THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Jean Hunt

“I think some people are born with the right kind of personality to do organizing, which is a degree of intense interest in other people and willingness to go into places where you don’t know your way around…but you’re willing to go and learn and listen.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, November 2023

JH:  My name is Jean Hunt. I was born in Buffalo, New York, on June 9, 1945.

JW:  Tell us a little about your life as a child before you got involved in the women’s movement. Did you have siblings? Your ethnicity, your neighborhood, your parents, whatever you think is appropriate.

JH:  My parents are first generation Americans. My father’s family from Ireland, my mother’s family from Eastern Europe. They were Jewish, and he was an ex Irish Catholic. My father was raised to be a priest by a deeply religious Irish Catholic mother, who was devastated when Dad left the Church and later married a Jew.  I have an older brother, David, and a younger sister, Miriam.

When I was five, we bought a house in Rochester, NY, and we lived in a middle-class neighborhood. I think everybody in that neighborhood was newly in the middle class, living in a single-family house.

It was all white. There no other Jews; my mom was always kind of alone. My father was a social worker, and my mother (who hoped to be a doctor but instead taught chemistry so her brother could go to law school), stayed home until our sister was five, and then she went to work in the nursery school of a very progressive community school in Rochester.

This was a very interesting school. It accepted all kinds of kids (white kids), including children with learning issues, etc. Families did workdays twice a year on the facilities, and there was a sense of community. My mom worked there so we could attend. I went there until I was in 6th grade when they got a new headmaster who was an antisemite and wanted to make the school into a prep school. My parents went to the board and complained even though other parents chickened out. So, they pulled us out, and I went to the neighborhood public school until 8th grade, and then to a very big public high school in Rochester. Which is full of lessons that I learned later in my life. Monroe High had a very complex tracking system in place. I was tracked into the honors class, which was up on the third floor. There were Black kids in the school. They were all in the basement where the vocational technical programs were. We hardly ever saw them, except in the lunchroom and the sports teams.

There was one Black guy who was in the academic track up on the third floor, all by himself. When I went off to college, I met him in the airport coming back from school on a student ticket once, and he was a skycap in the airport. That was what Rochester was like.

In my high school they had sororities and fraternities, Jewish and Christian. And my mother said, “Well, you don’t want to be in a sorority anyway. They’re very bad organizations.” I said, “I do kind of want to be in one, but all right”. I tried hard to fit in as best I could though I often felt different.

My mother was raised in Syracuse, New York, in a Jewish enclave of people that were active in the Workman Circle, politics, solidarity with the Soviet Union. They were socialists, communists, anarchists.  Emma Goldman came through there when she did her tours. There was a lot of activity in Western New York State over the years. Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony were in Rochester.  My Dad was raised in the First Ward of Buffalo, in an Irish neighborhood. He was raised to battle with Italian kids, kids from Eastern Europe. While both families were poor, my Mother’s always believed there was a structural reason why they were poor – capitalism. Not so for my Dad, and he absorbed a lot of shame about his poverty.

My parents met in a theater group which was part of the Communist Party cultural network in Buffalo. Neither of them was in the party, but they were close. My Uncle Izzy was in the party and lost a government job later when McCarthy came in.

JW:  Where did you go to college?

JH:  I got a full tuition scholarship to go to Bryn Mawr College in 1963 and I left after three semesters. Looking back on it, I left because I hit a wall. I had been a very good girl, hardworking, and succeeded at everything.  I just kind of gave out.

But I also had a “class attack”, of being in a place where people were so rich. I was just stunned. A classmate took me home for a weekend and we were picked up by their chauffeur in their Cadillac and taken to their Park Avenue, huge apartment. I felt so ill at ease in all that wealth. I also was increasingly drawn to the movement against the war, and against racism and wanted to be a part of it.

I dropped out in March 1965. All my closest friends, except one left for various reasons. Some people transferred to other universities. My roommate went to London to study at the London School of Film Technique, where she is still, and we remain connected. I moved into Philadelphia, and I’m really happy with the life that I made.

JW:  So, when did you become aware of what I’ll call, quote, the women’s movement?

JH:  Not for a while. When I left college, I got a job as a secretary at the American Friends Service Committee, which was a cauldron of young people in 1965. The women were all secretaries. The men were coming through to do their conscientious objector (CO) service in opposition to the war. I met my two closest women friends and my husband there.

I was very active in the fight against the war. I was active in civil rights demonstrations in Philadelphia. I had found my home. That was where I snuggled in and where I made my friends and where I got my energy. But I thought the women’s movement was not dealing with the main questions.

JW:  It, being the war? Not dealing with it?

JH: War, and civil rights. At first it seemed frivolous. Then I met a woman named Mary Wentworth, who had six daughters and who was a feminist. You know up, down, all around, unafraid. And I was like, “Wow, and she’s got kids.” I had all these ideas – you’d never have children, everybody hated men, though she did kind of hate men.

But that started opening the door to me.  When I was a secretary, I remember reading The Myth of a Vaginal Orgasm on my lunch break at my desk. And I was like, “Oh, my God. It’s not me, it’s them. They don’t know how to make love”.  I started reading everything – Sisterhood is Powerful, women’s liberation newspapers, everything that I could get my hands on.

That was in the late 60’s. I got a job as an organizer for the United Farm Workers on the grape boycott and lived in Boycott House. My boyfriend was the main organizer. The women from Delano that were there with us were powerful and very strong. One of them was a woman named Hope Lopez, who was a brilliant organizer. At one meeting she said, “the best organizer here is Jean,” which took me completely by surprise.  I had no idea I was a good organizer.

I got a job in the Model Cities program as a community organizer in the White community. They were like, “Well, you’re White, we’ll put you in the White community.” The community was poor and working-class, and I wasn’t any better at organizing there than I would have been anywhere else. But I learned to listen and learn from the people there.  Especially the women.

Then I did a job with the Quakers, organizing a national conference on race.

My best friend from Bryn Mawr came to Philly and we went on a trip in my VW bug around the United States. I got a little consulting gig to go south for this extraordinary woman at AFSC, named Barbara Moffat. She sent me down to talk to White organizers in the south, who are a very special and important group of people, very brave people.

We went to Mississippi, which scared us, where I did the interviews and reported back. Then we drove all the way across the southern tier of the United States, down to Oaxaca, Mexico, which is almost to Guatemala.  We realized along the way that we are wealthy. Driving around in a little VW bug, we were the so wealthy to the people we encountered in these villages.

Returning to the US, we met up with a man I knew from Haverford College, and realized he was attracted to Dana. He wanted Dana to dump me and go with him. She said, “Screw that.” It was a pivotal moment for both of us where we realized that men were always trying to divide us, and we chose each other.

We started looking for the women’s movement as we moved up the West Coast. Everywhere we went, we found a women’s center where we met incredible women who were doing fascinating organizing. I got more and more drawn into it and committed.

I decided I wanted to go back to Philly, which was my home. Dana headed back to London.

In Philadelphia I found a group that had formed a staff collective to create the Philadelphia Women’s Center. I think it was 1971.

We found a sympathetic landlord who rented us a big old house. I don’t even know how we paid for it. I guess everybody worked and threw in some money, and it became the center of feminist organizing in ’71. There were projects focused on health care, reproductive rights, domestic violence, legal issues, women coming out as lesbians – it was all being thought about and organizing emanated from there.

There was so much energy in that house. I lived and worked there, taking calls from women in the middle of the night who were trying to get out of abusive marriages.  “I’m trying to get away, but I don’t have any money, because he controls the money, and he beats me, and I don’t know what to do.”

The injustice in the laws controlling women became very clear to us. When you married, you became one person and that was him.  He controlled credit cards, bank accounts, and all economic decisions in many households. I felt that I was useful and was learning more about how to be effective as an organizer.

One of the groups that started there became the Philadelphia Women’s Health Collective. It was a group of people interested in healthcare, and in the end, all of us ended up getting jobs in healthcare. There were social workers, nurses, PA’s, and docs.  I went to nursing school because of this group and the work we did together.  We started reading Our Bodies, Ourselves, and taking the book to community meetings.  We developed a slideshow based on Witches, Midwives, and Nurses to make presentations helping women understand more about how our medical system developed in ways that weren’t supportive or helpful to women.  We organized against restrictive abortion laws in Pennsylvania, tried to connect women to abortion services when they needed it.

We were very involved in a particular struggle around abortion. A man named Harvey Karmen had a theory about how to do second trimester abortions with super coils inserted into women’s uterus. We were contacted by women in Chicago (it might have been Jane), asking if we would help support this procedure with a group of women in their second trimester. They were coming to Philadelphia because there was a doctor here willing to work with Karmen.

We went through a lot of agony about it, trying to understand who he was and was this safe. But we said, “We won’t do the procedures with him, but we will support the women as best we can.  He ruptured a woman’s uterus. We were involved in it and trying to find a way to talk about what had gone wrong, It was just a sign of how chaotic abortion services were pre ’73.

We began doing self-exams. In fact, my first pregnancy, in 1975, got diagnosed in my women’s group – my friend Susan said, “You’re pregnant”.

JW:  You could tell by looking at your cervix?

JH:  The cervix changes color.

JW:  Oh, I didn’t know that.

JH:  It was very early.

JW:  So that was your pregnancy test, then?

JH:  That was my pregnancy test. No rabbits were involved. The health collective still meets. It’s been 52 years.

There’s a lot. I could go on and on about all the different things that happened, but there was one interesting story, which I think might be of interest to people. We held a National Women’s Health Conference here in Philadelphia at a place called Fellowship Farm. This was post-Roe, to talk about the state of the women’s health movement. There was a big debate going on about, “Do we provide direct service, provide health care facilities, or do we agitate?” And my position is always, “We do both.” I mean, it’s never one thing that moves things forward.

At the conference, Naomi Fruchter, who was a very smart, clear-thinking woman from Brooklyn, got up and said, “We’re going to rue the day we won abortion at the Supreme Court, and we didn’t build a state-by-state movement.” And we all said, “What are you talking about? We won.” I think about her often. She was very prescient, very correct.

I’ve stayed active since then. My women’s group is a support group, a place to discuss women’s issues and politics. We go to demonstrations together and we’ve done so much work together over the years. I stand with them. They’re my women. We were nine, now we are six. And when somebody’s sick or out of town, we get even smaller. It’s daunting. But we will stick together until the last women are standing.

JW:  What kinds of actions have you been involved in lately?

JH:  I do a lot of work on local political campaigns here in Philadelphia for city council, Mayor, etc. I went to Washington to fight Brett Kavanaugh. I’m healthy and strong, but a day trip to a demonstration in Washington really takes it out of me now. Often, I do the marches locally. I’m very upset about Palestine and Israel and trying to find a way. I live in a racially and economically diverse neighborhood in a majority “minority” city and treasure the gift this brings. The issues of race and class are stark here, often painful, and difficult. At the same time, there is a great deal of positive work taking place all over the city.

I’ve been the co-chair of the board of the local social justice fund here in Philadelphia, the Bread and Roses Community Fund.  We raise money that goes to radical organizing in communities. It started as a small group in the ’70s. A year ago, we gave out $1.5 million to these groups. Being on the board has been a big piece of my political identity because it’s gotten me in touch with all kinds of young organizers in Philly, who are wonderful, smart, and doing amazing work. They’re so far ahead of where we were in their understanding of race and class, as well as gender. They’re fabulous, and they’re our hope.

My role is to be of assistance as we move forward. I just stepped aside after eight years of being co-chair of the board so new leadership can emerge. I’m active whenever and wherever I can.

JH:  The other thing is, my husband and I, we’ve been together 51 years, and we’ve raised two children. A son and a daughter. Both of whom have partners, and both of whom have two children. And my daughter and my daughter-in-law are feminists to the core, and the three oldest grandchildren are girls, and there is now a toddler little boy. We all live within 10 minutes of one another, and supporting those families is a big part of my life. They bring me joy and connection.

JW:  Well, it does sound like your mom had a major influence on you, and you followed through with the tradition, moved through different iterations, and landed where you are. Would you agree with that?

JH:   I think some people are born with the right kind of personality to do organizing, which is a degree of intense interest in other people and willingness to go into places where you don’t know your way around, but you’re willing to listen and learn. I was a secretary for three years. It was very useful to me when I became an organizer. I could type, I knew how to file, how to organize materials. I learned how to help make a meeting effective, keep track of decisions, and move     the work forward.  Building leadership wherever you are, so people directly involved lead the fight.  All of this is necessary.

I say to young people, “If you work in a kitchen, every single thing you do in your life gives you skills that are going to be useful later on no matter what you do.” It all comes together. I sold encyclopedias door to door. I was a waitress. I was a nurse, I was an organizer, I worked in City government, I ran nonprofits. I wouldn’t trade any of it. I really wouldn’t.

JW:  Oh, that’s so great.

JH:   I have a newspaper photo of my grandmother, Lena Levine-Greenberg in the Mayday parade in Buffalo with her hat. Evidently, she was active in Russia, in the shtetel before she came to America. She made chocolate chip cookies, my mother made chocolate chip cookies, I make them, my daughter makes them, the granddaughters have learned to make them.

There are traditions that we pass down in the family. Organizing and chocolate chip cookies go well together. You bring them to a meeting, people just relax. Food is an essential part of organizing. You must feed people.

JW:  Is there anything you want to add before we turn off the recording?

JH:  It has broken my heart to watch things that we fought for involving women and women’s safety, and women’s health, get rolled back. At the same time, I really believe the right wing has gone too far and I think that they’ve overestimated the degree to which they can exert their control over the body of every single woman anywhere around them. In the same way, our fight against white supremacy and patriarchy in all facets of our lives – this is essential as forces push against all the gains we have made as a movement. I always remain optimistic and believe in the power of the people, especially young people!