THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Katie Frankle

“The message I want to share is that important social change happens because of the work of a few leaders and many committed followers, each of whom may play a small role but who together can have a significant impact.  I was one such actor trying to do my part.”

Interviewed by Mary Jean Collins, VFA Historian, May 2023

KF:  My name is Katie Frankle. I was born in 1943 in Centerville, Mississippi where my Dad was at an army training base, but I grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and I’m Jewish. There weren’t very many Jewish people in Des Moines or in my class at school, but that’s where I studied and lived until I went away to college.

MJC:  Did you have any political awareness in high school?

KF:  Not very much. I was active in the synagogue youth group, but that was social, not political. Politics around the city were quite conservative and Republican, and I knew that I was more progressive than that. I guess as a very young child, I was one of the few kids in my class that was not for Eisenhower. I was for Adelaide Stevenson, but almost everybody was for Dwight Eisenhower.

MJC:  When was your first kind of political awareness?

KF:  My mother watched some of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings on TV. She was pretty progressive, and she was quite shocked and appalled by them. And then when I was in high school, I became aware of a film that the House Un-American Activities Committee had done called, Operation Abolition. It was about some anti-Communist hearings in San Francisco, where people protested the hearings.

And so, the committee made a sort of a propaganda film about the hearings, and the American Civil Liberties Union made an answer film called, I think, Operation Correction. I became aware of those two films, and I remember being very upset by what I saw. I remember the police dragging the protesters down the steps where the hearings were, and they were solid stone, government building steps. I think that was maybe my first political shock.

MJC:  So, when you finished high school, what was the discussion and where did you go to college?

KF:  There was never any doubt that I would go to college. My father was anxious for me to get an experience outside of the conservative Midwest. He wanted me to go east to college. My mother had a good friend who I admired quite a lot, who had gone to Connecticut College, which at the time was called, Connecticut College for Women. I ended up going there, and again, it was a pretty conservative, Republican oriented place. I felt a little bit out of step. I did join the Young Democrats Club at the college, but it was a very small contingent of people, maybe ten, and I don’t remember anything in particular that it did. It was not very active.

MJC:  What was your major in college?

KF:  Government. My junior year of college I spent in Geneva, Switzerland. I started college in 1961. During that time, there were sit ins in restaurants in the south, and there was a growing civil rights movement. The year that I was away, several people from the college went down to the south to participate in the sit ins. I knew those people so I was aware of that, and that was a little bit of political awareness, still not feminist.

And then my senior year, I got quite involved in learning about the anti-Vietnam War movement. There was a professor at Yale, which is nearby Connecticut College, named Stoughton Lynd who was a strong advocate against the war, and I went down to Yale a few times to hear him speak. So those two; civil rights movement and the anti-war movement were in my consciousness, and I was becoming more politically aware because of them, but still just intellectually at a distance.

MJC:  So, what did you decide to do when you graduate?

KF:  Well, I came to Chicago. That’s how I got to Chicago, to go to graduate school at Northwestern in political science. But I was really done with school, and I didn’t last there very long. I dropped out and looked for a job, and found a job, at the American Civil Liberties Union on their administrative staff. I was excited about that because of my earlier awareness; the kinds of work that they did.

MJC:  What did you learn from that experience?

KF:  I started working there in 1966. It was the beginning of a very active, tumultuous time in the United States in general. And I think particularly in Chicago, there was a lot of youth movement, trying to rev up activity in preparation for the 1968 Democratic Convention that was held in Chicago. So, there were some marches and demonstrations in connection with that. I met a friend through the ACLU who decided that she and her mother and sister and some friends, ought to go and try to integrate some restaurants that were for men only. Carson Pirie Scott men’s grill. I think Berghoff had a restaurant room for men only, so I tagged along and sort of integrated those institutions.

MJC:  So that was part of your feminist consciousness raising, rising, I guess.

KF:  Right. But I should have mentioned that before that, I had read Betty Friedan’s, The Feminine Mystique, and like many women of my generation, it really kind of exploded an awareness in my mind. That there were some imbalances that weren’t quite right.

MJC:  So, you were there for the Democratic Convention. Did the ACLU represent some of the people who were beaten up?

KF:  Yes, definitely. Many people. And of course, Hugh Hefner, Playboy, he, or at least some of his staff people, were beaten up one evening in the park. We represented them, and they were, of course, very high profile. Everything about that event and that time was very tumultuous.

MJC:  Yes, indeed. When did you get involved in more of the direct women’s work?

KF:  Shortly after I started working for the ACLU, I moved to Hyde Park, which was a very activist community on the South Side of Chicago. And there was an organization called the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference. One of the directors was an activist woman who had been active in the women’s movement at University of Michigan, I think. And she started a woman’s rights committee, and I joined that.

MJC:  Do you remember who she was?

KF:  Sharon Jeffries. She started a consciousness raising group. At the time, they were called rap groups. I joined that with maybe eight other women, and some of those women I’m still very close friends with. We talked about personal feminist kinds of experiences and slights. And then we decided that we ought to be more proactive. We decided to start a childcare center.

MJC:  You’re still working at the ACLU?

KF:  I think so, yes. Shortly thereafter, I left there and went to work for a progressive congressman.

MJC:  Okay. I’m sorry I interrupted you. Talk to us about the childcare center.

KF:  Well, we learned many things doing that. We wanted to start a childcare center that would be non-racist and non-sexist and parent run, or at least with a great component of parent involvement. And we wanted to have it be a center that would train people to be childcare workers. And so, we had a lot of lofty goals for the center, and we learned a lot of things, all of us doing that. We learned how to get a bank loan. We learned how to do fundraising benefit events. We learned about publicity and marketing and board organization. One other woman and I, ended up being on the board for several years to kind of shepherd and guide the organization along. So, I sort of consider myself one of the co-founders of that organization, which was around for a decade or more.

I don’t think I’d ever really started an organization before then, so that was exciting and fulfilling. And from there, in 1973, I joined the staff of the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference and raised grant money, along with some other people, to start an organization, the Childcare Task Force, to provide technical assistance to women who wanted to start daycare centers, or daycare homes.

And the idea was that we would use what we had learned, starting the Sojourner Truth Child Care Center, to help other people do the same. And I became the first executive director of that organization, which worked under the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference.

MJC:  So, then what comes next?

KF:  I’m working to help other women start childcare centers. And during that time, a very good friend of mine became one of the prime movers of the Abortion Counseling Service, which today is known as Jane, because of a well-received documentary about that organization. My upbringing in Des Moines, I was not a rebel, and I was sort of in a middle-class situation. I thought police were your friends, I was not combative, and I didn’t think much about things that were illegal. But that had changed during the time at the ACLU when I saw how people were treated during the Democratic convention. I saw a lot of police brutality, and my eyes got very open in general while I was there, to injustices in the world.

So, when my friend asked me to help and get involved in the Abortion Counseling Service, I wanted to help. I could see that there was an enormous need, but I was pretty reticent about breaking the law and doing something illegal. So, in the beginning, I just did kind of innocuous side tasks. Like, I went to some medical supply houses and got instruments that we needed to do the abortions. I helped find places for the staging areas, and for the places where the abortions were done.

But gradually, I just got more involved, and it was so clearly such an injustice and such a huge need that needed to be fulfilled, that I just got more and more involved. And there was a lot to do. And eventually what I mostly did, was to be in the room where the abortion was being done and provide physical and emotional support. Held the woman’s hand, tried to reassure her that it was a safe procedure and that it was not complicated, and that she was going to be okay.

MJC:  How do you think it changed you?

KF:  All of those activities made me a lot more radical. The Abortion Counseling Service in particular, I think, just changed my perception of how much injustice there was that needed to be fought for, fought against, and dealt with.

MJC:  So, you were still in the abortion counseling service when they got busted?

KF:  Well, I actually had stepped back a little bit at that time, because maybe just a couple of months before the arrest, I went to work for somebody who was running for state representative in the Illinois House of Representatives. And I didn’t want my activity and a possible arrest of me, to taint his political campaign. So, I was active on the fringes. I was certainly aware of everything going on.

MJC:  Do you want to mention his name and did he win?

KF:  Oh, that was Bob Mann, who won his seat, and was a distinguished representative for several terms representing Hyde Park. I was very aware of what was happening in the counseling service, but I wasn’t working day to day in it at that point. Shortly thereafter, the Roe v. Wade decision came down from the Supreme Court and abortion became legal. The Abortion Counseling Service was no longer needed, and my life sort of veered away into focusing on my career, and I got married and started raising a family. After that time, I’ve always remained a feminist. I supported feminist organizations and causes financially and attended occasional demonstrations and rallies, but that was actually the end of my most active feminist period.

MJC:  Did you stay in Chicago to raise your family?

KF:  Suburban Chicago, I did.

MJC:  And what did you do for work?

KF:  In the beginning, I stayed active, connected to childcare. I went to work for an organization called, the Centers for New Horizons, which operated eight or ten daycare centers in public housing projects. I did some administrative work for them. I was still not married then, and I decided that I needed a more professionally oriented career. So, I went back to DePaul to the Computer Careers program, which was a certificate program for people who had graduated college but were wanting to make a shift in their careers. I got trained in computer related fields.

MJC:  Were you a little bit of a pioneer in terms of the number of women in that field?

KF:  I was, but it was a time when computers were just mushrooming, and so they were looking for any bodies. So, in the program that I was in, it was probably two thirds, three quarters men, but women were welcome in the field. I did not experience a lot of discrimination, at least in the beginning. Later on, as I went up the career ladder and got in more professional positions, I experienced a little bit of discrimination. But when I first got into it, they were welcoming anybody.

MJC:  Well, it’s a good time to get into a new profession that’s developing like that. So, you go on with your life. You still stay active in some of the political stuff, or you still active in the women’s movement, any of the organizations now?

KF:  I took a very long hiatus, except in the ways that I described. I got more involved in educational kinds of activities as my kids got into grade school and beyond.

But more recently, when the Dodd Supreme Court decision came down, which was about a year ago, I suddenly realized that I thought our work with making abortion legal was done, but it’s not done. I’m not of an age and an energy level at this point to get involved in the kind of activities that I did in the ’60s and early ’70s, but both my husband and I have become occasional escorts at abortion clinics. In Illinois, abortion is legal, and there are clinics that provide abortions. And when there are people who come to the clinics and protest and jeer and harangue women who are coming to the clinics to get an abortion, what we do is to accompany the women from their cars to the entrance of the abortion facility to sort of act as a buffer between them and the hateful speech that they’re encountering.

MJC:  Well, good for you. So how would you say the women’s movement affected your life? How is your life different because you were involved in the women’s movement?

KF:  I became very aware of discrimination and feminist causes and fought for my own rights. I raised my children to be feminists. My daughter went through the Midwest Academy and is very much of an organizer, and I know that that was my influence. My son is also pretty much of a feminist. And in my jobs, and in my marriage, and in my life, I’ve stood up for myself.

When I was preparing for this interview, I did a little bit of reflecting. I’m not a person who was an important leader in feminism in the United States, but I realized that the movement needed a few leaders, such as yourself and others, but it also needed a lot of foot soldiers. And I think I was among the many foot soldiers who supported causes. I’ve gone to demonstrations for women and for feminism over the years. It took an enormous number of women to make the Abortion Counseling Service work. And it’s important, I think, for people maybe watching this interview, and the other wonderful interviews that you’ve done, to know that there’s strength in numbers and you don’t have to be out there on TV talk shows and giving speeches to thousands of people, to support the cause and work for women’s rights.

MJC:  Very wise advice, very well stated. Is there anything that I haven’t asked or that you’d like to talk about in addition to that?

KF:  There was one kind of fun, amusing incident, that occurred early on that you may or may not have been involved with. In about the late 1960s, probably, on International Women’s Day, there was a woman’s rally in the Civic Center in Chicago. You probably spoke. There were people speaking about various women’s issues. One of the speakers made a sort of disparaging remark against the state’s attorney at the time, who was a controversial figure, and about 1 minute after that, the microphones were cut off for the rally, and it was amazing to see what happened. The women, and there were several hundred I would say at that rally, were totally incensed. And we stood up and marched across the street to hit City Hall, and up to the fifth floor, and demanded a meeting with Mayor Daley, the senior, at the time. And I think, seemed at the time, that we gave him a new awareness of the strength of the woman’s movement.

MJC:  That was a glorious day. There are so many women who joined the movement that day who were on the fringes, and then came to that rally and got inspired to do so. Kathy Rand, the co-chair of this project, that was her first action, was August 26, 1970.

KF:  Really? People were inspired and incensed.

MJC:  Right, exactly. So, just a reminder of mass action and all the things we have practiced over the years. Right, Katie?

KF:  Exactly.

MJC:  Well, I thank you very much.

KF:  Well, I thank you. I think this is a wonderful project to preserve our important work for posterity.