THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Joan Nicholson

“I think things have undergone significant changes since 1970, and I am proud of my contributions to this change.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, September 2025

JN:  My name is Joan Nicholson. I was born somewhere in New York City, but I grew up on Long Island.  And I’ll be 93 next month.

JW:  Tell us a little about your childhood and what led you to think about women’s issues.

JN:  I could write a biography, but I grew up on Long Island. Typical middle class family. My father had owned an art gallery in New York City and he worked with his father. And my mother was in real estate business on Long Island. I went to public high school there, luckily, a very good high school. And after high school I worked for about a year. And then I decided I should go to college, which I did.

I went to Hofstra University on Long island and I did a year there. And then I moved into New York City and got a job and stopped college at that time. So that’s pretty much my childhood. I have four children. Three of my kids live here in California and one of them lives in Salt Lake City.

JW:  Whatever got you interested in the women’s movement?

JN:  I’m not quite sure. I know I had sort of an awakening around the late 1960s. I traveled to Sweden with my husband on a business trip and we were also attending his cousin’s wedding. The men went off the night before the wedding to do their usual bachelor party thing. And the women got together to have dinner. And I found myself with 12 women, Swedish women. And I was a kind of a middle-class housewife. Each one of them was doing something astonishing – like they were a doctor or they were a mathematic person or a teacher, a professor. My mind was just blown open.

JW:  Around what year was this?

JN:  I would say probably the late 60s, maybe. 68, 66, 69, something like that. I came back. I still had my kids to raise and still lived in the suburbs and didn’t do too much about the women’s movement. But I was thinking a lot about the options. In 1975, I got divorced. I had finished college by then, had a degree, finally got a degree in psychology. And my kids were growing up, and at some point I was doing a lot of freelance work, community work, that sort of thing. And eventually I went back to work full time. That was after my years with NOW.

JW:  Let’s hear about your years with NOW.

JN:  That went on for somewhere in the neighborhood of five years.  My main area of interest back then was the image of women: the way we were depicted in television, the movies, and so on and so forth.

After college, I had moved. I stayed in New York, and I was divorced. And I was thinking a lot about the women and the movement. And I joined a group. I read about a group of women who were meeting in New York City with an organization called the National Organization for Women. And I thought, I should go to a meeting like that.  It was a group of very active people, women who were getting involved in the movement for the first time like I was.

And I joined that group immediately. And for some reason, they chose me to be the chairperson. I don’t know why, but they did. And then we were trying to come up with the project to do, and we heard about this television license challenge project that was happening in Washington. I think it was an NBC in Washington. The one in New York, we challenged WABC, which was the local. You know, each major broadcasting television broadcaster had outlying stations channels.

We challenged that one for their discrimination against women. We challenged them on three issues: job and employment discrimination; the way news was presented, kind of leaving women out of what was happening in the world; and the image of women in their TV programming, their shows. So we were very lucky. We had a group of very dynamic, active women working on this.

And we connected with the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. And that was really a great thing because we got the help from all the women attorneys there for their unlimited pro bono time. There were about six of them, and they were with us the whole way. So we had six lawyers, seven, maybe eight lawyers working with us on and off getting that brief. You know, you have to have a legal brief to challenge.

They were working on the brief and we were working on the research. And so it was a very combined effort. I had two people who were sort of co-chairs with me. One of them was Judith Hennessee. She was a very active member. She wrote the biography recently of Betty Friedan. There was another woman involved who wasn’t a writer, but was an advertising executive, Deborah Beale. And we all were very good friends. And we wrote the brief with the lawyers.

We submitted it to the FCC, challenged their broadcast license, and we had meetings with them, their executives, for at least a year, on and off. So we had them pinned down to these meetings where we would discuss our issues and our complaints and our problems and try to get them to negotiate changes. The FCC eventually denied our challenge, which we expected, and they got their license after, but we held it back for a year. And so they were broadcasting for a year without their license.

But eventually we had to give up because we were turned down by the FCC. But you are aware of the changes that have taken place in the image of women in media. You can point out that there are probably more women doing the news today than there are men. Rachel Maddow, for instance, just got a $33 million contract, so they’re being paid more than they were back then. And certainly, the image of women in film and TV has changed for the good. So that was our big project and that really went on for a couple of years.

After that, I did stay with NOW for a while, but eventually my life moved on. I got divorced, I moved to New York City, I had four children. I had to start supporting them, so I had to go back to work. And that was a whole other phase. But during those years that I was with NOW and active, I did co-publish two articles with Judith Hennessee. She and I did an article for the inaugural issue of Ms. Magazine. And we also did a co-article in the New York Times Magazine which was a pretty big deal.

JW:  Was this issue on the image of women?

JN:  No, we did an article called “Women’s Work is Never Done.” It was the very first issue of Ms. Magazine. So we were right there at the beginning. And then the New York Times article was also published in the early 70s, and I think that one was called “NOW Says TV Discriminates [Against] Women,” something like that. And we wrote about that whole subject. After that we were with a group of women, all of whom had written for the New York Times. We met a couple of times as a group with the Times to discuss the topic of the image of women. So that was a good thing.

Later on, there was a meeting of the Veteran Feminists held at the Armory in New York City. I went to that meeting. Judith was there, I think Jacqui Ceballos and a bunch of other people. Betty Friedan probably. I knew them all. Not well, but I knew Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug. There were lots of people who were involved in those years and we got around to meeting most of them. It was a very exciting time.

I don’t know that it had anything to do with my getting divorced, but it certainly made my thoughts about marriage and children and all that very different from what they had been.

JW:  Yes, I got divorced around then too. I think it was a trend of women.

JN:  Yes, it was a trend. I very happily moved on. I was active in freelance writing and editing for a couple of years. I finished my college degree. I had some part-time jobs, freelance jobs. I worked with Phyllis Chesler for a while, sort of a personal assistant with her when she was in New York. I don’t know what she’s doing today, but we were good friends once and I knew a lot of the very active people in the early years.

And then I went back to work full-time and stayed with Polk & Company, the publisher of city statistics, for 10 years, from 1984 to 1994 when they shut down. They had a creative department in New York where they did direct mail for the Automobile Association and many other clients. I was the head of the creative department, mostly acting as an editor, but also doing a lot of art direction as well. 

I eventually retired. Tennis was a very big part of my life back then. And then I moved to Florida to be with one of my kids who had just gotten divorced and had to raise her kids. So, I went there and helped her. And then my other daughter, another daughter, had a child, she was also divorced and I moved to Austin, Texas to help her. Then we all moved to California and so here I am.

JW:  What else did you continue to do?

JN:  I didn’t continue to work directly with the women’s movement because I never really could find a way to connect in the different places. I was in New Orleans for a while, Austin, Texas for a while, moving around a little too much. But I did get involved in politics and I became a big participant in what they call the post writing campaign. I read an article last week that said thousands of people get out to vote after receiving a postcard. Tens of thousands of people apparently respond to that project. So, I’ve been involved in that.

Most Democratic offices in communities have a post writing group and they’re very active. They meet and write their postcards and it’s fun and we use colored pencils or colored pens to make it more cheerful. And it appears to be a very worthwhile thing to do. I never realized it was that effective, but it appears to be very effective.

And of course, I donate money when I can. I’m not much on the telephone and I’m a little too old to go out on marches and knock on doors, which I did when I was in Florida.

The last election I was active in was the John Kerry for President campaign. And then I was in Florida when George Bush was elected and I was watching news on the TV when the Supreme Court suddenly stopped counting votes and Bush was elected over Al Gore, which is the start of all this insanity that’s going on. I just read an article. I think by Robert Reich, that pins the direction of the country from the time George Bush was elected fraudulently because he had a chance to select one of the conservative judges on the court. And then the next election, the President also got the chance to pick a Justice. And a couple of times that happened. And now we have the Roberts Court, which is creating this big problem. So, history is important.

JW:  In the 70s, I had a pin that said 59 cents, which is what women made on the dollar compared to men. There’s some research that we’re up to 84 cents.

JN:  That’s a big jump. It’s not enough, of course, but it’s a big jump.

JW:  It took 50 years to go up, what, 25 cents?

JN:  And now we’re going backwards, so I don’t know what to say now. I don’t have the energy to go out and do it again.

JW:  There’s lots of ways to keep marching. I hope it doesn’t have to be outside, on your feet.

JN:  My heart is there, and I write a blurb every day on Facebook complaining about what’s happening and putting my ideas there. I have nowhere else to put them, really. I designed a button that became well used among the people in the movement. We had a blood drive here in New York to raise money for the Equal Rights Amendment, which I think still has not passed. The little button that you wear on your lapel said, “I gave my blood for the ERA.. And it was a double play on the blood thing.

JW:  Do you have any concluding thoughts?

JN:  I’m very glad you’re doing this project. Are you writing it?

JW:  No, we’re not creating documents. What we’re doing is transcribing these interviews.

JN:  I see. One of the reasons I’m very happy about this is when I was involved in NOW in the New York chapter, whenever there was a turnover in people, if a committee, for instance, took on a lot of new members and lost a lot of the former members, the history was lost and the women had to keep doing it over and over again. And it always upset me. I’m a wannabe writer. I kept thinking, why isn’t somebody writing this all down?

JW:  We appreciate your contribution.