THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Esther D. Rothblum, Ph.D.

“A well-meaning mentor once told me: ‘Don’t study women, it’s too narrow.’ I spent the rest of my life proving him wrong.” 

Interviewed by Dr. Nanette Gartrell, 2021

NG:  Good morning. I am Nanette Gartrell, with the wonderful honor of introducing my dear, dear friend and brilliant colleague, Dr. Esther Rothblum, for this interview for the Sophia Smith Collection, Esther Rothblum papers. There’s so much that I want to hear, some of which I already know and some of which I don’t, about your background, that has led to your incredibly prolific, distinguished career in research, teaching, and activism. So please take it away and tell us about how you got to be who you are.

ER:  Well, thank you, and same to you. And let me know if anything isn’t clear, you can just interrupt. I want to begin by putting this into context, explaining why I did this. And that is that I see myself as the first generation of lesbians who were able to be out, and also survive in academia. So really, I think we were the first generation in that regard. In 2013, so just about eight years ago now, I wrote an autobiography of my life, or a memoir. At that time, most of my family was still alive, so I could ask people for details and so on. Since then, it’s now 2021, my brother died about seven years ago, my mother died a year ago, my stepmother died a year ago. And thanks to my brother’s dying, I became very close to my half-sister, who did not grow up with us, and now we email every day.

I just want to say that what I saw happening in academia when I arrived there, was that the first woman hired in a department tended to be absolutely crucified. Either she would end up in a psychiatric hospital, or she would quit, or she would die. My department in Vermont in psychology, hired a woman just a year before me. When you think about an all-male department hiring their first woman, they don’t hire somebody who’s a good fit. She had three children, she was older than the faculty, male, so that was awkward because she was a junior colleague. The kind of research she did was very different. Her theoretical background was different. And so, when I came along, I sort of felt I had to mentor her, rather than be mentored by her.

My generation, which could be just a year later, I saw as just one of the boys. We were the women who did not have husbands, we didn’t have children, we went to the same schools as the guys, we could be there summers, weekends, holidays, evenings, because we didn’t have those family connections. And I think because we didn’t have husbands or children, my generation had a fair number of lesbians. And also, in the US, many universities are very far away from urban areas. Some are really in college towns. And so, the women who were able to live in those places where it would be really hard to find a job for a spouse, tended to be lesbians. And then the women who were hired soon after us were a very different group. They were often mentored by women. We didn’t really have women to mentor us. They had children. They insisted on maternity leave, and time off, and things like that. So really, in a span of three or four years, you could have three very different generations.

So, my life has two parts. There’s my childhood, and then there’s coming to the US in college and really taking off as a feminist and a lesbian. My parents had a really unusual marriage. It was hard to believe they even met each other, let alone lived with each other. My father was Jewish. A very scholarly, ruminative, detail-oriented, bald, short guy. And then there was my mother, who was this tall, gorgeous, athletic, ski racer, Protestant, divorced woman. Her picture of her skiing was on the cover of a book. During the Nazi era, Jews were considered a different race. And so, the fact that my mother in Austria, who was Protestant, and my father who was Jewish; it would be equivalent to an interracial marriage in the US in the 1950s. It’s hard to believe how they met and how they decided to get married.

My family background is that my father was born in 1915. He grew up in an upper-class household in Vienna. He had a nanny, or governess, who then became our nanny later on. His father, David Rothblum, was a Hebrew scholar, very wealthy attorney, a good friend of Theodore Herzel, who founded Zionism. And so, consequently, my brother was called David and my middle name is Davida, after him. My father’s mother went to finishing school, which was unusual for Jews. Her father had been a mayor of a town in Romania, and he actually had two visits from the Emperor, Franz Joseph. I have a letter in my living room, framed, thanking him for the Emperor’s visit. We have a distant cousin who’s looked at our family tree and tracked the Rothblum’s back to the 1700s around the time when Jews were given surnames. Before then, they didn’t have surnames. It would be Esther, daughter of Miriam, or David, son of Eleija, or something. On that family tree, I am the oldest of the oldest of the oldest of the oldest of the oldest. In other words, as far back as that family tree goes, I’m the eldest. Probably if I were a boy, I would have to be a rabbi or something.

When the Nazis invaded Austria, my grandparents and my uncle, who was in high school, were able to leave via Belgium to what was then called Palestine. And my father, who had graduated from high school, was working in Greece and he had an uncle in New York who got him the affidavit and the visa to come to the US. My great-grandparents, on my father’s side, died in the concentration camp in Theresienstadt. And then my great-grandmother died either on a train or in the camp of Ravensbrück, which is a women’s camp.

In the US, my father joined the military. He actually worked in the OSS, which was the forerunner of the CIA. Training spies, actually. He went back to Vienna during the Marshall Plan, the US Reconstruction of Europe, where he focused on getting industries back working after the war, and then he worked for the US State Department, doing industrial development in a number of countries, and then at the end of his life for the UN in Vienna, an industrial branch of the UN.

What was really surprising to me, and I can’t ever figure it out, is the State Department was basically a place of white men who had gone to Ivy League universities, who were Protestant. I don’t know how my father, with his strong Austrian accent; he’d never gone to college, he was an immigrant, he was Jewish. I have no idea how he came to be in the State Department. A number of people thought he must work for the CIA because he had worked for the OSS in the war. But I happen to know in my father’s memoirs, he was very critical of a peacetime intelligence service. So, in that regard, he was very down on the CIA.

My mother was born in 1923 and was very proud of her aristocratic lineage even though she was lower middle class. She has a family tree going back to 1583, and so there’s all kinds of titles in her background. Her family comes from what was then called the South Tirol and is now part of Northern Italy, the Alpine northern part of Italy. When my mother was in high school, she began dating a man who was much older, Oskar Seidenglanz, who then became her first husband. She married him when she was 22 years old, and they had a daughter, my half-sister, Brigitte or Brigitte, who now uses the name Gita. Oskar was a Catholic, so my mother was raised a Protestant and then was married to a Catholic husband.

According to people who knew them, Oskar had a lot of affairs. He ended up actually marrying one of the women that he had an affair with, and then later had a third wife. My mother, apparently, also had affairs. She was a lot younger and she would tell me stories of how hard it was when Oskar, her husband, would leave a party with another woman and so on. They got divorced in 1952 and then she married my father in 1954. What was amazing; I heard this from my half-sister who was living with her father; that after the divorce, my mother still lived with her first husband in their very large house, converting to Judaism, studying these Jewish texts. Here they were, a Catholic marriage, getting divorced was shocking. But then my mother, marrying a Jewish man, was even more shocking, probably.

My half-sister, Gita, was born in 1947, and it’s not clear to me why she ended up living with her father and not with her mother. My father claims he would have adopted her at any time. It may be that the family thought that my mother, as a divorced woman and also now as a Jewish woman, should not be raising a child. So, my half-sister grew up in Vienna and would visit us for summer vacations, traveling by plane or train, even when she was very, very young. Often during Christmas, my mother would actually go to Vienna and spend the holidays with my sister. One month after I was born in 1955, Oskar also had a daughter with his second wife, Sonja. I can’t imagine how hard that would have been for my sister to have both her mother and her father have another girl a month apart, when she was seven years old. And then Oskar ended up marrying a third wife and had two sons. So, my sister actually has six siblings, whereas I have two.

The other thing is that because my father hired his childhood nanny, or governess, who we called Gold, to live with us and who then moved with us to many countries, basically meant that he recreated his own family background. Which really sidelined my mother, who already I think, felt very guilty about abandoning her other daughter in Vienna. My governess was very nurturant, was a very close part of me growing up, but I think in many ways, meant that my mother was a very peripheral part of the family in some ways, even though she was a homemaker. We had Hebrew lessons like my father did. He focused a lot on education because he had never gone to college. He was very motivated to get us to college and so on.

I was born in 1955, my brother in 1956, and we were born stateless in Vienna. My father was already working in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, which was at the time a heavily Soviet-controlled country. Apparently, the US government felt that American families should not give birth in Yugoslavia. It wasn’t up to their standards. So, my mother flew on a military plane to Vienna, and in Austria, citizenship goes through the father. My father was already a US citizen, although my mother wasn’t until I was two. So, we were actually born stateless. We have what were called Nansen passports at birth, and yet we did have US passports as kids. I’m not really sure how that worked, but the story was that we would have to immigrate at some point. And actually, at that time, if you were born out of the US, you were not a US citizen. And because my father was American, I couldn’t be an Austrian citizen. But when I was 15, the law changed so that if your parents had been in the US military and you were born abroad, you could be a US citizen, but it was not retroactive. So, my father flew to his congressman in the Bay Area, and in a private ceremony had my brother and me sworn in as citizens at birth. So technically, we can consider ourselves citizens at birth. It’s an odd set up. It helped me a lot because some of the funding I got in graduate school was for US citizens and so on.

I spent my childhood in a number of countries. First four years in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in an apartment where we had a cook, and a maid, who were part of the Yugoslav equivalent of the KGB. In other words, obviously, they were reporting on us, this US family. My governess was there with us. We spoke Serbo-Croatian. Kids pick up any number of languages when they’re below age eight or so. We also for a while, had a French nanny because my governess, all her life spoke only German and French. She never learned English. So, when I was four, we spent a year in the US, where I learned English in a suburb of Washington, DC. And then two years in Madrid, Spain, where I went first to a kindergarten for kids who didn’t speak English. It was an enormous US Air Force school. A lot of American Air Force personnel, men, had married Spanish women. So, this kindergarten was all these kids who spoke only Spanish, and then my brother and I, who spoke only German.

The next year, I went to first grade at this US Air Force School. It was enormous. There were 10 first grades. My brother was in one of 10 kindergartens. I never saw him in school the whole year we were there. We lived way out in the country, and for a very short while, I actually took a school bus home. There were these two girls who sat on both sides of me, probably in fourth grade or something, and were very cuddly and affectionate with me and I was really sexually turned on. And so, I tell people that I date my lesbianism to that first-grade school bus, actually. I didn’t know the word for it, but that’s what I felt.

Then we spent a year in Brazil, in Recife, where we rented a house right across from the ocean. We went to a tiny school. My second grade had only 11 kids. My brother’s first grade was in the garage of this little house. Most of my second-grade materials were easier than my first grade had been in Madrid. And then we spent four years in Lagos, Nigeria. Lagos, at the time, was the capital of Nigeria. It no longer is. Now Abuja is the capital. But it was a wonderful time for me because ages 8 to 12 is a good time. You’re old enough to know what you’re doing, it’s before puberty. We lived on an island, but an enormous island, like Long Island. It was a suburb, Ikoyi. And there were a number of coups. The president would be deposed, or assassinated, or by the military, and so the government would shut down the bridges, including the bridge to our suburb. So, my parents bought a little motorboat. Just a tiny boat so we could, if we had to, escape into the mainland or whatever. But that became our main social life. Every weekend, we would take the dog and we would go down this creek that separated our island from the next island into the big harbor where there’d be all these oil tankers; Nigeria is a huge oil-producing country. There is no tourism; and then into the mainland where there were all these beaches. We would go water skiing, or swimming, or we’d fish for eels, and so that was a really great part of my childhood.

Also, while I was in Nigeria, when I was 10 years old, my sister got married in Vienna. My half-sister had kind of a wild life. When she was 17, she had a boyfriend who was a few years older, and they had a plan. They actually wrote each other letters that they would get on a boat that was bound for Mexico. First of all, because you didn’t need a visa if you were Austrian into Mexico, and secondly, this boyfriend, his father had worked for the Habsburgs. The Habsburgs are still alive. I think they’re living in Switzerland. He was from Liechtenstein, and he was their main, I don’t know what he did, sort of like a legal aid. And so apparently, there were some Habsburgs in Mexico, and my sister and her boyfriend, Gunther, were planning to go there. So, when my sister was missing, her father found the letters, called my father, who called the Austrian ambassador in Nigeria, who called the international police, who stopped the boat in Gibraltar. So, this is the drama.

My sister wanted to marry Gunther, but she was underage and so actually, her father asked my father what he thought about this. And my mother claimed, if my sister couldn’t get married, she would “Throw herself over a balcony,” is how my mother put it. She would be so upset. So, my sister did get married and then had a really interesting life. She and her husband were elite skiers, like my mother had been, and like my brother eventually became. And they were ski teachers. They went to, I’m going to say Guatemala for a while. And then for a while, my sister became a Tibetan Buddhist, which she still is. She was in the Dalai Lama’s part of India, near Dharamshala, and her husband, Gunther, was in Morocco, and he was killed. So, at age 27, my sister was a widow of a 10-year marriage.

They had also gone to Turkey to open a Spanish restaurant. They had gone to Sweden. And there, they were caught pushing drugs. Selling hashish, actually, and were briefly put in a sort of  criminal psychiatric hospital. We were told my sister was in medical school, that was how my mother put it. We were never really told the facts, but we did notice my mother seemed very upset whenever she came back from Sweden. The reason I mention this, is so there I was 10 years old, and my father was so worried that I, too, would get married and not go to college, that he really began to focus on my academics. He didn’t want me to go to school dances, things like that. Which didn’t bother me because I had no interest in boys whatsoever. But it did mean I was very infantilized. I still played with dolls, which he encouraged. I never learned to dance, things like that.

Then when I was 12, Nigeria had a very bloody civil war, the Biafra War, where the Igbo ethnic group on the east where all the oil fields are, wanted to break away from the rest of Nigeria. The Nigerian government really murdered many, many people who were Igbo, and many of my classmates were Igbo. I have no idea what happened to them, where they are today, if they’re still alive. At that time, the US government said that if US families left Nigeria, they couldn’t go back. So, we began packing up our stuff. We knew my father could go back.

Every two years, we would get a home leave to the US which was so exciting for us. The television, and the candy, and the stores, and the Barbie dolls, and all these things we never had in the countries we lived in. But in the other years, we would go to some Austrian place. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, would look for a place, and my grandmother would be there, my mother’s sister, my mother’s niece who was a Vienna State Opera ballet dancer, my governess would come out of retirement; she retired after Brazil when I was eight, and my father sometimes had his family from Tel Aviv also come.

We left Nigeria and we thought that my father’s next posting would be Morocco, which would be tricky for a Jewish family because Morocco does not, for example, recognize Israel. And so, my father would have to write letters to his brother, send them to my aunt in Austria who would send them on, and so on. We went to the American school in Vienna, which was to me, enormous. My class had 35 kids. I hadn’t had that many since first grade. The K-12 school had 500 kids from many different countries and I developed an enormous crush on a girl from Canada in my class called Dawn Horner. I would love to know where she is, but that seems to be a fairly common name so I can’t find her. I was happy when it turned out that instead of going to Morocco, the new UN branch had started in Vienna, and my father got a job there. He was there until he retired. We were at that school from eighth grade through twelfth grade.

I also in ninth grade, sat next to a girl in Latin class, Eleanor Meulenbrock, who was Dutch and who became my very close friend. We’re still in touch. She was two years older because my father had us skip a grade in Nigeria, thinking that we might miss out on school with all of our moves. And so, I was always the youngest in my class. My brother actually graduated at age 16 from high school, I was 17. The fact that I wasn’t dating boys, I just figured, “Well, they’re older. My classmates are older. One of these days, I’ll get around to it.” But I also had a real crush on Eleanor. I never came out to her. I was afraid my parents might send me to therapy or they wouldn’t let me go to college in the US or something like that.

I played on the high school Varsity basketball team. Remember that my high school only had 120 kids and half were boys, so it was easy to do that. I used to have long braids, and I actually would ride my bike to the hairdresser down the street and they would undo my braids and wash my hair and do them up again. Austrians don’t believe in washing hair very frequently. But an important thing was they had these teen magazines there called Bravo that I would never have been allowed to read at home. One day somebody wrote and said, “She is attracted to girls, but she’s 14 years old” and the psychologist said, “Don’t worry, if you still feel that at age 16, then it’s abnormal.” And I remember telling myself, “Okay, in three or four years, I’m going to have to go underground.” I knew it wasn’t going to change, but I knew that I would have to be really careful about that.

So, applying to college, my father’s best friend Uncle Heinzi, from his childhood, was a college professor at Tufts and was very, very helpful because we didn’t know what to do. My brother and I had straight As, but again, it was a tiny school. Many of my classmates didn’t speak English well. Uncle Heinzi sent me a book on how to study for the SATs and I spent two years memorizing those words. I barely knew any of them when I started because our school was so bilingual that if you didn’t know a word in English, most kids spoke German, you could use the German word. I applied to most of the women’s colleges, the Seven Sisters colleges, and got into them all. As I call it, “Affirmative action for Austrians” because these colleges really want to prove that they have students there from every US state and lots of countries, and Austria had a tiny population. It was not a NATO country, it was a neutral country. It was actually fairly anti-US after the war.

My graduating class only had 35 kids, and many of them went to school or university in their home country. So, what happened is most of my classmates got into every college they applied to, and then a couple of years later, they either flunked out, or in the ’60s dropped out. I was in high school from 1968 to 1972, while you were in college, I think. There were no so-called ’60s in Austria. There had been very little fertility after the war because so many men had died that there wasn’t any youth to speak of. I was sure I would go to college and flunk out. I mean, that was what I was planning was going to happen.

So, I want to talk about the second part of my life. I decided to go to Smith College. It seemed academic and I wanted to major in psychology and I just counted the number of psychology courses, which is not the greatest measurement. I sounded American because I’d gone to both British and American schools but I had never written a check, I had never used a payphone, I had absolutely no background in US popular culture. So, it was really frightening to me to go to college. Smith had maybe 2700 students, but that seemed enormous compared to my schools.

My very first week in my house, we had these small dorms called houses that had 10 to 80 students. Our house president, a senior, Lynn Kramer, had a house meeting, and she told us the house rules and all this stuff, and then she said, “Somebody saw a man on the top floor” and I was sure she was going to say, lock your doors and be careful, and so on, but instead, she said, “So if you see him, let’s all tackle him.” And I thought, “Wow, there’s 80 of us and there’s one of him.” So, I immediately got it about feminism. I also had such a crush on Lynn Kramer. She had a mother who was a judge. And again, I’d never even met a woman who was a lawyer, let alone a judge, and Lynn is now a judge herself.

I majored in psychology. Everybody had told me it would be really boring, which it was, a lot of rats and statistics. I eventually did an honors thesis. My advisor, Diedrick Snoek, was Dutch. I still write to him. He’s now retired. I did it on self-disclosure, looking at personality variables connected with that. As Europeans, you’re not used to complete strangers telling you their life history when you sit next to them on the bus. And so, I was fascinated by this American habit of self-disclosure. But I also double-majored in German literature because I thought to myself, if I don’t get into graduate school in clinical psychology, which is hard to get in, I would then apply to grad school in German literature because I was a US citizen, but a native German speaker. And in all my years at Smith, we never read a single Austrian author. I thought if nothing else, I can start a sense of Austrian literature, or something like that.

Smith was where I tried hardest to be straight. Partly because people would say, “Oh, you’re going to a women’s college. Aren’t there a lot of lesbians there?” In fact, Smith has become famous as a lesbian college but after I graduated, I had nothing to do with that. But at the time, I can only think of one or two people that were even rumored to be lesbians. I mean, it was very closeted. Whenever there was a social event, I would go, I’d find some guy, any guy, and I’d drag him back to my dorm for a meal. I would make sure everybody saw me with him and then I would tell him I had to go study. That was the set up.

An anecdote that many of my college friends remind me of, is there was a very fancy Christmas dinner one year and the Harvard Smith Glee Club were performing. I had invited this student from Yale, a grad student I met at some Hillel event. His name was actually Hillel Weinberg, and he was the son of a rabbi. And so, I went out, and I was wearing a long dress and he was wearing blue jeans. I was disappointed, but I brought him back to my table and I said, “Hillel, this is Jill, and this is Susan, and this is Cheryl, and this is Hillel.” And he said, “What did you say my name was?” Well, it turned out he was with the Harvard Glee Club. So, I dragged him back out and there was the real Hillel, wearing a suit, looking nothing like this guy, by the way. So, then I had to bring him back, and I said, “Oh, Hillel, this is Jill, and this is Susan, and this is Cheryl” and my friends just thought it was hysterical. Of course, I hadn’t come out to them either, not until much later.

The other thing was, even though we had Hebrew lessons and my father really raised us in a Jewish household, we had barely met any Jews in the countries we lived in. So, Smith, which all the Jewish students complained was so WASP, I had never met so many Jews. It was 12% Jewish. I joined Hillel, the organization, and began to learn about Jewish culture. Since my mother had converted, I’d never heard of a bagel or any of these Yiddish expressions or anything like that.

I had been very religious as a child, but really came out as an atheist when I came out more officially as a lesbian. What I missed the most about being religious, by the way, was I used to pray every night. First in German, then in English. And if I prayed for something like, “Please let me get into Smith College,” I felt it was only polite then to thank God for many years. “Thank you for getting me into Smith College.” And so, when I came out as an atheist, I missed that gratitude in a way. I didn’t have that anymore. I try to spend a lot of my time focusing now on gratitude.

I applied to graduate schools in clinical psychology. I think I applied to 20 schools and only got into maybe 3 or 4, or something like that. I went to Rutgers, which is the State University of New Jersey, and it was really different from Smith. By now, I was a feminist. I was in a college where everybody was a woman, all the students. My junior year, we had our first woman president, and so on, and now, I was in a department where every faculty person was a man, except for the person teaching child psychology. I was living in graduate student housing with three other women, so we had two double rooms. I’d never had a roommate. One of the three women in my group, in my little apartment, was Nancy Krett, and I developed an enormous crush on her. I’d never met anyone like her.

At Smith, people really focused on academics, but she had been a Girl Scout until she was a senior in high school. She watched every possible sitcom on TV. She taught me how to jitter bug. She was a well-rounded Girl Scout. She was in a one-year master’s program. And then I had two other roommates, both called Kathy, and the four of us were very close. To this day, I still write and talk to Nancy every Sunday. It’s been almost 50 years. Nancy was the first person I ever came out to. I wrote her a letter after she’d already left Rutgers and was working for NIH, actually, as a lab tech. She really freaked out, so it was a very negative reaction for me. She didn’t want much to do with me. I don’t know what she thought I was going to do to her, and so that was really hard. I think the second person I came out to was a Vienna friend who had met Nancy. And then I could count on the fingers of one hand the people I began to come out to in graduate school. And in those days, nobody had ever guessed, nobody had ever met a lesbian. It was late 1970s.

I did my master’s thesis on depression, my dissertation on learned helplessness, which is connected to depression, so I did a lot of research on depression. The last year of clinical psychology graduate program is the clinical internship. At Rutgers, you were encouraged to apply to research-oriented internships en route to getting an academic job. So, you saw clients, but in a very research setting. I really didn’t pay much attention. I applied in a so-so manner. My dissertation adviser, Peter Nathan, was very famous but he was on sabbatical, so I didn’t even bother him for a letter. Instead, the acting clinical director barely knew who I was.

When it was match day, the day when you hear from programs, I only heard from one place, which was the San Francisco VA. Had I gone there, I probably would have become a full-time therapist and probably come out as a lesbian. I probably would have met you and Marny and other people much earlier, but instead I really freaked out. I thought, “Oh, my goodness, there goes my academic future.” I called some of the places, and the University of Mississippi Medical Center said I was on the waiting list. And I said to them, “Well, if you take me, I will come,” and they immediately took me because year after year, they would accept a Rutgers student who would then not come. And the internships, too, wanted some geographic diversity.

I then drove down to Jackson, Mississippi and it was the deep, deep south. You couldn’t really go much further south. Much further south was New Orleans, which is not exactly the south. It’s a more progressive area. And again, all of my faculty, supervisors were men. My class of 13 interns, we were called residents, had about half women, half men, and we were a very tight group. To this day, I’m close to many of them. We really gelled as a group. Two of the women, Laura and Kathy, came walking into our first orientation, and I, without ever having met a lesbian, thought to myself, “They are a lesbian couple” and I was right. I mean, they didn’t look any different. We all, in those days, had permed curly hair and things like that.

Kathy was a real role model. They had actually rented a house. We all had these cheap apartments, and she made sure that we came together as a group. That we played volleyball and basketball and racquetball; it was the first time I played racquetball, and had a lot of parties and laughed a lot and so on. And certainly, everybody was white. I mean, it’s so interesting in Mississippi, there was such racial segregation still among the students and the faculty and so on.

Another one of the interns, Charlene, became my first actual sexual partner. At this point, I’d had crushes all the time but never had sex. The first time I had sex was about five months before I defended my dissertation, so I didn’t know what would come first, my PhD or having real sex.

One day, we had a social event and Kathy said she was doing research on agoraphobia; people who are afraid of leaving the house or get panic attacks. And she said, “I would say, 80% of my clients are female, and all of my research participants are female.” And I said, “That’s interesting because I do research on depression and come to think of it, most of my clients are women, and so are the research participants.”

Well, Charlene was doing research on assertiveness, Marilyn, on some kind of weight-related stuff, and Laura on stress management. Just think about that. This was 1979. We had never, ever, in any of our classes, had a focus on women in a clinical sense. And so, we decided to do a panel at an upcoming conference in DC. And Kathy, again, I loved her chutzpah, said, “Let’s invite Rosalind Carter.” Because she was the first lady, and she apparently had a real interest in mental health. But Rosalind turned us down at the last moment, so I had to really scramble.

I remembered at Rutgers, there had been a very famous professor, Cyril Franks, and he had a wife, Violet Franks, who taught as an adjunct professor, a course called, Women and Therapy, which I had never taken. So, I invited Violet. She became our discussant, and then she said to me, “I’m editing a new journal called, Women & Therapy. Why don’t we do a special issue together?” and each of these students, my fellow interns, could write a chapter. And then we had to really think, who else did we know in the whole country who was doing anything on women and mental health? And so, we organized that.

And then one day, Violet said, “Oh, by the way, I decided not to edit Women & Therapy.” They wanted a more, I don’t know what, clinical focus or something. And I said, “Oh, my goodness. I’ve just invited all these people to write these articles. They’ve written them.” And Violet said, “Well, don’t worry. I also edit a book series at Springer Publishing Company.” And so, it ended up that while still an intern, still in grad school, I edited my first book, which was called, The Stereotyping of Women: Its Effects on Mental Health, which came out in 1983, the first year I was an assistant professor.

In Mississippi, we were really well-mentored. Their clinical director, Ron Drabman, would sit us down every Friday and talk about how to write a CV, an academic resume, how to give conference talks, how to apply for jobs, how to interview. I had none of that at Rutgers. I interviewed for an academic job at Texas A&M University, which is the absolute middle of nowhere, and was offered the job. And then I was also called for an interview at University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, as it was then called.

Before I even went to the interview, I had, in my research on depression, come across this article by Myrna Weissman at Yale that was so seminal in a way, in terms of looking at why women predominate in depression. I just love citing that article. So, I wrote to Myrna Weissman and said, “Do you have any post-docs or things like that?” And she said, “Oh, yes, sure. Come here if you want to.” So, I actually flew there and interviewed, and then I didn’t hear from her. I called her up and said, “I would need something in writing.” And so, she gave me a letter, and I decided to do that post-doc.

But what I did is, my lover, Charlene, who, by the way, she was my first, I was her 29th lover; you can imagine that was not a great fit and she was also constantly getting involved with men and my heart would be broken. We even talked for a week about applying for jobs together. That would have been such a mistake. But she had always loved the idea of Texas A&M. She was living with two men in grad school in Wisconsin and having sex with both of them and one of them, apparently, was an Aggie. I called up Texas A&M and I said, “I’m turning you down, but if you want somebody, I would recommend Charlene.” They did take her. She ended up not getting tenure, and is now thriving at the University of Kansas.

And then at Chicago Circle, the star student in my grad program, Audrey at Rutgers, had gotten into the internship I would have most wanted to get into, University of Washington. Only because you could do a rotation in Alaska and I thought that would be cool. Well, Audrey got in. She was working with the guy who was the clinical director while my dissertation advisor was on sabbatical. I then suggested her name to this University of Illinois place and they took her. She ended up getting really sidetracked. They put her in charge of the clinic, which is often run by a grad student, and sort of forced her into retirement. First of all, I can’t even imagine that today; it would probably be illegal for a university to basically take people who hadn’t even applied yet, when they’re interviewing. But also, it just showed me that I was really lucky that I took this post-doc because, Charlene didn’t get tenure, Audrey was sidetracked. That’s what was happening to women who were just a year or two above me.

And so doing this post-doc; by the time I was done with that, things had started to change. I went to Yale with this strong Southern accent, I tend to mimic accents. In Mississippi, if you didn’t talk that way, nobody could understand you. And I had these southern social skills: “How are y’all doing’?” I had made everybody play racquetball, including Myrna and all the staff. And I decided, well, now that I’m no longer in Mississippi, I’m going to go to my first gay bar, my first women’s bookstore, my first women’s restaurant. I went to Yalesbians, their group. And so, I started to come out more publicly and began to tell people. I went to my first women’s music concert. It was Meg Christian, at a conference of the Association for Women in Psychology. That conference made so much money that they decided to have little spin-off conferences, and one of them was going to be in Boston. And so, I thought to myself, “Well, I really want to find a lover.” And so, I went to this AWP conference, basically looking for a lover.

None of the sessions were really relevant to me, they were all clinical sessions. But one of them was about how to write and so I went to it. The women around the room, one said she would like to write about displaced homemakers, and one said she’d like to write about body image. And so, I said, “Well, here’s the thing. I’ve heard that there’s a new journal called, Women & Therapy.” By this time, it had a different editor, not Violet Franks anymore, “I’m sure she’s desperate for articles. Let’s all write up our articles and do a special issue” and they were really freaked out. They were getting up the courage to write for their own pleasure, not for publishing. But I did, with another woman in the group, I would drive down to Boston. I didn’t find a lover, but that was a theme in my life that I would go someplace looking for a lover and end up; what actually happened is, we did the special issue. I was invited then by the editor to be on the editorial board and ultimately to edit the journal, which I did for 12 years. All for the theme of, “I wish I could find a lover in Boston.”

I also, at that time, had what for me was a very long relationship of five months with Annie, who lived in Hartford. That was new for me to actually be in a relationship for more than a weekend. Myrna Weissman, at the time, my post-doc boss, was the only woman who had tenure in the Yale Medical School. And to this day, Yale has always lagged behind other Ivy Leagues in hiring women, and Myrna was pretty freaked out when she discovered what a feminist I was. I would be invited to give a talk in the community, somehow Myrna would find out about it, somebody in the audience would know her or something, and I’d be in trouble. If I published on women in depression, she would ask to see it. She would completely ask me to change it.

I could see her point because it was such a hostile environment for women. She actually had a lot of large grants. For example, one of her grants was simply stolen. One of the male faculty went to the dean of the Yale Medical School, told the dean he thought he would be better at this grant, and the dean took it away from Myrna and gave it to this guy. So, I could see her point. But what really saved me is one day Myrna said, “Why don’t you give a talk in the Psychology Department?” Ed Ziegler, who was a professor there, was the head of Head Start in the US, was running this thing called a Bush Fellowship. And so, I became a Bush Fellow. It didn’t pay anything, but I could use it as an affiliation and I could bypass Myrna. Many years later, Ed Ziegler wrote a book about the history of Head Start, and I wrote to him and I said, “You have no idea how you saved my life during those years.”

I then applied for jobs after my post-doc. I was a little worried about Myrna’s letter because she clearly saw me as problematic, and I was getting no calls for interviews. Remember two years earlier, I had gotten one tenure-track job offer, one interview. Now I was at Yale, and I had a lot more publications from having been out there. And so luckily, one of the places I had applied to was at Smith. My undergraduate advisor, Diedrick, called me up and he said, “There’s a problem with one of your letters of recommendation.” I thought it was Myrna, but it turned out it was Cyril Franks.

I had asked Peter Nathan to write me one letter, my dissertation advisor, Violet Franks, with whom I was editing the book, and then Myrna Weissmann, my post-doc supervisor. Cyril had said to me when I was working with Violet on the book, that he would be willing to write me a letter and I was really flattered. He was very famous. But apparently in that letter, he said, “She lacks that spark of creativity that marks all true great leaders.” I think he was threatened because here I was writing a book with Violet, his wife. He saw himself as very famous. So, what I did then is I took him off the list. All the next batch of applications, I sent the request to Violet at her clinic, not at her home. I got an interview from almost every place that I had written to. So clearly, Cyril made the difference. But to this day, when I do something radical or when I get in trouble, I say to myself, “Cyril can no longer say that I lack that spark of creativity that marks all true great leaders.” I did write to him and Violet at Hanukah for the rest of their lives. They’re now both deceased.

Also, I had stayed in touch with my Mississippi fellow interns. And Kathy and Laura, who had been so important in my life, my first lesbian couple, they had split up. I was very close friends with Laura. Laura was working for a consulting firm in DC but decided she would apply for just a few academic jobs, I think just three. We discovered we had both applied to the University of Vermont, and both of us said, “You know what, we’ll just not apply.” And then we figured, “What the heck? What are the chances they’ll take both of us?” Well, it turned out that both of us were called for an interview. And so, Laura called me up and she said, “You know what? Let’s see if they’ll take both of us.” And I thought, “Oh, come on.” But Laura had done that twice in her life. She and Kathy split the internship stipend, which was like $5,000 a year. Even then, that was very little. And then she had also taken a job with a friend later on.

I interviewed first, and I flew up to Vermont. On the plane; this was an airline, I think it was called Piedmont, where if you sat in the first two rows they were facing each other, and I sat across from somebody who turned out to be a grad student in that program at Vermont. She told me the single most important piece of information, and that is that the department had been put on probation by the American Psychological Association for having no women faculty. And so, I knew that if we both come, they would really gain a lot. Laura came after me, and there was nothing on our CV that showed we knew each other except for our clinical internship.

They offered the job to Laura because the job was actually in prevention, and my research was really in intervention. But Laura said, “What it would take for me to come here is if you take Esther as well,” and they were really shocked. Also, they said we could not split a tenure track position. So, Laura said that I should have the tenure line, she would take the soft money line. Because she knew that I had other offers, I wasn’t going to come on soft money. And she did, in fact, fund herself on grants until she retired.

The month before we went up to Vermont, Laura was house sitting in Bethesda for a colleague, and we decided we would live together for a month and write a small university grant and I really developed a crush on Laura. So, the three major heartthrobs that were frustrating in my life were Nancy Krett, my roommate in grad school, Charlene in my internship, and now Laura. And Laura in fact, was at the time, involved with a guy, one of the men in my internship class. She was very closeted about being straight. She wanted people to think she was a lesbian. And so that also made it very difficult because everybody thought they had hired a lesbian couple and that they assumed we were lovers, even though we weren’t living together, et cetera. The grant we wrote together was on procrastination, given my research on depression and hers on stress.

In German, there is no German word for procrastination. It’s a completely foreign concept to me because I don’t get why somebody would put something off if they know they have to do it eventually. I mean, what is the point to do it at the last minute? But this article that included our procrastination scale has been cited by well over 2,000 published articles. And every week to this day, I get an email asking for permission to use the PASS, the Procrastination Assessment Scale for Students.

NG:  May I ask a question? You developed that scale?

ER:  Yes, we did. What happened is, we came up with 13 reasons why people might procrastinate. Difficulty making decisions, lack of assertiveness, perfectionism, and so on, and people would fill it out. We did a factor analysis. We actually found that women tended to procrastinate due to perfectionism, fear of evaluation from others, and low self-esteem. We called that cluster, Fear of Failure. There were no other gender differences and so that was the research.

So, I was really in love with Laura, and I decided to go into therapy. At that time, I would say in most places, there was one lesbian therapist that everybody went to, who usually had not gone to graduate school because she would have been kicked out if she had come out in grad school. And in Vermont, it was Lauren Berizbeitia, who did not even have a bachelor’s degree. She had gone to Goddard College, which was a very hippie four-year college, and dropped out. But my University of Vermont insurance, faithfully paid her for years and years. I think they had a $10,000 max, and she was charging $50 an hour. At some point, University of Vermont switched insurance policy, so I got to start from zero for another $10,000.

When I would be there in the waiting room, it would be all the people I knew. Every lesbian would go to therapy. And Lauren clearly had no training. I mean, if I started the session by talking about racquetball, she would start to chit chat about racquetball. So, I learned you had to come in and not distract her. But I could talk to her about Laura, because Laura had made me promise that I would not talk about us to anybody who we both knew, and we both knew all the same people. Luckily, Lauren then went to California in a VW, and another therapist came in, who was not great but at least had a master’s degree in social work and at least was able to  manage a session.

What I did after that, the first summer in Vermont was really hard. Laura was always involved with some guy. She would tell me we had to find new friends, which for her meant a new male lover, and for me, meant I made lots of contacts. I joined a lot of little divisions of psychology organizations and things like that, just to meet people and get through the summer. I had talked to Laura that the only continent I had not been to was Australia. And so, she said to me, “Well, why don’t you go to Australia for the summer?” Australia had very few universities at the time, and just about every one of them said yes, I could either come for free and give some lectures or they would pay me to give lectures. And then, Flinders University, in Adelaide in the South of Australia, said I could replace a professor who was on leave. So, for two summers, their winters, I taught there, and I loved it.

I lived with a couple, Margie and Leon. I had a real crush on Margie, who introduced me to all her feminist and lesbian friends. I thought about immigrating, but so many people confuse Austria and Australia that I was afraid they’d think I was going back to the old country or something. And also in those days, if you, for example, got your journal articles, it would take two months to get there by ship, and airmail took two weeks. It was before the Internet, but it made a big difference to be in this place where I wasn’t so connected to Laura.

Another thing was, one morning, I had breakfast with a colleague. I mean, any time a department hired a woman, I would ask her out for lunch or breakfast. There were just so few women. And this woman said to me that she had a Kellogg Fellowship. And I said, “What’s that?” And she said, “Oh, you really should apply. They give you lots of money to travel.” Well, at that time, Laura was breaking my heart because she was now involved with a woman who was a bus driver in Burlington. Burlington only had two busses, so every time there was a bus, I would look up and Deborah would wave and I would wave, and I was just so depressed. And again, to get away from a lover, in this case, I got what was a really important part of my life.

This Kellogg Fellowship, loosely connected to the cornflakes company in Michigan, gave you a lot of money on what they loosely called leadership development. And they really encouraged international travel. So, through the Kellogg, I went to the Antarctic on an Argentine icebreaker that sank two weeks after I got off. But as a result, I applied for a National Science Foundation grant to interview women in the Antarctic. I went to different parts of Africa: Egypt, Madagascar, Kenya, and later Swaziland, later South Africa. We had a required trip to Brazil, so I was back in Brazil after having lived there as a kid. We went to the Amazon and so on. And my group of 50 Kellogg Fellows is still very, very close. We still meet every February and get together. But it did help me get away from Laura.

I also began to do research on lesbians. I was invited to be on the Committee of Lesbian and Gay Concerns of the American Psychological Association. I had a colleague who was a former president of the APA who suggested my name, and I felt like a complete imposter because I had not done any research on lesbians. So, I faithfully began to do it and I did a lot of different things. Often, grad students would apply to Vermont to work with me on lesbian issues because there were very few other lesbian psychologists who were out at that time. I would do things like, look at using siblings as a comparison group because siblings are often very similar demographically. So, comparing lesbians to their heterosexual sisters, or LGBT people to their brothers and sisters, or trans women and trans men and gender queer people to their cisgender, non-transgender siblings. And I looked at lesbians and mental health, and to this day, still do a lot of research on lesbians.

In the year 2000, Vermont became the first US state to legalize same-sex couples in what they called civil unions. And when you were visiting me, you actually suggested, “Why not study those couples?” So, with a graduate student, Kimberly Balsam, and a colleague, Sondra Solomon who since died, we surveyed a large sample of about 2,000 couples. Including couples who had same-sex civil unions that first year, a couple in their friendship circle who had not had a civil union, and a heterosexual married sibling and spouse. We did a three-year follow-up and a twelve-year follow-up, and that’s been really interesting.

I also was honored to join your research team following lesbian mothers who had children through donor insemination. You started it when the moms were pregnant, and I joined when the offspring were aged 25. And also, I was editing the journal, Women & Therapy, and I then switched and edited the Journal of Lesbians Studies, which I have done since it started. I’m planning volume 25 or 26, so it’s been over a quarter century.

Also all my life, my fairly thin family had been focused on my weight, especially my father, and would put me on diets. Every time he’d see me back from college or grad school, he would worry about my weight. One of the people that Laura briefly got involved with was one of our grad students. And I thought to myself, that “this student looked a lot like me.” She had the same hair color, I was very young, the same age, except she was average weight and I was fat. I use the word fat now in fat studies. So, I thought, “Well, let me just see if I can lose weight.”

I began to look at the research literature in the clinical psychology journals and I was horrified that what they were doing, was they would randomly assign mostly fat women, into a variety of treatment A, and treatment B, or a comparison group. And if you had enough people, and the women lost a little bit of weight in one group compared to another, it would be statistically significant. But if you actually looked at how much weight they lost, it was a tiny amount given how much they weighed. And then if you did a follow-up six months later, or a year later, almost everybody had gone right back to where they had started.

So, I began to write about weight and stigma, and began to do a lot of research looking at weight and employment discrimination, weight and therapist biases about weight, and many, many things like that. Again, I would have students who would come to work with me in that area and I continue that now in the present.

In the year 2009, I edited a book called, The Fat Studies Reader. There was a lot of media about it in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Ms. Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and as a result, the publisher, Haworth Press, that had published Women & Therapy, and also the Journal of Lesbian Studies; that had been bought up by Routledge/Taylor & Francis, asked if I would edit a journal called Fat Studies. I was really hesitant because I didn’t think there were enough people doing research in this area, and so I thought, “Maybe one issue a year might work.” And they said, “Well, their minimum is two issues a year.”

So, I began to edit that journal. I think we’re just starting volume 10, and amazingly, that area is just thriving. I now have enough articles, or in progress, for maybe four years, and it comes out now three times a year. It could come out four times a year. Whereas, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, I’m struggling with, because the term “lesbian” is becoming somewhat dated. There’s a lot of people looking at gender non-binary issues or sexuality in general. And so, I’ve decided that I’m going to actually end the Journal of Lesbian Studies in the year 2022, the year after this, although they will find someone else to succeed me. But ironically, it used to be that lesbian studies was my mainstream area, fat studies was my radical area, and now I think it’s actually flipped in some ways.

I also began playing racquetball, I think I said, in Mississippi and played very seriously in Vermont. Thanks to my mother’s very elite athleticism, we did a lot of sports growing up, and luckily, it was not linked to my weight so I was not stigmatized as being fat and unathletic, or something like that. I’ve now played racquetball for well over 40 years, although now in the middle of the coronavirus, COVID time, I can’t do it because it’s indoors and it would be very risky.

NG:  You might mention you’ve won a few medals.

ER:  Yes, I competed in the Gay Games twice and have a long-time doubles partner, Beth Mintz. When I go back to Vermont, we still play. I also in Vermont, was very lucky that they gave you an automatic sabbatical after every six years. In other places, you have to apply, and it’s competitive, meaning only a small percentage of people get it. So, I spent a sabbatical in Duluth, Minnesota, actually in the middle of my Kellogg time, so I was traveling to many places from there. And then also, I spent one in San Francisco; where I had met you before, but where I really got to know you, and then three months in Cambridge, England, and so on. And then Vermont actually changed, so you could do a semester sabbatical after every three years. I would save up and I would take a year after every three years. One semester at three quarters pay, which was the sabbatical pay, and one semester at no pay. That was really wonderful because I got to be in other places, do a lot of research, and so on.

I had also been in a few relationships with women at that point. But in just, I think, two days before the millennium, the last two days of 1999, I met the love of my life, Penny Sablove. I was carpooling to Stanford with one of their history professors, Estelle Freedman, and she talked about going swimming with these two women called the Aqua Dykes, Penny and Carol. One time we had Dim Sum Chinese food together, and as an excuse to get to meet Penny, I said I was interviewing sisters; which I was at the time, and Penny was a twin so I wanted to interview her.

Anyway, we became lovers in the year 2000 and have been together for over 20 years and she’s just been so wonderful. I can’t even think of an argument we’ve had. I was so used to lovers who were so critical, and seductive, and charismatic, and withholding, and negative. And Penny has just been wonderful. She is a fifth-degree black belt in the martial art of Aikido and a retired physical therapist. And now, during COVID, she’s teaching Aikido online via Zoom and using me as the attacker. So, I grab her wrist and she does the rest, so that’s been kind of interesting.

In order to be closer to Penny, because the first five years we were commuting, I was in Vermont, she was in San Francisco. I applied for a job here and there, but it’s very hard to get academic jobs when you’re a full professor, because when anybody retires, they want to replace you with a new, young, assistant professor at a lower salary. But San Diego State University, which is the oldest women’s studies department in the US and the world, had a position that was rank open, meaning you could be a full professor. I applied for that job and have been there since the year 2005 and so now, we have a short distance relationship.

Every second weekend, from Thursday to Monday, I would fly up to San Francisco and see all my friends. The weekends when I was there, I would work. Consequently, I don’t know as many people in San Diego as I do here in San Francisco. I would be here in San Francisco for the whole summer, three and a half months, and five weeks at Christmas. Basically, five months of the year.

And now, of course, in COVID, I’m here full-time, teaching online, and have decided as of a few months ago, that I want to retire. I’ll be 66 when I retire in August of 2021. I had never really wanted to retire because I really have no hobbies. I already play racquetball, read books for fun, travel, I didn’t know what I would do with myself. But the online teaching and all the software and the poor instructions has really been aggravating. And other things, too. In my department, a number of colleagues have retired. I’ll be department chair this semester, in the summer, and then I will retire. So, I just want to end with a few final thoughts, unless you have any questions or anything I’ve left out.

NG:  Well, actually, I wanted to make a comment. Which is that you have talked about so many situations in which you have had an observation, that you translated into very innovative research. And I just wanted to underscore that incredible observational skill and talent. The ability to translate that into really innovative, scholarly work, on topics that other people had never done before. Or looking at things in a way that no one had ever done before. As an example, comparing lesbians and their heterosexual sisters, just a completely new concept. When we were, as researchers also, struggling with the fact that we didn’t have a so-called control group for sexual minority individuals that really worked, who were really easily comparable, I just think that’s really important to point out. I happen to know as you talk about, and then I studied this or that, I found it very interesting to follow up in this particular way with this observation. But those were really, really innovative.

ER:  Thank you. I guess I can thank Cyril Franks for that comment in his letter. I tell my grad students during their new orientation that they should thank the people who helped them get into graduate school or who helped them first become a feminist. I say, “You also want to thank the people who say, you’ll never make it, you’ll never be college material.” I think the Dalai Lama has a quote, something like, loving enemies, or something like that. Because really, sometimes those are the people who motivate you and you decide, I’m going to prove them wrong and so on. But also, I think in academia, you really have to have a thick skin about rejection, especially when you are doing work in new areas. I mean, doing work on women was very radical for its time. I would say more radical than doing research was on lesbians in the early ’80s, and even fat studies, although I certainly have had lots of amazingly negative comments about fat studies, too.

NG:  That, too, is one of your really unique talents. You, I believe, have a slide, or slides, that in your teaching you use to help students understand the concept of rejection. Which is really quite radical, because first of all, most people don’t confess very often, except to those whom they trust about rejection, and rejection is rampant in the field of academia. So, to talk about that, that’s really innovative.

ER:  Yes. I think that is another reason why women really struggled in academia. First of all, there were so many roadblocks, including in publishing. Just getting used to that, reviewers, editors; I mean, I’ve had editors say, “I would encourage you not even to publish in this area again.” By the way, also teaching evaluations. Students, the research shows, tend to be more negative of women instructors than male instructors, and certainly people of color compared to white instructors. So, if you are a person of color teaching, and most of your students are white, you deal with a lot of hostile comments also. So, you have to develop a thick skin.

Just a few concluding thoughts. Given my father’s history coming here from the Holocaust, and then our own experiences leaving Nigeria during the civil war, the Biafra War, I think has given me a lot of training in dealing with crises, big and small. I tend to spend a lot of time planning ahead for crises that may or may not happen. I warned my department back in February that as soon as one person got COVID on our campus, they would lock us out of our offices and close the campus. So if anybody had stuff in the office that they needed for teaching or research, take it home. People thought I was really exaggerating, and of course a few weeks later, that actually happened.

And as I mentioned, my life is sort of this aged zero to 17 in all these countries, I felt very bored and under stimulated in the schools we were in that were really small, didn’t have all of the amenities like advanced placement classes, or student organizations that American big high schools have. But coming to college was just wonderful. I mean, I became a feminist and a lesbian, and I just felt like I had found my home in the US. What still links me to the past is my continuing friendships. You, and many other people. I consider friendships so vastly important and have written a lot about friendships and nonsexual relationships that we tend to not prioritize them as much as lover relationships. And yet they are so important in our lives.

My generation of women, I think, was mentored by men, including our fathers. And my father really was a good mentor given that he’d never been to college. Thinking back, I’m puzzled by what future did he have in mind for me when he was pushing me to excel? Did he think I would have a career at a time when that was really impossible for women to have? Did he think I would get married after talking me out of marriage when my sister got married? Luckily for me, and really for him, feminism came along just at the right time. I was that first generation where universities were looking to hire a woman, any woman, just for affirmative action and so on. As I record this, I’m just about a few months away from retiring. And so, this is really an end of an era for me. And who knows what I’ll do? I have no really good plans for retirement, so we’ll see what happens. And thank you so much for being in my life, Nanette.

NG:  Thank you for this wonderful interview. And I’m sure that those who are following your research at the Sophia Smith Collection and studying how you came to do the amazing work that you’ve done, will be very, very delighted to have this interview.

ER:  Thank you.