THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Bonnie Huval

“I’ve always felt strongly that we need to not lose the story. So, while you’re doing all your activism, don’t just do it and forget. Write it down. Put it somewhere where people will find it.”

Interviewed by Mary Jean Collins, VFA Historian, June 2025

BH:  My name is Bonnie Dawn Huval. I was born in Port Arthur, Texas on the 26th of November, 1956.

MJC:  Why don’t you talk about your years growing up and how you became a feminist in those early days.

BH:  I am the eldest daughter and eldest granddaughter of two sea captains. My father met my mother when he was sailing under my grandfather, and they sailed in the convoys that supplied Britain during World War II. Now this is kind of important because women didn’t have the right to do a lot of things that we can do now. So, my mother didn’t have the right to give consent for emergency surgery for any of us kids. My father might be on the other side of the world, but she didn’t have the right to give consent until he set up special legal papers to give her that power.

That’s the way things were when I was growing up. So, I guess you could say that the awareness that we were not first-class citizens was built in from the start. It did not mean that women weren’t strong because if you were the wife of a sea captain, you had to do everything for almost all of the year and you had to do it with one arm tied behind your back because you didn’t have all the legal powers that your husband did. So, we got a taste from the start of how things were not right.

It was Campfire Girls then and later became Campfire Bluebirds. When you’re little, you’re in Campfire in the middle school years and then Horizon Club when you hit high school. When I hit high school, Campfire National decided to try allowing boys into Horizon Club. It was an option at the local council level. The group that I was in was very different from all the others. We were not based on a single high school. We had members from all over the area, all the different high schools in the area and the whole age range.

It was the oldest continuously operating Horizon Club in the area. It had been going for something like 30 years. And being rather open-minded, our group decided, sure, we’ll let boys in. Horizon Club is great. They should have a taste of this too. It’s not like scouting. Scouting has a sort of paramilitary flavor to it. Campfire has a lot of Native American folklore built into it. So, we got some boys to join, just a few of them, and then the local council had a panic and said, no more. I mean, we can’t kick out the ones that are already here, but we won’t allow any more.

So one of my first campaigns, I guess maybe my first political campaign was to get boys into Campfire to be equal. Now, that might sound like a not very feminist thing, but it kind of is, because feminism is all about being equal. Not separate, but equal. So, we campaigned with the help of my mother and my grandmother, who did a lot of strategizing. Boy, did we ever campaign.

We were doing everything. If the local council needed some kind of grunt work done, we were doing it. It didn’t matter how crappy the job was. And we made friends with the reporter for the local newspaper. So, we were in the newspaper all the time, doing all these good things, girls and boys. And shortly before this came up for another vote in front of the council, we found out that the local council never had the right to make that decision in the first place.

So, my mother and I met with the head of the council before the meeting and said, “Listen, we’re going to go through with our presentation and you’re going to go through with your vote, but if you turn us down again, we’re going to tell the newspaper about this.”  Lo and behold, boys were okay in Campfire in Port Arthur from then on.

It did become co-ed all the way through the ranks in later years.  My mother stayed involved with Campfire for a long time, but that was the start of it. We were one of the very first groups in the country to do that.

MJC:  Sounds like a wonderful campaign and nice to have a first campaign be successful, right?

BH:  It was. And it was a learning experience, and especially a learning experience that all those good works that you do, all that PR that you do doesn’t matter as much as that one little bit of Robert’s Rules of Order or the constitution of your organization or your articles of incorporation, whatever is your legal framework, that matters.

MJC:  Important lesson for our day. So where does it go from there? Tell us about your interest in science and then we’ll pick up the feminist story.

BH:  When I was a little kid, I can’t quite remember Alan Shepard’s flight, but I remember John Glenn’s. And when I saw him go into orbit, I thought, “Oh, I want to do that. I really want to do that.” But even at that young age, I realized that I couldn’t because you had to be a test pilot first, and test pilots had to be a man with 20-20 eyesight. I was out on both counts. I had to start wearing glasses when I was about five years old.

I was interested in science, still absolutely nuts about space, through high school, where I graduated pretty high in my high school class. I went to Rice University, which is important, more important than I realized at the time. At the time, I just wanted to go because Rice was hard and I was competitive. I started out as a physics major, but I realized pretty early on, like halfway through sophomore year, that wasn’t going to work. For one thing, modern physics is very abstract and I’m a very concrete thinker.

So, because Rice was such a hard place, I came out with coursework for my undergraduate degree that I wouldn’t even have been allowed to audit at most other universities until after I had a bachelor’s. That turned out to be useful because it was the beginning point of what I was going to need to know in less than a year.

When I first came out of Rice, I went to work in the oil field. I was a junior field engineer on a wireline services truck. Most people have no idea what that means. You drill what you hope is going to be an oil well and you don’t know whether there’s anything down there. Most of the oil wells that you drill are going to be dry holes.

So, you call a wireline services truck, and it comes out no matter what time of day or night it is, no matter what day of the week. And the crew works until they’re done. So, it is awful on your body. You might go out for three days and get three hours of sleep in that time, be working all the rest of the time. It’s very physical. Some of the oil tools weigh 300 pounds, and two or three people have to sling those around and put them on a special cable, drop them down to the bottom of the well.

And on the way up, you turn those tools on, and they measure characteristics of the borehole. Then you analyze that and tell the people who drilled the well, “yeah, you’ve got oil at this level, you’ve got natural gas at that level.” If you find enough to be worthwhile, then they will set casing, basically line the hole with pipe and pump stuff in to fill in the gap between the pipe and the rest of the borehole. And then they will lower an explosive tool that essentially shoots big bullets through at the depths where you found the oil or the gas.

I did that for about five months. Like I said, it is really hard on you. And at the end of five months, I thought, all this money isn’t going to do me any good if I end up dead or crazy. So I left, and I didn’t have a whole lot of money in my bank account.

MJC:  How were you received on the job by the men while you were there?

BH:  In the oil field, you get about two weeks to show that you can do your work. And if you can, you’re fine. And if you can’t, you start getting hints that you should leave. And if you don’t leave, something very heavy falls on you. I could do my work. So, I had no problems at all with my crew. I actually had more difficulty at the space center. They didn’t give me trouble about being a woman on the wireline truck. I did get trouble about being a woman in the space program. I was not the first woman ever to do that kind of job. I was the first at that particular base. So, they hadn’t seen a whole lot like me.

It was important that I was able to do the work. At the end, I was at the training school doing some training to become a full field engineer. Some of the equipment failed during a lab exercise. I couldn’t open it up, but I came up with various things to try and left a detailed note for the instructors for Monday morning telling them it’s either this component or that component in the circuitry. They said they had never seen anybody do that before. So they tried real hard to get me not to leave. But like I said, all that money wasn’t going to do me any good if I ended up dead or crazy.

MJC:  Where did you go next?

BH:  I did some intense hunting for a job. I didn’t really believe that I was good enough for the space program, but I really needed a job. So I sent a resume there, too, and lo and behold, I got an interview. And lo and behold, I got hired.

In the interview I asked if I would need a security clearance for this job at Lockheed. The way things are organized, most of the work is done by companies under contract and NASA supervises.

The manager said, “Probably not, but if you do, it won’t be for at least a year,” because I knew a security clearance would be a big problem. On the day that I started, he handed me this fat sheaf of paper and told me I needed to apply for a security clearance, “But there’s no rush. You can take two weeks about it.” Back then, if you were known to be gay, you couldn’t have one. Basically, there were a few people who had gotten security clearances, but not very many.

MJC:  Can you fill us in how you being gay fit into your story?

BH:  I was never very much like everybody else in pretty much any way you can imagine. My father didn’t go to work in the morning and come home in the evening. He went away to work on an airplane and came back months and months later for a couple of weeks. Like I said, I’m not very neurotypical. I didn’t understand people very well. I certainly didn’t ever go through a boy crazy phase.

I figured out that these feelings that I was developing were not what I was supposed to feel. I eventually figured out that the word homosexual went with them. But everything around me said, that was terrible. That was perverted, that was awful. And so, I looked everything up in the dictionary and the dictionary said, as long as you didn’t touch anybody, you weren’t one.

So I thought, well, okay, I can have all these feelings, but as long as I don’t do anything about it, I’m not one of those. And along about age 17, not too long before I went off to Rice University, let’s just say the dam broke and the feelings spilled over. I will not go into the details because that was a big problem.

My parents found out. My parents were not happy. I ended up as a psychiatric outpatient to avoid having to go to court.

MJC:  Do you have siblings?

BH:  Yes, I have a younger sister and a younger brother. My brother is gay.

So, I started work at the Space center. I had to put in an application for security clearance.

And I knew something about what that would involve because I had had a student work job in the political science department at Rice. I already had to deal with federal agents coming in to do background checks. You couldn’t turn your back on them and if you did, they were into the file cabinets pulling out files they had no right to.

You could tell what agency they were with by the way they were dressed. CIA wore well tailored dark three-piece suits with white shirts and ties. FBI wore gray suits, not quite as well tailored. Defense Investigative Service, which did the lower-level civilian security clearances like what I had to go with, they wore off the rack, not very well fitted two-piece suits in a relatively light color for the most part. I’m generalizing. You could generally tell what agency they were with by how they were dressed when they walked into the office. And I knew what they had put some of the people in the political science department through while I was at Rice.

I had looked around Houston and could not find anything for a lesbian to have a social life except going to bars or being on a softball team. That was it. That was all there was. Of the bars, there was one, Just Marion & Lynn’s, that reportedly paid protection money to the police to stay open. And they were as good as it gets. They were a relatively safe, stable place. But it’s a bar, and I never did drink much. I didn’t even like the taste of beer. So that didn’t really suit me very well. And my game is volleyball, not softball. I was kind of stuck. I spent about three months going to the bars, trying to find out if there was anything, and there didn’t seem to be anything. So, I thought, well, all right, I’ll create it.

So, I bought an answering machine. This was in the old days when you had a loop tape. You would leave your message and then it would go beep. And for the rest of that loop, on the first tape, it would allow the person who was calling to leave a message.

I got an unlisted phone number for it. I ran an ad in the student newspaper on the Rice University campus. This was about halfway through going to Rice, and then I had to go out of town for a volleyball tournament. And when I came back, there were an hour and a half of messages for me to listen to. Mostly people who called and listened and hung up. Or they were just poking fun at it, this was the thing to do for fun at Rice that weekend, to call this answering machine.

But there were a handful of people who actually wanted to go. So we had our first meeting at the Metropolitan Community Church then. And after that, we met usually in my living room, just a handful of us, about eight women, most from Rice, but not all. Some people were from the surrounding community. Of those, the best known now would be Annise Parker, who eventually became Mayor of Houston and is now running to be Harris County Judge.

So I couldn’t maintain contact with the gay community after I put in that application for a security clearance. The agents were going to try to find every gay person that I knew, and that could be the end of their job. It could be the end of their place to live. It could be the end of everything for them.

MJC:  You weren’t just putting yourself at risk.

BH:  I was putting everybody at risk. So during the two weeks that I was allowed to take to put the application in, I spent those two weeks notifying everybody about what was about to happen to me and telling them, “I understand completely. If you want no contact, you should assume that my telephone is bugged,” and so on and so forth. So I turned in the application. I did not hide Sister Symposium, the little support group that I had started. I did not hide another more activist lesbian group that I had joined but was just a checkbook member of. I did not hide that I was a checkbook member of the National Organization for Women.

The manager wanted me to move all three of those off, just take them off. And I told him “no, it’s a felony for me to submit an incomplete or inaccurate application. I won’t do it.” And to his credit, Phil Hopkins went ahead and submitted that application. It took me 11 months to get a low level security clearance that all my colleagues got in three.

I got tailed, my telephone replayed a previous conversation to a friend, just the whole nine yards. I was 22 years old and they did a full 15-year background check. I went through an interrogation, and I’m told that after I came out of it, I looked like somebody had beaten me. But I went to work the next day. I was not going to let them know that they got to me that badly.

The ACLU wouldn’t have anything to do with my case. They said it was a hopeless case.

My lawyer was just somebody who said she didn’t know anything about this area of the law. And I said, I’ll give you the ACLU handbook on the rights of gay people. And I just need you there to change the tone. She had a brilliant idea. She brought a court reporter to transcribe the whole thing. And the agents were not very bright. They didn’t have to accept the court reporter, but they didn’t realize it, and so they did. So I had an independent transcript and that limited what they could put in my file. Beautiful. They still put a bunch of garbage in my file that they just made up and claimed that their tape recording had somehow mysteriously not turned out very well, but I had the independent transcript.

And so I got denied the clearance on the first round, but when it went to automatic administrative appeal, it was awarded. And when I got my file through the Freedom of Information Act, it turned out I had two files in the government. One was thick with all the stuff that they had done, except there was no warrant for the wiretap.

And the other was just a couple of pages. It was a letter from the appeal that basically said, “Well, we really don’t want to give a clearance to this terrible person, but we guess we have to.”  We don’t know whether I was the first to get a civilian clearance as an openly gay person in my part of the country or just one of the first. But I was pretty close to the front edge.

MJC:  The good fight at the right time. So, talk about the job then.

BH:  I started out as assistant test conductor in the Electronic Systems Test Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center. They had just gone into two shifts a day of work trying to catch up with the schedule that they needed to meet so that the first shuttle flight could go when it was supposed to. ESTL tested space shuttle communication systems under simulated mission conditions.

We didn’t tell you whether the lights came on. We told you how many extra bits would be wrong in the data stream because a thunderstorm passed over a tracking station at the wrong moment. Or we told you what Doppler shift did to how well the data came through. Because the same thing happens with radio signals that happens to the sound of a train whistle.

You know how it is when you’re standing at a railroad crossing and the whistle sounds higher pitched as the train approaches you and then lower pitched as it goes away from you? The same thing happens to radio signals and it can affect how well you get the data from them.

All of this about digital communications over radio signals at the time was graduate level electrical engineering. I had gotten to study it at Rice because I went to Rice for my undergraduate degree. But I would have needed to have a master’s from somewhere else to have seen it all. So, like I said, what I got from Rice was the starting point for working at the Johnson Space Center.

About a year and a half after I got there, I got moved to be test conductor on an alternating basis with Jack Rivers, the test conductor who had built that lab. A couple of times men had tried to do that and they had failed. They had gone down in flames. I survived it. God, it was hard, but I survived it. And after that, they were able to ask men that they really wanted to have in that position: “You’re telling us that a young woman can do this job and you can’t?”

I was there for the first shuttle mission, and I got to work every mission that Sally Ride worked in any capacity, which was just a delight to me, whether she was flying or whether she was CAMCOM (Capsule Communicator) or whether she was working with the Canadian robot arm.

MJC:  Did you have a friendship with her too?

BH: No, not really. But I had met her because of the National Organization for Women.

Because I had to drop all of my connections in the gay community, about a month after I started at the Space Center, I attended a local meeting of NOW. I figured if I switched my activism into the feminist community, that would include the lesbian issues I had been working on. It was a broader base. And just because you had something to do with me didn’t mean that federal agents could ruin your life.

I chose a broader platform, and it made sense. The Sister Symposium volunteered to staff the International Women’s Year Conference in Houston in 1977. I saw all those women there and I thought, I am getting to go to Rice because of these women. I owed something to them anyway, and that was a debt I was going to have to pay anyway. So, my timeline just moved.

MJC:  Then how did NOW manage to take advantage of your presence?

BH:  You know how it is in volunteer organizations. You’re always looking for people to hold the offices that make things carry on. One of my friends, Beth Hudman, was communications coordinator for Texas NOW, the state chapter. And she was, quite frankly, tired of doing it. So, she talked me into it, and nobody else wanted to do it. Communications coordinator in Texas NOW was a combination of vice president, secretary, and newsletter publisher. Okay, it was a lot of work.

I hadn’t even been in the organization very long, just over a year, and there I was, the number two officer in the state chapter. And that immediately led to what will probably be ultimately my biggest contribution to the movement. And nobody would ever have noticed. When I became communications coordinator, all Beth could give me was one file box of a jumble of papers. That’s all there was. A lot of Texas NOW’s history had been lost, and what there was of it was not very well organized. So first I organized what I had. Then I asked around and collected as much other material as I could of the stuff that had been lost. And then I started angling to get a formal archive created.

So, we established a formal archive collection at what was then called the Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center in Austin, Texas. It’s now called the Dolph Briscoe Center. And once Texas NOW had its formal archives there, a number of women who had been prominent in Texas NOW over the years, or prominent in feminism in Texas in general, established their personal archive collections there.

So, my main contribution will have been to make sure it doesn’t all get lost.

MJC:  Talk about your experience in the various other positions you held within NOW.

BH:  May 1980 is when I became communications coordinator of Texas NOW. And then in the spring of 1983, we had the regional elections for the board of directors of the National Organization for Women.

There had been elections of national officers in 1982, in October, I think it was. I looked at who was running in my region, and I was concerned. I was awfully young to take on such a thing myself. And at first I thought, there’s no way I could do it anyway. There’s no way I could get on. But my partner at the time, Janelle Jenkins, was much more savvy than I was about politics. And she figured it out. She knew that I really didn’t want to see all of the board seats in our region tilted in the way it looked like they were going to be.

I thought that NOW needed to broaden its focus again after it had become very, very focused on trying to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. And then that failed, and the organization was struggling. It had falling membership, falling finances. It was in kind of a tailspin. And I knew something that most of the rest of NOW didn’t know. I knew that what the rest of the organization thought was a $2 million gift was really a loan from two members of my home chapter, which had to be paid back someday. We were really in a deeper pickle than most people knew.

So, Janelle basically ran my campaign. I campaigned my socks off. I wound up regional director, the ranking member of the three members for my region, by three votes in the fifth tally of a preferential ballot. So I knew I did not have a mandate. I was either the youngest or the next youngest on the board, and I was desperate for the board not to realize that. I was 26. And I really knew I didn’t know what I was doing.

I had a very steep learning curve. And sometimes I got it right, and sometimes I got it wrong. I did the best I could with it. Of the activist things, I’d say the highlight was from the year when NOW did a special action on the weekend of the anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision.

There had been fire-bombings of women’s health clinics all over the country. If you looked at a map of them, they were mostly in areas that were hot spots for media coverage. And there were just enough scattered in the rest of the country to make it feel like they were happening everywhere. And at that point in time, the bombings had all been done carefully so that nobody got hurt. It was all property damage.

The national NOW board decided that they probably would stick with that. They probably weren’t ready to actually hurt people with the bombs yet. But there had been such a wave of them. We were afraid that there would be a bunch of them over that weekend in the rest of the country. What NOW did was go and sit in some of the clinics that were most prominent, most likely to be targeted, and be very visible about it. We told the media, put up banners and signs and such. So if you went to firebomb that clinic, you knew that there were people inside and you were going to hurt them. And the gamble was that they weren’t ready to do that yet.

I tried to set that up in the Houston area. I lived about 30 miles outside of Houston, and I couldn’t set it up. We had about 30 clinics in the greater Houston area, which covers a radius of about 50 miles in every direction. We had had about five fire-bombings already. One clinic had been hit twice. They were afraid to participate. We could only get about two or three of them willing to participate at all.  After some conversation, I turned Houston into a shell game. I think it scared the bejesus out of the national office, but we thought we could pull it off, and we did.

So, in the Houston area, we had people staking out one of the clinics that had already been fire-bombed twice. We staked it out on behalf of the Webster police department. This was right outside the Johnson Space Center. The Webster police were angry at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms because ATF had insisted on taking over the investigation and then had done nothing. ATF leaned on both the police department and me trying to get it called off, and we refused.

We had women sitting, usually two at a time in cars in a hospital parking lot all night long in the freezing cold in January. It’s not as cold as it would be farther north, but it was cold enough. We climbed a tree at one of my home chapter member’s houses and put a wire up there as an antenna and ran it down to a citizen’s band radio in her house. And our women on the stakeout had walkie talkies. So, if they saw anything suspicious, they’d radio it in. And then our member at her house would call the police department.

We really only had two things happen that night. One man was very surprised that the Webster police showed right up and arrested him for trying to steal construction materials from a construction site next to a store. And the ATF agent who had tried to pressure both the police department and us into not doing this, he was so arrogant, he thought he’d go stomping around that clinic that night and show how stupid we were. And the Webster police showed up to say, what are you doing here?

So it worked. It did mean I had to get on all the major news outlets around Houston ahead of time and make it very clear that what we were doing in the Houston area, all the way down to Galveston, all the way out to Katy, all the way up to the Woodlands and even Conroe, what we were doing was not what NOW was doing in the rest of the country. We were in some clinics, but we were not going to let you know which ones.

MJC:  Were you still working at the Johnson Space Center?

BH:  I was. They were not happy about my activism. But the worst I got was the NOW national office drafted an op ed piece for people to try to get into newspapers. And with very little editing, I got it into one of the big Houston newspapers. And it was about pay equality, that women should be paid the same as men when we do the same work or comparable, you know, comparable work, comparable pay.

Boy, that hit a nerve. That was the nastiest anybody ever got with me at the Space Center. By then, I wasn’t at the lab anymore. I had moved on. I was doing computer programming now for Space Lab. And I had moved from Building 45 to Building 36. When I went to work the morning that the op ed ran, there were cartoons on doors, nasty cartoons about women not deserving comparable pay for comparable work. And I got nasty comments all day long. There were other people who were fine. It was more of a mixed bag. But it wasn’t like the oil field.

In the oil field, if you could do the work, they accepted you. There was one guy in the oil field who put me down behind my back a lot. The rest of my crew let him know that they didn’t like that and he should stop doing it. He didn’t stop doing it and something really heavy fell on him.

MJC:  It’s very interesting that there were some who came to your defense.

BH:  I didn’t know that they had done that until afterwards, after the guy was in the hospital. One of the guys came to me, just tickled pink and said, guess what? And told me. That’s how the oil field worked. Very direct. You always knew where you stood with them. But in the Space Center, you didn’t. You didn’t always know.

MJC:  Are there other NOW stories that you want to tell us from your time there?

BH:  While I was on the board, NOW made its first ever endorsement in a U.S. presidential race for Mondale and Ferraro in 1984. And for the most part, that gets discussed in terms of it was the first endorsement by NOW.

That’s not really how I saw it, and it’s still not really how I see it. The importance of that endorsement was that it was a sign of NOW trying to turn an important corner in any activist movement in civil rights, gay rights, AIDS activism, feminism. At the beginning, you’re just trying to get people’s attention. You’re trying to get them to hear that something isn’t right and that it needs to be fixed, it needs to be made better. And everybody else is saying, but this is the way it’s always been.

So, at the beginning, you’re having to do outrageous things just to get them to listen a little bit. You’re on the outside banging on the glass. Once you’ve gotten their attention, once they start to recognize that something is wrong and that it needs to be made better, that’s when you need to turn the corner. If you turn the corner successfully, you go from being on the outside banging on the glass, trying to get in to being in the room. You become part of the system.

Success for your movement is when your movement becomes part of the system and there’s no need for a movement anymore. We don’t usually get all the way to that point where there’s no need for a movement anymore. But if you don’t turn that corner, you’re never really going to achieve change in the system. You have to become part of the system to change it. That’s what that endorsement meant to me.

MJC:  Okay, that’s very good observation – accepting a different role.

BH:  Yes, accepting a different role. And if you look at NOW’s involvement in that campaign, that is what we were doing. We were stepping into the Democratic Party as our route into the system and becoming very active in it, wielding some power within it and having impact on platform planks. That was feminism, the second American feminist movement, trying to turn that corner.

MJC:  Were you a part of that?

BH:  I was part of that. I remember there was somebody on the board who was waffling about whether to do that endorsement or not. And the vote was looking very close, and so we needed everybody we could get.  I said something that brought up my Syrian, Lebanese background because she had a Lebanese background. And she told me later that something I had said was the thing that changed her vote. I’m only one eighth Syrian Lebanese, but boy, I made use of it.

MJC:  How long did you continue on the NOW board?

BH:  Only one term. I did not win reelection. I kind of went down in flames trying.

MJC:  What were the underlying issues about why you didn’t win?

BH:  Internally NOW became extremely polarized. There were two factions and they ended up being referred to by the campaign colors that they chose at the 1985 internal election of national officers. There was a blue faction, and I would be considered a blue. And there was a raspberry faction. That was their campaign color. And the raspberry faction wanted to return to the more centralized approach that NOW used during the ERA campaign.

The blue faction wanted a more decentralized approach, which we had been trying to promote during my board term, where the national office provided more of a supportive role for the local and state chapters to help them do whatever worked in their areas. It had been a big problem for some of us out in the rest of the country during the ERA campaign that everything was oriented toward the northeastern quadrant of the country.

Having a big women’s rights march in late August in the South is a recipe for heat stroke. Door-to-door campaigns don’t work out west because the doors are too far apart. There are a lot of things that needed to be done differently in different parts of the country, culturally, in terms of climate, in terms of the way infrastructure was laid out. That was part of why the blue faction was trying to go for a more decentralized approach. I am simplifying quite a lot here because there were a lot of other points of disagreement, but that’s kind of the high level of it.

There were a set of grievances filed within the organization before the 1985 internal election that was just awful. There were three grievances. There were more than 40 parties. Some of them were parties in more than one of the grievances. They all had to do with this split in the organization. And the board had come up with a grievance procedure that had to be done entirely through the mail instead of with some face-to-face hearings, partly due to cost and partly because face-to-face hearings got so heated. When the grievance committee members’ names were drawn out of a hat, Maria Saez in the raspberry faction was one. Rosemary Trowbridge in the blue faction was the second. The third name out of the hat was mine, and I was considered in the blue faction.

I was also considered the most even handed, so I ended up having to chair the committee. I beat myself up for years about how that went. I could have done better with it. But it was just a God awful mess. And I’m not too sure that I could have done any better than I did. It’s unfortunate that that happened at all. It was very damaging to the organization and pretty awful for everybody involved in it to go through.

MJC:  Did you end your involvement in NOW at that point or what happened as a result of that?

BH:  I stayed a checkbook member until sometime in the late 1980s, but I became very ill by the time of the 1986 conference. I didn’t know that I was getting ill. I have what the Brits – I live in Britain now – call myalgic encephalomyelitis. The United States calls it chronic fatigue syndrome.

I’m one of the 10% who had insidious onset. So it took about 10 years for me to go from the very first signs to full acute onset. So I was getting progressively more ill while I was on the board.

Nobody believed me. Even people who were very close to me didn’t believe me. I knew something was wrong, but nobody around me would acknowledge it. At the beginning, there wasn’t a name for this thing.

It turns out that ME cut a huge, huge slice out of the second American feminist movement right around the time that AIDS was cutting a huge slice out of gay men. So I didn’t realize it at the time, but yeah, something was going on. Some of the recent research indicates that there is a genetic predisposition, eight genes involved. And if you’ve got those eight genes with a particular defect, then you’re sort of set up to be vulnerable to it.

To give you some idea how devastating this was for some NOW chapters: my NOW chapter had the two people who had provided the $2 million to NOW as a loan. It had the woman who took American Express to court and made them allow her to have her credit record to herself instead of her ex-husband getting to keep all of her credit record and her having to start over. It had the handful of women who figured out how to change the Texas state schoolbook approval process to exert leverage in the textbook industry against misogynistic and discriminatory material in textbooks. It was a group of powerful women.

There was an active core of about 19. The real heart of the chapter was about a dozen women. When I joined in March of 1979, one member had multiple sclerosis. Around the time when I was losing my board seat and going into full blown acute onset of my illness, four more women in the heart of my chapter were diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Multiple sclerosis does not occur in clusters.

I was diagnosed as depressed. I was the youngest. I was the least powerful. If you were a doctor, would you want to look at the woman who brought down American Express or the woman who wrangled the entire Texas textbook approval system and say, you’re just depressed? No, the doctors gave them a more reputable diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, but that’s not what it was.

So maybe a correct diagnosis would have been the diagnosis that I’ve got. I’m not sure it was even a term yet, but there had already been outbreaks. So, there were a number of women like me who dropped out of the feminist movement. Not because we didn’t care anymore. But because it was taking everything we had to stay alive.

A few weeks after I went to my last NOW national conference, I could barely stay awake four hours at a time. And I worked full time all the way through this. Which was a trick. So, I dropped out of activism.

MJC:  You had to prioritize.

BH:  Yes, I had to prioritize. When I recovered somewhat, my volunteer activity had more to do with support rather than activism. There used to be a forum in CompuServe, an early online service provider. I stumbled into a forum for people with chronic illnesses. It didn’t matter what your chronic illness was, you could be in that forum. Doctors sent patients there to learn how to live with whatever they had.

Patients shared tips and tricks and kept an eye on research for each other. It was fantastic. Oh, what a revelation those people were. I ended up becoming part of the volunteer staff for the forum. I wrote some articles for it. I was a roving staff member. I didn’t just stay in the section for the illness that I had.

There was one occasion when I got assigned to go find out about an illness that a guy had shown up for that had only been diagnosed 26 times before in the entire world. But you know, I’m very researchy. I’m very sciency. So I dug in and I found what he needed to know. So I’ve done that kind of thing.

The forum was destroyed when AOL bought CompuServe. They just ruined it. It’s gone. The articles that I wrote for the forum as resource material are on my personal website.

MJC:  And nobody’s ever recreated it in another forum?

BH:  No. People have tried a little bit. But people in internet forums are not as well behaved as people in CompuServe forums were. People were serious. You had to be serious to go into forums in CompuServe. These were dial-up modem days. For people in countries like the one I live in now, you had to pay for every minute that you were using a phone or a modem.

So, you didn’t hang around online. You downloaded all the new messages. You read them offline as time allowed or as your health allowed. You composed replies as your time and health allowed. And then you logged in again, uploaded your replies, logged off again. It was a very different way of doing things. And because it was so precious, because it was not a thing that was ubiquitous, people took it more seriously.

MJC:  It sounds like something that’s really needed, too.

BH:  It was very needed. Now I say people took it seriously. We did have some absurd things, like pretending to have a race down a snowy hill on pieces of cardboard, just typing text, because, you know, it was a lot of fun.

MJC:  Yes, it sounds like it was a community, which in itself is a healing process. So, what came after that, when the CompuServe forum went away?

BH:  I had what I refer to as the year of losses. In 1985, my grandmother died. Then in early 1986, Martha Butler died. Martha Butler was a biology teacher in high school, the kind of teacher who shaped people. Challenger blew up. Some of the people on that flight had trained right above my head in a simulator facility. Flo Hyman died. I played volleyball opposite her. She was playing at University of Houston when I was playing volleyball at Rice University. She was an Olympian, 6 foot 5. She died during a match in Japan.

I lost my board seat. My father died. I hit acute onset. It all came within less than a year. And I finished off all of this with broken relationships, my ability to work very badly compromised, and an uncomfortable amount of debt built up.

Everything was a mess. I lost pretty much everything that my sense of identity was based on. I didn’t understand how I could be so ill and not be dying. So, I made a giant leap. I went into writing computer software on a contractor basis. And I moved away from Texas, where I had lived all my life up to then, and moved up to northeastern Maryland.

I was very lucky and my first contract was with Dupont. I learned a lot there, recovered a bit and paid off my debts while I was there. I was there for five years. Dupont used to keep contractors for a good long time if they were good people. And after five years when they threw out all the contractors, I decided to go visit a friend on my way back down to Texas. So, I drove across the Rust Belt in January to visit a friend in Minneapolis, St. Paul. And on the way, at every good-sized town, I stopped and fed quarters into a payphone with the Yellow Pages and tried to land an interview for a job.

I thought, if I can do this, I don’t necessarily have to get an offer, but if I can get some interviews, just cold calling like this, then I can go independent. Well, I didn’t land any offers for work, but I did get a number of interviews. And some of the people that I met during that drive, I wound up having a bit of a business relationship without transactions – the kind where you call each other, you care about each other, you ask each other how things are going with your business, for years after that.

So, I formed my own little consulting company, and I started doing programming on a contractor basis with my own company. And over the years things just evolved. I eventually ended up being a consultant and having more to do with business consulting than with IT consulting. But I have worked in some interesting places, and I have done some interesting projects in spite of everything.

MJC:  Are you now retired?

BH:  I was still working just a little bit until just last month. I was helping this particular university with commercialization of some of their inventions, working alongside a fellow who’s expert in that. We’ve put 15 years into this, and they blew up their last opportunity to make any of it work just about last month. And it’s so frustrating. So, I think I’m retired now.

MJC:  Where did you live after your drive across the Midwest. Where did you land?

BH:  After I visited my friend, I drove down to Houston. My brother was in Houston. A lot of my early adult life had been in Houston, so I lived in Houston for a few years. That would have been 1992 or 1993. After that, there was a sort of rule of the universe that I should have to relocate an average of once a year to get to the next contract. And it should be at least 1,000 miles.

And I did that in an unusual way. I hired an out of work oil field welder to build a trailer for me. Just an open utility trailer, exactly the size that I wanted. So sturdy that you could drop it off a building and it would bounce. I could put all the things I’d need for the first couple of months in the camper shell on the back of my little pickup truck, most everything except my documentation. I had a lot of documentation and papers. I would ship those to myself on Amtrak or Yellow Freight or Greyhound. Everything else would go on that trailer wrapped up in tarps and rope and plywood and I would just go putt, putt, putt across the country to the next contract.

I have lived and worked in, besides Texas and Maryland and Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Boston, Massachusetts, Chattanooga, Tennessee, Colorado Springs. Yes, I got around.

MJC:  Are you now a resident of England? Are you planning to stay?

BH:  I am. I am a resident and a dual citizen. I had to leave the United States because the insurance companies all declared me uninsurable for healthcare in the United States.

I later realized that that was because a doctor trying to do me a favor had misstated something in my medical record and it scared the insurance companies. He thought he was doing me a favor because he thought he was getting my insurance company to cover the price of a medication. He did that by saying that I had a condition that we were treating me to prevent. And the insurance companies looked at that and said, she’s way too young to have that condition.

So that was the end of that. And once something gets into the Medical Information Bureau in the United States, you can’t change it. They shared that information with each other through the MIB, and it got me declared uninsurable. So, I needed to leave the United States to get access to health care. I had a lovely scouting trip to Panama and intended to move there. But I happen to love somebody who is from Great Britain, from England, adjacent to Wales. And so here I am.

MJC:  Are you comfortable with the choices you’ve made?

BH:  I’m comfortable enough for the moment. Anyway, for the moment, it’s very uncomfortable to feel that I can’t visit the United States right now because the United States is such a mess. It’s horrifying. It’s absolutely horrifying. And, you know, I’m sure those of us who did movements most of our lives and made real achievements and real advances are horrified at the attacks.

And it’s pretty horrifying to see that the UK is on the same path. Brits will put up with practically anything before they fight back. It’s very worrying here. In the U.S. if you push too far, then everybody is pushing back. That’s happening in the U.S. But in Britain, the only people who are taking to the streets are mainly the ones that you wish would shut up and go away. The ones on the far right now, their big thing is flying flags. And that should ring a bell. Draping themselves in the national flag.

And the immigrants and trans people are very much targets here, just like in the States. It is so parallel. And because I have a foot in both countries, I see it. And people who don’t have a foot in both countries, they’re the frog in the pot that’s being slowly boiled.

MJC:  Are there questions I haven’t asked about your feminism that you think people should know?

BH:  I’ve always felt strongly that we need to not lose the story. That’s why I set up the archives. As I started to get more involved in the movement, I kept finding historical information that indicated we had done a bunch of this before. We did it before and we forgot.

So now we had to do it again and we had to figure it out again. So, while you’re doing all your activism, don’t just do it and forget. Write it down. Put it somewhere where people will find it later.

Somebody already did these things that we need to do, or they did a flavor of it and we can start with what they already figured out and add to it instead of having to reinvent it.