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. It was called Israel Zion in my day, in Brooklyn, New York, and that’s 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. Maybe it was Bensonhurst, but we called it Borough Park. I think we thought that was better than Bensonhurst. It was, I would say, a lower middle-class neighborhood. Most of the people there were either Jewish or Italian. My grandfather and grandmother, my mother’s parents, came from the Austrian and the Russian sector of what had once been Poland. There was no Poland when they came over in the early part of the 20th century, but they were Polish. My grandfather was a baker. They had six children. 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 apartment house he bought was a six-family house in Borough Park. That’s where I grew up with my mother. I was a singleton. I had two aunts who also lived in the building, and they had a single child. So, I grew up with my two cousins. Unfortunately, my grandfather was hit by a 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 all already developed. We had apartment houses, mainly four families, so they were low apartment houses. Then we had something called courts and those were residential single-family homes.

My father was German, and he was Irish. His parents were Irish and German, and that was a very popular combination around the turn of the century, or a little bit later in New York City. They were both from New York City. 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 did take ballet and tap-dancing lessons.

My family also, at one point, around 1939, 1940, decided they were going to have a boarding house. So, they bought this big house. My mother and her sisters and the spouses bought a big house in a place called Slate Hill, New York. It’s in Orange County. They had like 22 rooms, 25 acres. They had a boarding house for two years, and the war came. So that was the end of the boarding house. We used it to go up during the summertime for vacation, and it was absolutely wonderful. 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? So, we thought we would do that. 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.

It’s no longer called BCW. The last thing I did there was I licensed daycare homes for the foster children that we had. We were responsible. We were the agency dealing with the foster children in placement, and we would see their parents every year. We would visit them. Sometimes, the women in those days, they did not acknowledge, no one knew, that they had this child in foster care. So that was sad.

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 in together at the same time into BCW. 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. So, we spoke to each other.

I had read Betty Friedan’s, The Feminine Mystique. I had read Beauvoir, 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 something called, 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 in another pamphlet by Lennon, What Do Women Want? – something like that.

So, that Saturday was going to be the thing in Atlantic City, 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 they would win. Bess Myerson, who was famous, she was in the news, 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, spoke 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 the objectification of women, the using of women. This was the height of the Vietnam War as mascots for the boys fighting for the American woman at home. 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, 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 Lib-ers. Then we began going to meetings regularly. There was a conference in Thanksgiving. I mean, it was only about a month later, a month and a half. 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.

It was organized by her in Illinois, Valhalla. I think we stayed at a YMCA camp. So, 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 know everything that was going on. For example, Kathie Amatniek; at that first meeting I went to, I had read De Beauvoir, I mentioned all the things I had read and I had gotten from De Beauvoir 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.

So, when I got out to Chicago, the big thing was 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 over issues of democracy and how you organize groups and things like that. And she 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. I don’t remember exactly, but 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 Polotnik. And so, Shulie started talking. And she was a little discontent 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 you lose your virginity? It was very personal stuff. A lot of it was around body image. A lot of it was around your interactions with men. So, men were very prominent in these conversations. She wanted action, and she said that there was an opportunity for us to have an action.

There was going to be an anti-inaugural 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. So, there were going to be a lot of leftist organizations there. I think there was the representative of the Chicago 7. So, we said, “Sure.” But Shulie said, “But we need an action.” So, Margaret Polotnik 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. 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. We worked for, whatever it was, I think it was going to be a march and a rally, and we were going to be 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 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 do our thing. 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, and so on and so forth. 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, et cetera.

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. I said, “All right.” She thought, 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 it 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 it 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 Voice, and it was very favorable. And I believe Gloria Steinem has written that going to that abortion meeting really set the click off on 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. 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 a 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:  So, we continued. We were in Redstockings, and at this point, New York Radical Women was a little bit limping along, but it had reorganized itself. The meetings were too many. There wasn’t room for everybody. People would come, they would then go. They didn’t come back. There was a reorganization plan presented by somebody by the name of Judy. Her name was Judy Gabri at that time, but she took back her own name, eventually, Judy Thiebault. She had been in the group 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 she wrote an essay, it got her in trouble, and she got fired. And so, we lost the space. In the meantime, Redstockings had its own storefront. One thing we did with the money we got at the abortion action, is we had a storefront. There were a lot of meetings that were always held in people’s homes, in their small, tiny appointments or whatever. We didn’t have a public space, we didn’t have money to rent a space, so here, we had the storefront in the East Village. One little room, but it was ours, and we could meet there. So then, SCEF was gone.

In the meantime, in Redstockings, after the abortion action, we decided we would drape a banner off the Statute of Liberty that said something, I don’t know, Free Abortions for Women. I don’t know what it said. And the group approved it. So we began with this big sheet, sewing on the felt letters. There were seamstresses around and they would do it in a week or two. We had meetings at the same time. Cathy had been away for a while. She hadn’t originally 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. She came back, and she started coming to 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. And so, 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, 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 it should be a much more democratic process involved.

The groups were small. New York Radical Women was getting big, but the groups were small. It should have been able to handle that. The Feminists were known for using the Lot System for things, and having a packet in which they had an analysis, and a structure of the group, and so on and so forth. So, we thought that that would be fine for us.

Their first action was a marriage action, which I came in just a little after that, but they had an action at 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. And so, we wrote a lot of articles. We got a lot of things. And we did these stencils. We used to do the stencils and then do the Mimeo machine. So, we bought a Mimeo. I mean, 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 things. Everyone should be able to do stuff. Everyone should be able to participate in the decision making, stuff like that.

So, we went to the two congresses, the congresses to unite women, and we had other actions. Ti-Grace had a special relationship with the group in that she did stuff outside of the lot, so to speak. She was an independent person as Ti-Grace Atkinson, and so she could do press and things like that. And then she was out of the creative lot in the group, because she had speaking engagements. And at some point, because, 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. So, 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 people’s conferences, and we got involved with other people in the movement. 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 for Notes. We had contributed to Notes from the second year, and then we contributed to Notes from the third year, and she said, I need an article on rape, because rape was becoming an issue. 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 something through 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. Other women would come in and speak, and then there would be workshops. And each conference was kind of like that. And then at the plenary, at the end, there would be an open mic, or 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 whole proceedings. They just 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, whatever it was.

Robin Ryczek, who was a feminist and a journalist, wrote a whole series. Well, she wrote a couple of articles for the Village Voice, and Pam wrote an article in response to that. 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. Nothing really came out of it after that.

There was an article in the newspaper about a man, he was a German government official, and he had been attacked in New York or robbed or something at three o’clock in the morning outside of a hotel. And then an Italian industrialist had been murdered outside of a hotel. And supposedly, prostitutes had done that. So, we demonstrated. And so, I think maybe a convention was coming to New York and government 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 with the cop who said, We’re going to clean up New York City. He saw us, we gave him the demands, and we followed that up with a couple of other actions. And there was a momentum then 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 thing 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 beauty, Miss America, going on to the 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. 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 the sexual problem, 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, the groups were ephemeral. Some of them lasted a long time. I know Redstockings, after we left, they lasted for a while. They got involved going after Gloria Steinem and accusing her of being a CIA agent or whatever. And then they kind of died away, 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 Feminists. 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. I mean, they were leftists, and they were very anti-war and they had resorted to violence. They had set off some bombs and everything. 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, Woman Right, which was about matriarchy, and it was printed in Ms.

And then, I think 1974, she resurfaced, and she gave herself in and was sentenced to a certain amount 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, 18 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. 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 it, that it wasn’t true. So, we were a support group for her and I was in that. And at some point, I would call the organizer, but it was Florence who did the work.

But then, I made good friends with Susan Brownmiller and Florence. Susan Brownmiller called me up one night, 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 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. Their 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 here, mane of hair, legs spread open, her clothes in disarray, ripped. I think she’s kind of smiling, and bruises all over her thighs. The model who actually modeled for that, said later that she was supposed to give a growl, like she liked it. So, we spoke about that.

We had a meeting that, I forgot her name now, but it’ll come to me. She’s a famous writer. There used to be a column in the New York Times called, Hers. And women writers would write for the column for a while and then somebody else would take over. And she was writing the Hers column at that time, and she came to this meeting, and she called it a meeting of; it was at Susan’s house, of “Luminaries,” because there were luminaries there. Grace Paley, I think Gloria Steinem was there. Shere Hite, who had done 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, Linda Beckman, Florence Rush, Andrea Dworkin, so on and so forth.

And we thought; the movement in New York had sort of come to a halt, women’s liberation. Maybe pornography? This stuff is awful. There’s all this violence in it, and it was all directed towards women. And there were these guys, three big honchoes, and they were making loads of money, and it was a four-billion-dollar industry at this point. Maybe this is an issue that we can reignite that flame. So, we decided to write an ad for the New York Times. In the meantime, we called ourselves the Women’s Anti-Defamation League or something. We never really existed as a group, but that was our name. And we worked a long time on this ad, but we never published the ad.

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, they were very excited. The women in California, the organizers, there were two prominent organizers, Laura Lederer and Lynn Campbell. They wanted to go to another city to organize groups against pornography. They decided to come to New York. 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, 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. Come and see for yourself. Thank you very much, Susan.

So, I did go. I went, and I was floored by it. It was being covered by George Delaya at the Times, which I didn’t know at all, and so that was a big spread in the Times. They still were on the picture that was taken. They ran that picture a couple of months ago, a couple of us standing outside Show World with Susan giving the talk for the tour, because I think she was the tour leader. They didn’t have any kind of structure. They didn’t have a steering committee. They didn’t have offices 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. Dolores Alexander, who had been an executive something-or-other with NOW at some point, who had worked for Newsweek. At this point, she was working for Time, not as a reporter but she was working for Time Magazine. And Lynn Campbell, who came from California, she was a 23-year-old. Everybody loved Lynn Campbell. And me. We had an office, we had desks, we had telephones.

We were on 43rd Street and 9th Avenue, and as you opened the door, even if you were inside, the rumbling of everything, because there were trucks and cars swizzing by, it was very, very noisy. I once gave an interview to the BBC, I had to go to the back of the storefront, and it wasn’t a big storefront, I had to get under the desk and hold my ear in order to give this interview. That’s how noisy it was.

The neighborhood was very welcoming. They had gotten the storefront rent-free from a 42nd Street redevelopment corporation. We were not that far from Broadway and the Broadway theaters, and we were also in the hub of the Pornography district, which consisted of kind of all-purpose things where you had everything when you went in. They would have something called the carousel, where there were naked women dancing and stuff like that. And then there were people in phone booths that the men could call. You could go in and put a quarter in and there was a loop of a pornographic movie, which were not necessarily violent, but there was sex with animals, things with that. Some of them might have been violent. When I took the tour, I had not seen that.

The women knew us who were there. They had 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. Plus, we got so much coverage. I don’t know if it was all over the world, but it was a lot. 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 them 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 got there, 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, 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. But there was a woman, Wendy Kaminer, she worked, I think, for the 42nd Street Redevelopment, so she was a lawyer. She wrote a piece on the First Amendment.

Lucille Iverson and I, she was a poet writer, we wrote something on the First Amendment. I wrote a proposal, Dolores had done the first one, I had done the second one. In which I 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 there, we were never in favor of censorship.

So, there was a group, I think they call themselves FACT. I don’t know. I forgot what it stood for, the acronym. But Ellen Willis was in that. And Ellen, though she said she thought violent pornography was terrible, she thought that, and others who criticized us, thought we went beyond violence and pornography. We were really talking about sexuality in the sense that we didn’t want to see this because we were prudish. It finally became 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 had some conference; I think it might have been Linda Lovelace. We did a conference for Linda Lovelace, who had stared in a very famous pornography movie, that actually led to pornography movies being mainstream. You didn’t have to go to 42nd Street necessarily. And 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 blah, blah, blah. And so, Andrea appeared at that.

Somewhere along the line, Andrea got to know Kitty MacKinnon, who was an academic. And they kind of bonded and they began working on legislation, an ordinance. I was gone after this 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, I’m not sure. But it was declared unconstitutional. I’m not going to go in to what it said. People can look that up themselves. But I was gone. Because what happened with me is, the first summer I was there; not the summer I worked for the group, I had taken five weeks off to go to Texas. I was in the master’s program, to do an archeological excavation. Okay, that was fine.

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

And at 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 a 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 trafficking of women. And So, that was really my exit.

After that, I devoted myself to Anthropology. I went for a PhD, and I did become part of a poker game that was comprised of feminists. We had a poker game for many years. I left it when I was in Brooklyn. I was like that young woman in Saturday Night Fever, you want to get out of Brooklyn. In those days, Brooklyn was not what it is today. So, I had gone to Manhattan, and I was in Manhattan, but opportunity came. I think I was married by that point, and it was an opportunity to buy a little co-op, but it was in Queens. We bought it, and then we bought a house in Poughkeepsie, which is where I am now, when we retired here a couple of years ago.

I wrote a response in the ’90s, and it appeared in something called, Brains and Behavior with Susan. Someone had written an article on rape, and how rape, and this is definitely a theory, that rape is an adaptation by men and as part of their reproductive strategy. That it’s actually, evolutionarily selected for. Natural selection, selected it. So, we wrote a response to that. Then I became a teacher. And that was the rest of my 30 years in public teaching, or 32 years, whatever.

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, which 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 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.

Women have not been, like African Americans, as creative in the 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 thing 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 Lucile told me she 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.