THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT
Genie Gatens-Robinson
“Women have a place in all spheres – science, government everywhere.”
Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, July 2023
GGR: My name is Eugenie Gatens-Robinson; hyphenated last name. I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1943, so I was a war baby.
JW: Can I call you Genie?
GGR: Yes. Please call me Genie.
JW: What was your childhood like before you got involved in women’s issues? Were there influences you think that led you in that direction?
GGR: My parents did not marry until they were both in their 40s. I come from an Irish Catholic family, where it’s not unusual that one of the children take care of the mom, and my father took care of his mother. My mother was the oldest of eleven children and she was sort of in charge of everything, which is one of the influences. She was a pre-World War II woman. She was born in 1897, and I was born when she was 46 years old.
She had worked at the railroad as a secretary stenographer she would say, all of her life from the time she was about 20. So, she didn’t stay home to take care of me the way all of the rest of my peers. I think she was the only mother that I knew that was working. And she was kind of a Katharine Hepburn(y) kind of person, with the puffy blouse and the high heel shoes, and she was very smart. Of course, she didn’t get to go to school or anything like that.
So, I was taken care of by her sister. I would be with my parents every evening, but the days were spent with my aunt, and I had a very devout Catholic upbringing. My parents went to Mass every morning. I went to Mass every morning all through high school and through college. So, I could tell you one thing that radicalized me in the fifth grade.
JW: Let’s hear it.
GGR: Well, on the loudspeaker system in my grade school, the pastor came on and said that girls would no longer be allowed to march in procession with the Blessed Sacrament. That upset me because I liked that. It was pageantry, we got to hold flowers, and we would dress up in our little white dresses. And I meant it. I was awed by the whole thing. And then, “Why? Why can’t I be in procession with the Blessed Sacrament?” So, I got an idea very early, that at least the patriarchal church thought me to be profane in some way. I was not eligible to be that close to the Blessed Sacrament.
JW: Did they ever have a reason why?
GGR: That’s the reason why. I don’t know that they would say it out loud, but no girls could be altar boys because girls weren’t supposed to be in the sacristy, on the other side of the altar rail. I managed to do that anyhow because I helped the lady who did the candles and I would go behind the altar and I’d go into the sacristy and do all kinds of, I guess they were, I don’t know, sort of in violation of that, but nothing seemed to happen.
JW: Sounds like you found a way.
GGR: Yes, I did. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Pittsburgh, a beautiful neighborhood of Mount Washington, looking down on the city. My family never had a car. I used public transportation and walked everywhere I went in the city. I very early was a lover of nature. That was a little hard, but I found that I could get to nature in the alleyways and empty lots. There was a lot going on there. I had a nice childhood because I kind of ran free. My aunt wasn’t a disciplinarian. She was a very sweet, kind woman, and I just got to run around, which was fun.
JW: I’m assuming that you were an only child but had a lot of cousins, is that right?
GGR: That is correct. And an extended family in that neighborhood. I could walk into almost every other door. There were great aunts and great uncles and cousins and aunts and uncles all over the place. That was a blessing to me, especially my great aunts. My grandmother was gone. I never knew her, but I knew her sisters, and they were wonderful women.
JW: When then did you get involved with the women’s movement?
GGR: Maybe it might seem a little late. I was a biology major at Duquesne University and after I graduated, I went to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, to be a technician in a lab there. Lo and behold, I ended up in this laboratory, which was at the center of research in that time, with the Watson and Crick discovery of the structure of DNA and RNA. So, they were working on protein structure in this lab, which was a little beyond me at that point.
I never met women who were involved in research, and had PhDs and MDs, and they were all around me. So, the possibility of not being just a technician; besides that, they decided that wasn’t a good place for me. They were encouraging me to go to grad school, and the men in my lab were encouraging me to go to grad school, which was a good thing. They all were married to women who had PhDs and MDs so they thought, “Ok, that’s where you should go.” And then one of them, a post doc, he was a younger man, one day he brought The Feminine Mystique and handed it to me and said, “I think you should read this.” And I did.
It made me mad because it meant I had to do something. I couldn’t just take the normal course of things. So that sent me off to grad school. That doesn’t sound like I’m involved in a movement there, but I was moving in that direction. I got a master’s degree at the University of Wyoming in cell biology. I still consider myself at least partially, a biologist. It was very good, but I discovered that I didn’t particularly like working in the laboratory. But I did like thinking about what was going on in the laboratory, and also the history of science.
And so, I went to the University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana, and got a master’s degree in Philosophy of Science, and started writing a dissertation. My advisor left and so I didn’t finish it with him, but it was on explanation in the biological sciences. I was interested in the embryological development, or the development of organic form was my passion, and that was started by a woman, too.
My undergraduate advisor was a botanist, Helena Miller, who sort of made me into a rebel because she was from a different era of biology, before the Watson and Crick became more of a reductionistic science, which was very popular and very successful, and still is. But what the philosophy allowed me to do, was to stand back and look at it critically, and what it was doing to our understanding of the natural world and how that wasn’t all good.
So, I started writing papers rather late. One of the things that happened along the way to slow me down a bit, but was okay, I had a daughter who had autism. And so, I took a very long time to finish my dissertation, and in fact, I started writing papers and then getting them published before I was finished with my dissertation. Most of the papers that I wrote in the mid ’80s through the ’90s were on feminist topics, feminist ethics, and feminist philosophy of science.
JW: Can you give us a little example? Like, what’s a feminist ethic of science? If you could explain a little.
GGR: Okay, well, feminist ethics is the ethics of care. And it’s a bit of a revolt against enlightenment ethics, which we have been heir to. How we define rights, how we define justice, how we define a number of things legally, comes from Kant and Locke and those philosophers, all men, none of whom married and none of whom had children. And so, our way of looking at our legal relationships, our financial relationships, and our moral relationships, all come out of this group of brilliant men who were into order and rationality and had no idea what it meant to raise a family.
You can see how that might have worked in separating the public sphere from the private sphere. The private sphere belonged to women. They took care of everybody and the men did the significant action and the model that they got from the enlightenment fit. Well, it doesn’t fit women very well. Carol Gilligan wrote a book that influenced me called, In a Different Voice. She was a psychologist and she studied how, given a certain situation that was difficult from a moral sense, how differently men and women thought about it, and what they thought they ought to do in a moral sense in those circumstances.
So, that sort of started me off thinking. I wrote a paper, I think it was in the late ’80s, early ’90s, on abortion. I’ve written two, three, papers on abortion. That was my big one. Because I have a biology background, I wanted to look at pregnancy from the viewpoint of a woman who was pregnant, and what that meant in terms of her own changes in her body, and what it meant in terms of the development of the fetus, embryo, fetus preborn. And so, I did a lot of study about this business about heart beating. You can get a muscle to beat by putting a little electrical energy in it. It’s not a person.
I started out looking, “Okay, what’s there? What is there for the woman?” At first, she’s nurturing this part of herself, and slowly there’s a development of a capacity. But it takes a while. Way into the second trimester and the beginning of the third trimester, to develop feeling, hearing, having those kinds of senses. And it seemed to me that you could analyze the responsibility of the woman as these things developed in terms of a relationship that she was forming with whatever was living inside her.
And so, my thought was, early on in pregnancy, it didn’t seem like there had to be a very strong reason to end the pregnancy. As you went along and things became more complicated, then you would need a strong, not saying you never could have a late term abortion, I’m just saying you had to think about it in a much more serious way because you were involved. I mean, I can’t imagine any woman who had a late term abortion that wasn’t devastated by it because she had formed a relationship. And it’s like, people don’t even talk about that. I mean, how terrible. And people are having miscarriages now and being sexually brutalized by the system.
I don’t know that every single woman, but it seems natural to me that as the thing within you becomes a sentient being, you have a relationship to it that you didn’t have before. And therefore, a responsibility that you didn’t have before earlier.
JW: Would you say it has to do with feeling movement? I’m just curious because in ancient times, that quickening was sort of the dividing line in a lot of people’s minds, which was feeling kicking, and I wonder if that was part of what you were thinking or not?
GGR: Yes, part of it. I mean, that would be into the second trimester. I think my experience, is that that was a very startling thing, because you didn’t know there was something going on there that wasn’t you at that point. I think a second trimester abortion, there must be a good, solid reason for it. Maybe you’re too young, you’re 13 years old and you’ve been raped, and you didn’t know you were pregnant. I don’t know.
Anyhow, because I was raised a Catholic, from the very first, I was told it was absolutely no way. I didn’t believe that from the beginning, even as a young teenager. I thought, “You’re not considering the woman, and you’re putting the woman in conflict with her own body and with her ‘maybe’ child.” So, it’s like, child has rights, the woman has rights. See, it’s the rights paradigm. Child has rights, woman has rights. They’re in conflict. Right to life is stronger than the right to choose, and therefore you get the argument that they always use.
I was trying to undermine that, and also try to see it from the experience of a woman who’s pregnant, and that there is this incredible thing happening in her body, and nobody else is involved in that but her. And so, anyhow, I wrote a paper that was very long and very full of details about pregnancy. I had a woman philosopher that I admire, who said, “It’s the best, most pragmatic paper she’s ever read on abortion.
JW: How did your family react to that?
GGR: My father died when I was, early 20s, and my mother developed dementia. I don’t think she would have approved. I would have never shown her that paper.
JW: Did you get public reaction?
GGR: Well, it was published in the Southern Journal of Philosophy, which is a good journal, so it’s been cited a number of times, and other things that people are writing about abortion in the way that I wanted it to. I didn’t really have any backlash or anything. But one of the things that I’m sad about as I get older, is that I wish I could have written for regular people, not just for academics.
In 1980, right after my daughter was born, a bunch of us at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, women, got together from all over the campus to found the Women’s Studies Department at SIU. I remember the first meeting, Katie was still nursing, and I brought her to that meeting and nursed all the way through the meeting. That was 1980. And it was very successful. That program now still exists.
It was set up, not to be in a particular department, because we didn’t want a department to be doing things to it. So, there were faculty in it from the Philosophy Department, History Department, Physiology Department, all over the campus, teaching courses. I taught Feminist Theory for about 14 years. I guess that’s being involved in the movement, isn’t it? I sent a lot of women out there thinking differently than they came into the class. I hope so. That’s one of the things I’m very proud of.
JW: When you say feminist theory, I mean, I have an idea of what you mean, but can you explain what it was applied to?
GGR: Everything. Epistemology, ethics, political thought. There are various ways to approach these questions. I wish I had done some review of my syllabi. There are people writing, people like bell hooks. bell hooks, who died recently, I used her work there. There are women who are doing feminist philosophy of science, which is what I feel like I belong to, who are challenging notions of rationality that are male.
For ethics, the ethics of care, would be feminist theory about morality. That it’s not just a bunch of rules. It is also responsibility for those around you who have need. If you look at the sort of structure of the legal results of the enlightenment, if somebody’s in need, you don’t have any responsibility to help them, legally speaking. So, it makes all of us strangers to one another within our legal and financial engagements. You are nobody to me. Because that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
JW: If it’s written and signed, okay. But otherwise, whatever. Interesting. So, you taught 14 years, you must have had quite an array of students during that time.
GGR: Yes, and I noticed a difference. When I first started teaching, it was wonderful that the room was always crowded. I had people from all over the campus, not just the philosophy department. It was a high-level undergraduate course you could take for graduate credit, so there were undergraduates and graduate students. And this was when Our Bodies, Ourselves came out, everybody was reading that. And people were militant. The gay women were very engaged in critiquing the system, of course. We had very lively discussions, and it was wonderful.
But then as we got into the ’90s, or maybe late ’80s, the class got smaller. The philosophy graduate students, the women, became less enthused. They sort of wanted to work with one of the men who might be more well known. So, it’s like now the women are learning about what happens when people decide you can’t have birth control pills, or you can’t have an abortion. I think the memory had, I mean, these women were young enough that they didn’t go through that with us. I just found a lack of urgency.
JW: Right. Wow. I can see that. Of course, the urgency is back.
GGR: Yes. And the women are back.
JW: I wonder how those classes are now. Of course, you’re not doing that now, but it would seem like, I hope, the bell has rung and people are paying attention.
GGR: Yes. And I don’t know what happened then as well, because there were a lot of academic feminists, whether going into French feminism, which didn’t really speak to a lot of women, except maybe a few people in the philosophy department. Maybe that’s why, but I didn’t teach French feminism. Anyhow, I hope that I influenced a number of women to join the movement, or they were already in the movement. And then I think, actually, personally, there were a couple of women who I think had difficult situations that they were in, and were able to talk about their problems.
The other thing that I was very interested in, and still am, is women in science, because I was a woman in science. And I was particularly interested in the women who pushed the paradigm. Thomas Kuhn brought this notion of the paradigm of science, and people work within the paradigm, and you can’t go outside the paradigm. Well, women tend to do that. I mean, you have to look at Lynn Margulis, Barbara McClintock, and lately, Suzanne Simard, the woman who has trees talking to one another. She was mocked at first. Turns out she was right. Turns out Lynn Margulis was right. Turned out Barbara McClintock was right. Barbara McClintock ended up getting the Nobel Prize when she was in her 80s because they wouldn’t listen to her until then. There’s a wonderful book by a feminist philosopher of science. It’s a biography of Barbara McClintock. It’s called, A Feeling for the Organism. It’s a wonderful story.
JW: I don’t know her. What was her work about?
GGR: She was a geneticist who worked on Maize corn, and this was during the Watson and Crick. What she wanted to do, from their point of view, was to get as many generations turned over as you possibly could, so you worked on bacteriophage in little petri dishes. You could get thousands of generations in no time. Barbara McClintock, in her old car, would travel around the country looking for fields to plant her corn, and she would plant her corn, and then she could see the genome by looking at the kernels of corn that she had raised. Very few grad students were trained with that, but she saw that it seemed like certain genes moved, instead of it being this perfect little, beads on a string. That somehow or another, there was a movement within the genome. Of course, everybody thought she was crazy. And then, of course, they found out she wasn’t crazy and that’s why she got the Nobel Prize.
JW: Incredible. Being a woman had nothing to do with all that. But anyway.
GGR: Well, it did in the sense that she did her own thing. She was able to encounter nature in a way that some of the more rigid paradigm people couldn’t. I just admire these women who pushed. Maybe they felt freer to do that, sort of to push the received view, and actually take it somewhere wonderful. Everybody now is talking about trees talking to one another, which is wonderful.
When I was teaching, because I was in science when I had my first child, I was working in a laboratory, and what is expected of a laboratory scientist is almost impossible for a woman to do alone. You’re supposed to be there 24/7, so if you have enough money to have a nanny, I suppose it’s okay. But it’s very difficult to have a family and be a research scientist. If you’re working with your husband in the lab, I’ve seen this in a number of cases, works out much better, because you both are involved in the same thing and you know what the give and take is. But otherwise, it’s very difficult.
I think even subconsciously, that was part of the reason that I decided that I would be better off in philosophy. Although I loved philosophy, so that wasn’t painful, but I just knew that it wasn’t going to work. I wasn’t going to be able to be there 24/7. And for the rest of my life, because I had my first child and then I had a divorce, and then ten years later I had another child, I had to be home at 3:00 in the afternoon for 20 years. Schools out. And I did it. But it was without very much cooperation from the university. I think there’s more cooperation now. I think there has been some progress in that area.
We moved to North Carolina. My husband passed away three years ago, but we moved here because of Katie. She was an adult by the time we moved, and we were in bad shape as a family. She was very involved and she needs 24/7 care; she was becoming very agitated. We needed to find a safe place for her to be. My husband was eight and a half years older than I, and there was nothing for her in Southern Illinois, but there was a program here at UNC for Autism. Internationally known. So, I came out and I scouted and discovered that this was really going to be a good place for us. So, we moved here in 2001.
I think I published two papers after that, and that was it. I became very involved in the autism community here, trying to help with appropriate residential services, which there weren’t enough of at all. I wrote grants and I did all of that. I did write two feminist ethics of care articles for rehabilitation. We found a wonderful place for Katie, so she’s only 15 minutes from me right now, and the people there are wonderful. Talk about the ethics of care. They’ve got it.
JW: So, I want to ask you this. I’m trying to think of how to say this sum up question, which is obviously, as you said, a very religious Catholic background, but you had this epiphany as a child, when the girls were suddenly prohibited from participating in this activity. Do you think that affected your thinking and the things you lean towards doing in your life? The feminist theory, the women’s study. Do you think that incident really was crucial in your life?
GGR: I think it really set that off. Very early, when you’re small, the boys are saying, “Boys are better than girls.” And that upset me too. I was like, “Why are you doing that? Why do you have to say that?” So, I guess I just thought, “My goodness, women have a place in all spheres – science, government everywhere.” They have something to give that may not be there. And I think I was right about that. Because I think more and more women are having an influence on all of these areas in a very good way.
I’m really delighted, there’s also, I forgot to mention, Jane Goodall. She changed the science and so did Barbara McClintock and so did Suzanne Simard; the woman with the trees. They changed the science. There is this anti science thing that’s happening now. It’s anti-intellectual, anti-science. And I really think that when science becomes this objective monolith that is going to dictate to you what it is you should do; I know with the antivaxxers that became a really bad problem. People don’t trust science anymore, and it’s because it’s so distant. And they’re delighted with this, trees talking to one another. Have you read Braiding Sweetgrass?
JW: No. Sounds like I should.
GGR: Oh, you should. It’s wonderful. It’s by this woman who’s a botanist. She’s a Native American and she tries to combine her spiritual relationship to nature with her science. And it’s just a beautiful book. I think to be a really good scientist, you have to love nature. I mean, really be connected to it in that spiritual or emotional way and not be sort of locked up in a sterile laboratory and not murder animals every day. Which I did.
JW: It goes with the territory, I guess.
GGR: When I was at NIH, I did have to do that, and it was not a happy thing. I know women who have quit their graduate program in science because they just couldn’t do that.
JW: It just didn’t work for them, that kind of science.
GGR: Yes.
JW: Well, do you have any closing thoughts? I don’t want to cut you off. Is there anything you would like to add?
GGR: Well, this was nice to have this opportunity and I’m hoping it inspires me. I still have a lot of thoughts in my head about all of this and I need to get writing again.
JW: That’s wonderful. I’m sure the world would appreciate it from what you told us.
GGR: I’d really like to write for people, not for just academic journals. Which is what these two women did. Braiding Sweetgrass is a very popular book.
JW: I’m definitely going to look it up. Thank you so much.
GGR: Well, thank you.