THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Elizabeth K. Spahn

“I never lost a case and I never charged a client.  I am a world class troublemaker.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, October 2025

ES:  My name is Elizabeth K. Spahn, and I was born December 18, 1949, in Chicago, Illinois.

JW:  Great. So tell us a little about your childhood, and what do you think led you to be the person that you became?

ES:  Well, it’s been a long journey, and I hope it’s not over yet.  I grew up in a small town, Park Forest, Illinois, which was one of the GI Joe housing – like Levittown housing communities. Park Forest, Illinois is fairly famous. There’s an exhibit at the Smithsonian about the GI Joe towns that features, that focuses on Park Forest.

And there’s also a famous sociology book called The Organization Man that is a scathing, judgy, nasty piece of work, but quite famous in sociology circles. It was [about] 10,000 people, and it was a utopian-type, experiment. It was founded by a man named Phil Klutznick, who wanted to ensure that we didn’t have the types of divisions and segregation that had enabled the Holocaust.

So our town was about a third Jewish, a third Catholic, and a third Protestant, and we had joint religious instruction, and it was a very kumbaya utopian type of community.  This is not to say it was also the organization man, a lot of corporate 1950s traditional housewives. And a lot of returning veterans with what we now call PTSD, a lot of hidden violence and cruelty that, you know, so I don’t mean to paint too rosy a picture, but it was a very interesting place to grow up.

JW:  And it was not racially integrated.

ES:  It was not racially integrated until I think it was my junior year of high school. And a Black family, a doctor, medical doctor – I think he was on the faculty at the University of Chicago – a very, very prominent, highly educated family who happened to be Black was going to move in. And I’ll never forget the night before the family was due to arrive in the morning, there was an emergency meeting in our living room.

My father at that time was the president of the Rotary Club, and the neighbor to the Black doctor’s family had just put up a 10-foot-high wooden fence, painted it black on one side and white on the other side. And there was an emergency meeting in my living room with my dad and the minister of our church, Dr. Gerson Engelmann, and a bunch of leading men.

And they identified the neighbor worked for a department store called Goldblatt’s. They called the manager of Goldblatt’s, who called the employee and said, “That fence comes down before 8:00 AM tomorrow morning or you’re fired.” And the fence came down. I’m not sure whether the Black doctor ever knew. I was very proud of my dad.

JW:  That’s an amazing story. So when did you get interested in the women’s movement?

ES:  Well, I was in the first entering class of women at Yale College. So in 1969, which was an exciting year, Yale College decided to admit women into the undergraduate college. And there were 3 groups: freshmen, sophomores, and juniors. I was a sophomore. I had transferred. I was transferring into Yale.

And so when I got to Yale, I discovered a very, very different world than my little, you know, kumbaya, utopian, egalitarian, Midwestern kind of community. The summer before I went to Yale, I was the Dwight David Eisenhower Republican Party intern for the state of Illinois Republican Party.

JW:  Oh, wow. So what made you want to go to Yale?

ES:  Land of Lincoln. We’re very proud, right? The land of Lincoln. Republican was the flavor of the month, and within 6 weeks of getting to Yale, I had become a left-wing feminist activist. I mean, it took Yale only 6 weeks to create me.

JW:  So, but why did you apply to transfer anyway?

ES:  I didn’t, actually. My roommate’s father had gone to Yale, and Yale admitting women was this big deal. You know, the New York Times and the whole East Coast had their knickers in a twist. Yeah, superwomen and blah blah. I didn’t know where Yale was. I don’t think I’d ever heard of Yale. I was at George Washington. I wanted to go in the Foreign Service, and my roommate didn’t do very well academically the fall semester, so her dad had sent her an application for Yale, but it was clearly not in the cards.

So as a prank, a couple of my roommates got together, filled the application out, and submitted it for me. Got my transcripts. And the next thing I knew, when I came back from winter break, I made the first cut. I thought Yale was in Boston. And I didn’t really know, but everybody was so excited. You know, my professors were like, everybody on the East Coast was really just…so I thought, well, this must be a good thing. I literally thought Yale was in Boston.

JW:  Oh, wow. So, okay, let’s go back to what made you become suddenly an almost different person.

ES:  I think I’m the same person. I think I just found different language and philosophy to describe values that I learned as a child in the Midwest, in a small town in flyover country. And when I got to Yale, I discovered what I now call, you know, the wannabe British aristocrats. These are people who are just so proud of something that their great-great-great-great-great-grandfather did. As if— it’s just, it’s bizarre to me, you know. They’re proud of the elitism and the exclusiveness. And whether that’s intellectual elitism or economic elitism, it’s still elitism.

And that snobbery and the condescension. So I’m standing in the common room of my residential college at Yale. I think it was like the first week I was there. And there are two very tall – I’m short; I’m like 5’2″, 5’3″ – they’re two very tall white men, full professors, tenured full professors, debating literally over my head whether women should be educated at Yale. And very entitled, very smug, completely oblivious to me and the fact that I’m standing there.

And  the conservative was saying, oh no, you know, it’s a waste of resources. Women should stay home and cook and clean. And my mother was an accomplished musician. I mean, and my dad was really proud of her. I mean, this was really weird to me, backwards, you know, like a caveman. And the progressive guy was saying, oh no, it’s good to educate women at Yale because then they’ll be able to provide a better education for their sons. I thought to myself, wow, these people are really strange.

JW:  I love it.

ES:  I mean, they really did not see women as humans, right? And that was a real shock to me. Now, I’m not saying that Park Forest or my family was perfect or that there wasn’t misogyny. That’s not what I’m saying. But I was raised in an environment where human beings of all races, religions, and genders— and I might add, my parents had a conservatory of music and dance, so there were just tons of gay people coming in and out of the house. Now, I was very virginal. I didn’t know what gay was. I didn’t know what anything was. But you judge people on their talent. And as long as the talent exceeds the temperament, we’re good to go.

JW:  So did you start a women’s group or anything?

ES:  Oh yeah. Within 6 weeks, Yale had kicked me out. I was academically dismissed for rabble-rousing. That had to do with the first Yale student strike. There was a waitstaff person at Branford College who had been harassed. We didn’t have the language then. We call it sexual harassment now. And she had complained. And next thing she was fired. And then the SDS, this is the SDS era, went on strike. And the student strike.

In any event, I managed to get— you know, I was all about treating the waitress, waitstaff, as a human being with dignity. But she was a townie, and she was Black. And a Yale man pretty much could do whatever he wanted. So, we had a sit-in, and a bunch of us, I think there were, my memory’s not great, Judy, I’m sorry, I think 63. There’s a book Ann Perkins wrote. She’s a historian. Facts and numbers and dates are in her book. She’s a real historian.

Anyway, 63 of us managed to get academically dismissed, including 3 women. I was one of the 3. And it sort of took off from there. We got reinstated. John Wilkinson, the Dean of Students at Yale College, is one of my heroes. John Wilkinson, may he rest in glory as an ally and a friend. But anyway, we got back in eventually. And George May was the Dean of the Faculty. May his name live in infamy.

So, you know, we had allies and we had enemies, and it was pretty much like it is now. When I got back into Yale, and I was allowed to return to my dorm room because when they dismissed us, they made me homeless. I had no place to sleep. I was homeless. I had no place to sleep, no money. I was a scholarship student, no food, couldn’t have access to the dining hall. My friends would smuggle food.

Anyway, so we got back in, and, and a group of us, Kit McClure and I, decided to form— there was no way for the women to meet each other. We had been divided into the 12 residential colleges. We had no way to find each other. And by this time, I realized that, you know, I missed having other women. There were so few of us. So Kit and I started what became known as the Sisterhood. In those days, you know, it was women. The language was very gendered, and it was very binary still. We hadn’t invented language like gender or sexual harassment or date rape.  All that was yet to come.

ES:  So we called it the Sisterhood, and we met in the basement, and we founded the Yale Women’s Center, which is still there. And I’m told by Anne Perkins that it is one of, if not the only, still intact women’s centers from that 1969, 1970 era.

Then eventually we had what, what we then called consciousness-raising groups, which were really important to me. Robin Morgan’s book Sisterhood is Powerful. Kate Millett’s book. We had some very sophisticated, to my eyes, sophisticated women, girls from New York City who had been involved with the Redstockings, and they brought these books to the consciousness-raising groups.

And it was an epiphany. I mean, I learned about all kinds of things I didn’t know about, like incest and rape. And we had one of the first rape speak-outs together with the New Haven Women’s Liberation Organization. It was a joint Yale and New Haven. I loved it. One of the important things that I did personally, and I don’t want to talk too much about because this was collective, we were a collective, right? No stars. No stars collective.

So a group of us, and particularly Dahlia Rudavsky and I, lobbied to get courses in Yale College on what we would now call gender studies. At that time, it was women in law, women in history, women in psychology, women in— and there was nothing.

I mean, there were hardly any women on the Yale faculty, and there were no courses. And George May, assured me and Dahlia that there was no such thing as women’s history. You might as well have the history of— and I’ve forgotten whether he said children or dogs, I can’t remember, but it was one of, you know.

So we managed. So I spent one summer in Sterling Library finding all these books about women in history because there was literally nothing. There was no curriculum, there were no textbooks, there was nothing. The librarians helped me in the quest. I discovered Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Mary Wollstonecraft. I mean, literally, I was in the library, you know, discovering and creating this curriculum to prove to the Georges May that there was women’s history and there were materials. Now, and I think that of all the things I’ve done in my life, I’m very proud of that.

I think reclaiming and owning our history as women, and then of course later LGBTQ, you know, later as, as gay people were able to come out more or less safely, come out of the closet. It expands beyond the concept of woman. But at that time It was, you know, it was really groundbreaking. I don’t know if Yale College was the first women’s studies curriculum developed, but it’s certainly 1970 among the first. And when Yale does it, you know—

JW:  Yeah, it catches on.

ES:  New York Times pays attention, and we all know that’s what matters. So, in any event, I’m very, very proud of that work. Later, I went to law school. I picked a law school that had women on the faculty. So I went to Temple Law School, which at that time had 4, count them, 4 tenured women faculty members. Go Temple. And I loved Philly, loved Philly. And I got to go to the orchestra and hear Eugene Ormandy. I mean, I love Philly.

When I was a law student, I was very much involved in a movement called the Women and Law conferences. And this is something that I think is maybe getting lost. It was incredibly important at the time. So a lot of women went into law because we recognized we needed weaponry. And the Women in Law conferences would happen annually. I was the chair of the 7th Annual Conference on Women in Law, and this was I think it was 1976 or 1977.

And so my job was to develop the curriculum. So again, you know, I helped develop what we now call gender studies curriculum. And then I went to law school and as the co-chair and in charge of the panels, so we had a not very well-known, moderately well-known law professor named Ruth Bader Ginsburg give our keynote address, and I got to introduce her, and I got to say the famous line of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is to women’s rights as Prosser is to torts, which is a famous law joke that has a lot of different meaning because Prosser’s actually very conservative.

Oh, all the lawyers got it, you know, that I was saying something that was both complimentary and also insightful about Ruth Ginsburg. We had a lot of panels, but the ones that I am the most proud of— so we had probably, I would say, 120 panels. Lawyers and law— there weren’t that many law professors, but lawyers flew in from all over the country because there was no internet and there were no continuing legal education classes. And the technical stuff, you know, employment law, what eventually becomes credit discrimination law, we’re, you know, Title IX, all this stuff is happening right then and there.

And so we need technical exchange of legal information. But the most important ones were the panels on what we then called gay rights. In lots of states at that time, it was a crime, a felony, and people who were members of the bar, there are moral turpitude clauses. And so if someone came out of the closet or was arrested, they could lose their law license. And so it was very dangerous, and we had a lot of— and, and gay families needed legal help.

I mean, there was no gay marriage, right? They needed technical stuff— wills, trusts, insurance— the stuff we were trying to develop in the Women in Law conferences. And so what we did was we padded the panels with what we now call cis, or straight people to provide cover so that the gay and lesbian, and eventually at that time we didn’t really know about trans, or, you know, later on. But anyway, so we, we created, and, you know, it was— I can’t tell you, Judy, what a rush it was to be in an auditorium with 3,000 mostly women, a few male-identified, maybe gay or trans men, exchanging technical information about how to win these cases.

And the Women in Law conferences were so important, and I would like to make sure that the historians have access to that information. Temple was the one in the ’70s, and then University of Wisconsin did one the 8th, and then I think the 9th was at the University of Georgia.

And then sort of at that point, we start getting internet and we start getting digital ability, and they sort of petered out. We didn’t need to come together physically anymore. So I’m very, very proud of developing, helping to develop, be part of the group developing women’s studies, eventually gender studies, and the Women in Law conferences, which were technical expertise exchanges, but were also definitely a political movement and very, very important to gay, lesbian, and eventually trans families.

JW:  Wow, that’s amazing.

ES:  I did some good work.

JW:  I’m amazed because I graduated law school myself in ’76, and I [don’t] think I knew about these or I would have gone.

ES:  Where did you go?

JW:  I was here in DC.

ES:  You might not have needed— people in large urban areas maybe didn’t need it because they had women’s bar associations being formed at that time. So maybe you had enough of a community in DC.

So then after I graduated, I went to the University of Connecticut Law School as a clinical law, non-tenure-track clinical law teacher. And when I was at Connecticut Law School, I did the first lesbian mother custody case in Connecticut. And my hair turned white. I mean, it was unbelievable. They were going to take this woman’s children away from her.

I had been very active in reproductive freedom, and I’ve always been very and I still am very active in bodily autonomy, reproductive freedom. The lesbian custody case we won. She got to keep her children, but it was hair-raising. I did a really famous legal case called Geller v. Markham, which is age discrimination – a teacher, which falls most heavily on women.

Often women in that era would take a few years out of the labor market. They’d come back in and they would face not only gender but age [discrimination]. Anyway, Geller was a big case. I did a sex discrimination police case, Cher Chatterton against the town of East Windsor, Connecticut, in which I became the first lawyer to hold a town in contempt of court.

We won that one. I was doing pretty well. I never lost a case, and I never charged a client. I have never received even one penny directly from a client. I did a lot of employment discrimination cases. The losing defendant pays So I made a lot, you know, fair amount of money.

JW:  I was going to say, how did you survive?

ES:  Well, I had a faculty position. I always had a faculty position.

I have always had the luxury, and this is the Yale degree, you know, we were a single-issue stamp. There was only going to be one group of first women. And so people collected us like rookie cards.

JW:  I see.

ES:  So I used that. And I got a faculty position at Connecticut. And then I discovered that I’m really not a litigator. I don’t really thrive on conflict. I don’t— it’s not, you know, it takes a special kind of— it wasn’t— so I then I went on the market, and I got a position at New England Law in Boston, which was founded in 1908 as Portia Law school.

JW:  Oh, I didn’t know that.

ES:  And together with Washington College of Law, American University in DC.

JW:  That’s where I went.

ES:  Washington College of Law and New England Law both claim to be the first women’s law school. And so Janet Spragens, who was the first woman tenured at Washington College of Law, tax law, very dear friend of mine, may her memory be forever – she’s a wonderful person. So I was the first woman tenured at Portia Law School, and Janet was the first woman tenured at Washington College of Law. And we did a lot of research, and, you know, and we decided to split the difference, right? We were both the first women at the first women’s law schools.

JW:  Janet— Janet, I’m sorry, what?

ES:  S-P-R-A-G-E-N-S. Janet Spragens, Professor of Law, Layal Stiegel, now deceased. Tax law. Oh, and I did con law and she did tax law. And we’re both unbelievably brilliant. She was taken from us way too soon. Anyway, we’re going to call it a tie. You can argue depending on dates of incorporation, dates of first classes, and all that stuff. I’ll let the historians’ figure that out. I’m happy to be in part of the sisterhood.

We don’t need to have a star. We can be together. Anyway, so where was I? I went to New England School of Law, and they gave me a podium in constitutional law, despite the fact that I had not had a clerkship, which is very unusual. But the judges in Philadelphia at that time were not all that comfortable having a female law clerk, because you worked long hours. You’re in the chambers late at night. So, I didn’t have a clerkship.

Other judges did take female clerks. There were people who had, but I wasn’t one of the lucky ones. So, I got a con law podium. I’m not sure how. I think the Yale, I think that, you know, rookie card, that first women at Yale thing helped. And there was a network of Yale men alumni who mentored and helped me. And I’d like to acknowledge their courage and their kindness. Avi Swafer, Hugh McGill. And they mentored me and they opened doors and they fought battles so that I could cross thresholds.

I did not do this by myself, and it wasn’t— it was together with other women. But it was also together with progressive men. And I think that’s important to understand, that all of these firsts involve some men on the inside opening a door and holding it open with their bodies, fighting with conservative men, and giving women, minority, racial minorities, gay people, trans, giving outsiders a chance to cross that threshold and get on the inside.

Now, this DEI stuff — we were always 5 to 10 times more qualified than the guys on the inside. So it was 5 times harder to get into Yale as a woman. It was not a DEI situation. We were always Ginger Rogers. We did it all, everything Fred Astaire did backwards and in high heels. And many, you know, this DEI is such bad propaganda. We were so far qualified.

Yale men were furious when the women came in because we broke the gentleman’s C curve. We studied, we went to class. We weren’t going to waste this opportunity. Anyway, so I just want to thank the progressive men and women. There were very few women ahead of us. You know, the women who were did what they could.

But it, you know, it was, and it was a group effort. It was not stars. That was very important. And I give great credit to Gloria Steinem for resisting the media’s effort to turn her into a Kardashian. You know, a celebrity. I mean, Gloria— anyway, no stars was one of our guiding principles. No, don’t allow the media to create celebrities.

Now, this is the two edges of the sword because we operated relatively below the radar as a group, and therefore it’s hard for the historians to — and we want to preserve our history. So this project you’re doing is very important. Thank you. All right, so I get to, to Boston, and it’s the Troubles. It’s the time of the Troubles. They’re having riots over racial school integration, and I’m teaching at New England, which is— has an evening division, right?

This is not Harvard or Yale. This is working-class heroes, and I went there because I thought, well, maybe I could help, you know, kumbaya with my little Midwestern small-town values, right? And my con law prowess and my fancy Yale degree. I thought maybe I could help with the troubles. And I learned a lot.

I mean, I really learned so much from my students in Boston, and I’m very grateful to them. That particular period, epoch, was not particularly focused on gender. It was focused on race. So, I’m not sure. But anyway, I learned a lot about racism. A lot. And I had— I just, you know, it was a great— I loved my students. Those evening division students, working class heroes, first in their family to go to college, the only one returning to their parish or their neighborhood, going back to Roxbury or South Boston, legally educated with— I just, you know, I’m so grateful that I had that opportunity, and I loved my students.

And let’s see, I did a bunch of stuff. What did I do? I worked a lot on reproductive freedom, bodily autonomy. So I worked a lot with Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts. We tried to get paid parental leave so that poor people had real choices about whether and how many children to have. I’ve always been pro-choice. I do think people have the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy. I’ve done a series of YouTube videos recently on one of my scholarships.

It’s called Misconceptions: The Moment of Conception in Law, Science, and Religion, piece of scholarship I’m very proud of. I just did a YouTube trilogy and then a synopsis for the League of Women Voters. It’s on YouTube under my name. I did a lot of work on reproductive freedom, a lot of work with GLAAD, the gay and lesbian, bisexual, trans, queer. And eventually I had an early case involving a trans woman who was stripping to raise money.

She had to go to Sweden for her surgery in those days. So that was an obscenity case. She had been charged with obscenity. I’ve never lost a case. I’ve never lost, and I’ve never charged a client. So yeah, but I only took cases that I believed in, right? Because I was an academic. I didn’t have to make a living. I didn’t, you know, I didn’t. And I was training law students, and I wanted to take cases that the practicing bar couldn’t afford to do.

Because the practicing bar has overhead to meet, and, you know, yeah, yeah, I was an academic. I had a salary, and I had all these law students. So all I did was just make trouble. I mean, I’m just a world-class troublemaker. That’s about making good trouble, right? Yeah, the good trouble. I am a difficult woman. What else do we do? Oh, we did a bunch of stuff. I mean, I loved my time at New England, and I’m very grateful to Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts.

We were not successful in getting paid parental leave. That’s a whole book unto itself. I was unable to form an alliance with the Roman Catholic Church despite the best effort. And the Catholic Church is very powerful in Massachusetts. Despite the best efforts of one of my favorite students, Father Philip Earley, he and I really tried to get Cardinal Law, the now infamous pedophile protector. But that time we didn’t know about it. Anyway, we couldn’t get the Catholics on board. And this is paid parental leave.

JW:  Yeah, I mean, really, this is not anti-choice, this is not anti-life, you know.

ES:  This is to keep having babies, but we’re not going to help. Yeah, well, what did Barney Frank say? Barney Frank, who at that time was my congressman, in Newton, said, pro-life people care deeply about the life of the child right up until birth, right? And after that, the kid’s on its own. And I, you know, Barney was a hoot.

Anyway, it was a good time. I had a great time. I made a lot of trouble. I didn’t succeed in every political endeavor, you know, I did. And then I became involved through the reproductive freedom work. I became involved. I went to the— and this is a real shift point in my own journey. I was invited to at the last minute in a bizarre way that you’re going to have to read my memoirs for. I ended up at the UN Conference for Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt.

And there’s my law review article called “Feeling Grounded.” And it— in some of the early environmental law books, they identify that law review article as the beginnings of what they called ecofeminism. Which— and they called me the mother of ecofeminism, and I’m happy. I love that because I am really— I am a tree person and proud of it, you know, really proud of it. I ended up in Cairo, and that was a great story. That’s a movie. I ended up in Cairo and ended up fighting. I was with the Feminist Majority Foundation Okay. Eleanor Smeal.

Ellie Smeal and Peg Yorkin are great heroes, and I know we don’t want to have stars, but I think Ellie Smeal and Peg Yorkin are— they’re my, you know, I used to call Ellie mon generale. You know, she was my general. And so we end up in Cairo, and we’re doing battle with what we called the Unholy Alliance. So these are the radical right-wing Wahhabi Islamists funded by Saudi Arabia and the radical wing of the Roman— the Vatican, the Roman Catholic Church. And they’ve been having secret meetings.

So historians, listen up, there is data there. And the issues that we were fighting the Unholy Alliance on were Child marriage, pedophilia, Epstein, child marriage. So the African women were asking that the UN conference declare that it was a violation of human rights for girls to be married under the age of Fill in the blank now. We settled on 11. Oh my gosh, 11 years old.

This was at the request of the African women leaders. This was not initiated by white European ancestry women. This was the African women, and we were in solidarity with them and supporting them. And the age of 11. And the other thing the African women were asking— you have to imagine in 19 Let’s see, where am I at? I think, oh, UN Conference on Population and Development is probably 1993-ish, 1992-ish. I’m sorry about my memory for dates. You’d think as a historian, I’d do better.

The other thing the African women were asking for, and that we were in solidarity with and supporting them. This is the HIV epidemic is becoming pandemic, and we’ve got nothing. We got nothing. And they would like the right to refuse sexual congress within marriage if the husband is HIV positive.

And the Unholy Alliance opposes, vigorously opposes, both of these measures: child marriage and marital rape to prevent HIV transmission, and at a time when HIV was a death sentence. Right, right. So, you know, Feminist Majority Foundation and the UN Population and Development Center, and so we’re doing battle, right? I mean, we’re doing political battle.

And it was really very interesting. That was a turning point in my life, I became much more international. My shift focused from American women to the international battles. And I met for the first time and spent time with women from Africa and the Middle East and Asia and Korea and the comfort women.

So, and Ellie and I had some interesting discussions because I wanted Ellie, and she did, The Feminist Majority Foundation was very early on supporting women in Afghanistan during the first Taliban living death takeover. And I asked Ellie if we could take this on, and she said, “It’s not going to work because American women only care about American issues.” And I said, “I think you’re underestimating us. Could we give it a chance, right? Could we just try? You might be right.”

But I think we’re better than that. I know we’re better than that in the Midwest. I know Midwestern culture cares about something outside of the New York Times/Beltway cabal, you know. And give us a try. And Ellie, you know, mohn hin a doll. I mean, she and Peg just did it. And sure enough, we did a very successful campaign to raise awareness and money. And oh, that was— that’s another book and a great movie in which I was a bit player. I was a troublemaker. I mean good trouble.

So let’s see, where do we go from there? So then I get involved with Ireland. Now Ireland was great. So at that time, Ireland is part of the European Community. And governed by European community law. But Ireland has in their constitution the establishment of the Roman Catholic Church, right, is part of their constitution. They have an established church. And the other thing they had was a ban on information about birth control and abortion. So what would happen is the Irish women wanted to have access to birth control or abortions.

There were clinics in Britain right across the, you know, just take the ferry across. The clinics in Britain, it was legal, it was a medical service. In Ireland, it was a crime. And Ireland has a really sad and sordid— and later, when the priest pedophilia scandals come out, you know, Anyway, this is prior— we didn’t know about the priest pedophiles yet, right? Or I didn’t know about them yet. Lots of us.

Anyway, so Ireland criminalized the publication of the telephone numbers of the British abortion and birth control clinics. Listen up, Oklahoma. Listen up, Texas and Florida. It is a crime homicide to provide information about birth control and abortion in England, where it is legal, and they’re criminally prosecuting. So I get involved with the Irish— they don’t call themselves Planned Parenthood at that time because it was way too controversial and dangerous.

They called— they were just Irish activists, you know, feminist activists. I got to meet Bono. I ended up helping to design a legal strategy that I’m very proud of. And this article is in Sweet Maxwell, published in the UK. Everybody was framing abortion issues as a human rights issue, which is what we’re still doing today with Oklahoma.

And these lessons are very important in 2025 in America. They were framing it as a human rights issue. I had to learn a ton of European Community law. Oh my God, the coal and gas. I mean, the stuff I have done for women. You have no idea how tedious it was to learn European Community law as an American lawyer. But I did it. And I am, you know, a Yale woman. I am dogged. And I said, so human rights issues go to the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which is where my ancestors on my father’s side came from. I’ve still never been. I want to go.

The Human Rights Court, like most human rights mechanisms, legal mechanisms, has no teeth, right? Name and shame. Well, these people are shameless. Naming them, they don’t care, right? How well does name and shame work with, you know, okay, bullies? Bullies don’t care. I said, well, why don’t we frame it? Oklahoma, Texas, Florida, listen up. Let’s frame it as an economic issue. And under the European Union law, Article 57 or 157 and 58 or 158— I’m sorry about my memory, the commercial business of medical services is protected, the free flow of business across the borders.

So translated now into American law for American lawyers, it’s the dormant Commerce Clause and the Commerce Clause. Frame it as business because property has more rights than women. Let me just say that one again.

JW:  I gotta write that one down.

ES:  That one is really important. In law, property has more rights than not just women, Black people, Hispanic people, right? Property has way more rights than humans. Feminism is not gendered. And property has more rights than humans. This is what I’ve learned. And so, so I said, well, let’s frame it as a medical services issue. And it goes to the European Court of Justice. So you’ve got all these white European men all of a sudden with this brief talking about menstrual periods. You can imagine. Oh my God. They were— it was so hilarious.

Now, I didn’t argue this, right? I just deal with the legal strategy. There were lawyers in the European Union who did the case. And the European Court of Justice is like, why is this on our docket? This belongs in Strasbourg with the Human Rights Committee, right? Periods, bodies, and women’s bodies. You know, and it was so much fun. It was really good. I got a call from the lawyer. This is in an era when making a transatlantic call was a big deal. And I get this call. He says, they want to transfer it to the human rights. I said, absolutely not.

Do not let them do this. This is an economic issue. And we had all this data about, you know, how much money the British clinics were making. In the meantime, the Dutch— oh, God, I love the Dutch. The Dutch women are just taking no prisoners. They want to have a hospital ship anchored off the shore in Ireland in international waters. And I’m saying, oh, please just wait, you know, you know, I’m, I’m for once I’m reining it out. I love the Dutch. God, I love the Dutch.

Anyway, so it gets remanded back down to Ireland. The Irish Supreme Court decides, you know, maybe the phone numbers could be published. And so we won, you know. And the deciding vote, the justice on the Irish Supreme Court, the deciding vote was mysteriously killed when a truck ran his car off the road in Spain, and he and his wife were killed. Within a few months or a year after he cast that vote. That’s all the facts that I know. Although privately I was informed that I was now on the list of people to be hunted.

JW:  I see.

ES:  By the witch hunters, and I don’t know. You know, who knows? I hear a lot of crazy— I, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t think I’m important enough for Opus Dei to be hunting me, but maybe. In any event, so that was fun, and I really enjoyed that. And I had no idea it was going to become important to my own beloved country and my own beloved Constitution, but I think it’s worth studying.

And I did some other stuff with Planned Parenthood, population development. The other one that was really tough in that era, and this was again at the Cairo Conference, and this one was not primarily requested by the African women, although some African women supported this. Now when I say African, I mean from Africa.

JW:  Yeah, no, I get that. Yeah, that’s what you said.

ES:  Yeah, I mean, international conference. So now the French women are leading, and again, you know, these French women, their feminist tradition is just awesome. I mean, they are fierce and fearless, and they are concerned about a medical procedure that is being practiced in some cultures called female circumcision. And/or female genital mutilation. And it’s politically very loaded language, right?

The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times are calling it female circumcision because some of the female circumcision is not in fact a part of Islam. It is not, but it is practiced in some countries that are majority Islam, majority Muslim. And at that time we had women professors from the leading Islamic university in Cairo, giving us lectures and background on this. Because of course, you know, study of Islam is like way above my pay grade.

And so there are real scholars who do this and we had them, you know, we had access to them at the UN conference. And so the French women are lobbying hard. And Ellie Smeal, I love her so much. I can’t tell you how much I love her. So she’s a little prissy. I mean, she’s like not that comfortable talking about bodies and periods. And I taught obscenity law. I know all of George Carlin’s words, and I had to say them in public.

I mean, you know, I’m shameless. But Ellie is a much— she’s a lady. In a way that I’m not. And I mean, I spent my summers on farms. You know, farm girls are a little more earthy, I think. Anyway, so Ellie’s like, “Do we have to do this?” And Jennifer Jackman and I, who were in Cairo, say, “Yes, we have to do this.” And we need to— what the French women are asking for is to change the language, because language is so important.

So calling it circumcision makes it equivalent to Jewish male circumcision, right? But the actual medical procedure for females is vastly different. So I don’t want to get too much in the body. It’s, you know, I’ve got some scholarship on this, but pharaonic infibulation is unbelievable torture for females, and it’s happening in rural areas with a tin can lid No anesthesia. I mean, it’s gruesome. It’s really bloody. And poor Ellie.

So we’re on the international phone calls and, you know, emails. We have emails at that time and faxes. We’re doing a lot of faxing. And we’re saying, oh, the French women and the women, you know, the doctors and the Islamic scholar women are telling us it’s— anyway, we think we should get the New York Times to change their language from circumcision to genital mutilation.

And so Ellie goes to a meeting in LA with the publisher of the New York Times and the LA Times. I think they’re both Jewish. I’m not sure about that. But they’re certainly protective of Jewish male circumcision.

And I’m faxing Ellie descriptions, in-the-body descriptions of pharaonic infibulation in which they cut off the clitoris with the rusty tin can, you know. And Ellie’s like, “Eh, do I have to do this?” She did it. She did it. And we got the language changed. And then there was a huge pushback from the African American women’s community on cultural imperialism. So there was a whole period of time.

It was kind of like the pornography era, where, you know, is pornography— you know, it was a huge split inside of the larger writ feminism, and it was painful. And, you know, it was like the gay-straight split or the pornography fights. I mean, it was— it’s hard when people who are allied have such strong feelings. And anyway, so that was a thing. And then I ended up representing the Feminist Majority Foundation at the 5th UN Conference on Women in Beijing, China.

And this was one of the highlights of my life and again a huge turning point in my own journey. As I’m learning, you know, I’m a long way from the soybean fields and Park Forest, Illinois. I’m far away now. And the Fifth Women’s Conference on Women, UN Conference on Women, Beijing, 1995. I remember this date. So this is the one where Hillary Clinton as First Lady gives the famous women’s rights are human rights speech.

And I was there, physically there in the space, and I was there with my then-daughter Erica, now Rowan Mena. And they at that time were still female-gendered or identified as female. Anyway, I don’t want to speak for Rowan. But my eldest child was with me. And Peggy Carey, who was the U.S. liaison to the U.N., who’s a great friend and ally, and the three of us were in this space, and Hillary gave her talk.

And Judy, I’m telling you, you know, I’ve been in some exciting moments for women’s history where we just ignited. But this Hillary lit the match, and you could feel it globally. I mean, it was unbelievable. And women from India and Korea and Africa, I mean, to have Hillary Clinton as First Lady come and say women’s rights are human women’s rights. It was so, you know, indescribable. I mean, it was a moment in history. And I’m so lucky and grateful that I got to be there.

So that was a thing. And then two important things happened in the context of the women’s conference. So the Feminist Majority Foundation was organizing the largest movement of civilians in U.S. history up to that time. I don’t know about since then. Largest movement of civilians in U.S. history abroad. And Ellie, the Feminist Majority Foundation, was in charge, you know, of organizing all this. I don’t mean physically making the hotel reservations but just coordinating it.

And We had everything from the Iowa Christian Women’s Choir. There were 247, as I recall, organizations, nonprofits, NGOs, non-governmental organizations, charities that were accredited by the U.S. government to send people to the Beijing UN Conference. And 247— the Iowa Christian Women’s Choir. And then I also had San Francisco Dykes on Bikes and everything in between.

I mean, it was just— it was great. Black women, Asian women, Black American, African American women, Asian American women, Hispanic, you know, anybody who said the women’s movement was all white by this time was no longer accurate. It was global. It was global, and it became global, and it became a global movement, and it scared the willies out of a lot of powerful people who’ve been profiting off of unwaged women’s free labor and stealing land.

One of our groups is Catholics for Free Choice. U.S. Frances Kissling. I don’t know if you know Frances, but she would be worth interviewing. Frances Kissling is the head at that time of Catholics for Free Choice. I think she’s a former nun. And in any event, so she— the Vatican, which is a sovereign state in the UN, challenged the credentials of a U.S. Non-governmental organization. And this is a real invasion of sovereignty.

So the U.S. is a sovereign government, and the Vatican’s got the chutzpah to tell us who we can and can’t accredit to the UN conference. So I got to litigate that. That was really fun. It was so much fun. And I won. And, you know, it wasn’t litigation in a federal court. It was you know, UN-type hearing in which sovereignty, one sovereign cannot tell another sovereign what to do inside of their own sovereign.

So if the US says Catholics for Free Choice is an NGO, then damn it, it’s an NGO. So get back in your corner. So that was fun. But the one that really changed my life, the one that was really— is my Rowan, my eldest child, at that time was— her name was Erica, and she was using female pronouns. And since I’m talking historically, I’m going to refer to her with their permission. Now I’m going to refer to it as it was at that time.

I have discussed that with Rowan, and that choice is theirs. Erica is maybe 13, and she’s off with the NGOs. I have to stay with the official conference, which is just dull as dirt water. She gets to go off and hear all these great panels. You know, it was like the 7th Conference on Women in Law, only this time it’s global. Korean comfort women, and, you know, women economists talking about the undervalued. It was unbelievable curriculum, education, unbelievable.

And she comes back from the NGO conference on the bus with all these other women, and she comes, she brings these women to me, and they’re from Nepal. And at that time, they called themselves Nepalese gypsy women. Now, gypsy is not a politically useful term anymore.

So again, as our education improves, I’m going to call them Nepalese nomadic women. And that what they did is this is a group of women who would walk through Nepal, through the Himalayan mountains, and go from village to village teaching numeracy.

Because literacy is really not that important to rural and poor women. And of course, I’ve developed a huge special interest in rural and poor women, unlike the New York Times and the Washington Post. And, you know, rural and poor women, they need numeracy so that they can count the number of eggs or the number of cows, you know, and not get cheated.

JW:  I see. Yes, that makes sense.

ES:  And this numeracy idea becomes very important in the next phase of my own journey. Numeracy, business, property, money is power. Duh. I’m still focused on human rights even though I learned this lesson with the Irish. I’m a slow learner, and I’m— so numeracy. So the Nepalese women know what’s important, and that’s numeracy. And they’re teaching numeracy, and they go and they stay in the villages, and they teach numeracy.

And the men allow it because when the wives and women and daughters are able to add and subtract and read numbers that helps the family economy. So it’s— they’re not threatening the male, but what they have are— in those days, cassette recorders with the little tapes. And they have interviews in the local dialect of children, female children, who have been sex trafficked from Nepal to the brothels in Bangkok in Thailand.

So this is the child sex trafficking theme. Again, pedophilia. And so they’re using their skill in numeracy, but then they’re playing these cassettes of— because the fathers are being told that when they sell their daughters, they’re going to a rich family in Bangkok and they’re going to be a servant.

Well, they’re going to the brothels. And HIV is pandemic. And Japanese businessmen pay top dollar for the youngest girls because they believe that having sex with a virgin adds 10 years to their life. Oh, so this is, this is just, this, the pedophilia is so disgusting. Anyway, and it’s not anyone— I, I’m not criticizing any one culture. The German sex tourists, the American, and the dirty little secret is the gay men sex tourists go to Thailand to have sex with little boys.

And at that time, I didn’t talk about that publicly because I didn’t want to feed any anti-gay— I would talk about that privately when I gave talks to LGBTQ, GLAAD, you know, in the community, but not publicly. In any event, the Nepalese women— and Erica said, “Mommy, can you fix this?” Oh God, of course I can’t, but I can try.

I said to them, well, what do you need, right? Let me see, I know a lot of people, and you know, what do you need? And they got very excited. They go off and they come back the next day with a list. What they really need are batteries for the cassette recording machines because they go up and they’re gone like 2 years no electricity.

They’re up in the mountains for 2 years from village to village, and they need batteries, and batteries are expensive, and they can buy them, but they need money. And I said, okay, you know, how much do you need? And they said, well, you know, we don’t expect you to— it’s a lot of money because batteries are expensive, and we go up for 2 years.

And I said, just give me a number. They needed $124 US dollars. And I said, yes, I can, I can raise that money. I opened my purse up and gave them $200. Now, the— this is not a scam. I’m telling you, I’ve met scam artists. This is, this is like grassroots, you know. These women are up and— and wow. Yeah. And it changed my life.

So then I ended up as a Fulbright professor at Peking University Law School. Oh, and while I was there, I was able to slip, you know, slip out from underneath the State Department, and I went up to the Golden Triangle— Laos, Burma, and Thailand— because I had promised the Nepalese nomadic women that I would take a look at the trafficking and see if I could figure [it] out.

And I found, you know, I found there were— I, I saw it with my own eyes, you know. I saw children being trafficked across the border from Burma into Thailand. I saw children being trafficked on little boats from Laos. And it was unbelievable. But what I saw when I went to observe trafficking was the sex trafficker, a middle-aged Thai woman, female, which is often the case, handing a roll of American dollars with $100.

I mean, there was $100 US on the outside. I don’t know for a fact what was on the inside. Handing a big stack, a wad of US dollars to the Thai army officer at the border station on the bridge from Burma, Myanmar into Thailand. I saw that. I actually had pictures of that, but the Chinese – they were accidentally destroyed when they were developed in China. Ooh, who knew, right?

Anyway, so I go back to China to my Chinese students, and that’s a different story, not particularly about feminism. I love my Chinese students. When people want to reward a teacher, they send good students. And my Chinese students are— and I said as I was leaving China, sadly leaving China, I said, what can I do to help, right? And they said, work on corruption. And I said, you know, God, money law, ick. But I did. I came home, and it took me a long time. I was in my 50s, and I learned money law. And I developed the first American law school courses that I know of in international anti-corruption and anti-money laundering.

Which was really hard for me to do because I don’t really like money and I don’t, you know. But the most important thing in this era is that I learned that name and shame human rights law doesn’t work. It is toothless and cannot succeed. But if you start following the money and analyzing human rights atrocities. Take a genocide, pick a genocide, any genocide. I’m going to go Holocaust, Nazi Germany, but you could pick any genocide you want.

Stampeding the base with hatred of a racial or religious or ethnic group, whether it’s the Hutus and the Tutsis or the Jews, Indigenous people, the Haudenosaunee, who we call Iroquois, you know, it’s a land grab, it’s a money grab. And if you want to get the really bad guys, you want to hit them where it hurts them.

They don’t care about their reputation. They care about the money. So follow the money. Grab them where they care, which is in the money. So any corruption, any money laundering, grab them where it hurts, twist and take away their toys. Asset forfeiture. And that’s what I learned on my journey on this earth.

JW:  Yeah, yeah, no, and that makes a lot of sense. It really does. Like we’re watching it happen here before our eyes. Wow.

ES:  Yeah, I feel like Cassandra, you know, don’t take the horse. I mean, yeah, but you know, I’m so grateful to have had— I mean, that’s a long way from that little town.

JW:  Well, I’ll say.

ES:  And the values that I learned in that little town are good values. And I’m also very, very grateful to my students, my Chinese students, to the Nepalese nomadic women, to my eldest child, to all the people along the way that I’ve learned from. That’s the feminist methodology, is to listen to the poorest people. Those rural women in impoverished countries, real subsistence, they are so smart and resilient and tough, and they know what it takes to survive.

And I just— I’m very grateful that I had the chance to be of some service, and I’m very proud of my service. I think even though It looks grim right now, the trees will survive. And I have hope that we’re going to listen more to Indigenous people. That would be my next— my next— if I live long enough, I’d like to spend some time with Indigenous cultures learning their wisdoms, if it’s appropriate for a Protestant white woman from America to be a student.

JW:  Wow. Wow. Yikes. I don’t even know what to ask you. It’s just— your life has been incredible, and I thank you for everything.

ES:  I’m thinking about writing a memoir.

JW:  Yes, I think you should.

ES:  I’m a little worried about my memory, you know.

JW:  Yeah, well, yeah, but maybe there’s other people that can fill in some of those dates or something.

ES:  Well, my son suggested I write it as historical fiction. That works. I can do that, right?

JW:  That’s a good one.

ES:  Because everybody remembers everything differently, right? All these truths are also true, right?

JW:  Right, right.

ES:  So if I just write our own vision in these things. My truth doesn’t have to be the only version. I’m perfectly happy to have it be one of many versions, which is why I love your project.

JW:  So what are you doing now then?

ES:  I’m working with Planned Parenthood of Central and Southwest Florida, where I live. I thought I was retiring but apparently, I was being moved again on the chessboard to the front lines. So I’m working with Kate Lannamann, who is the CEO, chairman of the board. She’s my new mohnen et al. We’re, we’re doing the best we can. I mean, we are able to provide a lot of healthcare. We’re able to provide HIV treatments. We’re able to provide— we have free birth control, free pap smears.

Very important because of the Medicare cuts. Women who rely on Medicare, very few doctors in the area are able to financially accept the low Medicare payments. So we’re providing free prenatal care, we’re providing free prenatal vitamins and checkups. We have— now, we cannot provide abortions, right, legally. It’s too risky for our staff and our allies, right? ACLU has been wonderful providing legal backup and representation as needed. I’m right back where I started at Yale. Birth control for unmarried people, right?

JW:  And married too.

ES:  Oh yeah, married. We don’t discriminate on the basis of marital status or gender or anything else. We plan, you know, and I don’t mean to say that Planned Parenthood is a perfect organization, no organization is, but it’s frontline grassroots hands-on service, and that’s the best I can do right now. Yeah, I’m open to other ideas if people have other ideas. I’m coachable.

JW:  Right. Well, my final question, I could probably answer it for you, but I’ll let you answer. And we always ask this. So how did, like, your early life affect all the things you did in your life?

ES:  I think the kumbaya utopian values really formed me. And that’s it, right? Dr. Gerson Engelmann, who was my minister at the United Church of Christ, United Protestant Church. And then my parents— I was an exchange student in Germany as part of the Make Peace. And my parents wanted me; my father wanted me to be sure not to idolize the German culture too much. So he took me to Dachau when I was 17. And, you know, I became a human rights lawyer. I mean, Dachau is, people should, if you haven’t been.

JW:  I have not.

ES:  You should go there. I think those values I learned early. My mother’s a musician, church organist. I still always go to hear organ concerts whenever I have a chance. I love classical music. I’m very grateful. I didn’t make it as a pianist because my hands are too small and I can’t remember the music, but I can remember the footnotes in a Supreme Court case.

JW:  So, you know, it’s great. Well, any final thing you’d like to add?

ES:  You know, I think it’s important that we not lose our history this time. I’m hoping the digital world, we’re going to be able to find nooks and crannies, the women of science, the people, the allies, ’cause feminism is not gendered, and the allies will be able to find nooks and crannies to preserve our history. And I think that’s incredibly important that we not allow our history to be taken away again.