THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Carol Anne Douglas

“It’s very reassuring to me to know that feminism really is worldwide. It’s really not just a Western phenomenon. It’s worldwide.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, August 2023

JW:  Would you please start with telling us your full name and when and where you were born?

CAD:  Carol Anne Douglas. I was born on September 12, 1946, in New Rochelle, New York.

JW:  Tell us a little about your childhood, and some of the influences that led you to where you got to.

CAD:  I don’t know whether they led to where I got to or not. I was raised Catholic. My mother was very Irish Catholic. My father was a Protestant; a businessman who owned his own business. We moved to Los Angeles just before I was seven, much over my objections. I never really liked Southern California. I really loved the foliage of the eastern United States and was determined to move back when I grew up, which I did. I went to Catholic all girls’ schools, and I think going to a private all-girls school, Marymount grade school and high school, I think being in all girls’ schools definitely influenced me in terms of thinking female.

I went to UCLA because I wanted a slightly broader education. My education at Marymount was really very good, especially in history and languages, but I wanted to know all about the world. And UCLA and Berkeley, I saw had by far, the widest curriculum in terms of history and politics. They had classes on the history, the politics, the language, the arts, the literature, of the whole world. And so, I was able to take classes on China, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Africa as well as Europe, and that was really important to me. I’ve always been really interested in international matters, and that carried over into my work on off our backs.

I got a master’s in political science at UCLA, and then I came east and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a little while. I got married to a very nice man who was getting a PhD in physics, and our first year we lived in Nashua, New Hampshire. That’s getting into the women’s movement part of my life.

JW:  So, you were in New Hampshire, and what were you doing there?

CAD:  At first I was just getting used to being married. I had some money, so I was supporting us while my husband was in graduate school. I hadn’t had that much work experience before. I’d done some substitute teaching in Boston. I was trying to do a little writing, and then I wanted to get involved in the women’s movement. I had already had some interest in reading about feminism, and I think I’d heard a little bit about it while I was in Cambridge. But I was actually nervous because of abortion, with my Catholic background.

I was kind of horrified. I thought it was killing, until I read an article in the liberal magazine CommonWealth, by Mary Daly, who explained that the church hadn’t opposed abortion until the 16th century. That really changed my mind because I knew the Catholic Church was the main critic of abortion and if the critic was that recent, I thought, “Oh.” And she quoted Florynce Kennedy as saying the wonderful line that, “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament,” and that straightened me out. I thought, “All right, I can be a feminist. I’m not going to have any problem with that.”

I was very determined to be an intellectual. I wanted to go further and get a doctorate, and I was a little intellectually pretentious. I didn’t think the women’s movement sounded necessarily intellectual, but then when Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics came out, I thought, “Oh, that sounds intellectual.” So, that was the first feminist book I read, and I was like, “Oh, ok, this is intellectual.” I got Shulamith Firestone’s, The Dialectic of Sex and other books. Then I wanted to join a group and I called up New Hampshire NOW. No, Boston. I called up Boston NOW or Massachusetts NOW. Because Nashua New Hampshire, I didn’t know anybody there at the time.

My husband and I knew New Hampshire was a more conservative state, but the person from Massachusetts NOW said, “Oh, no, you have to join New Hampshire NOW if you live in New Hampshire,” and I thought, “That’s just too bureaucratic. I don’t want to be a part of something this bureaucratic. This is not me.” So, I somehow heard, maybe it was through a newspaper, I’m not sure how. Boston Female Liberation, which was located in Cambridge, they had an office in that square near MIT, I don’t remember the name of it.

I went there and it was a little bit shabby, as I learned most movement offices were, but I was thrilled. They did so much. They had programs on trying to get free child care in Cambridge, working on abortion rights. They had discussion every week of some political topic, and I think a separate discussion of personal topic that was more like consciousness raising. And they were affiliated with a magazine that was in their office called, The Second Wave, which was a quarterly, so, all of that fascinated me.

I drove down to Cambridge several times a week to attend their meetings. My husband and I had been making elaborate meals and learning different kinds of cooking, and I was no longer interested in that. Picking up a hamburger in Cambridge was fine, and actually, my husband usually had good meals for me ready when I came home. He was very supportive.

JW:  I was going to ask you that. He was supportive?

CAD:  Oh, he was extremely supportive. When we married, he suggested having a hyphenated name. I decided I wanted to just keep my name instead, but he definitely tried to be feminist. In Boston Female Liberation, for the first time, I met lesbians. I had always somewhat identified as lesbian from about the time I was 15, when I knew there was such a thing. I thought, “Hmm, maybe that’s me. I think that’s me.” I heard about the movie The Children’s Hour, which was kind of a painful story about lesbians, but I thought, “I think that’s me.”

I was attracted to both women and men, but somehow, women seemed deeper. When I was in college, I did look around a little for the possibility of meeting a woman, and I didn’t. It just didn’t seem like something possible. I did learn there were women who went to bars, but my mother had been an alcoholic and I didn’t drink, and the thought of going to a bar was just like, “No, why would I do that?” But when I met lesbians in a political meeting, it was like, “Oh my goodness, there really are lesbians that you can meet in a normal kind of setting.” That really stayed with me. Although I stayed with my husband for several years, I really thought about it.

And then my husband completed his PhD. His name was Fred Douglas. I really wanted to get a doctorate myself and I was accepted in a Catholic University in Washington. Of course, I was very ambivalent about it being a Catholic university, but it accepted me, and it offered me a teaching assistantship. My best friend from college was living in Washington, so my husband got a job at National Health Institute and we moved to Washington. I was sad to leave the Boston Women’s Liberation. I had worked on one issue of the Second Wave, but people told me there, “When you get to Washington, you should join off our backs, the feminist news journal.

JW:  Explain what off our backs is.

CAD:  It was a feminist news journal. It was the earliest continuing publication in the movement. I believe it was started in January 1970 and I hadn’t read it yet, and it lasted until fall of 2008. I think it was – The Women’s Survival Catalog called it, “The New York Times of the Women’s Movement” and it really covered feminist news. It tried to cover women’s news, women’s health, but it covered the movement. Conferences, controversies, and of course, reviewed books.

So, the first thing I did, the very first day we were in Washington, I went to the office of off our backs in Dupont Circle, and I learned they had just closed the group. That they weren’t accepting any new members, and I could write an article for them. I went to a meeting of the National Women’s Political Caucus and wrote that up, but I wasn’t all that excited about it. I really wanted to be part of a group.

So, I heard about the Women’s Lobby, and that seemed to be something interesting; going around to congressional offices to try to support feminist legislation. I was assigned working on labor. I think minimum wage for housework was the main issue; minimum wage for maids. Tip O’Neill made this wonderful speech, I think when it was passed, about how his mother had been a houseworker for others to support him, and so he was very supportive of the legislation. Mostly I didn’t really love it. It was interesting being in Congress for a while but I didn’t really feel any connection to the other women. I told some of them that I was really a lesbian, and they sort of laughed, “No, you aren’t.”

So then in July of 1973, I read in off our backs, that a number of women had left, and they were looking for new women. I went to their next meeting, which was July 11, 1973, and I stayed until the paper closed in the fall of 2008. That was my main service. I loved it. It was a way to combine writing with feminism and I loved having a product. For most of the time I was on it, it was a monthly. And I think having a monthly product meant that you could only spend so much time on political problems, although we did spend quite a bit. But you did have to get something done, and I’ve always found it very rewarding to have a product. I just loved the paper.

JW:  Tell me some things that you remember that you wrote about.

CAD:  I did book reviews. I wrote a book review every month for all those years. Well over 200 book reviews, sometimes two a month, and sometimes they were very lengthy. I particularly enjoyed reviewing books on feminist theory and also history books. I loved feminist theory. I was very interested in political theory.

Political theory was one of my areas of concentration in political science and the first was comparative government. So, I was also very interested in other countries, in writing anything about other countries, in meeting women who sometimes came to Washington from other countries. Later on, I would also go to National Women’s Studies Association conferences after that group began in the ‘80s.

JW:  Can you remember any particular review that stands out in your mind as one you really enjoyed doing?

CAD:  Well, a lot of them did. I have a few on my website now, and one of them I particularly like, is I think about Catherine McKinnon’s, towards the feminist theory of the state. There were so many.

JW:  How about the people at off our backs? I assume they changed over a lot.

CAD:  Well, probably. I was the only one who stayed quite so long. A number of strong women and a number of very capable women. One of the great results for me in off our backs, was some of my closest friends came from there. I met my friend at my first evening at off our backs. When I came, she was very friendly, and she’s still one of my very closest friends.

Another close friend, Tricia Lootens, joined the paper in ’82. There were also a number of other friends. Those are the closest, now. Vicky Leonard. Anyway, all the women were really interesting. We definitely had some intense political times, especially in the ’70s, which were not always enjoyable for me. That’s putting it mildly.

JW:  Give me an example. What was tense?

CAD:  Some women were a little more, wanting to be revolutionaries. We had some meetings where we were supposed to have code names or something, and I thought that was pretty silly. So, I said mine could be ‘Coca Cola’ because I drink a lot of Coca Cola. And I was seriously criticized for being insufficiently serious about it all. And, there was concern about whether there were agents who might be spying on us, and there very possibly were.

At the very beginning of my time at off our backs, we had run some materials regarding the Weather Underground. Jane Alpert leaving the Weather Underground, Robin Morgan criticizing it. And see, as a newspaper, we tried to always publish both sides, or in some cases multiple sides of an issue, and we were always getting people angry at us, usually on both sides. “Why did you publish those other people? We have the legitimate side.”

JW:  I could definitely see that.

CAD:  There was a lot of that. So, we sort of thought if we offended both sides, it was unfortunate, but it probably meant we were right on. We wrote up disputes that involved some different organizations, such as the Feminist Women’s Health Network, because we were a newspaper and we of course, published both sides. But that offended people. And sometimes the Women’s Center, which moved around to different buildings, would want us to get an office in one of its buildings.

But we always thought, “Well, we’re a newspaper. We’re independent. We want to be able to report independently if need be, on other groups, and so we really shouldn’t be affiliated officially with any other group,” although many of us as individuals belonged to the Women’s Center and various groups. There was always that point of tension of being on a newspaper that some other groups resented for either some article we wrote, or we published, I should say.

JW:  Tell me too, did the tone of the paper change over the years? Really a lot of years.

CAD:   Somewhat.

JW:  Like how?

CAD:  We always saw ourselves as radical feminists. Well, as I said, in the ’70s, first, there was a time when some were just becoming lesbian separatists. Although we always I think had at least one heterosexual woman on the paper, it was never entirely lesbian, but maybe towards the end. Anyway, it was not officially lesbian ever. But we published something called the CLIPT Papers. I think it was called, Collection of Lesbian International Terrorists. And I found a few of the things they said too extreme. For example, they said straight women are men, in one line, which I thought was just so ludicrous that it should be taken out. Well, they were among the groups that thought that not one word of what they wrote should be taken out and they supported that. So, we published it.

And then, maybe about a year after that, some women joined the collective who were a little more Marxist, so there was a little more Marxist orientation, or at least radical orientation. I’d studied Marxism quite a lot, and I’m not a Marxist. And I had studied China and all that, so I found it sort of ludicrous to say that the Cultural Revolution was something good. We started defining ourselves as a collective, which was pretty much what we had been anyway.

We operated by consensus, which was somewhat difficult, but worthwhile. It was a small enough group, like eight to twelve women, where you could generally get consensus. But I was really bothered when the Symbionese Liberation Army captured Patty Hurst, and some people on the collective believed that she really was converted, which I never believed.

I came from not that much wealth, but a little bit the same social strata. A cousin of hers had gone to Marymount. I thought, “Well, of course she’s acting. I would act. I’d pretend to go along.” But at one point, I think it was after the shoot up where a number of them were killed, some people on the collective insisted on having an editorial in support of the SLA, and my friend Tacey and I were like, “No, no, no.” But all we were able to do was water it down a great deal.

And that was one of my worst memories on off our backs. I was deeply embarrassed and ashamed that we published that stupid thing. But after that, we had a lot of discussion, and we no longer had group editorials. We had commentaries instead, where people could each write individually what they thought. I wrote quite a few commentaries, and sometimes they’re directly opposing commentaries, but I thought that was a better way of handling it.

JW:  Take accountability for your own view. Tell me a commentary or two that you wrote about.

CAD:  Oh, goodness. Well, I’m sure I wrote a couple that were about being a long-term activist as opposed to believing there’d be an immediate revolution. I think I had maybe one title, The Long-Distance Runner. Another, What if the Revolution isn’t Tomorrow?, which it wasn’t going to be. I always saw being activist as a long-term experience; a life experience. And I did notice that some of the most militant people after several years, would sort of drop out generally, or at least drop out of off our backs, maybe not necessarily out of activism.

JW:  Tell me again a little about what do you think the tenor, or attitude of the paper was once you got into the 2000s?

CAD:  I would say it was still radical feminist. There are a lot of shifts before the 2000s. That’s a really long time. I want to say, I think starting in the early ’80s, we became a little friendlier and milder in temperament and meetings. That covers so much territory in all those years. I mean, I’d say I’m a radical feminist. I’d say the paper was basically radical feminist, in that it thought that feminism was key to understanding the world and trying to ensure that the world survives, and not in a patriarchal form.

JW:  Earlier you said you stayed with your husband some more years.

CAD:  Oh, I left him in 1975.

JW:  Okay. And you have been in DC since then?

CAD:  Yes, I now have a winter home in a lesbian community in Florida, which is a wonderful place.

JW:  I don’t want to delve into your marriage, but because you were a radical feminist, it was time to move on? Was it something about that?

CAD:  It was that I wanted to come out. To be with a woman. That was what I really wanted. There was nothing wrong with my husband. He was a wonderful person. If I had wanted to be with a man, I certainly would have stayed with him always. He was very good person, and I’m very sorry that I hurt him by leaving.

JW:  Did you have a profession while you were working at the newspaper all this time?

CAD:  Yes. For several years I was continuing towards a doctorate. I’m ABD, (all but dissertation), I took the test, did all the coursework, and then my mother developed Alzheimer’s and I had to take care of her. I also left my husband about the same time. I left my husband, I had to support myself, and the dissertation fell by the wayside. I had hoped to be a professor. Actually, at some point, I did teach feminist theory for about a decade at George Washington University. So, I was very pleased that I was able to teach in a college for a while.

I sort of wound up in journalism again, through connections from off our backs. I had a sort of forgettable job where one of the things I did was report on taxes, and then a group of us, where I was actually trying to make it a collective, a group of us were laid off, and then a friend in off our backs said, “You should start your own publication.” So, I started a newsletter on state taxes, which were very underreported.

I had gone to a company in Virginia that published a variety of newsletters, and I convinced them to hire me to write a biweekly newsletter on state taxes, and I did, and it was doing well, and then someone approached them and bought it, and I realized that I didn’t have any legal rights to it. Even though it was my idea, I created it. It never occurred to me that I had intended to do it for many years, that if I wanted to do that, I should have gotten a contract. I was legally naive.

So, then I went around to other publishers. I went to Tom Field, publisher of a company called Tax Analysts, a nonprofit that was putting out a federal magazine called, Tax Notes. And I said, “I want to do a state newsletter.” And he said, “I don’t want to do a newsletter, but I’ll hire you to do a state tax column for Tax Notes, and then, I do want to do a magazine on state taxes, and in a few years, you would edit that.” Well, that’s what happened. He created State Tax Notes, and I created it as the editor, and was the editor for 22 years before I retired.

We covered the taxes of all the states, the legislation, the governors’ proposals. We had correspondence in all the states. And also, we had a legal department that got in all the state tax appeals court, and state Supreme Court cases. We had always six pieces at least, of commentary in every issue. It was a weekly of at least 64 pages. It was substantial.

It was a magazine, not a newsletter, and I spent a lot of time getting the commentary together. Trying to make sure that there was a lot of liberal commentary and what you would think of a tax publication. It wasn’t just business oriented. We also had a lot of writers who were academic or in public interest groups or were state tax officials. So, I really was able to have pretty balanced commentary like The Washington Post and the New York Times, so I’m pretty proud of that.

And the publisher was very open about lesbians and gays. There were a lot of lesbians and gays there. We didn’t have a dress code. It was a good place. I never had to dress for success. I mean, I would dress like this, but I’d always wear pants and sensible shoes. So that was all in all, a good experience. But it was demanding, since I was also doing work on off our backs. It transitioned into a full-time job, and then in the ’90s, I was teaching at GW also. It was a lot of work. I also taught community feminist theory classes for free, first through the Washington Area Women’s Center. The Women’s Center kind of folded at off our backs. For at least a decade, I taught free classes on feminist theory.

JW:  I’m going to assume you’re somehow involved in some issues still. I’m just going to make that assumption. What are you continuing to do?

CAD:  Well, lesbian issues. I belong to Old Lesbians Organizing for Change, a very good political group. I go to its conferences, which are called gatherings, which are every other year except we had a gap with the pandemic. And in my lesbian community, I’m on our education committee, which brings in speakers, and I’ve been bringing in diverse lesbian writers. Several black lesbian writers, an Indian Irish lesbian writer, and a lesbian writer who writes about disability, who has polio, and that’s my main political work.

I’ve been writing fiction for a long time. I had a feminist theory book published in 1990 that helped me get the job at GW. Since I retired in 2013, I’ve published six novels, four of them for an adult audience and two young adults, which were fun to write.

JW:  Okay. Do you have some final thoughts?

CAD:  I think one of the questions was about outstanding experiences I’ve had, and I think some of the outstanding experiences were meeting other feminists. I had a chance years ago to get to know T. Grace Atkinson a little, and that was fascinating to me. That really thrilled me, and lots of other well-known feminists, especially Andrea Dworkin. She moved to DC in her final years, and I was just becoming friends with her and able to go with her to Starbucks, and I was thrilled with that, and then she died pretty suddenly. I knew she’d been quite ill.

Meeting Katherine McKinnon, who I admire very much. Alex Dobkin, the singer, who I really admire and care about greatly, and was very sorry and shocked when she died. Old Lesbians Organizing for Change, the group I belong to, she was co-director for well over a decade. It’s really hard to think of the organization without her. I got to spend more time with her at conferences and lots of other wonderful women. I really admired her for when she felt she needed to give up her singing career, and becoming an activist.

I loved meeting international feminists that I got to interview for off our backs. Some women from India, especially Madhu Kishwar, who was publishing a feminist magazine. Manushi and another woman, whose name I unfortunately don’t remember, who was doing a project in which women were building their own homes in a community that was to be feminist. I think there were men allowed, but violence against women was to be completely unacceptable.

And then I met a feminist from Costa Rica whose name I cannot dredge up today, even though she’s a Facebook friend of mine, who I met, and I told her about that, and she started a project like that in Costa Rica. I was just so thrilled to be a conduit for something like that. I met French feminists. I met Monique Wittig and Christine Delphy, who were very important in the movement in France, and that was a great thrill. I just love meeting international women.

JW:  When you met women in other countries and compared their activities to ours, how did the United States measure up?

CAD:  Reasonably well. I mean, it just is very reassuring to me to know that feminism really is worldwide. It’s really not just a Western phenomenon. It’s worldwide. I was just on a trip to Kenya last year, and we went to Woman’s Village, Ujamaa village, that really was all women. It was in northern Kenya. It was very small. There were maybe three dozen women at most with their children.

They were located near the police station to help keep men out. If men became troublesome, they did sometimes hire men to come in and help with something, but they did not have men. They built their houses themselves. Their houses were huts made out of some wood, some straw, thatch roofs and all, and wooden floors. They were raising their children, both girls and boys, to be feminist. To be respectful of women. And that was very impressive.

JW:  I didn’t know that such a place existed.

CAD:  There are a number of them in Kenya.

JW:  How do you see the future of feminism?

CAD:  Feminism certainly has a future. I’d like to say the future is female, but I don’t know. It’s very widespread in the world, and I think it will continue to be with progress in some places and backsliding in others. Serious backsliding in Afghanistan is just tragic. I don’t see any hope for Afghanistan.

JW:  It’s sort hard to understand what that’s about.

CAD:  Well, I think it’s about, in a way, the same thing. The trend right, is everywhere. That it’s really hard for people to adjust to change. There have been so many dramatic changes in the world, certainly regarding women’s sexuality, women’s agency, reproductive rights. I guess it really isn’t surprising that there’s quite a reaction to them.

JW:  Do you have any closing thoughts about the activities you’ve been involved in in your whole life, and where you see journalism going?

CAD:  I’m concerned about journalism too, as there are fewer independent newspapers, at least in the United States, and of course, many journalists abroad are censored, even killed. It’s not going to be easy. My thoughts are that I’ve had truly a wonderful life. I wouldn’t take back a minute of it. I’m thrilled to have been so closely connected with the women’s movement, particularly through off our backs, that I’ve been able to meet and interact with many different feminists and different groups. I’m impressed with all the hard work women have done, and we have made some significant changes. And in addition, I’m deeply concerned. I’m also concerned about preserving the memory of all we’ve done, and I’m very glad that Veteran Feminists of America is working on that. That’s very important work.

JW:  We decided that we needed to cover a new area. So, Carol Anne, you said you worked with off our backs for many years. I’d like to explore off our backs. So, can you start by telling us where the name came from?

CAD:  Well, I wasn’t around then, it was founded three years before I got there. I think it was just, get men off our backs, get the government off our backs, all that. I think later, Reagan used it as a slogan for getting government off the backs. So, it is kind of policy neutral. But it was started by a number of women, none of whom were still on the paper when I joined.

JW:  Tell us again, what year did you start?

CAD:  July 11, 1973. I kind of celebrate that date. This past July, it was 50 years since I joined.

JW:  What else do you want to tell us about?

CAD:  Well, I want to tell a little more about what it was like working on off our backs.

JW:  Okay.

CAD:  Certainly, as I think I said in the first part, there were issues, there were some tensions, but it was a miracle that almost all of us were unpaid. I mean, there often was an office worker, paid very little, in around 1975. I was office worker for a while, and I was getting the magnificent sum of $50 a week. I would admit I was still living with my husband then. Eventually it was larger, but it was never very large. It was always a struggle financially, but there was so much work put into it. Again, I think some people assumed that we were all salaried, but in fact, almost all of us had other jobs and we just did it for love.

For me, the most challenging part was the physical part, because it was not only writing and editorial decisions, but we laid out the paper by hand for many years. We pasted pages onto cardboard and created headlines by rubbing letters from letter press. It was very physical; it was very emotional. I was never very good with the design part, and I did get criticism for that. I remember once in the very political intense part, someone said I wasn’t politically serious because I didn’t do good letter press.

Well, I’m just graphically challenged. But I did learn to do it well enough that I was proud of it, and I really resisted it when we moved to computers. I just couldn’t imagine how that would be. One of the reasons that I was reluctant to give it up, in addition to being quite a luddite, is that that was how we brought women into the paper. We would meet once a week and then on one weekend a month, we would lay it out, and women would come and proofread, and that was our biggest source of getting new collective recruitments.

JW:  That makes sense. Volunteers who wanted to be part of it.

CAD:  Yes, right. And we didn’t invite anyone to join the collective until they’d done that for several months, and we had a sense that they were responsible people who could work with us.

JW:  What was the circulation like?

CAD:  It’s very hard to know. It was in the thousands, but not very many thousands. In the low thousands. I think at one point we said it was 10,000, but part of that we would assume, or if we said more than that, we would assume that more than one person was reading a paper, which was frankly true much of the time. Our real bulwark was institutional subscriptions from libraries. Especially university libraries, women’s studies programs, women’s centers, and we had a higher price for those subscriptions.

JW:  So that’s where the money came from.

CAD:  Yes, well, it also definitely came from individuals and also from donations. For the first decade or so, we had enough money from subscriptions. But then we realized we needed to make a pitch for donations from our subscribers. It was hard to get new subscribers because we had a very specific readership of women who were very interested in the movement and who weren’t so angry at us politically for one reason or another that they didn’t want to get it anymore.

JW:  So, around the country?

CAD:  Oh, it was absolutely a national paper. It was international. We always had a good sprinkling of subscribers from Europe. Quite a few in Canada, some in Australia, New Zealand and a few in South America, Africa. We always were billed as international. We were never a local paper, which was another reason we didn’t want to join the women’s center and another reason why it was a little hard to get revenue. We did sell some advertising, but because it was a national rather than a local paper, local businesses weren’t interested in subscribing because only a small minority of our subscribers lived in the DC area.

I think our most frequent advertisers were bookstores; book publishers, I should say. And occasionally lesbian guest houses. It was challenging to try to get subscribers, and we did get donations. We got some donations from people who just happened to hear of us. At one point, Paul Newman sent us $500. I don’t know how he even knew about it, but it was very kind. We eventually started making pitches a couple of times a year, sending letters to our subscribers saying, “We really do need your donations.” And to continue, I’d say by the time we were in the ’90s, we relied on that because, again, as women’s bookstores started fading out, that hurt us. And gay bookstores. We were also in gay bookstores. When people didn’t renew, it was hard to get new people.

We managed to get a few lists from other groups, such as Ms. but feminist groups are often reluctant to share their mailing lists, and we never shared ours. At one point when we were struggling, I called Gloria Steinem and she graciously gave our name to the Ms. Foundation and the Ms. Foundation gave us a few thousand dollars a couple of different years. That was particularly gracious because back in the most radical days of the mid ’70s, we had reprinted a publication by, I’m trying to remember the name, very important early radical feminist group whose name escapes me at the moment, charging that she was a CIA agent.

JW:  I never heard that one.

CAD:  They actually had some rationale for it. Things like, she had appeared at a Helsinki peace conference for young activists that was CIA sponsored. But she did reply. We were not the only ones to make that charge, and again, we didn’t charge it, we published an article saying that. She replied that, yes, she had gone to the Helsinki conference, but later she decided that was a CIA thing and she didn’t want to be part of it. But anyway, so I’m saying that then 20 years later, or 25 I don’t remember how many, when I appealed to her, she helped us out anyway, which was very gracious of her.

JW:  Interesting. Yes.

CAD:  But there was a lot more to us than that. I mean, we covered women’s health as a field we were very concerned about, extensively. Now, I never knew a damn thing about health issues, but we had two women on the staff who were professional health writers. We really covered things early. We actually covered, very early, through one woman who was a health writer, just the beginnings of people discovering that AIDS was a thing. We covered a lot about women’s reproductive health and the dangers of some forms of contraception; the early IUDs. We covered many issues, and we had real enthusiasm.

I mean, even after we did computer layout, we still had layout weekends where we worked together, and on Saturday nights, we would all go out for dinner, which was a wonderful bonding experience. For most of our history we had mailing parties after it was printed, where we would all sit on the floor and physically mail every single newspaper, and sorted them into zip codes, and somebody would take them to the post office.

In the earlier days, when we went to a printing press, we had a press out in Carroll County early in the years of off our backs. Again, just when I joined, the press they had originally been taking it to, refused to print it because there was a graphic of a painting of a woman inserting a tampon. It wasn’t even a photograph. We had to search all over, and we found a press in Carroll County of all places, in Maryland, a pretty conservative area, but the press that published the Carroll County Times accepted us. And for many years we would drive out to Carroll County and bring the paper and stand around while they printed it.

We just had so many adventures. And we had so many times when, again, women got angry at us. And then one point Andrea Dworkin got angry at me, this was long before I met her, and sent a letter that my friends in the office read and said, “You don’t want to read this, Carol Anne.” So, I let them destroy it because apparently it was incredibly scathing, and it was a little uncomfortable in the sense that I think everybody we ever wrote about, seemed to get angry at us for something.

I did one interview with Mary Daly that I thought was wonderful, and I sent her the transcript. I said, “Well, some of the things you’re saying are a little inflammatory and I think you’d like to take them out, probably.” She then decided she didn’t want the whole thing to run it all, even though we would have taken out anything she objected to, and we had spent a lot of time working on it and transcribing it. I’m proud to say we did what I believe is the first issue on the women’s disability movement in ’81. Women of all different kinds of disabilities contributed. I made a good friend there from one of the women who wrote for it.

I made so many of my friends through this. In fact, my long-term lover, who died in 2009, who was somewhat the love of my life, I met through off our backs. She came to a layout weekend. We were together for 15 years. I just can’t say how much off our backs enriched my life. And I know it enriched a lot of other lives. We were always getting letters from women saying how important it was to them, especially women who lived in more isolated or rural areas, that it was just incredibly important.

JW:  Is there an archive of the issues?

CAD:  I would have to look up which universities. It’s in a number of universities. The University of Wisconsin. I’m sure Smith, Radcliffe. There are a number of places that have complete sets.

JW:  Oh, that’s great.

CAD:  It’s also available through something called JStore. One other thing I should mention that wasn’t too much fun was around 1970, 1980, I think it was around 1980. A group of women of color came in and were upset that we had said we wanted to edit an article by a Native American woman. They felt that it should just be, in their own words, unedited, and they demanded not only that we print that article, which we agreed to, but that they wanted to have their own issue of the paper, which they did. And they wanted to do it all themselves. It was called the Ain’t I A Woman, issue. And it was around 1980.

But again, that was typical of the kind of challenges and strengths of the times. We never had terribly many women of color working on the paper, unfortunately. And again, we didn’t have salaries, so it’s a little harder to recruit people to put in a huge amount of unpaid labor. The person who was on longest, who was a woman of color, was Adrian Fu Berman.

The paper was such an integral part of my existence that I wanted it to live as long as I did, and it was a shock that it didn’t. But I’ve gotten over it, and it will always be important to me. I’ve really enjoyed doing my own writing of novels since then.

JW:  Thank you for this addition. I think it adds a lot to your interview.