were prostitutes, but they thought they were prostitutes, so they photographed them. So, we had a demonstration outside the police station in midtown Manhattan. We presented the police captain with a list of demands inside the station. We followed that up with a couple of other actions.

Soon there was momentum within the movement to deal with prostitution.

The Women’s Liberation Movement, as I experienced it, we did not offer rape counseling services. We didn’t have a battered woman shelter that we ran. We didn’t do other kinds of services for women. We didn’t have a Jane organization like they had out in Chicago with the abortions. I think we saw ourselves more as militant radical feminist activists who wanted to develop a theory of women’s oppression but also wanted to act on the elements of that oppression as all women experienced them. So, we dealt with these body issues, basically.

I mean, starting with the Miss America beauty pageant, going on to violence against women, the threats of violence in rape, eventually sexual harassment, women having to sell their bodies in prostitution, women forced to get illegal abortions. I remember Ms. had a photo of a dead woman after an abortion. It was awful. And so, this was the thing that I think we felt. I’m speaking for myself, I guess, that we introduced these issues and we wrote about them. And of course, as we all know, as the movement went on, starting with Kate Millett and her book Sexual Politics, women were incredibly prolific. I mean, there was just one book after another, one article after another. We really seemed to be at the center of things at last.

So then from THE FEMINISTS, and this happened to a lot of groups, many groups were ephemeral. Others lasted longer. I know Redstockings, after we left, they lasted for a while. They went after Gloria Steinem and accused her of being a CIA agent or whatever. And then they kind of died, but they came back. They’re still around today. I’ll give them credit for that, absolutely. But others were short-lived. And so, we were winding down in THE FEMINISTS, and so, I left the group. There were very few people left, and I walked away from the movement.

A couple of years later, Florence Rush recruited me. Well, actually, it’s Robin Morgan who did the recruitment. A woman by the name of Jane Albert had been part of a cadre in New York of people who were in The Left. They were anti-war and had resorted to violence. They had set off some bombs. There was an informer in the group, and they were eventually arrested.

Jane Alpert had gone to Swarthmore. She was brilliant. Anyway, she was out on bail, and she was working for RAT, which was an independent newspaper which the women of RAT finally took over. So, she went underground, and she stayed underground for a few years. But during that time, she became a feminist, and she was very closely associated with Robin Morgan. She wrote a paper called, “Mother Right,” which was about matriarchy, and it was printed in Ms.

And then, I think in 1974, she resurfaced, and she gave herself up and was sentenced to a certain number of years in prison. So, we were a support group, and Robin had recruited us. I think she spoke to Florence Rush who was also a social worker at one time. She had been a member of OWL in New Rochelle. She had a house on Fire Island, and she was about, I don’t know, 24 years older than me. I loved Florence Rush. She was wonderful. She was so funny. And she wrote a book, The Best Kept Secret. She spoke at the Prostitution Conference. She spoke about the sexual abuse of children.

And so, we got involved. Florence wrote a lot of papers about Jane Albert because she was attacked by other feminists who claimed that she had talked. That she had revealed where another woman in the group was living, and that woman had been arrested. Nothing ever happened to that woman I don’t think, but I’m not sure. And of course, Jane denied that it wasn’t true. So, we were a support group for her and I was in that. And at some point, I was called the organizer, but it was Florence who did the work.

By then I was good friends with Susan Brownmiller and Florence. Susan Brownmiller called me up one night, in the late ’70s, and she said, “Barbara, this woman called Julia London is going to be coming to New York to show a slide show at my apartment on record album covers. Especially this record album cover, “I’m Black and Blue from the Rolling Stones – and I Love it.” It was on a massive billboard on, I think it was Sunset Boulevard.   

And they had organized a group called WAVAW, Women Against Violence Against Women. And so, I went. And these record covers were pretty bad, especially, I’m Black and Blue from the Rolling Stones – and I Love it.” WAVAW’s whole approach was to organize boycotts, demonstrations against the record companies, and in fact, they had this billboard taken down. It was a very glamorous woman with her hands tied above her head, a mane of hair, legs spread open, her clothes in disarray, ripped. She’s kind of smiling, and has bruises all over her thighs. The model who actually posed for that, said later that she was supposed to give a growl, like she liked it

There used to be a column in the New York Times called “Hers.” A woman writer would write columns for a while and then somebody else would take over. The author Lois Gould wrote a column at that time. She came to a meeting organized by Susan Brownmiller and called it a meeting of “Luminaries.” Grace Paley, Gloria Steinem, I think were there. Also, Shere Hite, who wrote The Hite Report, which was a survey of women and their sexuality and created a big stir. Robin Morgan might have been there. Susan was there, Minda Bikman, Florence Rush, Andrea Dworkin, and several other feminists came.

We thought the women’s liberation movement in New York had sort of come to a halt. Maybe the pornography issue could revive it? The stuff was awful. There’s all this violence in it and it was all directed towards women. And there were these three big honchos–Hugh Hefner, Bob Guccione, Larry Flint– making loads of money. It was a four-billion-dollar industry at this point. Maybe this is an issue that can reignite the feminist flame. We decided to write an ad to be placed in the New York Times. In the meantime, we called ourselves the Women’s Anti-Defamation League. We never really existed as a group, but we worked a long time on this ad, though we never actually placed it in the newspaper.

In the meantime, the young women out in California were really doing things regarding pornography in the media and pornography itself. They had a Conference. Florence and Susan went out. They came back very excited about what they had seen in San Francisco. The women in California–there were two prominent Conference organizers, Laura Lederer and Lynn Campbell– wanted to go to another city to organize groups against pornography. They decided to come to New York. Only Lynn Campbell did; Laura stayed in California because she was editing a book, Take Back the Night.

So, Lynn came, but I didn’t want to get involved. I guess Lynn came in February, and the first couple of months I did not have anything to do with Women Against Pornography. They had gotten a storefront. They were doing tours of Times Square, doing slide shows. But one day, I called up Susan and asked, “How are you doing?” By the way, by that time I was going to school for Anthropology. I was going for my Master’s. And Susan being Susan would not tell me what was going on. “Come and see for yourself,” she said. Thank you very much, Susan.

So, I did go. I was floored by the slide show and the tour. Unbeknownst to me,  it was being covered by Georgia Dullea at the Times, and her article ran on the Style page. A picture of the tour group outside Show World appeared with the article. They ran that picture a couple of months ago, a couple of us standing with Susan giving the talk on the tour. At the time Women Against Pornography didn’t have any kind of structure. They didn’t have a steering committee. They didn’t have officers or anything. And Susan said, “Barbara, you want to be an organizer? A paid organizer?” I  said, “Sure.” It was in the summer of ’79, and that’s how I got involved in Women Against Pornography.

There were four of us. Susan, of course, and Dolores Alexander, a journalist and former Executive Director of NOW. At this point, she was working for Time magazine. And Lynn Campbell, the 23-year-old organizer from California and me. Everybody loved Lynn Campbell. We had an office, we had desks, we had telephones.

Our office was on 42^nd Street and 9th Avenue, and as you opened the door, even if you were inside, you heard the rumbling of the trucks and the cars whizzing by. I once gave an interview to the BBC, and I had to go to the back of the storefront, and it wasn’t a big storefront, I had to get under a desk in order to give this interview. That’s how noisy it was.

The neighborhood was very welcoming. WAP had gotten the storefront rent-free from the 42nd Street Redevelopment Corporation. We were not far from the Broadway theaters, and we were also in the hub of the pornography district which was like an all-purpose center for all things pornographic. One theater had something called the carousel, where naked women danced suggestively and men in booths could pay to touch them. And then there were women in phone booths that the men could call to talk “dirty.” You could go in and  pay a quarter to see a loop of a pornographic movie, which were not necessarily violent, but there might be sex with animals, things like that. Some of them might have been violent. When I took the tour, I did not see any physical violence in the films.

The women who worked at the places we went into for a tour knew who we were. They told us when I was on the tour that they did it because, this way it was better for other women, that men could come to these places. And there were all kinds of men. There were guys in suits, there were college kids in sneakers. That’s how I started out at Women Against Pornography, doing the tours, the slide shows twice a week and working all day in the office. Plus, we got so much press coverage, even internationally. We had a lot of press. It was unbelievable, and we had a lot of invitations to go to colleges.

A lot of college kids came into the storefront. People going to the theater, every conceivable person, mostly women. And it was just very exciting, electric. We had meetings. A lot of the women were a generation younger than me, but they were damn good feminists. That was encouraging to see. Everybody was eager. They had already, before I joined, decided they were going to have, in six months, a conference, what else, and a march. Susan had said she was working on her book, Femininity, and she was going to leave after the march, which she did. Dolores was the fundraiser. I became the treasurer at some point, pretty early, so I managed the money, and I was also the archivist.

We had to organize this conference. It was the same familiar faces. All the “stars” gave workshops and even Ellen Willis was there, because it didn’t take too long for the opposition in the feminist movement to go after us, so to speak. We didn’t have official position papers, and we didn’t have an official policy on restrictions of pornography. But there was a woman, Wendy Kaminer, she worked, I think, for the 42nd Street Redevelopment Corporation, who was a lawyer and a member of WAP. She wrote a piece on the First Amendment stating that we did not advocate any legal remedies that trampled on free speech rights.

Lucille Iverson, a poet and writer, and I also wrote an article on the First Amendment basically saying the same thing. I wrote the second fund raising proposal–Dolores had done the first one–which had a section on the First Amendment. It said, “We’re not for any legislation” because pornography was supposed to be obscenity, and we weren’t interested in that, but we didn’t have an official policy. So, people could, depending on what person they heard, could say that we were in favor of censorship, which we were never in favor of. As long as I was in WAP we were not in favor of any type of censorship.

There was an opposition feminist group. I think they call themselves FACT (Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force). Ellen Willis was in that group. And Ellen, though she said she thought violent pornography was terrible, she believed our politics was about more than violence and pornography. She claimed we were really talking about sexuality in the sense that we didn’t want to see this because we were prudish. It finally became we were anti-sex. And that was the reputation we had when I left. But it wasn’t true.

Andrea Dworkin was never in the group. She had come to that “luminary” meeting and kept in touch with everybody, but she said at that meeting, “I do not work in groups,” so she never belonged to the group. We held a press conference for Linda Lovelace, who had starred in a very famous pornography movie, that contributed to pornography movies becoming mainstream. It was called Deep Throat. And she had come to us and said, “When I made Deep Throat, I was married to this man, and he forced me to do it,” and “I was sexually abused.” And so, Andrea was invited to appear at that press conference

Somewhere along the line, Andrea got to know Catharine MacKinnon, who was an academic and legal scholar. And they kind of bonded and they began working on legislation, an ordinance. I was gone from Women Against Pornography. It was maybe about ’83. The ordinance was passed, I think it was Indianapolis, and I think it went to the Supreme Court where it was declared unconstitutional. I’m not going to go into what it said. People can look that up themselves. But I was gone. In the summer of 1980 I had taken five weeks off to go to Texas to work on an archeological excavation. Okay, that was fine.

By this point, in ’81, we had a steering committee. And in fact, I was the first person that was evaluated as to whether or not I should be hired for another year, and I was. I was maybe working part-time at that time. I had to go to Texas to do field work for my Master’s thesis. I observed a troop of Japanese macaque monkeys and that was going to be for three months. Everybody approved it. I thought everything was fine.

Toward the end of the study, I get a special delivery letter telling me how wonderful I am, so intelligent, so great for the group, so this and that, “But we don’t want you to come back as staff. We don’t want you back.”  That was awfully nice. And the reasons were, I didn’t get along with people or I was, whatever it was. It wasn’t true. I’m not that kind of person. So, I never found out what the real reason was. And I had seen Dolores Alexander after that. I saw Dorchen Leidholdt after that. She was another woman in the group. Another, like many women, extremely bright. She went on to become a lawyer. She’s very well known. She deals in the trafficking of women. That was my exit from the women’s liberation movement.

After that, I devoted myself to Anthropology. I went for a Ph.D, and I did become part of a poker game that was comprised of feminists. I was living in Soho in Manhattan then. We had a poker game for many years. Later I got  married and  eventually bought a little co-op, but it was in Queens. We also bought a house in Poughkeepsie and retired here a couple of years ago.

Susan Brownmiller and I wrote a response to an article by the evolutionary biologist Randy Thornhill in the ’90s, and it appeared in the journal Brains and Behavior. Thornhill theorized that rape is an adaptation in men and is part of their reproductive strategy.

Then I became a teacher. I spent the next 30 years in public education.

JW:  What do you teach, or did you teach?

BM:  I taught Economics, American History, World History. I taught Journalism for a few years, and Government.

JW:  Oh, wow. Quite a range.

BM:  Yes. First, I worked for several years at a junior high school, where I didn’t have such a range. And the big range came when I went to high school in Queens. I was working on the Lower East Side. They were both inner-city schools. And all I want to say about that experience is that my students were largely non-white, and it really enabled me for the first time to be around, every day, people who were not like me. Kids who were not like me. They weren’t white. I’m not saying I was a racist. I wasn’t a racist, but I wasn’t so aware of white privilege. It’s like we were all the same. That is one of the great things I took away from it.

JW:  What do you see about feminist action thought among these kids?

BM:  The girls knew about feminism, and I would say they were feminists. They didn’t have the words. I mean, I didn’t have kids that just sat there, wrote things down, asked questions, went home, did their homework. It was a different atmosphere. So, there could be some hostility between kids. And when things happened, the girls in answering the boys, they’d use male imagery about themselves to show they were strong. “Suck my cock.” They would say things like that, because there’s no words to express strength or hostility using female sexual imagery.

Women have not been, like African Americans, as creative in the use of language. Even the language that we developed in the movement, like “reproductive rights” or “women’s liberation.”  Ms, I guess, was our own, but there aren’t that many. We resurrected misogyny, but there’s a handful when you think about it. And it’s because we dispersed amongst our families, amongst men. Whereas African Americans, they have a community. They’re extremely creative in language. So, I couldn’t give this girl a word. Instead of saying that, what I said, I couldn’t give her a word.

JW:  But she was at a different place than I’ll say we were at that age.

BM:  Absolutely. And I think maybe where white women are today. If you look at elections, I mean, women, they always vote. I don’t know if they voted for Harris, the majority of white women. But more women voted for Trump, a majority, than voted for Hillary. I know that for sure. And I mean, after all, Coney Barrett, I think of her at that abortion action that I talked about, the Speak Out. That one woman, I think I could say her name, Barbara Kaminski. She actually was not able to find an abortionist. So, she delivered the child, a daughter, and she talked about how every birthday was very hard for her. The day the child was born, she thought of the kid. She gave the kid up for adoption.

Years later, maybe 35 years later, she met Lucille Iverson, who I’ve mentioned. They were both in real estate. They happened to meet in downtown Brooklyn, so they said, “ Let’s go out for lunch.”  And Lucille told me Barbara told that same story. And Coney Barrett said, “Well, can’t women” – I’m being facetious – “can’t women put the baby in a Dropbox? I mean, I thought they could do that now, and nothing would happen to them.”

As if women are so callous that having a child, all they’ll do is they’ll throw it away and they’ll leave it in the church or somewhere. Not a garbage can, but a place where someone will find it. And that’ll be it. They’ll walk away and they’ll never think about it again. The horrors imposed upon women. The bleeding out in the parking lots, the women dying because they can’t get access now, bans across the country. It wasn’t that way. We still have illegal abortions, I guess, and it was that way before Roe. But we didn’t hear about it.

JW:  People didn’t talk about it.

BM:  Even now, though, the states that have banned abortion are not keeping statistics about different outcomes of women who are coming to the hospital to have an abortion, but they don’t give it to them. To me, abortion has always been the core issue. If we cannot control our bodies. If we cannot have agency in that way, we cannot be free.

JW:  I agree. I totally agree. Well, as we come to the end of our conversation, is there any final thought, like looking back, looking forward, any final thought you’d like to add?

BM:  Well, I think looking back I think I’d have to say in my interactions with women through my life, the women that I met in the women’s movement were incredible. They were brilliant. They were creative and imaginative. They were funny. They had a sense of themselves. They were competitive. Sometimes they were insufferable. But it was, for me, I’m very proud and grateful — I think I’m going to cry — that I was there. That I took part in this. That I knew those women. And I have that fond memory, that we made history. We changed the world.