THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Jane Mansbridge, Ph.D.

“When you have a social movement as opposed to something else, a social movement is made up of ordinary people talking and making sense of things.”

Interviewed by Mary Jean Collins, VFA Historian, January 2025

MJC:  Start by telling us your name and when and where you were born, Jane.

JM:  Okay. Jane Mansbridge, and my nickname is Jenny. I was born in New York, November 19, 1939.

MJC:  Tell us about your early life, and what your life was like growing up that might have led you in the direction you went. Just give us a little impression of your family and a short telling of it.

JM:  Well, I was born in the city, but then when I was in third grade, we moved to the country because my parents had had a second child. In the particular area of the city that we were in, the public schools weren’t so great, so they moved to a place that had good schools in the country, and my dad commuted from then on.

My mom was a homemaker until we left for college. Her mom had been in one of the first law school classes to take women at NYU. My mother had had governesses, and my mother vowed that she wasn’t going to do that to her children, so she was going to be a full-time homemaker. That’s the way the pendulum swings.

I saw my mom getting really depressed. Classic Betty Friedan stuff, but I didn’t know Betty Friedan at the time. Anyway, I’d planned to have five kids. I was definitely somebody of that generation; I didn’t have any professional plans. I didn’t want to be my mom, but that was about all. My mom said at one point that she had raised me “to marry a prince or a pauper,” and she was proud of that. That I could live on practically nothing, but I could also marry a prince.

It’s so interesting looking back that those were the bookends of her vision, a prince or a pauper. It was great that she could raise me. Particularly the older I get, the more I appreciate my mom. She really did what she could. It wasn’t easy, because she was smart and entrepreneurial. I always thought that if she’d been on the Titanic, she would have been taking tables from the dining room and getting them up there on the deck to hold onto when the ship sank. She wouldn’t have been sitting and singing, Nearer, My God, to Thee; she would have been doing something. Whether or not it worked, she would have been trying. So, there was that.

Neither of my parents were particularly political. My dad was English, and he never changed his British citizenship, and so he never could vote. He was progressive, but he wasn’t involved. My mom was raised Republican but then lived in somewhat artistic circles. The word in political science is “cross-pressured.” She had the Republican side and she had the Democrat side, so she wasn’t really active in politics. I didn’t come from a politically active family at all. I came from a family where my dad at least had definite progressive sympathies and pro-labor sympathies, but didn’t really have any experience with politics.

MJC:  Can I just go back? Because of the peculiarity of your grandmother here, I want to ask a little more about her. Did you sense any impact of her beliefs? Was she disapproving at all of how your mother had decided to change her life?

JM:  I never met any of my grandparents; three had all died before I was born and the other was in England. So, they were just mythical figures who were invoked at various points and not invoked that much. My mom didn’t talk about her family very much, and my dad hardly ever talked about his family. So, they weren’t there.

MJC:  So, they were a non-influence. You know about them theoretically. But it’s interesting because your grandmother was of the suffrage generation, right?

JM:  There’s nothing in the family papers to suggest that she was active in politics, but she must have been something, because she was obviously unusual. What she thought, what she felt, what she cared about, I haven’t a clue.

MJC:  Right. Okay. Well, I just had to dip into that.

JM:  Yes. I wish I knew.

MJC:  A little bit of an unusual situation. So then how many siblings?

JM:  One. And he’s in Austin right now. He’s five years younger. So, I was kind of the foreman. I was in between the grownups and him.

MJC:  What was the town you moved in to after you left New York City?

JM:  Weston, Connecticut. Now, it’s filled with mega-mansions. But then, there were 27 kids in my graduating class from what we now call middle school, and I would say half of them were working class, and some of them were poor factory. It was actually a consolidated school; even though there were only 27 kids in the class, it was consolidated with Georgetown.

There were kids without all their teeth, there was one kid who was illiterate, there were two that were tenant farmers. Then there were a bunch who were just ordinary working-class and middle-class and a couple of professional kids. It was very class-mixed. I knew that some people had money and I knew that other people didn’t. It didn’t seem as if we had much money, because my mom was always saving for travel. But I didn’t have any class lens, and of course, not much of a gender lens.

MJC:  Right. Was there any discussion of college?

JM:  Not a whole ton of discussion of college, but I expected I would go to college. I always got very high grades in whatever tests they gave. I was always getting good grades.

MJC:  Was that decision influenced both by your parents and the teachers and you, or how did that go?

JM:  The decision to go? Well, not to go to college, I just assumed I was going to college, but where to go. I was always a misfit. But in a class of 27, everybody’s different. I didn’t feel too much like a misfit. When I got to high school — and again, to me, it was huge.  It was really only, I think, 250 kids in the graduating class, but it seemed huge.

The problem for me was that they made a mistake. My fall of my entering year, they had a dance. At the dance, for the first time ever, and also the last time, they asked a group of artists from the town to choose the Homecoming Queen. It’d always been chosen by the football team. And as luck would have it, they chose me, because I was sort of a pretty girl. I wasn’t wearing the right things and stuff, but I was sort of pretty, and they picked me.

And it was a catastrophe, because I became the Homecoming Queen, and I was not what anybody wanted. So, they labeled me “Queeny” and started bullying me, like yelling, “Queeny,” when I walked down the hall. And an anonymous phone call saying, “You think you’re top banana, but you’re just a rotten fruit,” then, click, they hung up.

I was not tremendously happy in high school. My parents noticed it. I didn’t know this until about 40 years later when I was home and saying to some friends of mine, “My parents didn’t even know I was unhappy at high school,” and I looked at my mom’s eyes and I said, “Did you know?” She said, “Well, yes, we did.”

Anyway, they offered me, if I wanted it, to have a year in boarding school here in the United States, or six months in a school in Europe, because that’s what they could afford. I chose six months in school in Europe because I wanted to learn French. I chose a school in Switzerland. It was a girls’ school. I didn’t choose it for that reason, but in the end I had six months in a girls’ school, an all-women environment. And it was fantastic because I didn’t have to worry about boys.

When I came back, there was no question in my mind that I wanted to go to a women’s college. I looked at Smith and Mount Holyoke and Wellesley and Radcliffe, and I decided that Radcliffe was not really a women’s college. It was a fake women’s college; it was actually part of Harvard. And so I went to Wellesley. It was four of the best years of my life. I saw boys on the weekend, and the rest of the time, I was me and I didn’t have to be anything other than me. It was pre-women’s movement, of course. But I think that had a very formative effect on me.

MJC:  Yes, I’m sure it did. So that’s great. So, you went to Wellesley. What did you study?

JM:  I studied history because I loved history. It’s so interesting. It helps explain who we are. But I didn’t find out until many, many years later, that I’m a bit dys-numeric. I can’t remember numbers. I don’t know the multiplication tables to this day. If you asked me eight times five, I would have to count it up on my fingers. And so, I couldn’t remember dates.

I kept taking courses in history because I was bad at it, which was fine until I went to graduate school. I went to graduate school in history because that’s what I had a degree in. It turned out that my failures in being able to remember numbers weren’t really great once I got to the professional stage. Anyway, I majored in history. I loved it. But I just couldn’t remember dates.

MJC:  So interesting. What a weird problem to have, right?

JM:  Yes. Isn’t that strange? I mean, what professional person these days, what kid — because they are all now thinking professional — would pick a major that they weren’t good at? It shows how the times have changed.

MJC:  Right. But you understood the concept? You understood what came before something.

JM:  Oh, sure. And I wrote great papers. I mean, that’s how I got into graduate school — I wrote really good papers. It’s just I couldn’t remember dates. So I wasn’t ever very good in exams.

MJC:  Oh, that’s interesting. Okay, so now we’ve got a master’s in history, and we can’t remember any dates. So, what do we do now?

JM:  Okay. Then I was married.

MJC:  When did that happen?

JM:  Oh, well, my husband-to-be came to Wellesley from Harvard for the first freshman mixer of the year. Straight ahead, I fell for him, and married him in June of senior year. Classic ’50s. Then later, he divorced me, but that’s a whole other story. As we got to the end of college, he wanted me to go to graduate school because he was going to graduate school. So, Okay, I’ll go to graduate school. That’s how unprofessional I was. I was just, Okay, honey. I applied for the things and I got a fellowship. There was money rolling in the streets then, because they wanted people to go to graduate school. There were scholarships all over the place.

MJC:  Okay, so that’s good. So, you’re going right along the woman track of that period of our time as we remember it. Okay, so now what happens?

JM:  Okay, so here I’m in graduate school, and now the rubber hits the road. First of all, I’m in the second shift doing all this stuff, so I don’t really hang out with the graduate students, and I don’t hear the scuttlebutt of how you do it.

MJC:  Are you working? Is that why you don’t hang out with them?

JM:  Part of it was because I was doing the household stuff. But secondly, my husband got very interested in the folk music scene, and so did I, of course. And so, my friends, our friends, were all from the folk music scene in Cambridge at the time, which was wonderful. But it also meant that I just wasn’t part of what they call my “cohort.” I was out of it because I was married and doing this household stuff. And then also any free time we had, we were down at the Club 47 listening to wonderful people pick and sing.

So, I flunked my History generals, and I flunked them so badly –they only had orals, they didn’t have any written exams. It was three men and me. They were good people, but it brought out their sadistic side. I was told later, many, many, many years later, that the Harvard History department had an international reputation for misogyny. Believe it or not, being a feminist and all that, I never thought of that as an explanation. All the explanations I gave myself were about the reasons in me for my failure.

At one moment in the orals — this was the most humiliating moment –they asked me for some boundary changes. This wasn’t about a date that I couldn’t remember.  It was about the boundary changes after some war or other. I said, “Well, there were seven, and I know five.” I listed the five. Then one of them said, “Oh, I’m sure you can think of the other two.” I said, “I told you I know only five out of the seven.” He said, “A famous man once came from there.” And another guy said, “His name began with N.” I said, “Okay, Napoleon, Corsica.”

But I mean, what good did that do me? It just humiliated me. I told them I didn’t know. They knew I didn’t know. So why wipe my face in it? It wasn’t that they were bad people. It’s just that something in the whole situation brought out this badness in them. My total triumph was I didn’t cry until after I got out of the room. But they told me I’d flunked the exam so badly that they had considered not letting me take it  again — which is never done. You always get to take the general exam again. And they said, “But because your papers were so good, we’re going to let you.” And I said to myself, “No way, I’m out of here.”

MJC:  So, you finished the coursework, but you didn’t take the exams? Is that what happened?

JM:  No, I had already finished my courses. This was called the general exams. After you finish your coursework, you spend six months or something just studying for these exams. Then you take the exams, and then you go on and write the PhD. So, these are the big, big, big gateway exams. I really flunked them terribly, and I flunked them in this humiliating way, as I said.

I felt, Okay, history, at Harvard at least, is not for me. I dropped out for a bit and then I applied to Sociology and I got accepted, but I got accepted by the acting acceptance person. This was all at the last minute, and so it wasn’t really in the standard process. Then the non-acting person came back from vacation, and he called the History department. Then after listening to what the History department people said, he de-accepted me. Then I applied to the Political Science department, and I said to my then husband, What am I going to say when they ask me why I flunked the history generals? And he said, Tell them you thought you were going to ace it, so you didn’t study.

MJC:  Oh, dear.

JM:  This is so far from the truth. I am a real truth-teller. This was a bold-face 100% lie. It couldn’t have been further from the truth. But I saw that strategically, it was such a male thing. Strategically, I’m so good that I didn’t even bother to study for the exams.

MJC:  Arrogance.

JM:  So, I said it, and I got into the Political Science department, and the rest is history.

MJC:  Oh, for God’s sake.

JM:  Isn’t that amazing?

MJC:  That’s a fabulous story.

JM:  That is the biggest lie I’ve ever told in my life. And it got me in.

MJC:  That’s amazing.

JM:  I wrote a dissertation. I was going to write something on attitudes toward law in France and the United States, and it was all fantastic. I’d written a big paper on it and whatnot, and then I got divorced, and I couldn’t bear the idea of going to France all by myself. I thought I’d have a complete collapse.

So, I went around to all my professors and said, What can I do really fast? This one guy [Arthur Sutherland, at the Harvard Law School] said, Well, here’s a topic you can do in the summer. I thought, A summer? Fabulous. I’ll do it. I wrote this dissertation on Justices Brandeis and Sutherland. I’ve never published a word out of it, but I got my PhD.

Then, there we were in the midst of the ’60s, and I was part of all these participatory collectives and stuff, and they were not doing well. I thought, Well, here I am in a field, political science; don’t we have anything to say about how to make these little democracies work better? I looked for something. There was one book, Sid Verba’s first book, on small groups, but really nothing else that applied.

I thought, Oh, okay, well, I’ll try to figure it out. So, that’s what I did. That’s what started my work, was trying to help the participatory collectives that I’d been part of. That’s what started it all. And of course, some of those collectives were my women’s collectives, the small groups.

MJC:  Okay. So, bring us up to date on the women’s collectives. They obviously formed sometime in this same period. So, talk to us about what you saw happening, why the women’s collectives were forming, and so on.

JM:  Well, I was in Boston, luckily. And Boston was just like, booming. I don’t know when, I meant to look it up, there was a conference at Emmanuel College [May 1969] that I didn’t go to, but out of that came a bunch of collectives, and I was in two of them. First, I was in just an ordinary one where it was just 7-12 people talking. I’ve never had anything so transformative in my life. Were you part of a women’s collective?

MJC:  Sure. Well, we were consciousness-raising groups. I think that’s what we called them at the time.

JM:  Yes, consciousness raising groups. Exactly. A CR group. Then, you know, Oh, my God, things that we never had thought before. It was incredible. It was really incredible. It was hugely consciousness raising.

MJC:  Literally. Right. Now, your husband and you have left each other.

JM:  He left me.

MJC:  He left you. Now, are you dating, or what’s your status now at this period?

JM:  I’m dating. I was a little burnt by that experience. I wasn’t dating too much. I was dating and I was doing this women’s stuff. I also helped begin the Bread and Roses, the Our Bodies, Ourselves thing.

MJC:  Yes, I want you to talk about that. I didn’t mean to get you off. Let’s go back to that and talk about the institutions you saw booming all around you, including the ones that you helped develop like Bread and Roses. Tell us about that time.

JM:  Well, it was just an amazing time. It wasn’t just the women’s movement. There were bicycle collectives, there were law collectives, there were free schools, there were counseling collectives. You name it, there was a collective around it. Then there was Bread and Roses, which was a holding company of a lot of consciousness raising groups and other women’s collectives.

And there were marches, on Women’s Day in particular. There were plays. There was guerrilla theater going on in the streets. At one point, I was passing out pamphlets on the Cambridge Commons. One was The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, but then there was the other one about housework.

MJC:  Was it Wages for Housework?

JM:  No, that wasn’t it. Anyway, it was about housework. It was a great pamphlet, whatever it was. [Pat Mainardi, “The Politics of Housework”] I’m sure they have it at the Schlessinger.  And I was just handing them out with friends. I don’t know where we got free pamphlets to hand out, but we did.

MJC:  How were you supporting yourself?

JM:  I was supporting myself by a sort of ABD type job at MIT. We taught Humanities, a group of us, and there was a big sit-in against the war. Actually, MIT did a wonderful thing against the war. Some of the departments, including the Fluid Dynamics section, stopped taking any money from the Defense Department. It was wonderful.

Well, you remember, it was a very positive, hopeful time, when it looked as if you could do a lot to change things. And things were changing under your nose. I felt that at every meeting I went to — either a consciousness-raising group or a larger meeting. One day it was, “Smash monogamy” and the next day it was, “No sex,” and the next day it was, “All sex.” The ideas were coming fast and furious.

There were radical feminists, socialist feminists, but people didn’t go around with initials over their heads. It wasn’t like New York, where there were a lot of separate cliques. It was much more mixed and fluid and fruitful. It was just an explosive time for ideas and collective action and a huge warmth among the women trying to do things. Movies, and plays, and people starting magazines. It was fantastic. It was just an amazing, amazing time. I think some people remember it with more bitterness because there were some issues. I just remember it with incredible joy, and such excitement. Everything was making sense.

At that time, a library at Harvard had what’s called the reserve books — the ones that you read for courses, as opposed to just the stacks of large numbers of books that you could take out. That library was closed to women, and you had to go 15 minutes over to Radcliffe to use the library there, because the library at Harvard was closed to women. The idea was that the presence of women would distract the men.

And if you were a faculty member, if you were a female, you couldn’t go to the faculty club without a male escort. And when you did, you had to go in a special back door. All of this, when I got there, I just accepted like water that you swim in. Well, that’s the way it is. And then the women’s movement, my God. I mean in a sense, it’s trivial, but also it’s big  — that you can’t go to the goddamn faculty club without a man. Those things were changing, and we were changing them. It was an amazing time. Really a wonderful time. I wish everybody could go through that.

MJC:  I know. Okay. So, now where are we going from here?

JM:  Let’s see. Well, there was the course that somebody or other started. I don’t know who started it, but the group that became Our Bodies Ourselves had a course they gave one year. It wasn’t a course for credit or anything like that, but it was structured like a course where you had lectures. It was done at MIT, and I did the “Sexuality” one. I remember years later coming into a room, and a woman said, I remember you, she said, Showing us how to masturbate! Because I’d drawn a vulva up on the board and I was saying, You move your finger up and down next to the clitoris. And I moved my finger up and down on the board in the right place. Because for a long time I didn’t know how to masturbate. I learned it at age 27 or something like that. I learned at the time of the women’s movement. She said, I remember that!

Then Ginger Goldner, whom I hardly knew at that time, revised it, along with Nancy London, and so that was the first sexuality chapter in Our Bodies, Ourselves. [The name of that 1970 first edition was Women and Their Bodies: A Course.] It was Ginger and Nancy London and me. My name at that time was my husband’s name. My name there was Jane de Long. But it’s me. Anyway, being part of that collective was great.

My dad was a publisher, so we [the collective, later called the Boston Women’s Health Collective] had this big decision as to whether to stick with the Free Press, which was publishing it for, I think 75 cents, or to go with a real publisher. (I know the Free Press was a real publisher, but I mean a big, large-scale publisher – we went with Simon & Schuster) and have it cost more.

I was very much of the faction that was pushing for the bigger publisher because I thought that large numbers of people should be able to have this, and that that would only happen with an established publisher. But there was a real back and forth because you can imagine the arguments on the other side. It was a definite big decision to go with Simon & Schuster, and I’m really glad we did, of course.

MJC:  We all started in small spaces wherever we were, right? Then the question was bringing it to the larger public to have a bigger impact on the whole world, right? And so that debate did go on.

JM:  It was a real decision. There were arguments for keeping it cheap and sticking with essentially a socialist publisher. They had worker control.

MJC:  Right. Yes. And those debates are still relevant, right? I mean, in some ways.

JM:  They are still relevant.

MJC:  So, you went to the larger publisher, and I believe Our Bodies, Ourselves got publicity at that point and got a much wider distribution through bookstores, et cetera. Is that correct?

JM:  Yes, absolutely.

MJC:  So, the impact on the whole population of women, you can’t even calculate how big it was in in some ways, right?

JM:  And then the next year, there was the occupation of the Women’s Center, and I was not in on the planning of that.

MJC:  Can you talk about what the issues were in that?

JM:  Well, the issues were that we had all these collectives, and then we had Bread and Roses, which was sort of an umbrella organization. But we were all very anti-leadership, anti-hierarchy, and it’s hard to organize. The spokes on a wheel have a center; that’s a very easy, understandable way to organize. And it’s hard to organize when you have all these decentralized things, but then how do they come together? So, we were struggling with that.

Some people, not me, came up with the idea we needed a building. This was true in San Francisco; lots of people, lots of collectives came up with this in different parts of America at the same time — that a building would allow the decentralized aspect, but also the coordinated aspect.

There was an almost empty building, part of the architectural school, I think. Anyway, some planning committee identified this building, and then on the Women’s Day march, as we were walking down the street and chanting, somebody said — there’s a documentary on this called Left On Pearl— somebody yelled out, Turn left on Pearl! We turned on left on Pearl Street and walked down and they said, Occupy the building.

So, we rushed in and occupied the building. And we held it for, I don’t know, four, five, six days. I don’t know how many days. [It was 10 days.] And then, towards the end, the cops got more serious and said, We are really going to invade on, whatever it was, Monday or something. And so, we had basically all-night meetings about, what were we going to do? I was in the faction, Call it a victory and leave. But we went back and forth because it was the women’s movement, because it was a building.

The meeting, of course, changed people. I mean, over the course of an evening, we’d decide one thing and then different people would come in and we’d decide another thing. Flo Kennedy had come down from New York. I remember at one point, there were only maybe about 25 of us, maybe 30 at the most, I don’t know, in the circle. It was like 2:00 in the morning, making the decision in one way or another.

She said, Well, how many of you have been arrested anyway? Assuming all these white middle-class people hadn’t. About 15 of us raised their hands. She was shocked. And I thought, There. Don’t be so scornful, goddamn it. We’ve earned our stripes. And I was actually one of them. I’d gotten arrested in some Vietnam thing and actually been put in jail and stuff. It was no big deal; except it got on my record. And then we did decide to leave and walk out in triumph.

Before that time, a woman who was a Radcliffe donor, and also on Radcliffe boards and things; I’ve forgotten her name [Susan Lyman]; she gave us some piece of money. I wish I could remember the amount, let’s say $10,000 or something [$5000]. We put it down as a down payment on Pleasant Street. Anyway, I’ve forgotten the exact address [46 Pleasant St], but the Women’s Center.

And I became very active in that, and I fundraised for it and did a lot of planning in regard to it, and we pulled it off. Then there was a big problem because it was empty some of the time, and some neighborhood kids came in and trashed it. What we found was that we had to have somebody live there. We were against having somebody live there because we’re against leaders, and we thought that anybody who lived there was going to, by definition, have a central role. But the person who came to live there was not that kind of person. She was not an imposer. But it was pretty up and down there for a while before we figured out how to do things.

And then there was a bit of a radical/socialist split. I’ve forgotten what issues there were. I was kind of on the radical side. I was a sort of a deputy to the socialist feminists at some point. Linda Gordon was on the socialist feminist side; I was on the radical feminist side. I can’t remember what the issues were even. It was semi-amicable. I mean, some people may have felt bitter, but there wasn’t a pervasive bitterness.

MJC:  Just trying to learn how to be in the world, right?

JM:  Yes, it was good. And the Cambridge Women’s Center exists to this day. I think it’s the longest living women’s center in the US and possibly the world. So, it’s still there. We did a good job setting it up. So that was very exciting and I learned a lot from it about organization.

MJC:  All right. So, now we have the Women’s Center, and you’re a part of setting that up. Now, where are you going from here?

JM:  Well, then I finished my PhD, and I started work on this other book, which is what my real trajectory was. I started work on a book about participatory democracy. I used two case studies — a town meeting and a workplace in a big metropolitan area. I was going to have the Women’s Center be my third case study, but my notes were terrible because I was involved, so I kept not taking notes.

Also, I realized that it was different, because in the workplace and in the town, everybody was affected by the laws that they made whether they attended meetings or not. With the Women’s Center, it was hard to even figure out, Okay, who’s the membership? What’s the denominator? With the town, the denominator is all the people who live in the town. With the workplace, all the people who work in the organization. Then you can say, 50% attended a meeting or something.

But here, if somebody who comes into the Women’s Center signs something, does that count as being a member? It was too analytically confusing, so I dropped the Women’s Center and it’s just those two case studies. I really poured myself into that because I cared a whole ton about actually helping these participatory democracies work. That book became the foundation of my work.

MJC:  Okay, I want the name of the book and the publisher, please.

JMC:  Okay. It was, Beyond Adversary Democracy. It was Basic Books. Then later, the paperback was taken up by the University of Chicago Press. But it was originally a Basic Books publication.

MCJ:  So, this is your first published book, is that correct?

JM:  Yes. It had a deep meaning to me. I made the argument that the kind of democracy that we have in the nation-state level, where we have a lot of conflict, is a different democracy from the kind that you can practice if you have a lot of common interests. And that we allow our — what I call — adversary framework — the democracy that we’ve evolved over the years that is appropriate for lots of conflict, we’ve allowed that model to become basically our only model of democracy. And then when we apply it to our own collectives, it doesn’t make so much sense.

And you have to kind of say, Wait a minute, this is actually a somewhat different beast, and it needs a different kind of democracy beyond adversary democracy. Then you can say, Okay, wait another minute. There are actually some moments in the polity, the larger polity, that are a little bit more like the collective. And we can borrow lessons from the collective, even for the national stage, that are beyond adversary democracy.

So, that’s the message of the book. That’s what I learned and passed on in the book. So, I was working on that, but I had finished my dissertation and I went on the market and I got a job at the University of Chicago, which was heaven on earth, by the way, at that moment in time.

MJC:  Can you remember, Jane, what year that was?

JM:  1973. So, I left the Boston scene, and when you take a new job, well, particularly a new academic job, you’re very, very busy, obviously. Moving, getting accustomed in the new place and stuff, but there was also the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. I was in Hyde Park, which is where the University of Chicago is, which is a suburb of Chicago.

The Women’s Liberation Union was in the city per se, so our group wasn’t integral to it. But I helped start a women’s organization at the University of Chicago. We went on marches and stuff with the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. I was a member of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union; I just wasn’t deeply active in it.

MJC:  Did they have a name, Jane?

JM:  Oh, I don’t know what it was. University of Chicago Women’s Liberation or something. Then there was our little collective that came from my class. One of my students wanted to call us the Belle Star Bandit Queens. She was from Texas, not surprisingly. I think we chose some more innocuous name, but inside it felt like the Belle Star Bandit Queens. So, my class was the core of that — my class on whatever it was, women in politics or something. It was one of the earliest classes I taught. It was also one of the earliest classes on women in politics, so there weren’t many books for it. There were very few books to assign. It was exciting. The whole thing was very exciting times. And the marches were great.

Then, when did the ERA start? The ERA seemed like very interesting stuff, but it wasn’t passing in Illinois, and a student of mine wrote a paper on it. That was a really interesting course; it was a new choice among the introductory courses in the social sciences.  We started it, and for the first time at the University of Chicago, an introductory course in the social sciences used survey research. The University of Chicago was very great-booksy. One course of the two existing intro courses was the more sociology one, which was Marx and Tönnies and Weber. The other  was the more political science-y one, which was Madison and other more political science-y theorists.

We, for the first time, invented a course that was like modern social science. At that time the General Social Survey was just beginning, run out of the University of Chicago. I think it was the second year, possibly even the first year, that they’d ever done a general US-wide survey, and they asked a question on the ERA. My student did her paper on that question and found that some huge percentage were for the ERA.

What I realized was that this was a conundrum. Here are all these people in favor of equal rights for women, but here’s Illinois not passing it. So why is that? I thought, Okay, well, let’s investigate that. So, I did. And one of the things that I found out, the basis of the book, Why We Lost the ERA, was that we, we the activists, were arguing that the ERA would do things that a majority of Americans didn’t want.

For example, only 22% of Americans at that time wanted women to be drafted and sent into combat. At least one important legal scholar argued that the ERA, if passed, would not in fact do that, because the Supreme Court at the time had something called the “doctrine of military necessity,” which meant that people in the armed forces didn’t have the same rights as civilians. And that was settled doctrine.

So, if the armed forces had said, Drafting women is not good for the security of the United States, the Supreme Court would have said, Doctrine of military necessity. No. But we did not make that argument, because our lawyers didn’t like the doctrine of military necessity, naturally. I mean, I don’t like it either, but we didn’t say, Hey, the ERA wouldn’t do this because of the doctrine of military necessity. We said, Yes, it would draft women, and only 22% of Americans wanted that to happen. You may notice little similarities to some of the stuff today.

MJC:  But you wrote the book after the ERA had been defeated in Illinois.

JM:  Well, I was writing it before the ERA was defeated and I luckily didn’t have to publish it until after because I didn’t want to produce criticism of the ERA if it still had a chance to pass. By then, I was at Northwestern, which is north of Chicago. And you know how universities are, they say, Oh, how about you speak to this person in the press? How about you speak to that person in the press? They’re always trying to get publicity for the university by getting the faculty to talk to the press.  I just didn’t speak to the press about what I was doing.

In general at this time and earlier I benefited from the fact that I began pre-woman’s liberation, because not taking myself seriously as a professional actually allowed me to do what I thought was useful. I didn’t do what I would need to do to move up. I was able just to do what I thought would be helpful. It meant that my vita was terrible. When I came up for tenure at the University of Chicago, I had only this one book [Beyond Adversary Democracy], which had just been published. It didn’t even have any reviews.  And I had practically no articles. Except for one, the few articles I had were not in fancy places.  So I didn’t get tenure there. I mean, they were very nice, my department at Chicago loved me, but they said it was hopeless. So I went as a trailing spouse to Northwestern.

MJC:  Wait, where did this new spouse come in? Put him in there.

JM:  After the divorce, I went out with lots of people. Then this guy and I, Christopher Jencks, his nickname is Sandy Jencks, got together. I got the job in Chicago 100% by myself. When they called me to offer me the job, they said, Is there anything we can offer you to make you come? Because they really wanted me. I said, No, I don’t think so. I mean, I’m happy to come.   Sandy’s going like this [waving his arms] across the room, and I’m saying, Let me call you back. I said, What should I say? He said, Ask them for every other year without pay.

Because he was teaching at Harvard at the time. So, his theory was, which turned out to be correct, that he could take every other year without pay at Harvard, and I could take the other every other year without pay at Chicago, and we could live together.  Instead of being a regular commuting couple, we could commute just once a year, and I would go live with him one year, and then he would go live with me one year, and then I would go live with him, and then he would go live with me. Which turned out to be the reason I could get any books done, because I’m a very slow writer. We live frugally, and so we could live on one person’s salary and have a one-bedroom apartment.

And so, I would have every other year free to write without pay. It took me years to finish Beyond Adversary Democracy because I’m also very particular and obsessive. If it weren’t for that every other year, I would never have gotten the book done. But that was a wonderful, wonderful thing. Then we went to Northwestern. They had something called the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research, the most wonderful little gentle-progressive, Midwest-progressive, straightforward, salt of the earth-progressive, wonderful, wonderful place.

MJC:  So, did Christopher come to Northwestern also?

JM:  Yes, he did. That’s where I was a trailing spouse. That’s where the Political Science department, which was a very standard Big Ten department, didn’t even think they needed political theory. They hired me because the university gave them a position to hire me because they wanted Sandy. So, we got that job because of Sandy. I think we also got the job at Harvard because of Sandy. Other people have said no, but look, the Harvard Kennedy School didn’t need a political theorist. They were after Sandy.

Not that I didn’t hold my own. I mean, I’ve won a lot of prizes. I have won sort of the Nobel in Political Science [the internationla Johan Skytte prize]. I did that on my own, but I’m also aware of these dynamics. Anyway, we went to Northwestern, and there, with Arlene Daniels and Janet Abu-Lughod, the three of us started the Organization of Women Faculty, and that was really a wonderful organization. It might even still exist. [It does.]

MJC:  Tell us about that. What faculties, when you’re organizing, are you just organizing the women faculty at Northwestern?

JM:  Just the women faculty. It’s called the Organization of Women Faculty, at Northwestern. We did lots of things. We got the wording of all the brochures changed to be gender neutral; this was before all of today’s pronouns and such. We got lots of hires because we were able to get the President and the Provost on our side. They took it seriously. They were allies. (They were not 100% allies, obviously.)

One of the things we said was, Look, Northwestern is a second-tier university, but it’s in Chicago. If you hired a full-time person whose job was to place spouses, you’d be able to attract more really good faculty. And then they did. They hired a wonderful woman, and she became knowledgeable about every law firm, architectural firm, you name it. All the other universities, she had counterparts in. Well, there were no counterparts in positions precisely like hers, but she knew the people to call at all the other universities. She knew the hiring scene in Chicago.

So, whether the new faculty member being hired was male or female, we were in a very good position to get the spouse a job, not by any business of pulling levers, but just knowing the scene. We made better and better hires. We made fantastic hires. That was something we could give.

Later, when I came to Harvard, I knew all these things that we’d done at Northwestern, and I thought, Oh, my God, wouldn’t it be wonderful to do the same thing here? They weren’t interested in any of it. To this day, they don’t have somebody like our hiring person. Harvard is in Boston. They could have somebody like that.

Anyway, it was a really wonderful organization. We did a whole lot of things, and there was a wonderful spirit, just a terrific spirit. When I left, they created a Jane Mansbridge Scholar Activist Award. I don’t think it probably exists anymore, but it was very nice. The title says it all –that you can be a good scholar and an activist at the same time.

MJC:  Did you write about that experience? Is anything published on that organization?

JM:  No, I never did. I think this is the only time I’ve ever talked about it, really. We started a Women’s Center. We did lots of things. It was different from the Boston movement because the Boston movement was in the middle of the late ’60s, and everything was happening all over town. This was very Northwestern-centric, but it was real flowering. It was wonderful to be part of. And the other women there were wonderful people. That was a high point of my life.

MJC:   Excellent. It sounds like it. So, you stayed at Northwestern, and then where did you go?

JM:  For quite a while, 20 years or so. We raised our kid there. He got to go to public schools, and that was really good. And then he graduated and then the offer from Harvard came, and so we decided to take it. I gave a talk, which someone told me was the best talk they had ever heard –my job talk. So, I pulled my weight, but there’s no doubt in my mind that they were really after him.

Then at Harvard, I tried to make things happen. But I got stop sign, stop sign, stop sign. I just thought, Oh, to hell with it. I don’t want to bang my head against brick walls. But then, later, Larry Summers put his foot in his mouth. I don’t know if you remember that. That was fantastic. One of the best things that happened for women, because he was suddenly on the defensive.

MJC:  Could you describe that to our audience? Who Larry Summers is, and how he put his foot in his mouth.

JM:  Larry Summers was the President of Harvard at the time. Lawrence Summers. He’s an economist. I actually like him. I like him quite a lot, but he does have a bit of a tin ear. I like him because he’s very smart. I don’t know what would be worse than a tin ear, perhaps an aluminum ear. Anyway, he was supposed to give a talk at the National Bureau for Economic Research, NBER. It wasn’t at Harvard. It was separate. It was for economists.

He said to Dick Freeman; he told me this, that he said to Dick, Am I giving this talk as President of Harvard, or am I giving it just as an economist? And Dick foolishly said, Oh, you’re just giving it as an economist. This is NBER. Okay, so Larry gives this talk, and he says that Women do less well than men for a number of reasons. There may be a genetic component. There’s discrimination, and I can’t remember the third thing.

Well, even if he had just said quite a lot of discrimination, but as a third thing that there might be a genetic component, it could have had a different effect. Instead he put the genetic component first and made it the centerpiece of his talk.

Nancy Hopkins, who’s a friend of mine– she’s in the same “continuing care community” that I am in here — was in the audience. She’s famous for her work on women’s issues at MIT.  She walked out. The other women also freaked out totally, of course. And what he said wasn’t even particularly true; it had a possible grain of truth that still remains to be explored more carefully, but he blew it out of all proportion. Everybody completely exploded, and he was in a very, very bad position.  It was great because he suddenly realized he had to do something about women.

So, after all those years of relative inaction, we got a Task Force on women that Drew Faust headed. She later became President of Harvard. Evelynn Hammonds also headed it. She had been active at MIT in women’s things, and I loved working with her. We got money. I was actually on leave of absence that year. I was supposed to be working on my own work, but I just put my own work to the side.

It was the first breakthrough. It was the first moment where they said, Oh, my God, maybe we need to do something. So, we spent a ton of time on it and produced a really good report. And we got a Senior Vice Provost; we put the word “Senior” in there so it would be above the other Vice Provosts. A Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity.

The first in that position was Evelynn Hammonds. She had what I thought was a terrific organizational scheme, which was to have one person at each of the schools who was the sort of spot person for that school, and I was the one for the Kennedy School. We met once a month, all of us from across the university in Evelynn’s office, to scheme and plan. We did a whole lot of things, like a good thing on guidelines on hiring.

The dean at the Kennedy School, David Elwood, and I arranged for me to meet with him once a semester to talk about, Okay, what was the Kennedy School doing? Which was very good because during the semester it focused both of us on that meeting. We had to come up with stuff. We had to say what we’d done since the last time, et cetera.

There’s a guy, Frank Dobbin, in the Sociology department at Harvard, who has done a study of more than 800 companies using EEOC data. The EEOC collects data on workforce diversity from companies with more than 100 employees. He was able to show quantitatively that having diversity training actually reduced the numbers of numbers of women and minorities on the payroll after the training . But having a person whose responsibility it was to pay attention to hiring, retaining and promoting women and people of color made their numbers go up.

The point that came out of the data was that having a person with responsibility who’s actually in the workplace — you know, that person learns, if they didn’t know already, what things are appropriate for that particular workplace.  They learn which  ways of going about thingswork or not. Whereas this diversity training stuff is very generic, and it also puts people’s backs up. It gets them pissed because the implication is: You’re racist, you’re misogynist, whatever, and you need to change the way you do things, you idiot.

That’s not the greatest way to get people to change. But somebody who knows, Oh, these people, they’re going to be hiring in such and such field. Maybe they should blah, blah, blah, whatever is appropriate to that workplace. And that was my job for several years at the Kennedy School. It was really great.

We’d started a Women and Public Policy program at the same time. Joe Nye was dean, and he realized that to change the faculty composition was going to be very hard because it’s such a slow process. But if we had a Women and Public Policy program, it could bring in speakers and it could change the vibe, while changing the hires as fast as we could.  And we did it. We changed the hires, but it had to be slow. But we could change the vibe immediately with a Women and Public Policy program, and I became the faculty advisor to that.

Then we had a little project that I loved, that I started, of getting portraits of women on the walls of the Kennedy School, because it was only male, male, male, male, male. Because everybody who had been involved in the Kennedy School in a high level had been male.

Our first portrait was in a fancy seminar room. It wasn’t big, but it was the major super-duper seminar room. [It had, I don’t know, an oak or mahogany table and oak paneling and all that. And it had different portraits, all male, around the walls. And on one wall, behind where the speakers often stood, was a big picture of Churchill. He was leaning forward and being very Churchill. And I’m thinking, What woman can we put up on that wall next to him who will be equal to him?

Then I saw a photograph that Ida B. Wills had taken for her anti-lynching pamphlets. She gave a lot of talks. She made some money going around giving speeches about anti-lynching, and she had a pamphlet with a photograph of her., And I said, She’s it. She’s got it. So, we had this wonderful portrait of Ida B. Wells painted, just as big as Churchill’s. It was beautiful. She just wows them. It was fantastic. Then later we got other ones, too.

We got Abigail Adams to be next to John Adams, and we got Edith Stokey, who was a wonderful faculty member, and we got Ellen Sirleaf Johnson.  We got a wonderful portrait of her. She stood for the portrait when she was back in the United States. Our portraitist ran down to New York and did a really wonderful portrait of her, which is in the library. So, we were able to break through the male vibe that way. Those are some of the things that we did at the Kennedy School as part of the women’s stuff.

MJC:  So, your feminism went all the way from graduate school right to the end of your work life, correct?

JM:  Absolutely.

MJC:  Are you doing anything now or are you busy taking care of your family?

JM:  Well, the stuff I’m doing now is around some of the issues here. We have a diversity committee here. It’s not an issue of not enough women, but there are issues having to do with race and other things that we’re working on. It’s a different environment. But there are still feminist issues, everyday-type feminist issues here. Actually, the book that I’m working on is called Everyday Feminism. It’s based on a bunch of interviews that I did in the1990s.

MJC:  You’re working on that book now?

JM:  I am working on it now.  But I have to tell you, just apropos of everyday feminism here in my current community, people laugh – with me, not in derision — because here at lectures, I often ask the first question. It’s partly because basically, the men are more likely to ask questions here than the women. They’re all from our generation, and our generation [of women] was quiet. That’s what women were supposed to be. So, I’ve trained myself to ask the first question, and people laugh now because they think, Oh, Jenny will ask the first question. But it’s little things like that, just trying to change the vibe a teeny bit. There are issues even here. There are little everyday issues. Absolutely.

JC:  Well, that’s just incredible. It’s an incredible life, Jenny.

JM:  Well, we lived through an incredible period, didn’t we? I mean, thank God we were so lucky to be able to have had that to live through. Just the work you’re doing right now, it’s because of that, right? You can just tap into it. It’s wonderful that you’re asking me to say these things because I’ve never put it together like this. It’s fantastic that you can do it. I mean, we’re very lucky.

MJC:  Well, I thank you. This is just enjoyable for me too, so, I’m really glad about it.

JM:  Before we wrap up, can I put in one more thing?

MJC:  Of course, you can put in anything.

JM:  Okay, because I do want to talk for a second about the Everyday Feminism book.

MJC:  Please do.

JM:  Back in 1986 they created the first question ever asking, Do you consider yourself a feminist? You might say it was a little late because feminism started, the second wave started, in 1968, but whatever. By 1986 they got around to asking this question. Fifty-seven percent of US women said they considered themselves feminist. (This was a fairly badly worded question, which asked, “Do you consider yourself a strong feminist, a feminist, not a feminist, or an antifeminist” and so had no neutral point, which tipped people toward saying “feminist”). More than half of the high school-educated women said they considered themselves feminists, and many more Black women than White women. And I thought, Well, I would like to see what feminism means to them because I knew primarily college-educated women.

So, I took five little catchment areas and asked people. I asked some nurses and secretaries in South Carolina, some farm people in Kansas, and some police officers in a big city, a group of welfare mothers in another big city, and like that. I didn’t ask them, Do you consider yourself a feminist? because I’m a professional woman. I talk that way, I act that way, even if I wear neutral dresses and stuff, there’s no way I’m not going to come across like a professional woman. I don’t want to use words like feminism, which they would think I knew more about than they did.

I asked them some version of, As you were growing up and things have changed between men and women, what do you think are some of the changes for the better, and what do you think are some of the changes for the worse — in your own life? They are the expert on their own lives.  And out of that, I found that there was a huge amount of talking and thinking about the ideas of the movement among women, around kitchen tables and stuff like that.

It’s not rocket science. But my point was, that when you have a social movement, as opposed to something else, a social movement is made up of ordinary people talking and making sense of things. For example, for the police officers I interviewed, one of my questions was, How do you feel about a man opening a door for you? Well, I love it. How great. How about your partner at work in your patrol car? How do you feel about his opening the door for you? No way! 

That makes perfect sense. There’s the home scene, in which a little romance is lovely, and then there’s the work scene, in which there’s no way that somebody’s going to open the door for me, suggesting a little weakness. That’s a distinction we didn’t make. That’s a distinction that came out of their experience.

In I think my fourth interview, I was talking with a Black woman in Chicago. She said about somebody she knew, He is a chauvinist pig! He thinks he’s the only  rooster in the hen house. When he clucks, everybody’s supposed to cringe.

Then my next interview was with a White welfare mother, and it was one of these horrible interviews. It was going very badly. Well, it wasn’t going that badly, but I was getting monosyllables. I couldn’t make a connection. And finally, just in desperation, I said, Have you ever called anybody a male chauvinist pig? She said, Yes, I did. I said, So what was the incident?  Tell me. She answered, , Like, you know, I’m supposed to be his.  To me that’s a male chauvinist.” And she’s off. Now we have a real interview. So, I started asking people that question. I got wonderful stuff.

And then there was a guy who was doing a survey at Northwestern. He was starting a new survey organization. To get it started, he was giving every faculty member a free question if they wanted it. I said, Okay, I’d like to ask –it’s a sample of Chicago people – Have you ever referred to someone as a “male chauvinist” either while speaking directly to that person or describing that person to  someone else?

63% of the women in the Chicago area had, and more than half of the women without a high school education, more than half of the Black women, and more than half of the women who called themselves conservative. Before that, I had asked him to put a question at the end of the survey asking If anybody wants to follow up on these questions, would it be okay for them to call you? Some people said yes, and I called up some of the conservative women, and I said, Tell me the story. And they told me their stories.

So that’s what I mean by everyday feminism. These are people carrying forth the message in their own way, in their own words, through their own actions, in their own context, making the kind of sense of their lives that makes sense to them. So, that’s what the book’s about. It’s called Everyday Feminism, and it’s about how social movements really are about people.