THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Judi Marraccini

“We have to tell our story. I’m not going to be around here forever, and the story, this and many other stories, have to come out.”

Interviewed by Wilma Stevens, VFA Membership & Development VP, June 2023

JM:  My name is Judi Marraccini, I was born in Patterson, New Jersey, and my date of birth is 05-01-52.

WS:  Thank you. What was your life like before you got involved in the women’s movement?

JM:  I lived in a very small town. My great grandparents, my relatives that came before me, settled the town, so many of the street names were named after my mother’s family. It was a very small, close knit little town. I went to school with the same kids that I went to kindergarten with, graduated from high school with the same kids, and I also was the only Jew in town. My father was Jewish, and my mother converted to Judaism when she got married to him.

It was a White Republican town and I was the only Jew. The only reason why I knew that, was because the kids would chase me at Easter. This was like eight, nine years old. They would chase me at Easter and say, “You killed Jesus Christ. You’re going to go to hell.” I knew a little bit about Jesus Christ. I didn’t care very much; I was like eight years old. I just wonder where these horrible children; I mean, they must have gotten it from their parents.

I wasn’t raised particularly religiously even though my culture has always been of the Jewish faith, and there’s a culture there and a feeling there. My parents raised me as ethical culturists, which is a humanist religion. I’d go to Sunday school and I’d learn about all the different religions, and then we’d go visit. We’d go on field trips and go visit all these different religions. And because it was New Jersey, right across from the river in New York, we had all the religions we could ever want. So, it was very cool.

I was an only child, and books were always my friends. My parents encouraged me to read absolutely everything in the world. The first library in this little tiny town was above the fire station. The fire trucks were parked on the first floor, on the first part of the building, and then upstairs was the little library. So, when a fire occurred, the sirens would go. It would be all silent and then all of a sudden; It was a volunteer fire department so we’d hear all the guys, and it was all guys at that time. They’d be running, they’d be putting on their brakes, they’d be yelling at each other, “Hurry, hurry, hurry.” So, you’d be deep reading a book, and all of a sudden, the fire would happen in town. So, it was sort of interesting.

WS:  Well, it looks like you also went to a small liberal arts college.

JM:  I went to college for six months out in Illinois and we didn’t get along, me and that college. I was already a feminist. I was already active in all sorts of things, especially protesting against the war in Vietnam. The president of the college was friends with the president of the country, of the United States, and that was Nixon. I don’t know if you know this; Nixon was a Quaker, which was always our big disagreement with him because he kept the war going.

So, the president of the college invited the president of the United States, Richard Nixon, to come and speak to his little college in Rockford, Illinois, which Rockford, Illinois, is about 2 hours north of Chicago. There was a big billboard when you ride into town, and it said, “Rockford, Illinois, Screw Capital of the World.” It was a factory town. They made screws. And so, we would always laugh at this big billboard advertising this little town in Illinois. So, the president of the United States came to speak to the students. We were just 2 hours north of Chicago, almost in Wisconsin.

There was a very radical college in Wisconsin called Beloit, and when they heard that Nixon was speaking, they came down, and they brought rotten tomatoes and rotten eggs. I was there with my little tiny group, and we were stoned, and just hanging out, and we had this big bed sheet which said, “Give peace a chance” with a big peace sign. So, we were sort of hanging out, and then the students from Wisconsin got right up front and they threw rotten eggs and tomatoes at President Nixon. And, of course, nobody was expecting that. This was a little quiet college. He actually got hit. There wasn’t plexiglass, so some of the eggs and tomatoes got on his shirt, and there was this whole big thing, and the kids ran away.

I was a student at this little college and I was already in trouble with the administration, because one of the things about this little factory town, was there were a lot of kids there taking drugs; this was in the ’70s. Taking drugs and not knowing how to deal. They would have bad trips or whatever. So, me, with all my knowledge, I installed a hotline in my dormitory room so people could call me and I could suggest how to make them more comfortable.

The school found out about it, and they really disliked it. Number one, the college was supposed to stay separate from the town. We weren’t supposed to really mix at all. And number two, I was helping people take drugs. That’s what they said. I was already angry at this school, and so when I was called in by the by the president of the college saying, “Were you part of this group?” I said, “Sure” because I was 18 years old and just not happy there. So, I got kicked out.

For a year, I found out what life was like without a college degree, which I sort of knew because my parents had already told me. They were totally disappointed in me. But then, there was this local college just down the road from my parents’ house, which I stopped living at, but it was not far from the area. And my mother and I both went to this little tiny four-year college which was just starting out. Ramapo State College in Mahwah, New Jersey. We both were very big activists, both my mother and myself, and newspaper articles were being done on us because we were mother and daughter at this little school and we’re both active in the feminist movement and anti-war movement and all sorts of things.

But what was distressing to me, was there were all the cool people at this college and they liked my mother more than they liked me. My mother was this older woman and she was very cool, so I could understand it. But I couldn’t be friends with them if my mother was friends with them. And that’s when I started getting involved with Planned Parenthood. I worked hard to help set up places where people could go to get exams. They called them satellite clinics at that time. So, they were on college campuses, and other places like Board of Health places. We would go once a month and people would have appointments. This was New Jersey in the ’70s and there was not a lot of public transportation, so it was much easier for people just to go to their local town Board of Health to get GYN exams.

WS:  I want to talk more about Planned Parenthood because you got involved very young with Planned Parenthood, and you said that was you and your mother working together?

JM:  No, my mother didn’t get involved with Planned Parenthood. My mother started out in the League of Women Voters. She was a suburban woman in this little town. I remember her sitting with a bunch of her friends outside the grocery store and getting people registered to vote, and I was always so embarrassed. But then I finally realized that this was a great thing for her. She finally got annoyed with League of Women Voters because they wouldn’t come out on choice. This is 1970. In 1971, abortion became legal in New York. Not in New Jersey, but in New York. In 1973, abortion became legal in the country. That was when it happened.

So, my mother felt that the League of Women Voters should be supporting choice, politicians, and talking to people about choice and all that sort of thing. She was pushing, pushing, pushing, so they finally did that. They finally got involved with choice issues, and then she was pushing for gay issues. That was the next thing that came on the plate because everybody wasn’t straight. My parents met in New York in Greenwich Village, at NYU, many years ago, but they had gay friends and so they knew that there was more than one way to have relationships.

My mother started pushing League of Women Voters on gay rights. That just didn’t go over very well. These are all nice women. Actually, in New Jersey, they were Republicans. This little town was pretty much a Republican town. But New Jersey seemed to raise nice Republicans. I mean, not like what we know now. Planned Parenthood was supported by Republican women. Most of the staff, the board, they were Republicans because they had money. My parents were not Republicans. They were never Republicans. But in New Jersey, it was a softer kinder Republican than what we see now, that’s for sure.

So, my mother got more involved with NOW because of the whole, I forget what they called it, lavender threat, I think was the word. And NOW, came out obviously for abortion rights, and at that point lesbian rights, but then it turned into trans rights. And then Planned Parenthood also started getting more involved. I mean, they were always for abortion rights, but they got more involved in lesbian health care. One of the things that sort of evolved, was when I started with Planned Parenthood, they would only see women that were straight, because they offered contraception and health counseling, and referrals for abortions, or did abortions there.

And then I, and other people, got on them about that, and they said, “You know, these women who are lesbians, they have no place to go because they’re terrified by their doctors and judgmental, and all that sort of thing. Planned Parenthood is the only place that women will feel comfortable.” That’s when they got into lesbian health care also. So, you didn’t have to be straight to go to Planned Parenthood. Now, everybody knows that Planned Parenthood is wide open, but those days it was a little stricter.

WS:  Well, you said you were very young. What got you started? You were 19? 17? You were very young when you became an intern at Planned Parenthood.

JM:  I had had an illegal abortion when I was 16, so that really opened my eyes. Because before that, I was a privileged person. I could do anything, go anywhere. Nothing was going to stop me from going on to college and beyond, and have a career, and have a life. And then I got pregnant and my eyes just opened about how I had no power. I had no voice, I had no power, I had no money, I wasn’t working. And all of a sudden, I had to make decisions that I thought that I would never have to make.

So luckily, I had a friend who had a girlfriend, and he was probably four or five years older than I was. So, his girlfriend, they were both in college at the time, she took my urine, because at that time, there were no over the counter pregnancy tests, so you had to go to a doctor. And I couldn’t go to a doctor because everybody in my town knew who I was, and I couldn’t go anywhere else. I didn’t have my own car or anything.

She took my urine to the college school nurse, and the school nurse told her that she was pregnant. This was before abortion was legal, even in New York State. So, my friend and she, helped me greatly. He gathered some money; she did a lot of research to find out where I could go. And so, I went with my friend’s money, and I went to this place in New York that I’d never been. My parents always took me to very nice places in New York, so this was a neighborhood I was not familiar with.

I go upstairs and this guy meets me, and he’s a big guy and he has a bloody butcher apron on. So, it was pretty scary. But I was determined, because if I couldn’t get an abortion, it was the end of my life. I mean, as I knew it, as I wanted it. I was a young kid and I saw the finality of this. So, he said, “Give me the money.” I gave him the money, and then he punched me. I’d never been hit in my whole life. When I came to, I was lying in my own blood and I was in pain.

My friends were circling the block and they saw me and they took me to the hospital. I had my friend’s girlfriend’s ID on me because I was 16 years old and she was over 21, but because I was so much in pain, the hospital personnel were yelling at me because they knew that I had had an incomplete abortion. I kept saying, “I don’t know what happened. I must have fallen, I don’t know.” And they were yelling at me about how I was a baby killer, and who was I, and they were going to throw me out in the street if I didn’t behave myself.

Luckily, I had my friends with me, so it all worked out, obviously. But it was a horrible, horrible experience. So, when I had that experience, I decided that I was going to do everything in my power to not let this happen to anybody else, because it was awful. I worked hard on this, and that’s when I became involved with Planned Parenthood. I didn’t want to work by myself, but I wanted to get this to happen. And of course, marching in various rallies, that was all part of it.

But I’m not the only person that has that story. I mean, this is the problem. We’ve all had that story. Either we knew somebody, or it happened ourselves and we had to tell the story all the time. And actually, the story of mine is in a book, and it’s going to be in a book that I’m compiling of old feminists. So, you and I are kind of doing the same thing. And now at this point, women’s organizations are urging people to get these stories out. So, there’s none of the judgmental, “Oh, she must have done this, this was her fault.” I think people are finally getting it. That it’s nobody’s fault. Things happen. And the only thing that you can do is deal with it in the best way you can, and then move on.

I always urge everybody who’s had this kind of story, or had some other story, to move on into the women’s rights arena because we have to tell our story. I mean, I’m not going to be around here forever, and the story, this and many other stories, have to come out. So, I really urge people at Planned Parenthood, the patients at Planned Parenthood, to talk about what was going on in their life rather than to keep it in, because you keep things a secret and then it’s not good for yourself and it’s not good for the people who care about you.

WS:  After you worked as an intern, you actually worked for Planned Parenthood for a while. What were you doing?

JM:  When I was an intern for Planned Parenthood, I was the young person that was saying, “Well, we need this, we need this, we need this.” One of the things that I did, was I taught women self-exam. And the excuse I had was, “You need to know where you’re putting your diaphragm.” And besides that, then I taught them how to teach their partner where to put their diaphragm because there’s two of you involved, and it’s not just your method, it’s both of your method of birth control.

So, we used to have self-exam classes at Planned Parenthood and we kept it under the wraps, because it was a little weird. But women learned to see their cervix. And besides that, I was going out to all these other conferences, doing self-exam workshops. I would get plastic speculums from Planned Parenthood and I’d bring mirrors with me, and flashlights, and we’d all get on the carpet or the table or whatever and look at cervixes. So, it was really cool and fun. I sort of was the kid with the cool ideas.

They got a grant and they were able to hire me finally, in 1976. I had been an intern, I had graduated from college, and I was made into a clinic manager. I didn’t have any medical background or anything, but I had this way about me, to get people enthusiastic about doing things they might not really want to do. And that’s really a good thing when you’re a manager. To convince people with a smile and they finally smile back, “Oh, yes I’ll try it.”

At one point, and I don’t know if this is still true, but at one point, Planned Parenthood, because of the way that New Jersey was structured or something, we had to learn all the methods of birth control, and that meant family planning. So, we had to go through the family planning thing. I don’t know if you know much about the Catholic family planning, but it’s this little workbook and it’s all about how to take your temperature and know when you can get pregnant. And that’s what it was all about. When you can get pregnant, not when you can’t get pregnant.

So, here we’re learning about when you can get pregnant. It was all about the mucus, and once again it was self-exam, because you have to test the mucus to see if it was stretchy, to see if you were ready to get pregnant. So, I took that information and made it into, now you’re not ready to get pregnant because this and this, and also to look at your own cervix all the time. So that if you do become pregnant, very early, if you’re used to what your cervix looks like, you can see that it’s a little bit more blue if you become pregnant, because the blood vessels sort of form. Everything starts to change.

If you never look at your cervix, you wouldn’t notice. But if you look once a week or whatever; and also, you would know when you were going to get your period, because once again, you would know the changes that happen. And you’d also know exactly when you got your period if you kept looking, because you’d see blood coming out. So, it was an interesting thing to learn from the Catholics, and then to turn it around to make yourself not get pregnant, or to know when you are pregnant as early as possible. Because even though abortion was legal, it was still expensive and it was still hard to get.

The problem was that the demonstrators were just so, so close, and nobody had any kind of sympathy for women getting abortions. When abortion first became legal in New Jersey, they did them in hospitals where they’d been doing them for years. But then the hospital boards got all upset because the Catholics got all upset, so they said, “No, they have to be freestanding clinics; doctors’ offices.” We were constantly fighting to get the barriers bigger so that the demonstrators would be far away from our patients.

And in New Jersey at that time, if you saw a license plate, you could call up the motor vehicle people and they would tell you whose license plate that was. There was no protection. It was a long time ago. And so that’s one of the laws that we changed almost immediately, was to have license numbers that you couldn’t just call up and find out who owned that license plate. So, the demonstrators would come with a big jar with a pig fetus in it, and floating in red stuff; hopefully it was dye, but they would throw it at the people. It was horrible. And the cops didn’t want to be bothered. This is New Jersey, so nobody wanted to be bothered.

And then we finally, at one particular abortion clinic; it was in a very ritzy town in New Jersey. The people who lived in that town hated the abortion clinic, because there were all these demonstrators making noise and parking on the street, and just embarrassing stuff in this nice little town. They finally passed a law saying that the demonstrators had to demonstrate across the street. And we were like, “Yay, finally, at least we have a street.”

But what was across the street was a library. And it was this very fancy library. It was a very rich town with a very fancy library. A lot of big windows and skylights and gardens and stuff. And people would drive by and they wouldn’t think about an abortion clinic across the street. They’d say, “What’s the library doing? Why are these people demonstrating in front of the library?” And I think finally the demonstrators just got annoyed because people weren’t making the connection between the abortion clinic across the street and this beautiful library.

We kept trying to get abortions back in the hospitals, because everybody goes to the hospital, people are in and out. And so, we wanted the demonstrators at the hospital because people didn’t believe us. The demonstrators only came out at like 8:00 in the morning. They usually left about 10:00, because all the patients had gone in and they weren’t going to stick around until the patients came out and the deed was done. So, they always came very early and were noisy and scary and horrible, but they finally left and we wanted everybody to see them, but that never happened. It stayed in clinics just because hospital boards are very powerful, and they just didn’t want to dirty their hands.

WS:  Were you doing escort services for the patients at some time?

JM:  Yes. It was all volunteer and the clinics were just so happy to have us there, because they couldn’t get the staff to stand out in the parking lot. That’s not what the staff was for. And so, once all the patients were in and once the crazies went away, then they’d invite us in for donuts, but it was very trying on me. I remember there was one abortion clinic that wasn’t far from a shopping mall. It was always Saturday morning, and I would go to the shopping mall afterwards just to sort of calm down and look at stores and look at regular people, because the yelling and the screaming was just scary, scary.

These people had so much hate in them, and they were all old, ugly men. I mean, it was just very distressing. The few women, few and far between, they had some children that they would drag out in the weather. It wasn’t horrible, horrible. It wasn’t during a hurricane or anything, but still, these kids would be standing out in the parking lot among these screaming adults. And then the women would always pick up the children and almost throw them at a patient and say, “You’re killing the baby! You’re killing your baby!” It was horrible. Just horrible.

One of my friends became a manager of an abortion clinic, and she got threats all the time, and she was followed all the time. It was very, very scary and then they actually did blow up the abortion clinic. And of course, they never found anybody who was responsible for it. I’m sure it was one of the crazies. But the most difficult thing for me with the abortion clinic, was that I would be there often. I would volunteer my time in there, not only on Saturday and not only to do clinic escorting.

And so, we would see some of these young anti-abortion demonstrators come in for abortions on Wednesdays, because they did abortions on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and the crazies weren’t there on Wednesdays. So, the patient, the woman, would come in, and this happened a number of times because I would get to know these crazies, and I’d see her Saturday morning and I go over to her, “What the hell are you doing?”

She just looked at me, “What?” It made me so angry, and I really wanted to report her to everybody, but because of patient confidentiality and I wasn’t really an employee; but it just annoyed me that she would have the balls to get an abortion on Wednesday, then come and demonstrate and throw pig fetuses at me or whatever they felt like that week. It was just crazy. And it hasn’t stopped.

Actually, here in Florida, it’s gotten much, much worse. I’m sure you’ve known about the doctors that have been shot and killed by these crazies. It’s just amazing. And right now, in Florida, we’re doing a ballot initiative to get abortion on the state constitution. It says something like, keep government out of your life. But it’s very specific that it’s abortion. That the government has no say in a decision that a woman makes about abortion. Only her and her doctor have that say. So, it’s a very strong ballot initiative, and we are working very hard to get as many signatures as possible. We have to have it done by December in order to get it on the ballot in 2024. So, it’s still happening.

And Florida, I don’t know if you know this, they passed a six week ban, just this legislative session. They did a 15 week ban last year, so it’s in the courts right now. We have something in Florida called the privacy amendment, in the Florida constitution. And it says, “Every natural person has the right to be let alone and free from governmental intrusion into the person’s private life, except as otherwise provided herein.”

The people that fought for this, of course, was NOW, in Florida. And also, people who didn’t want the government interference in their gun rights, or in their education, or in their medical care. And the governor and the legislators have completely ignored this privacy amendment in the Florida constitution. It’s been here since, I think, 1988 or something, and they say, “Oh, that didn’t mean abortion, that meant something else.” And we’re like, “let alone and free from government intrusion” what are we talking about?

And also, the governor just passed a legislation saying that doctors can’t treat minors for any sort of trans health care, so now all these minors in Florida are not able to get trans care. We also think that the adults won’t be able to get trans care either because the doctors are being told they can’t do it. Florida is really the end of the road and this is a big problem, so we’re hoping to get this ballot initiative. The trans community has not done a ballot initiative yet, but hopefully.

I don’t know what’s going to happen because this privacy amendment is still in court, and right now, there’s a 15-week limit on abortion because this is still being dealt with, this privacy amendment. The court is supposed to meet in October, and then if the court says this privacy amendment does not mean abortion care, then the six-week ban will go into effect, I think 60 days after the court makes a decision that 15-week can stand. Which means that obviously, the six-week can stand. So, we’re hoping to make something happen.

I’ve been a NOW member for a very long time, and I’ve carried it through my career. I worked for the county welfare agency for a while, and I was involved with adult care, which means being a liaison between nursing homes and the hospital and the family. Because often what happens, I guess everywhere, but in New Jersey, is the parents get old and they don’t want to leave their house. They can’t make the stairs anymore, and the children don’t have time or the resources to take care of their parents. And then the parents get bed sores because they can’t be turned over by the children and all sorts of bad things happen. So, New Jersey tries to get people into nursing homes; and at that time, they were nursing homes, there was no assisted care fanciness.

The other thing that happened, this was in the ‘80s, was that men were coming home from, mostly California, with AIDS. And so, the parents would see their children, their grown-up children, like skeletons, dying of AIDS. And we tried very hard to get the nursing homes to accept men that were HIV positive, and hospitals, and they refused. There was all sorts of craziness with the whole HIV AIDS thing.

So, we finally, as the welfare agency, we finally got lay nurses to come to these men’s homes to do grocery shopping, to do light health care, make sure they take their pills, all that sort of thing. The healthcare workers wouldn’t go because they were scared they were going to get AIDS. So, what I did was I wrote a little booklet, about third grade level, in Spanish and French and English, because a lot of these people were from Haiti and Puerto Rico, so it was better in their languages about how you can get AIDS and how you can’t.

I was very clear. I drew little pictures. I can’t find the book anymore. I don’t know what happened to it, but it was distributed widely throughout New Jersey. And finally, the women started doing what they were supposed to do, showing up at people’s houses, but we could never get them in the nursing homes. We could never get these sick men in the nursing homes. And that’s where they really needed to be. It was a very sad time, but that’s another thing I’m very proud of. And it’s because I educate myself and I find out things and I say, “This needs to be done.”

After that, I got a job at New Jersey Medical School. It’s now part of Rutgers in New Jersey. And the way I would explain it to people, “I was teaching clinical skills to medical students.” Really, what I was doing, is I was teaching medical students how to do a patient centered GYN exam. And then eventually, I also went into the male exam too, so that the patient would understand more about their body and more about what was going on. I’m sure you’ve had the experience, most women had the experience, just staring at the ceiling and hoping that it will be over. But we supplied a mirror for the woman so that she could see what the examiner was seeing, and it was quite amazing. And this, along with my whole birth control and abortion experience and lesbian healthcare, I was just rolling along. It was a great life.

WS:  You did that for about 30 years?

JM:  Yes. We expanded, doing sexual assault, trauma exams. We had nurse practitioners doing those exams, because what would happen in the old days, is that women would come into the hospital and say they’d been raped, and the OBGYNs didn’t want to have anything to do with it because they were dealing with their real patients. They didn’t want to go down to the emergency room, and the emergency room was sort of a scary place anyhow.

I mainly worked in Newark, New Jersey, so there was a lot going on; one of the poorer cities, probably more crime and whatever. So, the OBGYNs didn’t want to do it, and they would come late and sometimes a woman would leave without getting the exam and people weren’t paying attention to her. So, I really pushed to get a trauma center where women, and men, could go when they were traumatized in some way.

We also got nurse practitioners, so we trained nurse practitioners how to do this kind of kinder, gentler exam, so that there was more of a dialogue instead of a monologue. And also, patients tended to be more comfortable with a woman examining them. We had women doctors also, but they were sort of bound up in whatever was going on with their hospital and office patients. So that was another thing that I was very proud of getting involved in.

Another thing that I did, was I, and many other people, got domestic violence shelters in every county in New Jersey. Because once again, this was the ’80s and ’70s, it was such a secret and nobody talked about it. And the way I got my little group of people to sort of get involved with this was I said, “Look, we all know somebody who’s been beaten by the person who supposedly loves her,” and, “Why don’t we just do an experiment? Why don’t we just say that we’re an old high school friend or whatever of hers, and we stay the night, one night, because we know this bully who’s beating her up will not do anything to her when there’s somebody else in the house.”

And you know that, but that’s one way to really isolate women. To get rid of all their friends and all their family, to have their family not come over. Because these bullies make it uncomfortable and scary, and the woman’s ashamed and all that sort of thing. So, we would spend one night and the woman wouldn’t get beaten. And then she’d start thinking about “What was that like?” not being scared for that one night. And so, it started the wheels turning, and then we were there to sort of help her. “Okay, what’s the next step? What do you think you want to do?”

It usually took about three or four times of her leaving her abuser, to finally leave her abuser. Because as you know, once you leave, it’s much more likely he’s going to kill you. And he’s going to find you and kill you, and then probably kill himself, too. He’ll always kill you and your kids first. And we really pushed for the guy to leave. We really pushed to find him someplace to go because he was the problem. He had to be out of there, but it never happened. This whole thinking about, “Well, if she wants to go, she can go.” So, that’s how it came about, that we set up these shelters. They were safe places. It was sort of cloak and dagger, because nobody was allowed to tell the address, because then he would find out and would come and there’d be problems.

And the cops, often, they didn’t care. So that was another thing that we did. We did a lot of trainings of police officers during the ’80s about domestic violence. Because they really had no training. And they listened to us, because we were the people that knew these women and knew these situations. That was another thing I was very proud of getting involved with.

WS:  And this group, was this involved in NOW in any way?

JM:  Yes. We were NOW members. We were chapters. There are 63 counties in the state of New Jersey, and New Jersey is very small, and so you pretty much had a meeting that you could go to that was ten minutes away because it was a small county. We would get together all the time and just talk about, “What we can do? What’s missing?” And we would figure out something was missing and something had to be fixed.

Another thing that NOW people did in New Jersey was, we added; in every state constitution, there’s a nondiscrimination clause. You can’t discriminate against this person, that person, because, because, because. So, we wanted to get sexual orientation in that nondiscrimination, and we finally got it in. And that was a marvelous, wonderful thing to have it finally happen in New Jersey, because nobody really thought about it. And then people started thinking about it. I said, “I’m not going to discriminate because of who you sleep with, who you love” and so we got that through.

WS:  You have been involved in NOW, I think, since you joined with your mother?

JM:  Yes. With my mother. It’s funny, NOW had, I don’t know, a 25-year anniversary, and they put this big gala event on at the John F. Kennedy center in Washington, DC. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, but it is a magnificent, beautiful, theater gathering place. It’s an amazing place. And this was, I guess in the ’80s and my mother and I both went. It was a conference. And then that Saturday night, we all got dressed up, and so we’re all wearing these gowns, and I didn’t recognize a number of people because we were always wearing jeans and T shirts. But this was such a spectacular event, and NOW was putting it on, and all these celebrities were invited, like Jane Fonda, all these wonderful women celebrities, and they were telling us how wonderful we were as a grassroots organization.

So, we’re all hobnobbing. Except a lot of us, because we’ve been so involved in political action and being activists and being out meeting and doing things, we didn’t know a lot of these actors because we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t go to movies. We were out on the street. We were fixing the world. So, we were like, “Who’s that?” I mean, Jane Fonda, we knew. She was an actor. Lily Tomlin, we knew. But the soap opera people, we had no sense. But it was an exciting thing. And my mother was there, and I was there, and I don’t look like my mother at all. So, people are like, “This is your daughter?” I’m about five seven. My mother was 5ft tall, if that. She was always heavy, I’ve been slim for the most part my whole life, so I would tower above her.

She had this beautiful silver lame gown on, which was down to the floor, and I wore something, I forget. That was an exciting moment. But yes, I’ve been involved with NOW. NOW fits me. NOW is a grassroots organization, and yet they have so much great information about their issues. They don’t delve off into never-never-land with something, something. They stay always straight on their issues. There are six core issues, and you pick one, you pick two, you pick six, and you get to work on them all. So, it’s quite wonderful.

Most of my life I was in New Jersey, and I’ve been here for 15 years, in Florida. It’s a whole different thing. Florida is a whole different world than New Jersey, and it makes me miss New Jersey greatly. But I still see all my friends at NOW conferences, and I’ll be seeing them in Washington, DC. in a few weeks.

I’ve been married twice. And the second marriage, the vice president of National NOW married us, so that was sort of cool. She was my friend in New Jersey. She was president of NOW New Jersey for many, many years, and I was her vice president, so we knew each other very well. And then 23 years ago, she married me and Charlie, which was super, and she was still president of NOW New Jersey, or still involved in New Jersey. And then a few years ago, she became vice president of National NOW. So, whenever I see her, we’re like sisters. She’s been my friend, and she’s a pretty well-known person, now. She’s just another Jersey girl.

The hate in Florida is just awful. New York, New Jersey; I knew Donald Trump when he was starting out. I was a model for a moment a million years ago. I was a department store model. And what we would do is, we would get dressed up, and we’d get to keep the clothes which was sort of cool, and then there’d be a lady’s luncheon, and we would walk down the walkway and they would look at us and the clothes we were wearing. Then they would figure out, “Oh, I could look good in that.” This was in the ’70s, maybe the ’60s, I’m not quite sure.

But Donald Trump, and he was a Democrat back then, you must have heard the court case where he attacked a woman in the dressing room. Well, he did this all the time. I was far too old for him because he liked little girls at that point. He was probably, I don’t know, in his 20s, I don’t know. But one of my friends was raped by him, and she committed suicide because nobody believed her. He had all the armory. He was untouchable, absolutely untouchable. And so that was the beginning of my hate of this man who I didn’t know would become what he became. But I knew, everybody knew, that he was a horrible person. You don’t want to be alone with him. You don’t want to be near him. He was just scary, scary.

And then in the ’80s or ’90s, he decided he was going to do a thing with Atlantic city. Atlantic City was a beautiful little city on the Atlantic Ocean. I would go there with my grandparents. They lived in Brooklyn, and in the summer, they would take a month or two months, and I’d go with them to Atlantic city. There were big kosher hotels on the boardwalk, and past the boardwalk was the Atlantic Ocean.

Trump came in, and he decided, when casinos became legal, when betting became legal in New Jersey, he made all these promises that he would hire people. It was a very poor city, and then there was a tourist area, and he promised all sorts of things that he would hire everybody who was living in Atlantic City to work at his hotels. Well, of course that didn’t happen. He ripped us off awful. The state of New jersey, and more crime happened.

He brought in his own people. He never hired anybody. He was going to send them to school, he was going to do this, do that, all these promises, and a number of his casinos went bankrupt, which of course Jersey had to pick up the tab. So, I always disliked him. But coming to Florida, it’s been very, very disheartening, because he’s such a presence in this state, and there’s so many people that just love the hell out of him, and they’re just weird, just very scary.

So, when I came to Florida, I wanted to do something. I wasn’t really ready to retire, I was ready to move down to Florida. So, I started working at a medical marijuana dispensary. And medical marijuana has been legal in Florida, I think for about six or seven years, maybe longer. But they’re just sort of getting it together. And so, I said, “Oh, well, I’ll find good people. They’ll come in, they’re getting medical marijuana, they’ll be lovely people.”

And it was so distressing to me because a lot of these people were not lovely at all. They would come in with their Trump buttons and threaten to carry their guns inside and just be nasty. And I was like, “Where’s all the stoned lovely people that I expected?” So, it’s very disheartening to me that Florida is what it is. I thought every state was like New Jersey, but I have found out that this is a whole different world.

I’ll tell you a funny little story. I’m very big on separation of church and state, which is a joke in Florida, because there is no separation between church and state. But I went into the grocery store in Florida near my home, and I get to the conveyor belt, put my stuff on, and, “Thank you. Yes. Okay. You want plastic, you want paper?” all this sort of thing. And then she said, “Have a blessed day,” and my mouth just dropped open. I mean, I hadn’t been here for a very long time. And I said, “Excuse me?” And she said, “Have a blessed day.” And so, I heard her.

So, I went to the store manager, and I said, “I’m sorry, I’m a little upset about what your cashier said to me.” And he looks at me, I mean, this is what I look like, right? He said, “What did she say?” Because he was like, what could she say? How funny does she look? So, I said, “She told me to have a blessed day.” And he said, “Well, ma’am, I’m sorry.” And I knew that I couldn’t go any further, but this is the stuff that makes me crazy down here. I don’t want anybody wishing me a blessed day. And everybody wishes me a blessed day, and I resent it.

WS:  I want you to talk a little bit about your book that you’re working on.

JM:  Oh, okay. Well, one of my very close friends, somebody that I had been very active with NOW, her name is Connie Gilbert Niess, and I’ve known her probably since I was 17 or 18. She was one of the people in NOW in New Jersey, that really got the nondiscrimination act through. She was a very wealthy divorcee. She lived in this gigantic mansion in South Orange, New Jersey, which is a very well-to-do area, and she would have big parties at her beautiful mansion. It was just her and maybe her son sometimes living with her, but she’d have all these great parties, and it was to get the gay men to come and support this antidiscrimination clause in the state of New Jersey.

So, she would throw great parties and people would sign things, and agree to things, because she was in theater and very dramatic, and a fantastic, fantastic woman. Only about 5 ft tall, maybe weighed 100 pounds. But she had such a personality. When she walked into the room, you knew it was Connie coming in and that she would have some great ideas and want to have fun making things change.

And then she died. It was very sad because she had moved from New Jersey to Key West, where she was also making trouble, and doing wonderful things with the Key West NOW chapter. She had some sort of illness. She couldn’t breathe. Maybe it was COPD, I don’t know what it was, but she had trouble breathing, and she knew eventually it would kill her.

She was probably 10-15 years older than I am. So, she went on a road trip, and I knew that she knew she was going to die because she saw all her old friends that she hadn’t seen. We had all scattered from New Jersey as we had gotten older, and she was stopping here and stopping there, and we all sort of knew each other, because we were all friends of Connie’s. And when she died, I hadn’t gotten a lot of stories. I had worked with her, but I didn’t really know when she started being a feminist, what her life was like, and it was very sad. And I would tell people about her, and other people would meet her, but they didn’t know what she did in New Jersey because they knew her only in Florida. She traveled, and she had all these circles, but she made a difference everywhere.

So, at that point, I decided that I was going to write a book and try and catch everybody that hadn’t died yet to tell their stories. I have about 25 stories. It’s mostly people from New Jersey, but it’s funny because I met them at a certain point in their life, and then they went on to do even greater, more wonderful things. Like my friend Bear Atwood, who’s now vice president of National NOW. I mean, she was just a regular NOW chapter member, and then she became president of NOW New Jersey, and now she’s vice president of National NOW.

I sort of caught people in their own little spots, and I’ve asked all these people to write stories. It has to be uplifting, happy stories. It has to be, “I saw this problem, and I fixed the problem, and now I’m moving on to fix another problem” or, “Because I fixed this problem. This is what happened.” I don’t want any sad, “Oh, I regret. Oh, I shouldn’t have done that,” none of that.

It’s been wonderful just reading, these people that I’ve known, reading their stories about something I didn’t know they did. They changed the dress code in school. One woman ran an abortion ring in a college because she was able to find the students, find the doctors. Another woman worked with Jane, I don’t know if you know, “Call Jane” in Illinois; just amazing stories. And I tell these people that I know, some I know very well, some I don’t. “Just write a story, write three stories.”

And so, I find out about these people that I didn’t know what they had done. It’s very cool, so the book is coming together. I have to write one more story for a person because she’s too busy; she’s our lobbyist in Florida. Barbara is probably in her 80s now, but she’s still working as our lobbyist, and working as the teacher’s union lobbyist, and the senior lobbyist, AARP lobbyist. She’s very busy with the Florida legislature. And the good news is, with the Florida legislatures, they only meet 60 days of the year.

I was surprised because in New Jersey, they meet all year, or maybe they take a summer vacation or whatever, but I was surprised that there are state governments that only meet 60 days. Of course, what they do is they have all the bills written, and they have all the support and everything, so those 60 days, they’re just passing bills, they’re not writing them. They’re not meeting, which, once again, this is the craziness of Florida. There’s not a lot of knowledge about what’s going to happen until it actually happens, and you can’t really do anything about it.

Barbara is very busy. I finally got an hour with her at the NOW conference; we had a NOW conference in Orlando, just the state NOW, a few weeks ago. She’s a fantastic woman. I knew that she started out as head of the teacher’s union in Florida. I knew that she was a teacher. And then I think she ran for office a few times, and she lost. She thought it was a good thing, because she got to know other people and got to urge other people to run for office, because then she became a lobbyist. She stopped running, but she encourages other people, and she can tell them all the things, all the downfalls of running and how it’s going to work, and she can tell people how the legislature works.

She’s just full of knowledge. I was so worried that I wouldn’t get her story, so I finally made her sit down at this conference in my hotel room, and I said, “Okay, tell me everything.” And she had a whole thing of newspaper clippings, and pictures of her, and I kept saying, “Where did you start, where did you start?” And it was fascinating because people don’t know where she started.

She was the daughter of a tobacco farmer, almost in the state of Georgia. Right on the border of Georgia and Florida, and her family grew tobacco. He wasn’t a big farmer. He didn’t have a lot of land. He was just a little tobacco farmer. And so, she knows everything about growing tobacco, which you would have no sense that she was a farm kid, because she’s very educated, very well spoken. She knows her facts.

So, she said, “I know everything about tobacco. I know how to pick it, I know how to plant it, I know how to dry it.” Her parents were sort of forward thinking, because she was allowed to work for other tobacco farming families and make money, rather than just for her own family. They said, “You can give two days to make money doing something with our neighbor. And then you come back home and you get back out in the field.”

And the other thing that she told me, this is a very small town that she grew up in and they were all Baptist, and dancing is frowned upon. Her mother felt that the kids should be able to dance. So, they would clear out the barn and they would have parties. They would have one week at one person’s barn, another week at another person’s barn, and people would dance to music and have fun. And these little towns, everybody knew each other, everybody went to the same church, everybody hung out. People felt that the kids should be able to have fun, and so this was their fun.

I said, “What started you getting active?” I’ll tell you a little story. She was a teacher, and the superintendent of the school system had promised all the teachers that in three years they would get a 15% raise. This was a long, long time ago, probably in the ’50s or ’60s. And so, all the teachers stuck through the three years, and then there was this meeting called by the superintendent of the schools. So, the teachers thought, “Ah, he’s going to announce we’re going to get this raise 15%,” which is a big raise. And the guy said, “No, you’re not going to get a raise because the county has no money. “

And because Barbara was Barbara, she knew it was a lie. She knew that they had taken the money. They had not allocated something. They had not done something that was supposed to be done. So, she gets all upset, and she calls in a reporter into this meeting and the reporter writes that the teachers didn’t get the raise. Barbara gets all excited, and she’s like, “He’s a bald-faced liar” she said, about the superintendent. And she got quoted by the reporter as saying, “He’s a bald assed liar,” which in the ’50s was a big deal, right? So, the reporter writes this. She did not say it. And the superintendent comes out, “You’re obscene and you have to apologize, and maybe we’ll have to fire you because you’re not of good moral character,” because she said ass.

So, she said, “I refused to apologize. The reporter did not quote me right, and you’re still a liar.” So, they took her out of the school in handcuffs. They called the cops and it was raining. So here she is, coming out the back door of the school in handcuffs, and the cop is trying to hold the umbrella over her because it’s raining and she’s a White woman, and this is what they do in Florida, I guess, in the south.

All the reporters were told to get away from the school. They all went to the back of the school so they saw her coming out in handcuffs. So, she held a rally, a demonstration, right then and there. She became elected the president of the local teacher’s union and then went on. But that was how she got started. And this is a story that she’s never told anybody, as far as I know.

So, it’s going to be a story in my book, and people are going to say, “Wow, that’s how Barbara started out.” I think this stuff matters, because the reason why I’m writing this book is these old-time feminists have made changes in the world. All the people that are in my book have made changes in the world, all sorts of wonderful changes. I want the people reading this book to say, “My grandmother did this, my great grandmother did this. And I could maybe do this because I’m growing tobacco. I’m in a little tiny town where everybody looks the same and acts the same, and I see injustices.” That’s why I’m writing the book.

A lot of the stories are, of course, about abortion, because a lot of these feminists, that’s the way they became active. Like myself, because we didn’t know that this could happen. And it was just a very scary thing. And now it’s happening again. At least now there’s better birth control. Whether women can get it or not, I mean, that’s the next thing I think that they’re going to go after, because these crazies, they hate any kind of power that we have.

Part of me wants to make Viagra illegal. They tried to get rid of the abortion medication with the judge in Texas. I don’t know if that’s gone away. I haven’t heard anything about it. But they tried to get rid of it because it makes women have a miscarriage. Of course, that’s what the medication does. So, Viagra, as you know, it forms blood in a certain area, so the man could have a heart attack or a stroke because of all this blood going different places. Of course, that’s its job, right? So, we could make the same argument. And there have been more men that have died from using Viagra or Cialis, than women that have died from the medication. All they do is they have a miscarriage. So, it’s a thought. And also, there’d be less children being born if there’s no sperm.

WS:  Well, you’ve had quite an amazing career as an activist, Judi. Is there anything else you want to cover? Anything else relevant we need to know about you and your life of activism?

JM:  Well, I just want to tell a little story about my parents. My, mother came from this cute little town in New Jersey, and my father was born and raised in Brooklyn. His father, my grandfather, came to this country when he was 12 years old, from Russia. And at that time, they were getting rid of all the Jews in Russia. My grandfather’s family had a resort on the river and they were doing quite well, and then they were, “Either you leave or you get killed.”

So, the family left. They had a lot of children. 15 children, and he was the youngest. He was 12 years old, or he was one of the youngest. They came to Ellis Island outside of New York, and he got some sort of eye disease, some sort of condition. It was probably pink eye. So, they couldn’t send him into Brooklyn where the rest of the family was going, because he had an eye disease, and they weren’t going to send this 12-year-old back to Russia, so he stayed on Ellis Island for a number of months without his family.

His family went off to Brooklyn to all the other; my main name is Shapiro, to all the other Shapiros in Brooklyn, New York, and they settled. He was there for, I think for about six months, and he sort of became their mascot, because he knew Hebrew, he knew Russian, and as you know, those letters are not our letters, a little bit of English. And he translated and helped the authorities on Ellis Island to take new immigrants in. So, it’s kind of is a lovely story. That’s how my grandparents got here.

My father was born, and he eventually wound up going to NYU down in Greenwich Village. New York University in Greenwich Village, which is a cool, hippie kind of place. And he met my mother, who was two years older than him. He was 19 and she was 21. They decided they wanted to get married, because in those days, you couldn’t live together unless you were married. It was, I guess, in the ’40s. He was 19, and in those days, he had to be 21 if he wanted to get married without parental permission. And his parents, who were Orthodox Jews, said, “Absolutely not. You’re not getting married. You’re still in school, and you’re not marrying an Anglo, a Christian.”

So, they decided to elope because they were in love. They wanted to live together. And so, they went down to South Carolina. That was the first state that you could get married at any age. Didn’t matter. So, they eloped to South Carolina. And my father, who looked Mediterranean; he had sort of dark skin, and thick lips, and brown eyes, and curly black hair. He went to the water fountain to get some water. It was, I guess, summer. I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

So, a guy came up and started screaming at my father about, “You get away from there boy” and used the N word, because probably South Carolina people, a lot of them, never saw a Jew. So, my father and mother had no idea that this was happening in the ’40s. They decided to do something about it, so they join CORE. Congress of Racial Equality. and they start doing nonviolent actions, and they go down south. They become freedom riders, and they go down south and sit at counters with other people of different colors. And then the police come and take you away because it’s illegal.

My mother, as I say, she was heavy. She was about 5 ft tall. And those days, heavy women had no real clothes. They didn’t make size 2X, 16X, whatever. So, she’d wear moo-moo’s all the time. Long, down to her ankles, and she had Birkenstock sandals. She was like a real hippie person. And so, she would be the first person, when they all lay down on the floor to be taken away by the cops, she would be the first person by the door. And she was a big woman. I mean, she’s short, but she was heavy. She was big. So, these cops, because she’d just lay there, they have to pick her up, kind of drag her, carry her. And plus, she’s a White woman, so they’d have to make sure that her legs were covered, it was a whole big deal. But that’s why I think she did it.

Then she’d get into the paddy wagon. At those times, it was a paddy wagon where you’d have benches along the side, and people would sit in the back and she’d take up as much room as possible. She’d put her purse over there, she’d lean back, then cross her leg, take up as much room as possible. Most of the people that were demonstrating were men, and a lot of them were Black men. And of course, they would not put the Black men in with her into the paddy wagon.

And she took up a lot of room in the paddy wagon, and they just put a few White guys in there. Maybe, maybe not. Or maybe she’d have her own paddy wagon, or maybe they’d find, whatever. But that paddy wagon was never filled because my mother was in there. So, then they have to call for another paddy. But I, as a child, was really scared. Because of course I’d see this on the news every night, with the dogs barking and the mace being fired and rubber bullets. It was quite a time in this country. But I knew my parents were doing good.

When things settled down, when I came along, they weren’t doing that anymore. But what we were doing, was we were trying to do integrating apartments in the little cities in New Jersey. What would happen is that a couple would come, they’d call, “Is the apartment available?” “Yes.”  And then they’d show up, and if they were the wrong color, they would be told the apartment was taken. So, what my parents would do, is they would call, say, “Is the apartment available?” And they’d say, “Of course.” And then they’d give the key to the people, and then there’d be all sorts of problems.

Then the apartment owners would be taken to court because you weren’t allowed to do that in New Jersey. But they did it all the time. And so that was one of the things that CORE did, besides doing southern things, they also did things in New Jersey because it wasn’t fair in New Jersey either. That’s the background that I come from. So, people were like, “Either she’s going to be a John Birch-ite,” I don’t know if you remember who John Birch is, “Or she’ll be a revolutionary.” I was never a revolutionary, but I care about things, and I’m an activist, and I will always care about things. It’s been a good life.

Right now, I’m involved with NOW down in Florida. I write their newsletter, and I work on their website, and I go to conferences, and I talk to our lovely legislators who are like, “Oh, it’s so difficult.” I mean, they just repeat themselves. “It’s murder. It’s murder. It’s murder.” I’m like, “Excuse me, what are you going to do with these women that don’t want their children?” I don’t know how much you know about Florida, but Florida has a horrible, horrible system for putting kids up for adoption or foster care. I mean, every single day, there seems to be a news article on how these foster kids are sleeping on floors of offices because there’s no place to put them.

There are no orphanages anymore. They depend on people to house these children because they want to make the little bit of money that they make. They have found most of these people have abused these children. And then there’s the problem of homelessness. In Florida, it’s comparatively easy to be homeless because it’s warm all the time. You’re not going to freeze to death. And there are enough places that you could probably hide in Florida because there’s so much land that isn’t being used; swamp land or whatever. So, these kids come out of high school and then they get thrown out by their foster families, and then they have nothing. They have no savings. It’s just horrible, the foster care system in Florida. And nobody seems to care about it. It’s just like third world. It’s just horrible that these children aren’t precious.

WS:  Well, you’ve had quite a life of activism, Judi, and I’m very grateful that you were willing to talk with us today. And thank you again for being part of our histories.

JM:  You’re welcome.