THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Janet Colm

“I went to work for Planned Parenthood and thought we were going to change the country.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, May 2023

JC:  My name is Janet Ann Colm. I was born on Mother’s Day, 1952 in Washington DC.

JW:  How long did you stay there?

JC:  Well, at that time my family was living in Silver Spring, Maryland, so I didn’t live in Washington until much later.

JW:  Oh, I see.

JC:  We Lived in Silver Spring, and then we moved to this sleepy little southern town called Herndon, Virginia, where AOL is now, and Dulles Airport. But at the time, it was pretty different.

JW:  Quieter, I imagine.

JC:  Much quieter. My sister was born in 1959, and that year there were one thousand nine hundred and fifty-nine people in Herndon – or at least that’s the family story. She was the nineteen sixty-fifth. It was a small town. My dad was in the foreign service. So, when I was nine, we moved to Taiwan and I lived there for six years. And then we came back to Washington. I went to high school in DC.

JW:  What was it like in Taiwan? Did you go to an American school?

JC:  It was called an American school. For four years, we went to what was called Taipei American School. It was a lot of international students. A lot of high-level Chinese officials sent their kids there, a lot of military kids. And then for two years, right in the middle of it, we moved down to a smaller town and I actually went to a missionary school there, so I was exposed to some fundamentalism for a couple of years.

JW:  Do you speak the language?

JC:  Not anymore. My dad was a diplomat, so he really thought we should be there, and we were there a long time. A lot of kids just lived there for a couple of years; but six years, so, nine to fifteen. It’s a pretty big swath of childhood.

JW:  Influential years in your life too. You did come back to DC for high school. So, by then it was the early ’60s?

JC:  Yes, we came back in 1967.

JW:  Were you getting interested in the women’s movement then? What happened?

JC:  Well, DC in ’67 and ’68 and ’69 and ’70, that’s when I lived in Washington. It was a very interesting place. A lot of anti-war stuff going on there. A lot of civil rights and racial tension in the city, and this blossoming of all of us in high school, to kind of waking up to what was going on in the world.

I guess I’ve been thinking about this, of course, and I think my first awareness of the women’s movement per sé, was the alleged bra burning down in Florida for the Miss America contest. I never knew whether that actually happened or not.

JW:  It didn’t. It was at Atlantic City. And also, I have interviewed some of the women that were there, and they say they were on the boardwalk. They did have a big trash can where they threw in their bras and girdles, but they were never going to start a fire.

JC:  That’s great. I’m glad you talked to them. The other thing that was going on there of course, was the sexual revolution was happening, and the pill. So, I think again, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, I think that my feminism started pretty early as a kid. One of my first memories is when we lived in Herndon. We lived in this neighborhood, and everybody went out and played softball. All the boys took off their shirts, and I took off my shirt, and my mom kind of pulled me aside, and she said, “Girls can’t take off their shirts.” And I was like, “This is ridiculous. I look just like a boy.”

JW:  That is great.

JC:  I think back at that, I mean, that was kind of an idyllic time, except for that one incident. Abortion was illegal. There were unmarried moms in the class who had to drop out of school and/or get married. I hadn’t thought about this in a while, but I did agitate for my health class, that we should learn about birth control. And the teacher, to her, whatever you call it, did do a section on birth control, but we had to get organized to ask for it. So, I think that was probably ’68 or ’69, something like that. But the main thing that was going on was anti-war and black power stuff. So that’s really where, in terms of a movement, rather than just me kind of trying to assert myself, that’s where it was happening.

JW:  Well, at some point you did get involved in the movement, so to speak, right? Tell us about that?

JC:  I went to undergraduate school at Duke, which was not my favorite place, but that’s where I was. I think that’s really where it started to happen. The YWCA in Durham at that time, was a pretty radical place. They had self-help health things going on. I remember going there to read Ms. Magazine when it first came out, it was in our library. I don’t know what was going on with the Y, but it was different. I had attended a consciousness raising group, but in 1970, Duke was a pretty staid place.

One of the things that you just had to do, was go through sorority rush. There was no question about it. You were automatically signed up for it. We had curfews. And we didn’t just have girls’ dorms, we had a girls’ campus, but there was still this undercurrent of hippies. I remember going to freshman night at the dorm, and looking around, and I noticed one other girl who wasn’t wearing a bra, and I thought, “I’m going to make friends with her.” That’s kind of how we identified ourselves. She and I ended up being really good friends.

We were assigned to, a sorority rush advisor I think they called them, and when I told her I wasn’t going to go through Rush, she cried. And I just thought, this place is just – especially coming from DC because there had been so much political action there and there just wasn’t much happening at Duke. We were kind of in that gap. Kids had taken over the administration building and SDS was active, but that was a couple of years before me. So, there was kind of this gap. But we were doing things.

The big thing, I think for me, was this consciousness raising group, where we used to say, I’m sure other people have talked to you about this, “The personal is political.” And that really being the first time where I felt like it’s not just me being kind of weird. There are other people and there’s some philosophy to this. It’s not just, “I don’t get why I can’t wear a shirt.” It’s like there’s some theory behind it.

JW:  And did you discover the theory?

JC:  Well, the personal is political. Right?

JW:  Right. Absolutely.

JC:  After that, when the consciousness raising group kind of dissolved, there were a couple of us in that group who got together and said we wanted to do something. We didn’t just want to talk, we wanted to do something, and we split into two groups. One woman was really interested in getting abortion services started. This was probably in ’73. And the other group that I got involved with, was really interested in trying to do something about rape and sexual assault.

Because I did work at Planned Parenthood for so long, I know all this other stuff. But one of the things that a lot of people don’t know about North Carolina is despite our recent history, we’ve actually been pretty progressive on women’s health issues. We were the first state in the country to have state funded family planning services, and we liberalized our abortion law before Roe. For many years right after the Hyde Amendment was passed, the state legislature started appropriating money for low-income women and teenagers to have state funded abortions. We didn’t have parental consent. We had good sex education. I mean, it was really a different time.

In 1973, when Roe happened, I think there were actually already some abortion providers in the state, but they were pretty quiet about it. This woman, Connie, went to California and came back and actually opened up one of the very first abortion clinics in the area. I worked with a group that was really interested in trying to do something about rape. When I look back on it now, we were neophytes. We had a pretty narrow view of what we were doing.

One of the things we did, was we got a sketch of a guy who had been accused of raping some women, and we plastered it around town so that people would know about it. And come to find out, he was Black. I look back on that now, and I think, boy, we just fell right into that trope. Which now I see, was really about keeping both White women and Black men in their place. I’m proud that I wanted to be active, but I’m not proud of the way that we pursued that.

JW:  But there were other things that you are proud of, I’m sure.

JC:  Yes. I took a couple of years off between undergraduate and graduate school, and that’s really when I was coming into my feminism. I got involved, on the periphery, of a radical lesbian group here in the triangle. Although I don’t identify as lesbian now, I had a couple of lesbian relationships at the time. I took a year off and traveled, went camping by myself, which I’m very proud of. Just hit the road. I had been working at a bookstore, and I filled up the trunk of my car with all the books that I had borrowed, hit the road and went up to Vermont, camped, and was just by myself for about a year. I mean, I visited friends and stuff, but that was a great experience of really testing myself and seeing what I was made of.

And then I came back and went to graduate school. I’d thought a lot about what I wanted to do when I was on the road, and I decided really what I wanted to do, was get involved in women’s health. And the way I went about that, was to get a master’s in health education at UNC. And even there, the department at that time, you had to pick a subspecialty, and people were picking international health and rural health and this health and that health, but there was no women’s health subspecialty. There were two of us who wanted to do a women’s health subspecialty, and we had to really fight the department on that because they were like, “There’s no such thing as women’s health.” I mean, they really didn’t get it.

JW:  I’m sorry for laughing, but it’s just amazing.

JC:  There were a couple of women in the department, and my advisor, Jo Anne Earp, we worked with her; I mean, she really led the fight to start a women’s health subspecialty in that department. And actually, years later became chair of the department, which I thought was fantastic. I did my master’s thesis on abortion counseling and worked with a clinic in Raleigh called the Fleming Center. What we did there was for that thesis, which I haven’t looked at in 100 years. We provided what we called counseling to the people that came with women who had had abortions, and to see if that impacted the women’s experience at all.

It really came out of my experience going with a friend. She had an abortion up in Richmond; we had to leave the state. We went up there, and I just felt like there were several things that happened in that. She and I were in love, and they asked me whether I wanted to be in the room with her when she had her abortion. I was kind of really taken aback, because I didn’t. Out of that experience, I thought, really there are two people that are having an abortion experience. One of them is the woman, and it’s right that it be focused on her. But in the meantime, there’s somebody sitting out in the waiting room who leaves with her, and do they have the support and tools? Do they have any idea what she’s been through?

So, I did that, and we stretched the data a little bit. It showed that people did have a better experience, but I’m not sure we really had a big sample size or anything. As part of that, I spent a summer down at the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Atlanta, and that was really eye opening. That was a wonderful experience for many reasons. It was really radicalizing in terms of women’s self-help. I mean, we had women doing their own lab work, and it was so interesting to me. Women would come in to have a pregnancy test, and we would lead them how to do their own pregnancy test. And if they didn’t like the results, they were convinced they had done it wrong and they wanted somebody who knew what they were doing do it, either way.

We had women when they came in for a pelvic exam, well first of all, we were doing the pelvic exams and doing the pap smears. But women would put in their own speculums. I don’t know if women are still into looking at their cervixes the way we were, but that was such an extraordinary thing to see this part of your body that’s so powerful and so hidden.

JW:  What year was this, do you think?

JC:  Probably about ’76, ’77. Might have been bicentennial year. But I remember much earlier when I was still at Duke, Our Bodies, Ourselves, the newsprint version of it, kind of circulating around school, and the experience of taking a mirror and looking at my vulva and like, “Oh, my God, I had no idea.” It’s just like, “You’re not supposed to touch it. Who would want to look at it?” And that was pretty extraordinary. We had one girl in Atlanta come in. She had never had a pelvic exam before, a teenager. Her mom brought her in and she put in the speculum. She was the first person to see her cervix and I always thought, “It’s your body, why are other people looking at it. You get to look at it.” So that was great. And the experience of seeing women’s responses after they had abortions. Because I was an intern, I did a lot of this grunt work, but they were also really interested in giving me a good experience. I had a really great experience.

One of the things that they did, was they were really into weightlifting. This was 1976, and I really got into weightlifting. You know, I loved weightlifting. I used to joke because I’m not very athletic, I used to joke, the great thing about weightlifting is you get to do it lying down because you’re doing a bench press. But they were really into power lifting, and that is a powerful feeling, to be able to see yourself getting stronger, especially our upper bodies, because that’s where women are so weak, and that has been really important to me. That was the first time that I understood that my problem with PE wasn’t activity. It was group activity. That I really like being active, but not with a bunch of people who are counting on me.

JW:  No team stuff.

JC:  No team stuff, yes. We said we “Integrated the YMCA” in Atlanta. We went down into the basement where all the weightlifters were, and there was this group of women that went down there and grunted and sweated. It was great. So that really has hung with me, too. Both the abortion and the, “We can do this ourselves” and being physically active and strong. Both of those things have really been important to me.

JW:  And you continued it, it sounds like.

JC:  Yes. I’m not quite the way I was, but yes, both of those things are important.

JW:  Well, that’s wonderful.

JC:  Right around the time I graduated, the Rape Crisis Center in Chapel Hill was looking for its first paid staff person. This would have been maybe ’79 or ’80. I applied for the job and I got it, and I was scared to death. I was so nervous. It was a fledgling organization, especially now when I look back. We had a board, but we didn’t know what board members did. So, I took off on that and we did a couple of things.

One, was that we officially expanded the Rape Crisis Center from just Chapel Hill, to cover the entire county because we were getting calls from all over the place. This might seem minor, but this was something I got at the Feminist Women’s Health Center, is this notion of counseling. It kind of takes away women’s strength. When you talk about pregnancy counseling, and you’re not actually doing counseling, you’re actually providing information and holding a hand. We had rape crisis volunteers that were called counselors, and I thought that was off-putting to everybody, so we started calling them companions. That was important.

It’s hard to remember this, but it was landlines, and index cards, right? Clipboards. And the way the Rape Crisis Center worked, a woman who’d been raped would call this 24- hour number that was about housing, drug issues, crisis pregnancies and rape crisis, and there was a volunteer. It was called Helpline. There was a volunteer who screened these calls, and then that volunteer would work down the list of rape crisis volunteers until somebody answered the phone. So, I took this big step, which was, we got a pager, and I had to drive to Durham to pick up the pager. And then there was this whole thing that you had a shift, and you took the pager, and when a call came in to helpline, they called the pager. It seems rinky-dink now, but it was revolutionary.

We started a children’s sexual abuse program early on, and we had a lot of support from the police. The district attorney had a special assistant DA woman who handled all the rape cases, and that woman, Ellen Scout, got involved also in sexual abuse. We had support from the psychiatry department and pediatric people. I mean, if you were working on sexual assault issues, it was a great community to be working in. Chapel Hill had police social workers. One of the things they did was if there was a rape call, there was a social worker that went out with the cops. So, we did sexual abuse stuff.

I think the other thing I wanted to say about that, is I feel like one of the things that I tried to change, was moving away from this scary, crisis oriented, drooling, monster kind of vision of a man who rapes. I really felt like there has to be a way that women can deal with rape and come out stronger and not more fearful. What I observed was, actually I read this, that women who are sexually assaulted, almost always accomplish what their goal is in the situation.

So, if their goal is not to get killed, almost always they’re successful in that. If their goal is not to be raped, often they are successful in that. And that there’s a decision making that, I don’t know what the situation is now, but I think at that time, women weren’t even aware of the strength that they were showing in these situations. The whole blame the victim thing, I think a lot of it was about self-protection. That wouldn’t happen to me because I don’t walk alone at night, or that wouldn’t happen to me, because, whatever it is. So, we did a couple Take Back the Night marches. Those were really important, empowering things for people. Those were fun.

JW:  Do you have any particular memorable experience from working with a single woman that you can tell us about?

JC:  Yes. One of the things that I said when I worked there was, I told the board I was only going to get involved with people as a last resort. I thought the volunteer should do most of the companion work, and I should be the behind-the-scenes person, training and that stuff, and part of that, was because that’s my skill. I’m not a counselor, I’m an introvert. I like to push paper.

I mean, I heard all of the stories. One of the stories I used to tell people is one of the scariest situations that I heard about. This woman, who, she was a horseback rider, and she went to the barn where her horse was, and there was a guy there who threw a bag over her head and raped her. And for me, there are many things about that story that are so frightening. And one of them that is infuriating, is this is something that she loved to do that was ruined.

But in that situation, she memorized the look of his hands. That’s all she could see of him was his hands. And based on her identification of his hands, they were able to get a conviction in court. That’s the story I love about women’s ability to rise above it, I guess is the way I would say that. I mean, she still got raped. Her passion was still ruined. It was a horrible situation, but she still did an amazing thing, and she got him.

The other thing that I saw is that even when women didn’t blame the victim, they elevated them to like, “I could never do that.” But women did this all the time. There were all these ways that they had a little bit of victory in the situation. Not always, but almost always, there was some strength that came through. So, that was a very important job for me. I felt really good about what I did, and I burned out after three years.

JW:  I can imagine. Talk about intense.

JC:  Yes. I felt good about what I did, and I understood why I didn’t want to do it forever. Another thing I wanted to say is that one of the volunteers who was working with us, turned me on to Off Our Backs, the newsletter that came out maybe, monthly or weekly. And that was very important to me, as a way of connecting with a little more radical feminist than your everyday person, or my everyday person.

And again, I think back on this, there was no Internet. There was no way for us to talk to each other. When I got that job at Rape Crisis, somehow, I went to an alternative bookstore and bought a book on rape and brought it home and read it. That’s how I got oriented to my job. It was such a different time. So, something like Ms. or Off Our Backs or Our Bodies, Ourselves; newsprint that’s handed from person to person. I saw you did an interview with Carol Downer, her going around the country. All that stuff was really important and gave us a sense of coming together. So that was one thing.

A lot of what I was trying to do, and I did this at Planned Parenthood, too, was demystify things. I said when I started this job at Rape Crisis, I was terrified, and it’s true. I was terrified. You work around rape 24-hours a day and you start getting kind of paranoid. I always thought back about my first job, which was at a playground. Where, as a playground attendant, my job was to teach kids how to jump on a trampoline. And I’m terrified of trampolines. I had them up there doing flips on the trampoline. So, I’m a really good person at teaching other people how to manage things that terrify me. That’s kind of facetious, but it’s true. So, I went into the rape crisis job really scared on many levels, and my goal was not just to ease my fear, but if I feel this way, other people feel this way.

We also started talking a lot about acquaintance rape. And again, that wasn’t part of the rape crisis conversation. Early on, it wasn’t about acquaintance rape. And I had so many situations where I would talk about acquaintance rape with a group. Inevitably, it was almost literally every time I did that, a woman would come up to me afterwards and say, “I never thought it was rape, but that explains why I was so upset about it.” We were so isolated, and that’s what the women’s movement did, was give us these connections with people. The personal is political, right? Some woman gets raped by her partner and thinks she’s the only one. What’s wrong with her? Especially in the time of the sexual revolution when you’re supposed to be having sex with everybody you see, more or less.

JW:  For different people, different levels.

JC:  Yes. So, I quit that job. And the story of that was, I was doing a training for new volunteers. And it was the first time we had let men go through training with us because we did occasionally get calls from men.

JW:  That they were raped?

JC:  That they were raped, yes. That had happened a time or two. So, a man was going through the training. There was a radical lesbian feminist going through the training, and there were one or two women who had been raped who were going through the training. That was fairly common, but at least one of these women, it was just too soon for her. And so, these three, the man, the lesbian, and the woman who’d been raped, got into it in this training. And I was like, “I can’t handle this anymore.” It wasn’t just that situation, but it was dealing with the cops and dealing with the parents and dealing with the doctor and dealing with the volunteers and dealing with the funding. This is too much. I went home and I quit, and I had no idea what I was going to do.

A week later, the ad for the Planned Parenthood job appeared in the little free community newsletter newspaper we had, the Village Advocate. It was a brand-new affiliate. It was going to be the first executive director. This has my name on it, so, I applied for that job and I shaved my legs for the interview. Because, of course, not shaving your legs was important. So, I shaved my legs to pass, and I had the interview. The only question I remember they asked me was; Martha Branscombe, an amazing woman, asked me, “In this job, you’re going to have to deal with doctors. What do you think about dealing with doctors?” And I said, “If I can deal with cops, I can deal with doctors.”

JW:  Excellent. And you got the job?

JC:  I got the job.

JW:  Perfect.

JC:  Planned Parenthood had already started. There was this group of five older women who, I’m older than them now, but they were all retired, and several of them had recently moved to Chapel Hill. They met at a cocktail party that was given by the premier real estate agent in Chapel Hill, Eunice Brock. Chapel Hill was much different at that time than it is now. It was much smaller. And these women, Eliska Chanlett, Martha Branscombe, Julia Henderson, Gertrude Willis, and Chris Nutter. I don’t know if they were all at this cocktail party, but several of them were, and they started talking about, “Why isn’t there a Planned Parenthood here?”

 So, Libby McLellan had been the executive director up in Ithaca, New York, and retired down here. Eliska Chanlett was our first board chair. She was a demographer, an amazing woman who drove me nuts. A really strong woman who had escaped from Europe when she was 19, I found out many years later. Took a voyage to South America from Czechoslovakia to escape the Nazis. She was 19. Julia Henderson was head of international Planned Parenthood Federation at one time. Her good friend Martha Branscombe grew up in, I think in South Carolina, and was a social worker after the war. Worked with displaced people in Europe. Chris Nutter is a dairy farmer in Orange County, and Gertrude Willis grew up in a sod house in South Dakota and became a doctor. So, it was a powerful group. And they raised some money, they hired me, and they stayed real involved for several years. I like to say I was the founder, but I walked into a situation where there was a really strong foundation already. They were amazing women. They were really amazing.

JW:  What did it take to get the affiliation status?

JC:  I think they had already gotten provisional status. At that time, there were 144 Planned Parenthood affiliates. I just saw something that they’re 45 now because there have been so many mergers over the years. The affiliates were these really small community-based organizations. Many of them still operated out of the church basement kind of situation, and we were one of the last to be formed because, well, the times were changing. So, this was 1982. Who was president in 1982, was it Reagan?

JW:  Right.

JC:  Nixon had signed the Title X Family Planning Program into law, and Reagan was starting to tighten up on it. So, it was harder and harder to get money. When it first came into effect, a lot of Planned Parenthoods got Title X money. In North Carolina, all the health departments got Title X money. One of the things that we said to the health department was, we weren’t going to go for Title X money. We weren’t going to try because there was no more available. If we went for it, it would just take money away from them.

There was a lot of talk about requiring parental consent for contraception. Things were really shifting. A lot of Planned Parenthoods were so dependent on that Title X money. I always felt like we got a lot of help from National Planned Parenthood in getting started. And to be a Planned Parenthood affiliate, at least at that time, you had to pass these standards of affiliation.

JW:  Yes, you do now, too. I’m on the board of Planned Parenthood here.

JC:  Oh, that’s right. You’re in DC.

JW:  So, there are a lot of requirements now. That’s why I wondered in the 80’s, were there those kinds of requirements?

JC:  Yes, there were, although they were different. But for a brand-new organization, it was great. Because you had to have bylaws and you had to have your tax ID and you had to have fire extinguishers and you had to have consent forms. So, there was really a roadmap for how to do it. It’s so funny to think back on this stuff. So, the first time we had somebody from National Planned Parenthood come; at that time there were regional offices, there was one in Atlanta; and this woman, Elizabeth Barrier, came to do our review. And I remember I was so blown away because, little known fact, in 1982, suitcases didn’t have wheels on them.

JW:  A fabulous invention.

JC:  You had to carry a suitcase, right? Well, Elizabeth Barrier did so much traveling that she had this little set of wheels that she put on her suitcase so she could pull it.

JW:  Oh my gosh, she should have patented that idea.

JC:  Yes. Well, she came, and we went through; “You got to do this, you got to do that, you got to do this, you got to do that.” We were first authorized, I can’t remember the term, as an educational affiliate. At that time, you could be either a medical affiliate or an educational affiliate. And so, to be an educational affiliate was kind of the first step, because it was much easier. And we did that. And then we opened up our first health center in Hillsborough, which was another little sleepy town. Orange County is kind of a rectangle. Chapel Hill and Carrboro are down in the southern part, and Hillsborough is right in the middle and it’s the county seat. There was no interstate. It was the old days.

The founders felt like there was much greater need in the more rural parts of the county than in this, I wouldn’t call Chapel Hill urban, but there was a lot going on in Chapel Hill. A lot of doctors, hospital, the health department. So, we opened up in Hillsborough, which was a town of 2000 people. Hillsborough is very proud of its historical roots and we were in the historical part of Hillsborough. Our sign had to be approved by the historic commission. We had this tiny little sign that said Planned Parenthood and we hung it on the outside of the building. Some picketers came from Chapel Hill, and it was a big to-do in Hillsborough. They hadn’t seen picketers in a long time.

We had a balloon release, because it was okay to release balloons in those days. It was a pretty crummy building. It was a historic building that was in pretty bad shape. And we stayed there for not quite a year. It was just really clear that the people who were coming, were coming from Chapel Hill up to Hillsborough. Or they were coming from Durham to Hillsborough. We were not seeing very many people from Hillsborough, because there weren’t very many people.

We made the decision to move to Chapel Hill. It was a really big decision and we moved to Chapel Hill. We went through a big process of making that decision because it was such a departure. The whole founding idea of this Planned Parenthood was that we were going to be out meeting people where they were. So, it was a big kind of ethical dilemma. We had a board meeting where we talked about it and broke up into small groups. And one of the things that came out of that was, if we’re going to move out of the county; we’d still be in the county but out of Hillsborough, and move down to Chapel Hill, we had to continue to do something up in the county.

We started developing a program called, the Natural Helpers Program, which was based on a model that I had studied in graduate school called, the Natural Helpers Model. So, the idea is that you find people in these rural communities who are kind of the person that people go to when they need help. You provide them with some extra training so they have information about birth control, and what’s going on with abortion, and where you can get services, even up here. That program ran, and went on for several years. We worked with a minister and a hairdresser and someone at the county store and a neighborhood auntie kind of person, and they went through a training with us. That was a model we used a lot. We used it for a peer education program that we started a few years later.

But the thing about that program was, it was the first year that the state started funding family planning educational programs. It was a new pot of state money, and so we wouldn’t be competing with anybody for existing money. It was new money, and we decided to go for it. At that time, Planned Parenthood was me, our educator Karen Bley, our nurse practitioner, and our clinic manager and administrative assistant. There were five of us.

JW:  Did you have a part time doctor?

JC:  We had a medical director, that’s right. She worked for free and she signed off on the charts, basically. That’s another whole story. She was an amazing person, too. Eleanor Easley was one of the first women doctors in the area. I had just gone to a fundraising training and I had learned how to ask for money. I stayed with my dad. This training was up in DC. After learning how to ask for money, I came back to my dad’s house and I thought, “Well, I’m going to ask him for money.” So, I asked him if he would buy us a computer and he gave us $5,000 to buy our first computer.

It was the old days, computers were ten megabytes, you know, dot matrix printer. And we wrote this grant for the state on this computer. And then, I went through the grant, and I took out the word Planned Parenthood every single place in the grant, except on the cover sheet. I substituted ‘the agency’ because I didn’t want to rub it in their faces that they were going to give Planned Parenthood money. We got the grant and it was such a shock because now we had to do this program. So, we did it, and we hired a wonderful woman.

JW:  What was it for?

JC:  It was for this Natural Helpers Project. And it went on for several years. Later on, we got some HIV prevention money that we used for it. And eventually, we turned that program over to the county health department and the woman who was working on it, Louise Echols, became a county health department employee because we couldn’t sustain it anymore and they were doing good work up there. So that was our first expansion.

JW:  Did you do abortion at some point?

JC:  Yes, we did. I had wanted to do abortion forever. I thought it was a really important part of the mission. Early on, a lot of Planned Parenthoods didn’t do abortions. In fact, very few did abortions. Of those 144 affiliates, there were I think 10 or 15 that did abortions. The abortion providing affiliates had put together this consortium of abortion providers, and their role was to help other affiliates start. At one point, my new board chair Sue Levine and I, went to new board chair CEO training together, and at that meeting said to each other, we wanted to start abortion services.

The first thing we had to do was work on the board because I’m sure we had people on the board who were not pro-choice and we definitely had people on the board who were ambivalent about it. The first Roe v. Wade event that we had, 1983, the 10th anniversary of Roe, I got board permission to participate. I was told we could go, but we couldn’t have any signs or anything that said Planned Parenthood. There was so much ambivalence within, not just my affiliate, but the organization about it. So, it took several years.

As we started screening board members coming in, we said to them, “We’re thinking about starting abortion services.” It took a while to change the board, and it also meant that we needed to have our own building. We couldn’t do it in a rented building anymore. So, it went hand in hand with a capital campaign, which was a big deal for us. I mean our budget was maybe $100,000. We had gotten a really nice, unexpected bequest of a million dollars. So, we put it into what they call a quasi-endowment. It gave us a real base to be able to take some risks. And we did the capital campaign. It was an amazing experience.

JW:  Because? Why was it an amazing experience?

JC:  Well, the biggest gift I’d ever asked for was asking my dad to give us $5,000 for that computer. And now I was supposed to ask this woman, Adele Thomas, I was supposed to ask her for, I think it was $250,000. You’re supposed to do all this stuff, and the person who has the best relationship with the donor is supposed to talk to them. And we realized that was me. And I was like, “Damn it, can I teach somebody else how to do this?” But no, I had to do it. So, the consultant who was working with us, another wonderful woman, Priscilla Bradsher. She and I went and called on Adele, who was an amazing person. She was just so down to earth. She used to say her husband made the money and she gave it away.

We went and called on her. She loved to give money to organizations to get buildings. She thought that was really important. So, we went and talked to her, and it came time for me to ask her for this gift. And I said, “So we’re hoping you would consider a gift of $250,000.” And then you’re supposed to stop. You’re not supposed to say, “Oh, I didn’t mean it” or, “Only if you can.”

My blood absolutely froze, because I was sure I had asked her for $250 dollars instead of $250 thousand dollars. I was just sure. I had a gift chart with me where it has all the gifts of how many, and the top one was $250,000. So, I got up with the gift chart, and I walked over and I said, “You see, it’s right at the top here” because I was just sure I’d asked for the wrong amount.

So, she had to think about it. She had to talk about it with her son, John Thomas. He’s a supporter of Planned Parenthood in DC, I don’t know if he’s still on the board there or not. She said yes, and that was fantastic. It was a great experience because I got very comfortable asking for money. It really showed the passion of people for Planned Parenthood. We raised money both for the building and to set up what we called a justice fund, because the state had stopped the state abortion fund. That money wasn’t available anymore. So, we raised extra money to put aside to help low-income women have abortions. And we built the building, and that was a fascinating experience. I could go on for more hours on that. I learned a lot.

I was telling somebody this other funny story about my son. At that time, I think this was maybe 1997. My son was about five. And I thought, “Well, I need to I need to talk to him about this because he might get grief at school about it.” I think he already knew about abortion, but I thought, “Well, I’m going to take him by the clinic when we’re being picketed so he can see the pickets.” So, I took him by the picketers and said, “See, all these people out there don’t agree with what Planned Parenthood is doing.” And he at that time, he was really entranced with the Army Navy surplus store in town. He used to love to go look at all this army stuff and he kind of leans over to me in the car and he says, “Mom, we should get that cannon they have at the army surplus store and just put it in the front lawn of Planned Parenthood.”

So, we didn’t do that. But we started abortions. We had the justice fund. We expanded to second trimester abortions. We were early adopters of Mifepristone, medical abortion. At one point, we also were lucky enough to get a grant when emergency contraception first became kind of a thing. Before, back in the old days, we cut up packs of pills and counted out how many pills you needed, birth control pills, and put it in a little brown envelope, and that’s what we sold for the morning after pill. But then there was a standalone product and we got a grant. We were one of a handful of affiliates to start a big emergency contraception push. We started an emergency contraception hotline where women could call in from all over the state and we would get a prescription for them and mail them EC before it was over the counter. So, we were really out there on that.

That rolled over into a call center. We were one of the first Planned Parenthoods to have a call center, so that the phone wasn’t being answered down at the front desk. In the old days, you were checking people in and checking them out and selling condoms and answering the phone and making appointments and it was a crazy job. So, we heard from a couple of other Planned Parenthoods that had peeled that phone answering off, and we started a call center. And that grew.

We were considered a small affiliate at the time, but we had a lot of energy to try new things. We used to do this thing called the stand-up meeting every morning. Everybody would come in my office and we’d stand up and just go around and talk about what we’d done on the weekend and kind of what was happening. A couple of people talked about their first staff meeting being in that meeting, where we were talking about our peer education program and EC and abortion services, and just being really excited about coming to work for our affiliate. So, I’m really proud of that. It wasn’t all fun and games, but I feel like I was very lucky with this job. I made a difference, and I was able to make a living too.

JW:  It sure sounds like it. How long did you stay there?

JC:  32 years. I told my husband when I left after 32 years, I said, “When somebody has a job for 25 years, you go, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ But when they have it for 32 years, you go like, ‘Are they crazy?’”

JW:  No, I get it. You were making it better every day, from what I hear. That’s wonderful.

JC:  Well, you know, things have gotten so bad now. It’s just unbelievable. I sometimes say that when I started, early on, looking at my cervix and doing the Feminist Women’s Health Center, it was about changing the world. “We’re going to change the world.” And then I went to work for Planned Parenthood, and I was like, “Well, we’re going to change the country.” And then, “We’re going to change the state.” But looking back, what I feel best about is, I changed some lives. Actually, I changed quite a few lives.

JW:  Absolutely.

JC:  It became less pie in the sky and more real, I guess. It became more real.

JW:  Right. And you did. I am sure you helped many, many women change their lives for the better. There’s no question.

JC:  Well, there’s no doubt about it. I mean, I look at how many thousands of women went through Planned Parenthood and how many in particular, how many thousands of women had abortions because we started providing abortion services.

JW:  Absolutely.

JC:  I have a good friend who says, and I agree with this; I had an abortion when I was 22, and it saved my life.

JW:  Right.

JC:  Not in the sense of like, I was going to die, but it made me who I am today. It gave me the ability to be who I am.

JW:  To be yourself, to make a change in the world.

JC:  Yes, that’s right.

JW:  I wondered, though, if you had anything you wanted to say before we close.

JC:  I just feel so, we use this word privileged, and I really do feel privileged to have found this path. Now that I’m retired, on those days when I just want to take a nap, I feel okay about it.

*****************************************************************

JW:  Janet, would you introduce yourself again? And the point of this second interview is to fill in the gaps that we missed the last time we talked.

JC:  My name is Janet Colm. I’m here in Pittsboro, North Carolina, in my house, and just this little intro about why we’re doing this second interview. The first interview was such fun, and really sparked a lot of thinking on my part. And I realized, that most of my activism was the 30 plus years I was with Planned Parenthood. But I had left out a lot of the early stuff which is harder for me to remember, and was a shorter time frame. Judy was nice enough to agree to do a second interview.

JW:  Well, we did talk about the rape crisis center some. Did you want to elaborate on that first, or is there other stuff you wanted to talk about?

JC:  I think I’d like to go back actually, a fair amount previous.

JW:  Oh, please.

JC:  One of the questions you asked that I thought about a lot, is you asked when I first started thinking about being a feminist, and I told a story about playing softball with the boys in the neighborhood, being upset that I had to wear a shirt. But the other thing that happened around that time, which I think was really important for me, was my mom was a complicated woman, and in some ways was really ahead of her time. She had the philosophy that any question I asked, she would answer. Which was great, except for my sister, who never asked any questions and therefore didn’t get any answers.

I knew a fair amount growing up and was one of those people that the girls always came to, to find out, like, what is a Kotex? You know, that kind of stuff. But early on, I would say maybe when I was ten, or something like that, so, this would have been the very early ’60s, late ’50s, my mom had a friend who was exposed to German measles during her pregnancy. In her first trimester of pregnancy, there was a big German measles epidemic, and this friend wanted an abortion. My grandmother was a psychiatrist, and my mom and my dad helped this woman come to DC where my grandmother practiced. She had to have two physicians sign off on the abortion, and she was able to have an abortion. And my mom, I don’t remember how she told me this story, but I do remember thinking at the time, this is not fair. What if she hadn’t had this connection with my grandmother? Then what would have happened?

So, my first introduction to abortion in my mind, was about fairness. I don’t know what I thought about the baby and all that stuff, but it was about, this is not fair. And then, within a few years after that, this was still when we were living in Virginia, so it was before 1961, so, seven, something like that. There was a really popular TV show. You might remember it, the Romper Room.

JW:  Oh, sure.

JC:  And Miss Sherri, who is the host of Romper Room. It was a big deal. She took thalidomide during her pregnancy, and that’s right when the thalidomide story was coming out. You would see these pictures of really deformed children who had been born after their mothers took thalidomide, which was supposed to prevent miscarriage. And Miss Sherri decided she wanted to have an abortion. And I’m not quite clear on the story, but I think what happened was she went to a local hospital, and then it kind of hit the news that Sherri Finkelstein was having this abortion, and the hospital turned her down and she ended up going, I think, to Sweden.

JW:  Yes, I know this story.

JC:  That story really hit the news. And once again, the thing that I took away from that story was that even somebody who loved children, she had hundreds, because all of us were her little kids; even somebody who loved children, could make this decision under certain circumstances. So that was my introduction. Both of those things were carried with me, and that kind of shaped how I thought about abortion for a long time.

And it also showed that women who had resources would get abortions. And you heard stories later. I heard stories about women going to Cuba. Women got abortions. And then the other chapter that I think was really important to me was when I was at Duke, I was really lucky to take a women’s history course. So, this was probably about 1971. And the woman who taught it was Anne Scott. She was a wonderful teacher, really wonderful. And it was revolutionary.

We were taking women’s history. It’s one of the courses that I look back on and say, “That changed my life.” Because the assignment in that course, was to do what she called, primary research, where you would go back and read real letters or diaries that women had written, and then write a paper about it. And I got my hands on a book of letters that women had written to Margaret Sanger, who, of course, Margaret Sanger is the woman who started Planned Parenthood. And these were letters written in the early 1900’s, when the big form of birth control was diaphragms. And Margaret Sanger actually ended up going to jail for distributing diaphragms.

These were just eye-opening letters because, of course, in 1971-72, I was in college, it was the peak of the sexual revolution, people were on the pill, and everybody was having sex, or at least talking about/pretending to have sex. It was just such, in my face about what life was like for women without birth control. Because these were women my age, and younger, who wrote Margaret Sanger just absolutely begging for information.

They had three children or four children. They’d had a miscarriage. They did not want to have any more children, and they had no idea what to do. And I remember really vividly being in my car. And I was at a stoplight, and I was just thinking about these letters, and it just hit me in the face about how important access to contraception and abortion was for my life. It was really, really important.

So, I would say that those events really shaped who I was. And years later, when I went to work for Planned Parenthood, I had a friend who said, “It was like coming to the mothership.” And in a way, it was like that. It was like coming full circle. The Comstock laws, which were the ones Margaret Sanger fought, that said it was obscenity to send information about birth control through the mail, those are the laws that are being used today to try to stop mail order prescriptions for mifepristone. It’s the same law.

The other thing that happened this weekend was, I went to this rally in Raleigh. Our governor just vetoed what we call, the monster abortion ban bill that’s just been passed by our legislature. And in public, we had a big rally. It was fantastic. I’ve never seen him so fired up. It’s like he’s been liberated by this issue. It was cool. So, I was walking to this rally, and especially after the last interview, I just started thinking about all the times I’ve been to Raleigh. My first time in Raleigh was an anti-war march. And I don’t know, maybe after the invasion of Cambodia, and it kind of peaked, when the last year that I worked at Planned Parenthood, I got involved in the Moral Monday Movement, and was arrested wearing my Planned Parenthood t-shirt for civil disobedience. That was a peak experience.

But I also started remembering the very first time I went into the legislature, which was when, and I’m not sure about the date, I assume it was about 1978. Roe was decided in 1973, I remember where I was when I read about that, big day. And then within four or five years after that, the Hyde Amendment was passed, which prohibited federal funding for abortions.

The year after that, North Carolina passed our state abortion fund. And for many years, we had a million dollars or more that was set aside by the General Assembly to help low-income women and teenagers get abortions. It was pretty extraordinary. And the first time I went to the legislature and sat up in the gallery there, was when they were debating the state abortion fund. And here I was, last weekend, however many years ago this is now, trying to keep abortion legal in my state. I mean, it’s just amazing the way these things have flip flopped.

I don’t know when people are going to be watching this, but this is stunning. Really stunning for us. One of the points Governor Cooper made at this rally was that one of the provisions in this bill is a 72-hour waiting period. So, you have to come into the health center, get your informed consent, and then come back 72 hours later to have your abortion. This is a rural state. There are 100 counties in the state, and I think 10 of them have abortion providers. Don’t quote me on that. But he said that 72 hours wait, they pass this bill in 48 hours. They didn’t even allow as much time as they require women to have to make an abortion decision.

JW:  Excellent point.

JC:  So, women are thinking about this a little bit before they make the decision. Anyway, it’s infuriating.

JW:  Indeed. Were you going to talk about the women’s center?

JC:  Yes. So, then all the stuff I talked about last time, I went to graduate school, I went to the Feminist Women’s Health Center for a summer. I ended up working at the Rape Crisis Center, which was a great opportunity, and I worked there for about three years. This was like ’78, ’79, ’80, something like that, maybe ’81. And what I completely overlooked was that one of the things that was going on in this area at that time, is there were three really important organizations that were providing services to women, and they all had started before I started with Rape Crisis.

One, was the Rape Crisis Center, one was a group called the Women’s Health Counseling Service that provided counseling and referrals for birth control and abortion, and information about STDs. And the other one, was the Orange Durham Coalition for Battered Women. All three of these organizations kind of started at the same time, in the late mid 70’s. The Coalition for Battered Women started in Durham, and it was a little bit different because first of all, it started in Durham. Rape Crisis and the Women’s Health Service counseling service started in Orange County. The Coalition for Battered Women, I was at some of the formation meetings of that group. There was a lot of discussion about whether it was just going to serve Orange County or Durham County, and we really advocated for providing services to both.

There were two women who started that group. One of them was in public health, and the other was a social worker. They started with a real emphasis on service, and I would say both of those women were feminists, but there wasn’t a real feminist push to the organization. I went through the training for the first group of volunteers that worked with them and decided that that was not for me. I’m not a counselor. But I felt good about being involved in that group.

And then in Orange County, the Rape Crisis Center and the Women’s Health Counseling Service, where, I think this is right, both kind of started out of the auspices of NOW, and a woman whose name was Miriam Slifkin. And Miriam, I did not know her well, but she had a reputation, and NOW had a reputation, of being kind of out there, which is funny now. I read an interview with Miriam where she was talking about the beginning of the Rape Crisis Center, and she said she got a lot of pressure not to be too closely aligned with the Rape Crisis Center, and for now, not to be too closely aligned with it because it would turn off non radical people. She had an interesting story in this article about how there were women involved in the rape crisis movement who did not identify as feminists but were very concerned about rape. And I think that’s what happened on the domestic violence group, too. It was women who just didn’t want to be women’s libbers, but saw these as important issues.

So, it’s interesting to me because when I started with rape crisis, I kind of knew about Miriam, but she wasn’t real involved. I don’t remember what the story was, she might have worked at UNC and sued them for sex discrimination or something, but she was this women’s liber.

I got the politics of rape. I mean, that was clear to me. That it was about keeping women down, and keeping Black men down. I talked about this last time, about how part of what I was trying to do is de-terrify rape, because the terror was so restricting to our freedom. I mean, we did those Take Back the Night marches, which was about, let’s take back the night. Let’s go out at night and walk. I mean, come on, let’s do this. We’re stronger than they give us credit for.

But back to these three organizations. The other thing that happened, right after I started working for rape crisis, so this was maybe 1980, a woman in town gave an anonymous gift of $20,000 to start the Orange County Women’s Center. I know who she is, although I don’t know her well. She had some family money. She was a young woman. She wasn’t somebody who I knew as a feminist, or she wasn’t involved in NOW, she just wanted to start the women’s center, so she gave this gift. And part of the deal with the gift was that the women’s center should provide housing for rape crisis, women’s health, and the coalition for battered women.

So, $20,000, that seemed like a fortune to us, and it was. I mean, it lasted for a year. We rented a house. We hired two people. One was kind of a program person. The other woman, this amazing woman who now teaches at, actually, I think she’s retired now, but she taught at the medical school at UNC, Gail Henderson. Gail led a needs assessment for all of Orange County where she recruited and trained volunteers to go door to door in Orange County and talk to women about what they needed.

JW:  Oh, my.

JC:  I know. I can’t believe I got all this stuff. Isn’t that extraordinary?

JW:  That is extraordinary. And did women actually honestly talk?

JC:  Well, I think that it’d be interesting to try to go back and get the results of that. Actually, maybe I should get Gail to talk to you. The Women’s Center was kind of vague. We didn’t know what we were supposed to do. The three of us who led those three organizations were on the board, and there were some other board members. We were like, “Besides being a building, what should we do?”

What came out of that, was the development of a peer counseling program. I think we were doing financial literacy, job skills, and the first building where the three women services could be. All three of us had worked through what was called switchboard and then became helpline, which was, I think I talked about this last time, kind of the crisis telephone service. And we continued that. But for the first time, Women’s Health had a place where women could come and get a pregnancy test. Now, remember, in these days, there was no over the counter pregnancy test. You had to go to a doctor to get a prescription for Monistat.

We were just beginning to understand how great the diaphragm and the cervical cap were, and how dangerous the Dalkon Shield was. That Women’s Health Service was very important. And it was great for them to have a place where women could come, and there’s a card table, and they did the pregnancy test, and all that stuff there.

JW:  Amazing.

JC:  Yes, it was amazing. And it was great for the three of us to be together in that building, too, because that meant that there was some camaraderie and there was a place for volunteer training, and it really made a big difference. Well, that women’s center has developed into the Compass Center in Orange County. And at some point, they merged with the domestic violence program that was in Orange County. So, they have their own building; that’s another whole story. But those folks, Connie Rens and Elaine Barney, who died a few years ago, and Miriam Slifkin and Gail Henderson, those are all really important people for what happened in Orange County.

JW: So, a question that comes to mind is, was that building picketed ever?

JC:  No, it wasn’t. I think I mentioned that Planned Parenthood was picketed when we first opened our health center in Hillsborough. There was this guy, I called him, red haired guy. He was connected with UNC; I think he was a student. And when he was at UNC, there was kind of an active anti-abortion thing going on. But when he left town, it just died. Of course, now it’s back, but it was really linked to this one guy.

I wish I could remember more about how we found these buildings. The first building we rented was an old house, and the first Take Back the Night march we had, we were in that building. Earlier in the day we had different workshops, and I remember being in one room in that house which was packed with women, in this old house, and the floor kind of gave way. I mean, it didn’t collapse, but suddenly you could see a crack along the edge of the wall. I was like, “I think we have too many people in this room.” But it was also this, “Oh, my God, look what we can do.”

The other thing I wanted to mention, and I talked about this a little bit in the last one is how complex communication was because we didn’t have the web. When I graduated from Duke, in late ’73 so ’74, ’75, ’76, I worked at a really big used bookstore in Durham called, The Book Exchange. It was a great job, but it was a huge bookstore. It had a sign that said the South’s Largest Bookstore, and I think it really was. There were two stories. It was just crammed full of books, used books and new books. I started ordering women’s lib books.

I was trying to figure out where I learned about these books, and I guess it was, Ms. Magazine would have book reviews and I would go add the book to the ordering list. So, we ended up having a little section in that bookstore of books about women’s liberation and feminism, in Durham, North Carolina. And for a while I had fantasies about opening up a women’s bookstore. I was a secretary in the store, I just answered the phone and wrote the letters and signed my boss’s name to them. I added books to the order, but I decided that wasn’t for me either. And then I ended up going to public health school. But we had a little corner of a bookstore full of women’s books.

JW:  That’s fabulous.

JC:  It was an exciting time, wasn’t it?

JW:  It was an exciting time. Now is exciting too, in a different way. We shall survive because we’re going to pass the torch on to these fabulous women who are ready to take it.

JC:  I heard this story one time about some famous feminist who retired out in New Mexico or Arizona. There were these two women that were doing a cross country bike ride for women’s liberation. They stopped to visit this woman, and she answered the door and she said, “Oh, the reinforcements are here.” That’s how I felt at this rally this weekend.