THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Jane Kates Pincus

“It’s important to say that a lot of my work came from my awareness of my ignorance – how I’d been when I had my own children.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, September 2025

JP:  My full name is Jane Abigail Kates Pincus. I was born in April 1937. That makes me 88 years old, and I was born in Manhattan.

JW:  Tell us a little about your childhood and what kinds of things do you think led you to who you became.

JP:  I grew up outside of New York City in a very large house with my mother, my father, and I had two brothers. I was a very lonely child. I went to a wonderful private school nearby, which really was challenging in the best way. It used all of our capacities for figuring things out, for work and for play. For putting on dramas and for doing mathematical classes, et cetera, in the morning.

I went to high school for five years in two different high schools. Without having too great an idea of what I wanted to do or who I wanted to be, I went to Pembroke College in Brown University. It was Pembroke College at that time.

I studied French because I’d taken French courses in elementary school, so the thing I knew how to do was learn and speak French. I majored in French, wrote a thesis about André Marot, spent my junior year in France. I feel very lucky that all of that was possible. Then the year after that, I got married in 1960.

I graduated in ’59. I married in ’60. And I really didn’t have a sense of what I wanted to do, so I went with my husband to Italy for one year. He had a Fulbright. And so, I thought I would study art, that living in Italy on the seaside was an artistic way to live.

I was unaccustomed not to being home. I thought of going back to the United States. I decided that I would look to find in myself the happiness I needed to live in the moment, basically, because I’d read a book when I was little called The Blue Bird of Happiness, by Maurice Maeterlinck. And the moral of it was the “blue bird of happiness” is in your own home.

So we returned to the U.S. My husband was originally going to go to Princeton. He was a philosopher. He was a very brilliant philosopher at Princeton. But when we were in Italy, I remember the night he decided he would rather go to Harvard, rather go to Cambridge, Mass, and go to graduate school there. And so we moved to Cambridge. And that’s what placed me in an atmosphere of political happenings.

Many of the people who we happened to live close to or to meet, were very involved in radical socialist politics of the time. The Port Huron Statement came out. We did some political activity. Ed and I went to homes that were for rent, to see if they would rent to us. I forget exactly what it was called, where the African-American couple would go to the house after us, testing whether they could get the rental.

In the early ’60s, I studied at Harvard, and I became a teacher of French. And for two years, I taught at Wellesley Senior High School. I taught French until I became pregnant and had my daughter in ’65. And meanwhile, lots of things were happening around us.

And my friends happened to be involved in the politics of the time when women were beginning to get together, really, for the first time in a very long time, or in a systematic way or in a way to feel each other out, see who was interested in what. A lot of political enterprises began at that time.

For me, in 1969, my friends were beginning to mill around and we’d have meetings with each other. They might disband, a few people might get together. It was very fluid at that time. You could meet new people or you could find people that you thought you could work with or be with.

JW:  What did you talk about at these meetings?

JP:  I was personally in two different groups. One group became my work group. With five other women, we produced a film about abortion.

We were novices. We were four filmmakers and two actresses. We produced a film, and that’s the whole story, which I won’t go into, because it wasn’t legal at that time.

Because Ed, my husband, was a filmmaker, it just happened. It was like magic, it would come to me, and they wanted to make a film about abortion. Two groups formed, and they didn’t barely form. Somehow four of us got together and we became a group.

As soon as it was rooted about that a film about abortion was being made, we began to receive audio tapes of women sending them to us to describe the abortion experiences they’d had all during the time that abortion was illegal. We received the audio tapes. We found two women to be actresses in our film, and we created our film over the period of one year. We were all novices. The main thing was we used MIT’s resources because my husband had just been appointed a professor at the new MIT Film Studio. Basically, we used their film, we used their cameras to create our film.

JW:  What was the theme? What was the theme of the film?

JP:  You can actually find it on the internet because the amazing thing that happened with the film was it was lost for 50 years or so. Filmmakers wanted to revive it, 10 or 15 years ago. For all this time, the three of us filmmakers who are left have been getting the film not only redone and sources restored, because when we made the film, everything belonged to everyone, so we didn’t acknowledge the sources of any of the information we got, partly because there was very little information about abortion or about anything at that time.

The film is now complete. It’s been through a number of organizations to distribute it. We’re working with another one to redo it to make it look more modern. So it’s alive again.

The theme is it’s divided into three parts. The first part is Sue’s story. It is the visual of one person, but with a soundtrack cut from the voices of many women, because they were the voices of the women who sent us their experiences. So it’s called “Sue’s Story,” as told by six women.

The second part was Marie’s story. She was a woman in East Boston. She did not want to be filmed, but she told her story. So we found a friend who agreed to be filmed. And Marie’s story followed Sue’s story of the experience that she had had, having to give up a baby and then having a do-it- yourself-at-home abortion and coming out for choice.

And the third part was our analysis of the system, all birth control issues, medical issues, all the things that kept women from getting the medical care. It ends with this marvelous song. We had gotten a soundtrack track of a woman singing, “My body is mine to control. My mind defines the rage inside me. Every woman is my sister and my leader when she says she will stand and fight beside me.” It was a spoken song that we put pictures to and that ends our film.

We only found out this last round, half a century later, who the person who sang the song was, and we could attribute it to her, and we could pay her for it.   It’s called “Abortion. Abortion 1970.” It’s on the Internet.

We’re still in the process of trying to distribute it. We have had a few experiences with it. There’s a lot more I could say about the film, but that’s what I was doing for one year. I decided mid-work on that film to write up the history or the story of how four filmmakers worked together, and the problems that arose. I kept a journal of it, so I have that.

JW:  You said you were in two different groups.  What was the other group?

JP:  Another group that was fairly large and formless soon became the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective.

I took a year off to do the abortion film, and then went back to the Health Book Collective, because what we decided to do was just to expand our knowledge. I can’t get the dates quite right, but I had been pregnant, so we decided that we needed to write about this smaller group, about the issues that most concerned them, given where we were in our reproductive lives.

And then we would research them, we would learn about them. We would write them down. Then we would give a course. So that’s exactly what we did. I wrote down everything I knew, which wasn’t much about pregnancy. Everybody else wrote down and/or collected the info.

We gave the course in September of 1970 at MIT, which you’ve probably heard many stories about. We started talking about sexuality. That was the first course, and there were 50 women in this room at MIT, which was the belly of the beast, we called it. There was a meeting in ’69, right after my son was born. Just after that, we gave the course, “Women and Their Bodies.”

Well, I don’t know what we called ourselves. Then, later we called it “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” or the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective.

Before that, we just gave sessions at MIT on each subject, inviting women to come to the courses. And that was very inspirational for some women who then generated groups of their own. We, who worked on these original papers, met together because two women who worked at the New England Free Press wanted them to be gathered into a pamphlet, they were calling it, which I called a book.

We rewrote whatever information we had. I wrote about pregnancy and the stages of pregnancy and a lot of stuff that’s very interesting now. The woman who had postpartum depression wrote about that, et cetera. A woman who had an abortion wrote about that.

And the idea in writing about it, the idea in putting it down on paper was to make it accessible to more people so that they could tell their stories, so they could identify with it. It was an invitation. We never really meant to write a book. I don’t know what we had in mind. But we did write the book. It was called originally, Women and Their Bodies, to start with, and then, Women and Our Bodies, and eventually, Our Bodies, Ourselves.

JW:  How did it switch to Our Bodies, Ourselves?

JP:  Because women and their bodies alienates women from their body.

I’m not sure exactly about the conversation that took place. I don’t have any idea when, but it happened around 1970, because I think the first version was Women and Their Bodies.

The two women from the New England Free Press, which was a radical press, sent out radical pamphlets that were at that time very jazzy and very influential. We, at some point, had to pay somebody at the New England Free Press to pack up the books and send them out because they were so desirable that colleges started ordering them and giving them to freshmen, putting a newsprint book in each box and so forth like that.

JW:  How did you get MIT to allow you to do the class?

JP:  Well, because a number of our husbands worked at MIT, they were professors. I’m trying to remember how many of them, but a few. And so, we got a room at MIT, and there was another group that had put itself together, Abby Rockefeller’s group, Cell 16. There were a fair number of groups. Abby Rockefeller had a group called Cell 16, which was pretty radical, really much more radical.

JW:  You were pretty radical for the time.

JP:  They were even more. We had weekly meetings, and we invited one of the very influential leaders of this group from Somerville to come. She came and she said, “All men should be killed. Should be done away with in the world.” “Oh, then how would we have more women in the field?” we said.  “No, No, not our husbands. Not us.” There were a lot of groups. Cell 16 had a certain power too because it was more militant. We were just students and housewives becoming radicalized and radicalizing one another.

JW:  Were you involved in the second version of Our Bodies, Ourselves?

JP:  I was involved in all of Our Bodies, Ourselves until 2005.

JW:  What did you write about or what did you do?

JP:  I wrote about pregnancy and childbirth and basically became an activist in working for reform and revolution in childbearing practices. It was a challenge. It’s important to say that a lot of my work came from my awareness of my ignorance and how ignorant I’d been when I had my own children. When I saw my son, when I went for an appointment and saw my record from the birth of my daughter, I said, “That’s not my record. That didn’t happen that way.”

As a matter of fact, I had no idea what was happening when I was in labor with my daughter. I had been given Pitocin which speeds up contractions, which at that point in 1965, was a practice by OB/GYNs that had just begun. And it wasn’t regulated. So, I got too much, which sped up my contractions, and they had to slow them down with Demerol, but I had no idea this was all happening. And my labor was only for 4 hours long.

It was my choice. The doctor had said, the morning I gave birth, “do you want your baby now or do you want to have your baby naturally”? And I didn’t know anything. I said, “I’d like to have her now.” And I went in. That really was the beginning of my awareness that I had a lot to learn.

JW:  You learned a lot over the years and wanted to educate other people is what I’m hearing.

JP:  The important thing to talk about, too, is that I wasn’t alone. At that time, there were women all around me who were discovering facts about their lives and their medical care and the care that they were getting and the indignities and the successes. You’ve probably heard that at MIT, there were these huge women’s meetings at the end of the ’60s, where women would gather and put out pamphlets and articles that they’d written. So that also was an important part of my life and our lives.

They were free-flowing women’s meetings. I remember them as being in a big room, lots of tables, lots of information, all the information that we could gather and generate because it was being generated at that time. It was very exciting. And the thing about working on Our Bodies Ourselves was, if we learned something, if you needed to learn something, you could learn it.

You experienced it physically sometimes, and you learned from that physical experience. It was like you could take your knowledge, the knowledge you’d gained, sometimes viscerally, talk about it with other women, put it down on paper, make a book out of it, which lots of people read, and then eventually the book got adapted and translated in 35 countries.  It took a long It took a long time for that to happen.

JW:  There were many editions, right?

JP:  There were all together, I think, nine editions. The first edition was relatively very radical. It was very outspoken. It might have been very inaccurate at times, but it was, as I often think of it, as a thing of the spirit. It really had the whole spirit of excitement and resolve and earnestness and caring.

Then because the book was selling, we sold a quarter of a million copies of the paperback version published by Simon & Schuster. We took a vote on whether to go to Simon & Schuster or another big publishing house whose name is slipping my mind. We voted 6 to 4 for Simon & Schuster because they agreed to put out clinic copies at a huge discount, something like a 75% discount, to educational institutions and women’s groups.

Then Ed and I moved to Vermont, and my job was sending out books to whoever wanted them. It was a great job.

The incredible thing is, it still happens now. I don’t go out much anymore, but when I do go out, sometimes somebody who knows that I was part of that mentions that it was a book that saved her life or a book that meant a great deal to her and to her family. It’s still got a life of its own.

Our Bodies Ourselves, the organization, has moved to Suffolk University. Suffolk has taken over the work of Our Bodies Ourselves. So, the book continues. Or the enterprise continues to have a particular life of its own.

JW:  Did you work on the version for older women?

JP:  That’s the other thing that happened. One of the women in the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective that we incorporated in the early ’70s, together with a woman who wasn’t part of the group, wrote a book, Ourselves Growing Older. Also some of the women in our group wrote Ourselves and Our Children. It continues now in the new form at Suffolk University in Boston.

JW:  What’s the new form, being online?

JP:  The new form is being online, having lots of information of all different kinds, women speaking about their experiences, medical information, health information, organizing information. It’s a very rich website, and I consider it a blessing that it continued because a lot of organizations have died.

JW:  Did you stick with pregnancy and childbirth all those years?

JP:  Yes, I stuck with pregnancy and childbirth until 2005. For the 1984 edition I co-edited it with Wendy Sanford, another member of the collective. And then in the 1996 version, I did a lot of writing and rewriting and helping out. I did a lot of editorial work.

When it came to the 2000s, the way the book was written and the way the information was put together, it really excluded what I did and the other women. It had a different format. You had to have a pre-reader. You had to have post-readers. Voices would be changed and exchanged and taken away and reinserted. I found that by the 2005 edition, I couldn’t work that way anymore. For the book to become a book of the times and be published, it perhaps had to change form or change directorship. But for me, it just didn’t work anymore.

JW:  It seems like it was a very large part of your life for a long time.

JP:  It definitely was, from 1969 to 2005. The thing is that we moved to Vermont. We moved out of Boston. So, I was away for a lot of the time, and I would go back to Boston periodically. Meanwhile, the Health Book Collective moved into varied offices throughout Boston. I would meet up with it at various points in its existence.

JW:  Does the collective itself still exist or is it really the written materials that exist?

JP:  The written materials exist. It’s all online. Our Bodies Ourselves is online. There are people who want to continue some of the work who have nothing really to do with the Suffolk enterprise but want to find ways of keeping it alive. But we’re also advancing in age. Some of us have died, and there are a few of us still going, I would say. Everybody met in Boston yesterday, but I didn’t go down to Boston. And so we’re still going. We’re still trucking in one way or the other.

JW:  And there’s still stuff to talk about.

JP:  There’s even more stuff to talk about.

JW:  What has this project meant to you in your life?

JP:  Well, I’ll start to cry, but it’s meant my life. It really has meant my life. It gave me riches. It gave me friends to this moment. It enticed me to learn, if I wanted to ask somebody what should be done or if someone said I’d have to research it. It gave all of us incredible, powerful meaning to our lives. And even now, we’re still going in some form or another, those of us who are here.

JW:  I want to thank you for that. The volumes meant a lot to me and my friends when we first saw them and continued to read them.

JP:  That’s wonderful to hear. It’s amazing because that’s still happening in my life. I live in the country, and I don’t go out very much, but we did something online with our film. During the question-and-answer period, somebody addressed Our Bodies Ourselves because she knew I had been part of it and said it had meant so much to her. It’s incredibly moving.

JW:  Is there anything you’d like to say in closing?

JP:  I just wanted to stress that I’m part of a movement of many women and also many wonderful men who are trying to better women’s health. We’re having an increased struggle these days that things are changing again: to have won the right to abortion and to choose our reproductive lives, then find it’s gone. Now women again have to fight really, really hard to get what we need and what should be ours by right. Thank you for talking to me.