THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Dr. Myrna Goldenberg

“I was born on March 8, International Women’s Day.  I was destined to be a feminist.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, October 2022

MG:  I’m Myrna Goldenberg. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 8, 1937. The March 8th date should ring a bell. International Women’s Day. I was  destined to be a feminist.

JW:  Tell us a little about your childhood and your ethnic background, siblings. What do you think put you on your path? Besides your birthday, I mean.

MG:  Well, I came from East New York, Brooklyn, which was a tough lower economic neighborhood. My only sibling, my brother, was nine years older. We were very close all our lives—the age difference was never a barrier to our love for each other. I grew up in a normal Jewish home. The whole six family building was a very comfortable, very loving, very warm environment because every apartment housed a relative. So, I had my choice of where to eat every night. Money was always tight, but I know I had a very good childhood despite having very little in the way of material goods. I went to public schools and to CCNY, and I got the best education that you could get. If I remember correctly, the tuition for the first year was $5. a semester, and it went to $10. a semester by the time I graduated. Ir was an urban school, so train fare and books had to be figured in the budget. CCNY was remarkable.

But I was silenced there. I enrolled in CCNY the second year it became coed, and it was obvious that the professors were not comfortable with calling on the women in their classes. So, I was almost silent for four years. I just never said anything except to my classmates. But then I went to graduate school where I found my voice and was involved and loved it.

I met my husband when I was 15. He lived across the street, and we went to the same high school. In fact, I have to admit that I went to CCNY and not Brooklyn College because he went to CCNY, and we went to school by subway together.  Our history is very romantic; we’re still married and it’s been 65 plus years.

Ours is a beautiful love story. We have three great kids…two of whom live in New York City and one in Boston. Our daughter in Boston is our youngest. She’s an English teacher at Milton Academy. Our oldest child is Liz, and she lives ver near  where the World Trade Center used to be and works for Bloomberg, and our son is a psychiatrist on the Upper West Side and is affiliated with Cornell and Columbia.  I consider myself blessed. I have had my share of what everybody else has had—woes, loss, disappointments,  and the usual that life brings, but I’ve also had joys and love and gratification. I’ve been lucky and had a blessed life.

JW:  Do you want to say what CCNY stands for?

MG:  City College of New York. I don’t know how many of the viewers realize this or are aware of the fact that is was a scholarship school. You could not buy your way in. And it was a tough school. At that point, it had more Nobel Prize winners teaching than even Harvard. It was also very competitive. On the first day, the provost or dean or whoever it was who welcomed us into the Great Hall told us to  look on our right, look on our left. In a year, he said, half of you will not be here, and he meant it. As I said, it was very competitive.

JW:  Let’s talk about how you got interested in women’s studies and women’s issues.

MG:  I don’t know when I wasn’t interested in women’s issues, I really don’t. After graduate school, we moved to New Jersey, and then to Ohio, and  finally wound up in the DC area. We had three young kids, and I was very interested in what was going on socially and politically. What was going on for me was the women’s movement. It was the early ’70s.

I tried to connect with women’s groups but in this area, it the women’s movement strongly I’m embarrassed to say, it but I have to say it, almost anti-male/husband. And I was not anti-husband, so I didn’t connect very well. But, very soon after that, I joined the faculty at Montgomery College and recognized  that there needed to be a women’s studies program on campus, and I helped develop it and became involved in the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA).

There were very, very strong women in the NWSA. For a while, I was even on the board, so I never didn’t think of myself as strongly feminist. I taught women’s literature, women’s studies, and minority literature.

One day John Yarnell, the head of the department, an older, gray haired, distinguished fellow said to me, “You’re going to be the next chair.” I was stunned. And I protested, “No, I’m not ready.” He countered, “Yes, you are.” I knew that there was another woman professor who would be angry if she didn’t get the position first.

So, I said, “Let Anne get it, and then I’ll follow, if that’s okay with you.” And of course, it was, and I became the chair of a department with 73 faculty members. We wound up dividing it into two separate parts, ESOL and English.

The meeting with Dr. Yarnell was a turning point in my career.  I thought to myself, “Wow, that’s what he thinks of me, maybe I ought to start thinking of myself that way.” It was funny because then I thought about it and I said, “Why did I need a man to tell me that?” I had all these leadership qualities. My husband had been pushing me to accept leadership roles and enabling me as well, so taking a leadership role was natural.

MG:  I can’t tell you when the feminist movement wasn’t a significant part of my personal and professional life. I did my graduate work in the history of women’s higher education and that led to my interest in Jewish women’s history and work. Eventually my dissertation was on a woman named Annie Nathan Meyer, who was the founder of Barnard College, and who never got credit for it. Or didn’t get credit until maybe 20 years ago, after a long time of being denied credit.

The Ford Foundation gave me a two year grant at one point to teach minority literature, including women’s literature, to selected community college faculty throughout the United States so that they, in turn, would incorporate that work into their syllabi. The grant included Native American community colleges, where the women had been unappreciated, and being able to bring the women elders to the foreground and to them tell the stories of their tribes, felt great.

Going to historically Black community colleges in the south, and in LA, to talk about teaching Black women’s literature to people who had been thinking that they needed to teach the standard White curriculum so that their students could succeed in White society to give them Zora Neale Hurston and Pauli Murray and others—that was just exciting for me.

JW:  I want to go back to the Native Americans because I always had this understanding that women could be the chief. I think of Wilma Mankiller, but maybe she was an exception. You’re saying women really were not regarded that well?

MG:  Women were regarded well, but they were not the teachers. When we went to two large Native American community colleges in the Northwest where, in fact, the dean was a Native American who said, “Yes, we want you to come and talk to our faculty, but we want something else, too. We want to teach our history and who knows our history? It’s the women in the tribe who know the history.” And so, they organized, a Pow Wow; it was a huge gathering of three generation of Osage tribal members.

The older women of the tribe talked to the next generation, admonishing them to not forget their heritage and to be proud of who they were. It was the women who had kept the history. They were the historians of the tribe in a very real sense, not in an academic sense. And then afterwards, the Ford Foundation  took that history,  published it, and gave it to the tribe.

And they couldn’t have done it without the Ford Foundation’s grant of $10,000. That’s all it took. But what the Foundation said to me was, “Do you need more money, we’ll find it, we’ll do it.” It really was a wonderful time of growth.

JW:  Tell us a little about this woman who founded Barnard.

MG:  I was studying the history of higher education in America and also very interested in women’s higher education. I happened upon the autobiography  of a woman—I say “happened” because we scoured libraries and used bookstores to find source material. Very little work on women’s higher education history had been published. I discovered Annie Nathan Meyer’s first autobiography. She was a Jewish woman who, at the age of 15, went to Columbia College where she had enrolled in the  Collegiate Course for Women. It hadn’t satisfied her intellectual needs.

She went to the library and approached Melvil Dewey (of the Dewey Decimal System) demanding, “I want to study the same thing that men study.” He was really annoyed with her and  said, “You can’t go to this college, so start your own college.”

Literally, that’s what happened. She went from rich person to rich person to rich person whom she identifies in a book called Barnard Beginnings, asking for pledges to build a woman’s college. And she got them. This was 1885. And the school opened in 1887.

It took a while to build up the student body. It had, I think, in the beginning, eight women students. I don’t remember the number of faculty, but it had faculty and a dean, and it grew, obviously. Eventually, though, she went to Jacob Schiff for funds. He wanted to give $750,000 dollars to build a dormitory for women students to live together, irrespective of their class or religion. Nicholas Murray Butler, head of Columbia, approved. Annie wanted it named Schiff Hall, a customary way of acknowledging donors.

And that was the beginning of Columbia’s refusal to acknowledge the her Jewish Schiff’s. I found documentation in the Columbia manuscript room of Nicholas Murray Butler writing to Virginia Gildersleeve, who was the dean at Barnard, “Oh, we can’t allow it to be named Schiff Hall, because then it will attract too many Hebrews,” and so on.

So, there was a lot of antisemitism. It was a shocker for me to have proof of that. Annie was a very, very feisty lady, and she would not give up and kept writing to Butler and Gildersleeve to point out that naming a building for its donor was a usual occurrence.

Finally, Schiff said to her, “Let it go. I’m giving you the money, and I know what’s happening with trying to name it for me.” It became Barnard Hall. Frederick Barnard did not believe in coeducation, but he believed in women’s education, and he was a compromise.

But Annie did not give up. She was, to the very end of her life, actively recruiting not only Jewish students although she didn’t have to recruit them, they came, but also minority women. She sponsored Zora Neale Hurston as a student at Barnard. It really is a fascinating story.

Her ambition was to be writer. She wrote about five novels, none of which was very readable; she needed a good editor.  She also wrote and had published 350 letters to the editor in the Herald Tribune. She was interested in everything, and said so. And she was a playwright who had several plays on Broadway, none of which lasted long.

Her plays were very talky, and they would have been fine for radio programs, but she didn’t see it that way. She wrote one very good play that was on Broadway for a while called, Black Souls, attacking discrimination. To me, she’s underappreciated. I want to return to my dissertation. It’s something that I want to work on now and get published.

I got involved in Holocaust literature and Holocaust history right after I got my PhD. My husband and I took a trip to Vienna where attended a conference at the International Atomic Energy Commission, and I tagged along. We wanted to visit Auschwitz, but because he had a very high level of clearance, we couldn’t do that. The State Department suggested a visit to Mauthausen  instead. We went to Mauthausen, a concentration/death camp, and it changed my life.

We were the only two people “touring” the camp that morning, and I wound up in the gas chamber inadvertently. It changed my life. It traumatized me. I recognized in an instant that I was in a room like no other. I looked up and saw  pipes with the jets. I looked down and saw that there was no drain; it was a white tiled room with blue streaks; I was in the gas chamber.

My next recollection was that I was in another building. My husband said I screamed, and he came to take me out of that room. That was another turning point.

I immersed myself in Holocaust history and literature, and I asked, along with other women scholars, “So where are the women?” We have tons of memoirs by men that were written and published, but there were very few published memoirs by women. There were about seven of us feminist historians who were interested in this subject and who were excoriated by the Commentary Magazine editor Gabriel Schoenfeld, who became aware of what we were doing, which was trying to bring the life, and the death, the stories of Jewish women in the Holocaust, to the academic forefront.

We gave papers on the subject, and he accused us of diluting Holocaust history, but it didn’t deter us. In fact, it made us very, very visible and we even made it to the pages of the Wall Street Journal.  Research on women and the Holocaust became my passion. I am certain that we absolutely changed the way Holocaust history was taught and brought insights to the subject that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

JW:  Like what?

MG:  Women coped differently than men did because of their biology. Women’s biology means menstruation and childbirth. That was verboten by the Nazis. Women were subject to rape. They were subjected to physical humiliation. Women of that era were socialized differently. Relatively few women were independent or worked out of the home.

And so, women were taken into the camps, and only women and men between the ages of 15 and 45 were allowed to live, their fertile years. Anyone over 45 or 50 was gassed right away on arrival because they would not have been good or profitable laborers.

The women who were incarcerated, who were in the prisons, in the concentration camps wrote and talked about using, consciously or unconsciously, the skills that they learned as homemakers. Women who had worked together in sisterhoods and in women’s groups adapted those experiences to their lives in the camp. If you read women’s memoirs, ultimately, you’re going to come across a line that says, I couldn’t have survived without so and so helping me, another woman. Of course, not every woman survivor attributes her survival to another woman or acknowledges adapting pre-camp skills to her camp life.

Women tended to bond into surrogate families to care for one another. Men had connections also, but women intensely credited other women with their survival. Women even coped differently with hunger. Women talked about recipes. They shared recipes. And these are women who probably never cooked because their mothers and grandmothers and older aunts cooked in multi-generation family households.

But they remembered these menus. They remembered these recipes. I don’t think I would like to replicate them and serve them to my family because they’re memories that were remembered in horrible conditions. But there are cookbooks that women survivors have produced. The importance of sharing a recipes cannot be ignored. When you share a recipe and you have a group of women talking about cooking, asking“How do you make this? You’re from Hungary, so you make crepes a certain way. You’re from France, you make them another way,” their talk and even arguments about the cooking brings them together purposefully. These discussions reveal that these women had a sense of the future and were not going to be prone to giving up. There is an unconscious sense of the future when you teach somebody something, especially if you teach it to a younger person.

There were these socialization type differences between the way men and women coped. In fact, Victor Frankel, a name that most people know, a survivor  and psychiatrist, challenged the men in the camp who talked about food because he said, “It makes it worse for you.” Well, for women, it didn’t. So minor differences were really not so minor.

Women had the ability to sew; and they had more experience sewing. If you didn’t sew a button on the right way, you could get whipped by a guard. There were many routine behaviors of women that contributed to their survival. Obviously, men who were tailors could sew a button, but how many men prisoners were tailors.

Our work changed the way other feminist scholars, and male scholars too, had to acknowledge that there were differences. In fact, one of the titles of one of my books is Different Horrors, Same Hell. And it was the same hell. Women were not shown any kind of leniency because they were women. They were beaten the same way, they were starved the same way, but their lives, because of their biology and their socialization, were different.

JW:  Of course, we’ve heard about Mengele and experiments on women’s bodies. Did you run across that at all?

MG:  I ran across it, of course. I’ve read about women in childbirth who had their uteruses sewn up to see how they would manage if they couldn’t deliver when they were in labor. We have documentation of women whose breasts were cut off. We have evidence of rapes and brutality, all kinds of torture relative to rape. We have evidence of women’s pregnant bellies that were slit to see how the fetus would manage outside the womb. Mengele once sewed twins together to see how they would function. Well, of course, they died. And never any anesthetic, nothing sterile. Gruesome is not even the right word. I don’t know how to describe the horror.

JW:  And did you publish a lot of books?

MG:  The last book I published was called Before All Memory is Lost. And that’s a compilation of short memoirs by women survivors who emigrated to Canada. The Azrieli Foundation in Canada contacted me and asked me if I would review memoirs that were not full books, and find a way to organize those that were worth publishing.

I chose 21 of them for this book. It won the Canadian Holocaust National Award. It was a finalist for the US National Jewish Book Award, and I got some other prizes too.  I met some of these women at two events that the Azrieli Foundation organized, one in Toronto, one in Montreal. The Foundation  brought the women survivors who were in this book to two gatherings where I met them and their families.

It was heartwarming. Their happiness at having their stories told, and their families’ pride was a joy to experience. Their stories were, I wouldn’t say just recognized, but validated.

JW:  Well, in the second wave of feminism that we’re exploring here, it does seem to me that there was a disproportionate number of Jewish women participating. What do you think that’s about?

MG:  You know, Judy, I think your guess is as good as mine, but I think also, we feel strongly about truth and about making justice happen. And you can’t make justice happen if you don’t speak up or do something to change the world. Who was it who said, “I am in the world, to change the world?”

There’s a heavy presence of Jews in the world of jurisprudence, justice. I don’t know, is it with mother’s milk? But I could not in any way not do what I’m doing. And I think my sister feminists, scholars and so on, feel the same way. My hope is that we have transmitted that sense, and that responsibility, to make the world a better place.

I have to acknowledge my remarkable father. He was a bus driver. But he taught me that a person has to leave the world better than she found it, and it just becomes your motivation without being consciously aware of it. I just think it’s also part of the religion. If I’m not for myself, who am I? If I’m only for myself, what am I?

That’s Hillel, around the first century, so it is part of the heritage. I don’t want to sound chauvinistic, but I don’t know any other way to put it. Jews give a preponderance of charity to non-Jewish organizations, and one just has to do it.

JW:  So, tell us more about what you’re doing now.

MG:  I’m also trying very hard to say no to people who ask me to talk about the Holocaust. Yesterday I spoke to a group via a zoom lecture for Northwest Arkansas colleges, and I’m still giving talks. In two weeks, my synagogue has asked me to talk about America and the Holocaust, the Ken Burns tv presentation. I was a docent for the exhibition that motivated that six-hour program, and so they asked me to speak about it. I won’t do this without lots of preparation. No matter what I know, I will prepare again, probably read two more books. That takes time.

I want to go to a box full of my note cards, and a lot of the work that I did I did in the Library of Congress, because Annie’s books and plays are in the Library of Congress, and I spent a good deal of my graduate years in their reading room. I want to go back to that, and I can’t do that so easily if I’m doing  preparations for other projects. I’m adamant that I’m going to say no so I can go back to work on Annie [Nathan Meyer].

JW:  What would you say about the influence of the second wave feminist movement on yourself?

MG:  Thank goodness. As I said, it became natural for me. I never even considered not being part of what other women were doing to help other women. You know the line, “We are standing on the shoulders of those who preceded us,” and that’s how I feel. Look at the opportunities I’ve had. I think I was hired at Montgomery College with a bunch of other women because the government said you have to hire women and minorities. So, I was at the right time and in the right place.  I really want another life so I can enjoy all these things again and help make more good things happen.

JW:  So, give us any final thoughts you want to add.

MG:  I want some more justice in this world, and I want a whole bunch of Ruth Ginsburgs to get into the government. I really feel strongly about that. And I see my daughters and my son very strongly following in my footsteps—in their own ways. They’re not cloning me, but they are doing the things that I’m really proud of. We have to elect the right people. We have to march for the right causes. Is there a march that you ever missed while you’re living in DC? No, we went to everything. You just do it. And you just hope that it rubs off on others by example. I wish I had a magic statement. I wish I had something more profound to say. But just keep the torch and keep going. And elect the right people. And love thy neighbor as thyself. Isn’t that part of our heritage?