THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Derek Shearer, PhD

“All the gains in progress that have been made in women’s status came through political struggle as well as personal change and struggle. And we shouldn’t be surprised at the pushback that comes. And there are always going to be obstacles to this kind of change because it’s so fundamental if you’re talking about human beings and how one part of half of the species treats the other.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, September 2025

DS:  I’m Derek Shearer, and I was born in Los Angeles, California, on December 5, 1946.

JW:  Briefly tell us about your childhood and some things that led you to the career you had.

DS:  I grew up in Culver City, which is a separate city surrounded by the city of Los Angeles. It’s the home of many studios. It was the home of MGM, where they made “Gone with the Wind,” “Tarzan,” and “RKO,” where they made “King Kong.” It was a very pleasant city in that regard. I could walk to my schools. I could ride my bike to Little League.

I could walk to downtown and go to the movie theaters, and I could also take the bus to downtown LA and transfer to the trolley lines and go to watch football at the LA Colosseum. So, it had all the benefits of a small town, but because it was part of Greater LA, it had the sophistication of a larger community and all the history of Los Angeles.

My parents met during World War II in New York City in a rainstorm. My father, who was a GI, who was stationed at Yank, the Army magazine, offered my mother an umbrella. She was a college graduate who was volunteering at Grand Central Station during the War. They got married during World War II and drove out to Los Angeles when my father got restationed to Armed Forces Radio in the Pacific. That’s why I was born in LA.

JW:  You became socially conscious later on. What about your childhood made you move in that direction?

DS:  Both my parents were journalists, and so we had a naturally intellectually curious upbringing. My mother was a Wellesley graduate. That was very rare in the 1930s. In addition, she was an athlete, serious. She was actually one of the most distinguished varsity athletes, certainly of her generation, at Wellesley. And during the ’30s, when she was at Wellesley, she came out to California to attend a conference on Women in Sports at UC Berkeley. We have the New York Times article mentioning it and quoting her.

The thing about my mom, and this certainly affected my view of women, is that, one, she was a jock, so that was very important. She was not your typical ladylike housewife. Two, she decided to marry my father, who didn’t fit in the mold of the kind of people that Wellesley graduates married, or her two sisters who went to Wellesley.

She had dated boys from Princeton and Yale but found them in that country club east coast set, boring. She always said that my father was the first person she met who didn’t bore her. He grew up poor and Jewish in New York, whereas in New York City, the very poor went to the University of North Carolina on a scholarship.

Then just after he began a career in journalism, he got drafted. The draft started in February of 1941, so he spent the entire war in the army. But it was a very interesting war for him in terms of journalism. Because very few people who were drafted in those days were even literate, his skills were recognized early on, and he got recruited to be on Yank Magazine, then to cover aspects of the war even for the New York Times and other newspapers.

My mother was thinking of a career in physical education and coaching originally, but because of my father’s influence, she got interested in journalism herself. So, when they moved out to LA, my father wrote a screenplay, which gave them enough money to buy a house on a GI loan in Culver City. But he’d already begun a career writing for the New York Times, the Saturday Evening Post, major magazines. He didn’t want to be a screenwriter.

My mother began her journalism career by writing for different Hollywood magazines like Screen Gems and others, where she would interview husband and wife and write about their homes and their lifestyles. She did an interview with Mr. and Mrs. Gregory Peck and wrote about their house and their furniture and their lifestyle.

She also met a woman who was very influential named Elizabeth Gordon. Elizabeth Gordon was called in those days a “Lucy Stoner,” which is to say she kept her own name. So, although she was married to a man named Norcross, which is my middle name, she was Elizabeth Gordon, and she was the editor of House Beautiful. She was incredibly influential in the ’50s and ’60s using that magazine. You’ve heard the name Anna Wintour now and some other editors. Well, she was the equivalent. She had a famous affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. She introduced America to Danish modern architecture, to Shibui, a form of Japanese architecture and aesthetic.

She made my mother the family editor of House Beautiful. My mother could work from home writing articles about middle class living in America, getting credit and getting paid for it. And my parents even did an article about how they turned a basic GI loan house into a more interesting house. They were given by the builder a very spec home. And they said, “no, do this, do that, make these changes.”

Then through the magazine, they got donated various furniture, all made in America in those days. I remember a lot of the furniture was made in Wisconsin. And then they wrote an article about how they redesigned their home. Of course, they needed props. I was one of the props as a baby.

Over time, myself and my brother and sister, who were younger and were twins, would often be used by my parents in their articles because they didn’t want to pay professional models. I was very proud, because when you went off to public school, they would ask you, “what does your mother do?” Almost everybody would say “housewife.” I would say, “No, a journalist.”

The other thing is that we were probably one of the only families that had the New York Times delivered. The New York Times was flown in overnight, and there was a truck that drove around and threw it onto the front porch. So, we got the New York Times as well as other papers. As kids, we watched the GE College Bowl together. We, of course, watched the Ed Sullivan show. We watched all the classic TV shows of the era.

JW:  When did you get exposed to the women’s movement?

DS:  As I say, I had already had a predilection for smart women. I observed in my own school the typical high school dichotomy between smart women and the cheerleader class of women. It was very obvious. I was part of a group, and this happened in other parts of the country, that when Sputnik went up, we got recruited into special classes because we were going to ‘beat the Russians’. In our case, we were even given a little card that said you were “MCL – More Capable Learners.”

I obviously noticed that the women who were in our group were very smart and they were interesting, but they weren’t that athletic, they weren’t that good-looking, they weren’t cheerleaders. Then there were the cheerleaders, some of whom have been my friends for life, who were very smart but felt the culture didn’t reward them for being smart. It rewarded them for being good-looking, for being cheerleaders to join a sorority.

So that whole pressure on women was obvious to me and also felt by my various friends. I tended to go out with women who I thought were interesting, not simply physically attractive. And that was certainly a factor in who I ended up with in various life partners.

So, I guess I was never interested in what were called “bimbos.” And among our friends, we did not tolerate that putting down or categorizing of women. I had a strong coterie of male friends through sports and through my classes. And so, I guess I would say that we did not buy into the stereotypes that you saw on “Leave It To Beaver” or “Father Knows Best.” We were critical of all of that.

JW:  When did you learn about the women’s movement, which was from the ’60s through the ’80s?

DS:  I would say I was aware of the history of the women’s movement because I had a very good history teacher in high school. I knew about the fight to win the vote, the pre-world World War II history. The phrase “Lucy Stoner” I actually knew and I learned who she was. When I got to Yale and into all the Ivy Leagues, I had not really paid that much attention that it was all male, and I did not like it. I disliked the atmosphere, and I disliked the whole approach.

Our president in our freshman year basically said, “We are a thousand males chosen to lead.” And it was clear that the women at Vassar College had been chosen to be our helpmates. They might be well-educated and know French and good cooking, but they weren’t going to lead. We were going to lead. And I did not like this. I was in California, and I had some women friends who surfed and did other interesting things. And I thought, “What have I gotten myself into?”

We also had the culture of what were called mixers. Women would be bused in, and then they would be treated like objects. The guys would get drunk and try and pick up somebody. And actually, meeting a woman as a person was made very difficult. I didn’t enjoy it. I rebelled against it, in the sense that I didn’t buy into it. I could frankly say that while I had an interesting college education, it was not fun. They were not happy, fun years for me. And one of the issues I got involved in was fighting to allow women to go to Yale.

But the politics for me was very much conditioned by two things, the civil rights movement, because that was much more visible than the women’s movement, and the other was the Vietnam War. The women’s movement had hardly started. We watched on television, when I was growing up, the funeral for Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney.

I had watched what was going on with Martin Luther King. I was very affected by the Cold War, and we experienced the Cuban Missile Crisis my junior year.  Our response was to think that the people in charge had totally lost it, if they were going to maybe blow up the world over this. So, one of the results is that in my senior year, I went to UCLA. There was a program for high school students in LA.

JW:  This was senior year in high school?

DS:  Yes. You could take up to two classes at UCLA if you passed the test, and I did. So I took psychology and I took Russian. I had decided, “well, I’m going to learn Russian and end the Cold War.” So my emphasis at Yale, I took intensive Russian my freshman year, and I was very involved throughout the four years in the anti-Vietnam War movement, as well as tangentially in the civil rights movement. That was my initial politics and being well aware of that.

I would say my experience of the women’s movement wasn’t as a movement yet. It was really the issue of co-education. There’s a book called Yale Needs Women, which takes the title from a famous movie called “Mars Needs Women,” when Martians are sent to Southern California to find beautiful women to recreate Mars as populace.

My sister was somewhat influential. She was like my mother. She became a journalist at Stanford when she went there as an undergraduate. But she was also complaining about how women were treated. She even felt my father didn’t treat her equally, although we thought she was actually the apple of my father’s eye.

But she was a journalist at Stanford and four years behind me at university. But anyway, I publicly spoke out. I helped organize what we called a sleep-in. We invited women from the women’s colleges to sleep-out in a camp-out. I produced a wall poster, and I used a picture of my sister on it. It said, “Please, Mr. Brewster (who was the President of Yale), why can’t I come to Yale?” It editorialized in favor of co-education.

As a result of what we were doing, and certainly the changing times, Yale initially announced they were going to merge with Vassar, and that was going to be their solution. But then the Vassar trustees turned down the proposal. And finally, Yale announced that it was going to admit women, but I didn’t benefit from it because the first class of women was not until 1971.

JW:  When did you graduate?

DS:  1968. I’m the same age as President Trump, President George Bush, who was in my class at Yale, Oliver Stone, and a lot of other people, but there were no women in our class. Yale was one of the first, and then I think Princeton followed. When I tell students today, they don’t believe it. They didn’t have women at Yale when I was there. It’s unbelievable to me. Ancient history.

I was mainly involved in dealing with the Vietnam War, and I moved to Washington, DC. I do remember quite clearly when Nixon was elected, after Johnson had dropped out and all the events of ’68 happened. There was a big rally, and it had famous men speaking, of course. The journalist, Oliver Stone, was there covering it, who I knew a bit, and others.

At the end, they let one or two women speak, or the women who had demanded to speak. One was a woman named Marilyn Webb. When Marilyn got up, a lot of the guys started booing her. I also remember one of the black leaders saying that the position of women in the movement should be prone. I forget who said that.

But I took a picture of Marilyn, and I was taking photos, too, in those days, and I was a part-time journalist. After the events, I printed them up, and I took one over to her house, and that’s how I became friends with Marilyn and Lee Webb, who were both early SDS, and you probably know some of Marilyn’s history in the women’s movement.

Then I got involved with a woman from Vassar, who ended up being my first partner, who was a strong woman. Ultimately, we ended up together, and she got into the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. A few years later, we moved to Tufts or near Tufts, where I taught and I became one of the editors of a weekly newspaper, the Boston Phoenix, Boston After Dark, which is one of the first what we call C-level newspapers.

It had advertising, but it was run by the editors. I hired smart women to work on some projects. I organized a summer raiders-like investigation of the Pentagon. Two of the women on our team, one was a woman named Mary McCarthy. Mary was the daughter of Senator Eugene McCarthy, and a really smart, tough, interesting woman, as was her mother, Gene’s wife, who was head of Churchwomen’s United.

And then another woman I hired was Kerry Gruson. Kerry’s mother was a woman named Flora Lewis, who was, I think, the first, at least postwar, syndicated columnist in the New York Times, a very famous journalist, Flora Lewis. Her husband was Sydney Gruson, who was one of the editors of the New York Times.

So, I had these two interesting, strong women as friends. And I was going out with this smart woman from Vassar, who I ended up living with in Cambridge. So, I was working with smart women and living with one. And then something called the Cambridge Goddard Graduate School was started, and Lee Webb was very involved with it, Marilyn Webb and others. A historian you probably know named Gordon, who’s a professor at NYU, very famous. Anyway, these were early serious, organized feminists, and they even gave an MA in Feminist Studies at the Cambridge Goddard School. And my partner Patricia taught some of the Feminist Studies classes.

So, I’m in the position of being a friend of the movement, living with it, having friends who are in it, but I’m not in it or of it other than to be a supporter. In those days, too, I wrote a monthly column for Ramparts magazine, if you remember Ramparts. It was called the Almanac, and I would talk about different issues and then provide the addresses, how you could subscribe, how you could join and stuff. And of course, I wrote one on the women’s movement, and I promoted Our Bodies Ourselves. I knew some of the women who were involved in putting that together.

I made no claims to direct the women’s movement or be an advisor or anything else, but I was entirely in favor of it, as was my sister and my mother and the people I was living with and all our friends. I would say all my male friends were pretty much of the same outlook. My friends of those times, the women they married or lived with tended to be women who had careers, who were writers or lawyers or doctors or activists.

JW:  During those years, we did not experience that many men who were that supportive.

DS:  Well, as I say, there was a self-interest here, too, because my view is who wants to spend time with somebody who you aren’t really friends with, don’t have an intellectual interest or that you dominate? I mean, that didn’t appeal to me as a person.

In the rise of women athletics, I would have loved to be a woman soccer player, but I didn’t mention that when I was in high school, I was on the varsity basketball team, the tennis team. We had no sports teams for women. And one of my friends, who was a cheerleader, who’s been a friend for life, only recently told me she wanted to play basketball, not be a cheerleader. Her daughter became a varsity basketball player at the University of Utah, and she was so proud.

But then thinking about it, she said, “I could have done that.” And she didn’t have the opportunity. So again, I was aware at the time that women were not being allowed these opportunities. And certainly, in our house, we supported Billy Jean King. One of my sister’s classmates from her school was a woman named Julie Anthony, who did become a professional tennis player. And Julie was friends with Billy Jean King, and I’m still friends with Julie and Billy Jean King to this day. One of the other girls who went to school with my sister, Sally Ride, became the first woman astronaut.

JW:  You have a lot of this background from your mom and your upbringing that you likely carried through your entire life and career. Is that true?

DS:  Oh, absolutely. Another partner became the mayor of the city of Santa Monica, and I was the campaign manager. My campaign staff were all smart women. And one of them, who was then a graduate student at UCLA, is now the dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and a very famous professor of international law.

Another one married Joe Cocker, which is pretty funny. I was and continued to be friendly and a contemporary of Hillary Clinton, whom I met. I knew her husband during university days before, but I was an advisor to Hillary in both of her presidential runs. I’ve supported a woman for President.

My wife, Sue, these days was the first woman to create childcare at the University of Berkeley. And then became the chief lobbyist for children in the state legislature and then organized childcare for migrant workers. And there’s actually a childcare center in the Central Valley named after her.

And she continues to this day to work on issues of diversity, both in terms of race and sex, and something that’s all under attack these days. So clearly, I would say what we feel right now in our household, and I’m sure you and others are feeling it, is there is an all-out attack and assault on all the social change that we experienced, which I just described, and which I think younger people don’t realize how far we’ve come.

We very much feel the attack, I mean, the abortion issue is clearly one, but the fact that Trump has fired a number of leading black women. I mean, it’s racism and sexism, and we don’t have to go on to Trump’s views on women or the kind of women he’s been married to.

So we feel it very viscerally, what’s going on is an attack against all of the accomplishments of our generation over the years and all the social change that’s taken place in the country and real equality, which certainly I would say equality among men and women is the greatest in the country’s history in terms of all the change in women’s status. And that all happened because people fought for it, passed legislation, argued for it, and now it’s under attack. I mean, Trump is trying to go back to the ’50s.

But I mean there are a lot of admirable people out there. I didn’t mention I was adviser to a man named Tom Hayden when he ran for the Senate and friends with his then wife, Jane Fonda. I knew Jane pretty well. Her daughter and my daughter went to school together, and I very much followed and understood Jane’s art of her life being used as a typical movie star and then becoming an activist.

Now, to this day, she’s producing TV and out there speaking out and being an activist in her 80s, really admirable. There are lots of those people, some more famous than others, that are still doing it. My sister-in-law was a famous woman mathematician, who was a great role model. I would say that most of my best students whom I’ve been teaching at Occidental have been women. So, I’m still engaging with younger women who are trying, and they’re all trying to figure out career, how to navigate all these issues, and they’re not backing down.

JW:  Do you have some final thoughts that you would like to end this interview with?

DS:  All the gains in progress that have been made in women’s status came through political struggle as well as personal change and struggle. And we shouldn’t be surprised at the pushback that comes. And there are always going to be obstacles to this kind of change because it’s so fundamental if you’re talking about human beings and how one part of half of the species treats the other. And we know historically how it was.

The 20th century was a great change. And keeping that change into the 21st, now it’s clear, still involves political struggle. But I think for the younger people, our students, our granddaughter, who’s a junior at USC, it almost comes naturally to them to expect to be treated equally. That’s why when I tell our granddaughter, “I went to university, and they didn’t take women.” She doesn’t believe it. Oh, that was hundreds of years ago. So overall, I’m optimistic.

But we could talk about other issues like climate change or war, and those are different factors that won’t go on. But that’s what I’m worried more about those issues and about race these days than about whether the women’s movement is going to be pushed back. I don’t think it will.