THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Kathy Spillar

“I’ve been able to jump in with both feet and dedicate my professional life to this movement. I feel very fortunate in so many different ways that I can do that, that I can get up every morning and know that I can keep working on some aspect of all of this, with the ultimate goal of equality.”

Interviewed by Carol King, July 2024

CK:  If you would start with your full name and where and when you were born.

KS:  Katherine Spillar, but I go by Kathy. I was born in June of 1955 in Houston, Texas.

CK:  What was your life like before you got involved in the women’s movement? Please include your ethnic background.

KS:  Well, I’m about as Northern European as you can get. My life was pursuing a career. I have a master’s degree in urban policy and economics, and was working for a statewide trade association, working on state and federal housing policy and related issues, but had been following the progress of the Equal Rights Amendment very closely through the news.

I have always been a feminist. I was raised by a feminist mother, and a father who believed in equality for his daughters and for his wife. Both of them [were] physicians in practice together. I could see her struggles because I could hear it in the dinner table conversations between the two of them.

They would talk about their practice at the hospital and how some surgeons would not ask for my mother, who was the anesthesiologist. Both were anesthesiologists. They said, No, we want Bliss, who was my father. They wouldn’t go along with that. They would just decline the case if they wouldn’t allow her to do the work. So, I knew of the struggles, and I also knew her story.

She had become a nurse, working her way through nursing school, then joined the army during World War II, was shipped to England as part of a major MASH hospital outside of London, came back to the States on the GI Bill, determined to go to college and become a physician. She worked her way through college. The GI Bill ran out as she headed to medical school, I think she had a year left.

But the story is that the medical school wouldn’t accept her because they already had filled their quota of six or seven women in the incoming class. She had to wait a year before she could get in. But those fights I grew up knowing about and understood that women faced this discrimination in the world. I was always a feminist and was following the Equal Rights Amendment and was shocked when it wasn’t ratified in 1982. I could recite the ERA to colleagues, but I was not involved in the movement in any way. I decided in that June of 1982, that I had to get involved because it was too important not to be involved. So that’s how I got involved.

CK:  Where were you living at the time? Were you in Los Angeles?

KS:  Yes, I was in Los Angeles. I had moved here in 1980 after Reagan’s election, which was also a shock to me. I couldn’t believe that someone of his ultra-conservative, backward-looking philosophy could become President. I was here in Los Angeles and somehow heard about a rally in downtown Los Angeles on June 30th of 1982, marking the end of the ERA ratification timeline, and went downtown to listen to the speeches.

I heard Toni Carabillo, who was a founder of Los Angeles NOW and a long-time activist in the feminist movement and in NOW, and heard the speeches and picked up information on the National Organization for Women, Los Angeles. And I was so happy to find out that there was an organization dedicated to working for women’s equality. I didn’t know NOW before that, and immediately joined, and went to the first membership meeting. The rest is history.

As you know, NOW, it’s whoever is participating and the last to leave the room usually is the next leader of a chapter. But I was so fortunate to know and to meet Tony and Judith Meuli, and through them, Ellie Smeal. So, I was literally in friendship and in working groups with some of the most extraordinary feminists and strategists, and just was so excited about the involvement.

CK:  That’s incredible. You jumped in with both feet and got involved very quickly. As we know, in NOW, if you talked about an issue and nobody else raised their hand, you were in charge. That was it.

KS:  Which is great. You either sink or swim. It was so exciting to be part of that in the early mid ’80s and late ’80s. It was just extraordinary.

CK:  You became chapter president pretty quickly.

KS:  Pretty quickly. Probably by ’85. I worked on Ellie’s campaign in ’86 to have her elected as the National NOW President again. Once she became President, as I’m sure you remember, that conference, as part of her platform, put forward the mandate of holding abortion rights marches in Washington DC, but also in Los Angeles. I quickly quit my job and decided I would help organize and lead the effort here in Los Angeles to organize a march. I didn’t know anything about how you do marches or anything, but I knew we could do it.

CK:  I think that confidence that we could do anything was so remarkable and extraordinary, and I think it’s carried us through the years.

KS:  It has. I often think back to those early days and in meetings where it was almost all women, although there were men who were very involved and very strongly committed. But women in the leadership roles, in a room where it was a collaborative effort, no one’s ideas were ridiculed. I just had not been in those environments. I had been in an environment that was still, in the early ’80s, predominantly male leadership. And you suddenly wake up to the possibilities that with women in leadership positions, you can really move mountains and do incredible things.

CK:  That’s great. What issues were you most concerned learning about?

KS:  I was determined that we would get an Equal Rights Amendment in my lifetime. That was what really compelled me, although obviously NOW is a multi-issue organization, so we were active on so many different issues, including reproductive rights and abortion access, which was under attack in the Reagan administration and in the courts. It soon became a very dominant issue in this fight for equality.

But the ERA has been the issue that I have been most passionate about for all of this time, knowing that if we could get equality in the Constitution for women, that so much more could come out of that to change. I mean, it’s both the symbolic nature of recognizing that women were left out of the founding documents of this country, and that in fact, women should be equal under the law, but it’s more than that.

It’s all of the things that can happen if we get an Equal Rights Amendment and can use that in litigation and in advocacy for implementing laws. Which you know, the Equal Rights Amendment requires Congress to act to implement laws to stop sex discrimination, and it obligates the states in the same way. So, so much could happen if we had that basis of constitutional equality to work for real change.

It’s a defining issue. Of course, abortion rights is a defining issue. Equality in social spheres and equal representation, because that’s the only way we’re going to get to full equality, is that we have equal numbers of women sitting at the decision-making tables in Congress and in the state legislatures and in all aspects of our lives, whether it’s the corporate arena, government, volunteer organizations.

Everywhere that women are underrepresented, the decisions are not as good as they could be if half the population’s experiences and concerns were represented in those decisions. The two go hand in hand, reaching real equality but having equal representation in decision making is just vital.

CK:  So important. What were your most memorable and important experiences during those years?

KS:  Well, definitely organizing the 1986 March for Women’s Lives here in Los Angeles. That was an extraordinary effort. Until the Women’s March [that] came along in 2017, it was the largest march in the history of Los Angeles. I was very proud of that and learned how to collaborate with other women’s organizations and with the political leadership in Los Angeles, with the media, all of that was a steep learning curve for me in terms of how do you put it all together and build a team of volunteers and activists who can help achieve what you set out to do. So, that was an extraordinary experience.

I decided during that time that, that’s what I wanted to do. So, I kept some consulting work going. Fortunately, the organization I had worked for before hired me on as a consultant until – I was very fortunate to be in the right place at the right time with Ellie and with Toni Carabillo and with Judith Meuli and Peg Yorkin, who we had come to know during this period, to start the Feminist Majority Foundation. I was able to be full-time working on these issues and working to build a political advocacy organization that could have a big impact.

CK:  You’ve certainly succeeded there. It’s just remarkable. Have you been involved as an activist in the women’s movement or other areas since your second wave experience? I think we know the answer to that.

KS:  Yes. I’m of the mind, we can call it a second wave but in truth, it’s been a consistent wave throughout history. And even probably pre-history, if we knew, of women working towards equality for themselves, opportunity, so, I don’t think about second or third waves or fourth waves wherever we are in some of the vernacular right now. It is a continuous wave. It has never stopped.

If you read Gerda Lerner and other historians, you know that this fight for equality started way before the suffrage movement, and has been a worldwide movement from the very beginning. Taking on different aspects in different cultures and in different nations, but always and everywhere, women striving to achieve equal treatment under the laws, in society, in their families.

I think it’s the most significant movement ever, because it has the potential for eradicating the most severe poverty, for addressing some of the world’s most critical challenges. Everything from the climate crisis to food shortages and famine to improving health and health outcomes. I mean, all of this by empowering women and girls is possible. But we have had a patriarchy forever, and we still live under patriarchy, although I think that there’s been some very significant cracks that this movement, writ large, has created, and we have to stay with it.

You can’t stop for any moment because the minute you have a breakthrough, then you’re fighting a rear-guard action to push us back. I mean, look at abortion rights. We just can’t take our eyes off where we want to be as a human race in this movement, because there’s always going to be opposition that is going to constantly fight to stop us and push us back.

CK:  You’ve been working on this issue from the ’80s, and today, you’re in charge of the iconic Ms. Magazine. I mean, that’s pretty amazing. And the Feminist Majority has just continued the work and moved it forward in such a way that hopefully, things will look different in November. So, what keeps you going, Kathy?

KS:  Well, first of all, the sense of hope, and that we can achieve this. We can achieve equality. With each generation, we get closer. There’s no question. There’s so much that we need for our generation that still is living, as well as daughters and granddaughters and nieces. But it’s the knowledge that we can do this and that we have popular support for these ideas here in the United States and in almost all of the world. That we know the problems, but we also know strategies for solving the problems. And so that hope, that feeling of confidence that this movement can achieve real, significant and lasting change, is what keeps me going.

CK:  How has your involvement in the movement earlier affected your later life, personally and professionally?

KS:  Well, I’ve been able to jump in with both feet and dedicate my professional life to this movement. I feel very fortunate in so many different ways that I can do that, that I can get up every morning and know that I can keep working on some aspect of all of this with the ultimate goal of equality. I’ve been very fortunate. Been married now for 24 years. Was married before and decided that relationship wasn’t working, although we remained friends.

I’ve been very fortunate to be married to someone who’s very supportive and helps me think through some of these challenges that we always face. My brother and his two sons are enormously proud of this work. They’re the first to call when some new development has happened. The minute that Kamala Harris declared for the presidency, I was getting their phone calls. So, it’s been a joyful experience in many ways. Tough challenges, but all terrifically joyful. The people I’ve met, the friends I’ve made, my colleagues in this movement, just an extraordinary group of individuals. It’s been a real honor to be working beside them.

CK:  What advice do you have for young women who want to participate in this movement?

KS:  Get involved. Full stop. Step forward. Join any of these amazing organizations. We all need their help. Become active. Think about running for office. I mean, if you’re in college, run for the student government. Because the student government, some of these student government’s budgets are huge in the multimillions of dollars.

Having representation at the decision-making tables on what speakers are going to get asked to come to campus, what programming is going to be put forward by the student government. All of that. Those decisions are made, and if you’re not in the room, you get left out. It’s as simple as that. Your concerns get left out.

If you’re thinking that you want to run for political office, just do it. I mean, as soon as you can, too, don’t wait. Don’t buy into the, you have to wait until you have a career and you’ve proved yourself in the community. Get involved in the community now, and plan where you’re going to start running for office. You’ve got to take a look at where there are, you know, is it going to be at the local level? Is it going to be at the state level for Congress?

You’ve got to make your decisions, and you’ve got to get involved in the political parties and figure the system out. It’s not something that you’re going to be taught in college, so you’re going to have to get involved and figure out a path forward and then pursue it. I mean, it’s as simple as that, really.

And there’s so much activism on the college campuses, and in the high schools. The Feminist Majority Foundation has a high school program, and it’s just extraordinary what young girls and boys are doing to advocate for women’s human rights and for human rights writ large. They’re not waiting until they’re fully adults. They’re getting involved now. It’s just whatever age you are, and you’re never too old to get involved. My first involvement was in my late 20s. So, you’re never too old and you’re never too young to get involved in this movement.

CK:  Great. Do you have anything else you’d like to say, Kathy? I think we’ve covered everything. It’s been very nice.

KS:  The only thing I could add is with Ms. Magazine and the Feminist Majority Foundation, we’ve made a very deliberate decision to have a global perspective on all these issues and how critical that is. We can’t think that these issues only impact us here in the United States. For many reasons, to reach out to have those connections with feminists in other countries and through the United Nations more formally, to work to support the progress for women and girls worldwide. Because without that, we can never get to real equality, and we can’t address the world’s problems in an effective way without the empowerment of women and girls everywhere.

But we also have a tremendous amount to learn from feminist movements in other countries, and to support our sisters and ask for their support in our struggles. I mean, look at what’s happened on the abortion issue. After the Dobbs decision, we’ve had feminists in Mexico and in other countries step up to help women in this country. Women in countries in South America and in Europe have secured constitutional equality for access to abortion and reproductive justice. And here we are in this country enjoying their help and support and their example.

That’s just one example. That women in this country, and the Feminist Majority Foundation, in particular, stepped up to raise the alarm about what the Taliban was doing to women and girls in Afghanistan in the late ’90s. Now we’re working again, because the Taliban has retaken power, to ensure that the world doesn’t accept the Taliban and its gender apartheid regime. It must be shunned. We’ve got to get humanitarian aid to the women and men and children in Afghanistan, but we cannot do that at the expense of ignoring what the Taliban is doing in its gender apartheid regime, because it will not stay in Afghanistan.

We’ve been in ally-ship with feminists in Afghanistan who were there this whole time, and many of them now outside of Afghanistan because of the threat to their lives. But we continue to raise the alarm into working coalitions with organizations and with both Afghan women’s organizations and domestic human rights organizations, and at the UN to make further progress – to define gender apartheid as a crime against humanity, because it is.

The struggles that women face in Afghanistan are connected to the struggles we face here and vice versa. If we had more power, if women were half the Congress, if we were half the decision-makers worldwide, the reaction of the Taliban would have been very different.

Maybe the Taliban could not have gotten away with imposing these restrictions. We just have to constantly know that feminists in the United States are not the only ones in struggle for equality and for progress. Linking arms globally has been a major way to move forward. Anyway, Ms. has always taken that position, always reporting on global issues and the movements all around the world, and the progress as well as the setbacks. That’s what we have to keep doing.

CK:  Thank you. That was very important. I’m glad you mentioned that.