THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT
Kim Allison Gandy
“Moving forward, I think that one of the most important things for us to do is find ways for women to work together across racial lines.”
Interviewed by Mary Jean Collins, VFA Historian, June 2024
KG: I am Kim Allison Gandy. I was born in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1954.
MJC: You’re one of the younger ones. So, tell me about your life, your early days, your family life; cultural and religious, family and siblings or whatever, about those early days, please.
KG: Yes. Well, Shreveport, Louisiana was a fairly conservative area of the deep south, but I had a really a wonderful childhood. Fairly idyllic, I guess, by most standards. A very supportive family, lots of freedom, solidly middle class. Very early on, I started organizing things. A friend and I organized the SBCYGNBC in middle school. That stands for Shreveport Bossier Coalition of Youth Groups for Natural Beauty and Conservation. Believe it or not, I can still remember the acronym all these years later.
MJC: Fabulous. Wonderful. And how about, any siblings?
KG: One sister who died of cancer at a fairly young age.
MJC: Oh, that’s too bad.
KG: Yes, It’s very sad.
MJC: So, where did you go to school, and how did you get there, and what happened there?
KG: I went to high school in Bossier City where I grew up. Started college early – I went to Louisiana Tech on the summer semester between my junior and senior years of high school at age 16 and never left. And so, they let me stay and I graduated three years later from Louisiana Tech. Moved to New Orleans and got involved in NOW the next month.
MJC: Is that right? So, you came along at a perfect time, didn’t you?
KG: Yes, August of 1973. I guess it was July of 1973, I moved to New Orleans to take a job at the phone company as a statistician. I was a math major, and they were hiring women right and left, as probably later I found, as a result of the consent decree in the Bell cases. And even though I had very high-test scores, and was a math major and a physics minor, I still was put in a lower-level position than the men who were hired with me, which I didn’t learn until later on. But no surprise there.
MJC: That’s interesting. Even after the consent decree.
KG: Even after the consent decree. I was hired into management, but in an assistant position. I was called staff assistant, and I discovered that all of the women were hired as assistant. Even in the engineering department, they were engineering assistant or commercial assistant, and all the men were hired as managers. They were commercial manager or engineering manager, even though they were all 1H’s. 1H meant college degree. College technical hire is a 1H, but even the women technical hires were assistants, and the men were managers.
MJC: So, you were working at the phone company. How did you get involved in, or how did you hear about NOW?
KG: I stumbled into NOW, but in part related to the phone company because I was married at the time. We married young in the deep south, and I was filling out the company paperwork. Actually, he and I both got jobs at the phone company, he had a master’s in math. And in the paperwork, there was like an old-fashioned 401k. It was called an employee stock option plan. You put 3% of your paycheck in, and they would match 3%, and all of it would go into AT&T stock, saved for your retirement. It was really very much like a 401k. So, I was signing up for this, I’m like, “Oh, free money.” I got to the bottom of the form and it says, “If a married woman, husband must sign here.”
MJC: Oh, my God.
KG: I said, “What? What is this?” I went home and showed it to my husband at the time and said, “Does yours say this?” He says, “Yes, mine says the same thing.” He said, “Well, here, you sign mine and I’ll sign yours.” I said, “I don’t think that’s what it means. I think it means only you have to sign mine.” And so, I went and asked my boss about it, and literally, this is my first couple of days on the job and AJ Benintendi says, “Oh, that’s the lord and master law.”
MJC: Oh, my God.
KG: The what? He said, “It just means that your husband owns your paycheck, so we have to have his permission to take out the 3%.” Now, I’m only 19, and I have lived a relatively sheltered life in small town Louisiana, but I’m like, “Wait, what? I don’t understand.” Turns out that it wasn’t called the lord and master law. It was called the head and master law, but it did, in fact, give the husband control over all of the marital property, including the wife’s paycheck. And so, they really did need his permission to take anything out of my paycheck. My permission was not sufficient.
And so, I’m quite upset about this and happened to see, total coincidence, it could have been much longer before I found it, but there was a show on tv like talking heads. This is the old days where you didn’t have a lot of things to watch, and it was a group of women who were talking about the head and master law and how terrible it was, and describing some really horrible things that were happening, way worse than needing your husband’s signature on something. And I was like, “Wow, that’s that thing.” It turns out it’s this new organization called NOW, which somehow, I had gotten to 1973 without ever hearing of NOW. And showed up at Gail Gagliano’s basement to find out what it was all about, and never looked back. Spent the next 46 years being involved in the woman’s movement.
MJC: Oh, isn’t that fabulous?
KG: Well, we did finally get rid of head and master, but it took us until 1980. And the Equal Rights Amendment campaign had a lot to do with that. It really pushed them to get rid of it.
MJC: Yes. Like many other laws that they pushed in order to not pass the ERA, right?
KG: Exactly. Oh, we’ll fix it. We’ll fix it. Just don’t make us do that ERA thing. We’ll fix this bad stuff.
MJC: Right. That was the good part of the bad part, that it didn’t pass.
KG: Good part of the bad part. Yes, right.
MJC: Good for you. So, the chapter there was quite active, as I recall.
KG: Very active. So many things going on.
MJC: Right. So, NOW chapters, you tend to ascend toward the leadership quite rapidly. How did that work for you?
KG: Yes, well, it happened pretty fast. Not as much at the chapter level, although it was one of the things that I always kept in mind as I moved into other leadership levels, that nobody ever told me, You can’t do that. Nobody ever said, Oh, you’re just 19. What do you know? Or, You’re only a freshman in law school. What do you know? Why do you think you can write legislation? Nobody ever said that. They were just like, Yes, yes, go do it, go do it. And that level of support from the other chapter folks was really just incredibly inspiring. At the time, I thought that I was just the baby in the group and when I looked back years later, I realized that the rest of them weren’t much older than me. I was 19, but 20 years later, I looked at all the folks I’d started at NOW with, and they couldn’t have been more than 23 or 24 based on how old they are now. So, it was really a young women’s movement.
Roe v. Wade had been decided that January, 1973. The Delta Women’s Clinic was opened in New Orleans and immediately was under siege, so we were doing clinic defense right off the bat. I mean, 1973, I joined the NOW chapter and went to my first meeting in August. I think I finally paid my dues in September or October, and we were out there protecting the clinic literally from assault in Louisiana, and it got much worse later on with Operation Rescue and that sort of thing. But, boy, in Louisiana, it started quite early. There were so many issues. Everything was happening all at once, and there were so many different issues.
It wasn’t too long before I was undergoing a separation and later a divorce, which really laid open how unfair the marriage and divorce laws were in Louisiana. Not just while you were married, they were pretty bad after that. So, I started a task force on marriage and divorce, but I think we called it women in transition. And they were like, Yes, start a task force, sure. You’re in charge. This is the great thing about NOW.
There was just a spate of rapes in the French Quarter, and we were like, Okay, how are women going to get to work? So, the chapter rented a Volkswagen van and drove it around. Annabelle Walker drove that van all over French Quarter. We had a little set route, and we picked women up at work and dropped them off at home, and did that for weeks until they solved this series of rapes. But then that moved into starting the first rape crisis line. We passed a marriage license tax to support domestic violence shelters. We actually started the first little domestic violence program, but we didn’t want to run it. We had too many other things to do to be a service organization. So, we went to the legislature and got funding so that the YWCA could take it over, and then they proceeded to run the program, and we went on to the next thing.
And, of course, the ERA was happening at this time. Honestly, I thought that I had come in on the tail end of the women’s movement. The Equal Rights Amendment passed Congress and it’s just swept through the states. Title VII passed, 1972, the year before I joined, Title VII for equal employment opportunity. Title IX for equal educational opportunity, also 1972. I’m like, “Wow, it’s all done.” We got Roe v. Wade, we got employment, we got education, they let me into law school after that; my law school had five or six women I think, before Title IX. I thought I was on the tail end of this. Like, it would seem like it was all done. It was about to be over with. But not in Louisiana.
MJC: Not anywhere. The big back backlash was coming, right?
KG: It’s so funny to look back on it. I thought, Oh, wow, this is almost done. We’ve accomplished all these big things, and I missed it all. Oh, was I wrong about that. But, you know, we were working on the ERA. I thought, You know, some of these other states can pass ERA, we ought to be able to do that. We worked really hard for the ERA, and we couldn’t get a vote on it. It was bottled up every single year in the civil law and procedures committee, in the legislature. The committee chair, a guy named John Henkel would not let it come to a vote. We really believed that it would pass. It wouldn’t pass in today’s Louisiana, but at that point in 1974, we really thought that we could get it through, but we couldn’t get it up for a vote. So, I moved in his district and ran against him in 1979.
MJC: You did? Oh, how fun. I love that.
KG: I remember Molly Yard was the NOW political director, and she came down to Louisiana along with Alice Cohan to make sure that I had all my ducks in a row for the campaign, and I knocked doors and put up yard signs. A couple years later, when I was practicing law, the former us attorney, Gerald Gallinghouse, I had a case against him, and he said, “Let’s have lunch and talk about the case.” And he told me at lunch, he said, “You know, I want to talk about the case, but really, I just wanted to meet the woman who made John Hainkel cry in his beer.”
MJC: I love it. I love it.
KG: I have never, ever forgotten that. Apparently, he made a bunch of bets with a lot of people that I wouldn’t get five or 10% of the vote, and I got over 40% of the vote, which for – I was 25. It was pretty wild.
MJC: So, when did you go to law school?
KG: I started law school in 1975, two years after I joined NOW. We were joking that we were trying to get the handful of women lawyers in New Orleans to take all these cases we were trying to file. Discrimination of course was rampant, and, I mean, the handful of women lawyers were starting to cross the street when they saw us coming. They were like, No. No more free cases for you. And so, a group of us decided to all go to law school, and I think all of us ended up finishing law school and practicing law. I went to law school at night, because I was still a statistician at the phone company during the day. I was going to law school at night starting in ‘75, I graduated in ‘78, ran for the legislature in ‘79.
I mentioned the fact that the NOW chapter leaders didn’t tell me that just because I was a freshman in law school that I couldn’t write legislation. So, I wrote the Louisiana Domestic Abuse Assistance Act, was the title of it; because we learned from our work with domestic violence victims how many problems there were with the law. So, when I finally ran for the legislature in ‘79, Mary Landrieu, who later became a U.S. senator – she was 23 and I was 25 – and we ran for the legislature in adjacent districts.
We agreed that whoever got elected would introduce the other one’s bills. She got elected. I didn’t. But she introduced the Domestic Abuse Assistance Act and worked to pass it for several years. It finally passed in 1983, and much of it is in the law today. And I don’t know, maybe it would have happened, but I don’t know if it would have, if it hadn’t been for the leadership of that NOW chapter telling a law student, Yes, sure. You can write legislation.
We did all kinds of things. There were so many issues. The LGBT movement felt like it was really in its infancy at the time. There was just so much going on. I remember testifying in the city council for some local legislation. At the federal level, there was a lesbian and gay civil rights act that was introduced that ended up going by the wayside in favor of legislation that only covered public accommodations and employment.
But [on] the original bill, Roberts Batson, who was the head of the Louisiana Gay Political Action Caucus, and I, went to see Lindy Boggs and got her to be a co-sponsor of the Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights Act. I feel like that is like a lifetime accomplishment, because having this southern lady if you will, being a co-sponsor, was just huge, and it ended up getting other people on the bill. But then, the powers that be in Washington decided to abandon that broad legislation and go for something narrower, which also didn’t pass, as it turns out. But at the time, I think they thought it would be easier to pass that.
There were just so many issues. Louisiana is a very political state. Everything kind of revolves around politics. I was a co-founder of the Association of Democratic Women, which we set up specifically requiring that at least 50% of the board and leadership needed to be, we didn’t say women of color at the time, we said African American women. But it might have been the first really, really racially integrated political organization, because at that time, there were the black groups and the white groups, and we wanted the women in politics to be working together and supporting each other.
It continued to be a really successful group for a long time. And that also, for me, was really important and formative to see, when you worked with people across movements, how much of a difference you could make working together. You each work on each other’s issues, and that doubles the number of people advocating for any one issue.
MJC: You’re educating across groups, right?
KG: Yes.
MJC: So, that all came out of the NOW chapter, basically.
KG: Originally, the LAGPAC work, Louisiana Gay Political Action Caucus – I ended up being the state secretary of LAGPAC, but that sort of indirectly came out of the NOW chapter also. I would never have met LAGPAC but for the NOW chapter and for working in the city council, and wouldn’t have been involved in politics except for the NOW chapter, and never would have met Mary Landru or started the Association of Democratic Women, which Mary was also involved in. There were just so many issues. Everything was happening all at once, and everybody just did everything.
MJC: The energy. The energy was amazing, wasn’t it?
KG: It was a lot of energy. Finding time to sleep was challenging, and that actually made practicing law perfect because I practiced just enough law to feed my NOW habit. I was probably doing about 60 hours a week of NOW and about 20 hours a week of my law practice. So, I couldn’t be with a firm. I had to go on my own. I gave myself permission to not take many cases. I took just enough cases to pay the bills.
MJC: So, you went to law school and then instead of going with a firm, as you said, went into private practice so you could control your own time.
KG: Yes. I did a year at the DA’s office just to get some trial experience under my belt and then hung up my shingle.
MJC: Since there weren’t that many women students in the law school, what was your experience? How you were the women were treated?
KG: Oh, they were terrible to the women. There were a few women professors. I remember Kathy Laurio who I think had started teaching in ‘75. But the professors either called on the women all of the time to pick on them, or they never called on them and you could put your hand up all night and nobody would call on you. There also wasn’t – and this is in the new law school, because I started in the new Loyola law school. It was also a catholic law school, so that was one issue – but they only had one women’s bathroom in the entire law school. And so, as soon as Title IX started opening up the law school to women, and they had to accept people based on grades and their LSAT scores, then there was a line.
MJC: Even while you were in law school, you could see a difference in the numbers coming in. In the freshman class?
KG: Oh, absolutely. I started in ‘75. The class that graduated in 74, the year before I started, there were only nine women in the class.
MJC: And how many women in your class?
KG: We were about 20%. And the next year we were a third, and then 40%. I mean, it was quite dramatic. It was huge, and it made a big difference. I remember at the time, how there were so few women in leadership positions in law firms. There were very, very few women lawyers, few women partners, and I remember people saying, Well, there aren’t that many women partners because there aren’t that many women coming out of law school. Well, once we were 50% of the law schools – for 30 years, we’d been more than 50% of law schools and there were still fewer than 30% women partners, after 30 years of being half the law school graduates. I mean, we knew at the time it was an excuse, but we couldn’t prove it.
MJC: Right, but data has a way of catching up with you over 30 years.
KG: It does indeed.
MJC: So, what kind of law were you practicing in private practice? Did you do discrimination cases?
KG: I did. I did a lot of family law cases. The domestic violence shelter sent people to me because I would take people who couldn’t pay. I did all kinds of discrimination cases. I did malpractice cases. I did a psychiatric malpractice case where a woman had been really messed with by her psychiatrist, who started a relationship with her and screwed her up pretty badly. But, yes, I did.
I loved trial practice, and so I really sort of looked for cases that would help women, but would also let me get into court. So, I did lesbian mother custody cases, which were kind of rare back then. Really, any kind of custody case, because you would always get in court with that. Although, I started to notice that some of the people coming in were referrals from big law firms. I’m like, Oh, come on. These big law firms could take some pro bono cases. Big law firms were sending their pro bono cases to little old me, but I took them anyway.
MJC: Right. They didn’t want to deal with that. Change takes a while, doesn’t it?
KG: It does. And I had very few needs.
MJC: And you were very dedicated and very committed. Good for you. And it was a very important time for the women’s rights movement, and you were an essential part of it in Louisiana. So, do you stay in the chapter? Do you go on to the state?
KG: I became state treasurer in 1975, so I hadn’t been active very long before they recruited me to be state treasurer. Then I became acting state president in ‘77, when the current president went out of state. And then was elected to a full term, or several, I guess, in 1978, and then went on to the national board not too long after that, ‘81 or ‘82, and was regional director for the Mid south region, which was a really tough region. Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Tough region for feminists, but it was a very cohesive region, and served for several years as a regional director. And then I guess I was still regional director when I was elected to national office in ‘87.
MJC: So, talk about, a little bit for history, how the southern states were a challenge that might not have been the case elsewhere. Talk about that a little bit.
KG: Yes, I mean, I guess you got a little bit of an idea from Louisiana, some of that background. I remember one legislator, when upon being told that something he had proposed was unconstitutional that was about to pass, and he said, “We can pass unconstitutional laws faster than they can get them overturned.” Which was probably true.
MJC: That’s probably true. Yes.
KG: We had marital rape legislation, which the NOW chapter in state organization. promoted prohibiting marital rape, and it was like a circus. They treated it as just a giant joke. Legislators talking about how women can prevent rape with a single Bayer aspirin. You just have to hold it between your knees. The whole atmosphere was so insulting to women, and as I talked with other colleagues from the other mid-south states, they were having the same kind of experience. In Alabama, and Arkansas, and Mississippi. It was a little better in Tennessee, but not a lot.
In fact, it was Tennessee where I got the idea for the Domestic Abuse Assistance Act that I wrote for Louisiana, because they had passed what they called, the Spouse Out of the House bill for victims of domestic violence. Instead of escaping home with their kids and going to a shelter, they could have the abuser removed from the home pending a hearing, and have the use and occupancy of the family home. That’s what gave me the idea to do that for Louisiana. And then I said, “Oh, well, as long as we’re doing that, what else can we put in there?” And so, I started reaching out to people all over the country saying, “What are you doing that’s cool for domestic violence victims? What are you doing that’s making a difference?”
MJC: So, was being part of a national organization helpful to the work in Louisiana?
KG: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It helped a little more that I could identify other southern states that had done things, because I started going through all the legislation in Arkansas and Alabama and Mississippi because it was a lot easier saying, Oh, well, Alabama passed this, Mississippi passed this. Surely Louisiana can do it if Mississippi did it. Being a southern state was really tough then, but honestly, I think it’s worse now.
MJC: I mean, it’s not easy.
KG: I think that the Domestic Abuse Assistance Act, if it was introduced today in Louisiana, probably wouldn’t pass. That Child Support Enforcement Act that I wrote and that Mary Landrieu also introduced and got passed, I’m not sure that would pass today. I mean, it’s worse now, as hard as that is to imagine. The state has become even more, I don’t want to call it conservative, it’s backward.
MJC: Well, the backlash has been enormous from all the things that you’re talking about that we achieved, and many of them have stuck, you know, we’ve been able to hold on to them, but the backlash is really substantial, isn’t it?
KG: Yes. Louisiana has off year elections. They had statewide elections in 1991, and there were only three women in the entire legislature. 140-some-odd legislators and there were three women. All three in the House, none in the Senate. And so, we, at the national level – I was a national officer by that time – we decided to do a project to try to increase the number of women in the legislature.
Harriet Trudel from Nevada drove her station wagon over to New Orleans, and she and I ran a nine month project that increased from, I guess it tripled, from three women to ten women in the legislature. But we also got a whole bunch of women who didn’t win, interested, and running, and winning the next time. And the number of women continued to grow pretty dramatically after that.
MJC: That’s how it’s done.
KG: So, I didn’t abandon the state just because I moved away.
MJC: Let’s go back to you. And you’ve been the regional director, and now what happens?
KG: Molly Yard called me up and asked me if I would consider running on her ticket for national office, 1987. And I was getting ready to run against John Henkel again for the legislature.
MJC: He was still in?
KG: Yes, he was still in. Well, he became the speaker of the house.
MJC: Okay.
KG: And our elections were that year, 1987. I had run in ‘79 and then ‘83, ’87, every four years. So, I was planning to run that fall for the legislature. And Molly said, “Well, if you don’t get elected at the convention, you can still run for the legislature.”
MJC: That’s funny.
KG: I was like, “I’m not sure I can do that.” But, I thought about it and talked to my parents, and I remember my dad saying, “Oh, I know what you’re going to do.” “Well, you do not know what I’m going to do. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do.” “Oh, yeah, you’re going to go to Washington.” I was like, “I don’t know that that’s the case.” He says, “You can do more for a lot more people up there. So, I think that’s what you’re going to do.” And, that is what I ended up doing. He was right.
MJC: Dad was a lobbyist, too. I can hear in those words, he was a lobbyist for you.
KG: He was. It’s funny, though. I’m not sure that he really wanted me to leave. I think that he would have preferred that I not leave the state. I know my mom would have preferred that I not leave. He and I were so much alike in so many ways. And he was like, “I know what you’re going to do. I can tell you or not, but I know.” And he was right.
MJC: So, you were elected what?
KG: I was elected to a position that was then called national secretary, and then it was later changed to be membership vice president. I was national secretary until 1991, and I became executive vice president on December 31, 1991.
MJC: Okay, let’s go back to the secretary and talk about your experience there and what that was like and what kind of work you did, and what it was like to come to Washington.
KG: I just took off and moved to DC and stayed at Lois Reckitt’s house for a few weeks, and then stayed at Molly Yard’s house for a few weeks, while other people packed up my house in New Orleans and sent everything up here. I didn’t even pack myself. It was quite something. They said, “You need to get here right away.”
MJC: They wanted you.
KG: Well, part of the reason that I was recruited was because I had a computer background, strangely enough. I’m not sure why. I mean, my level of computer background was that I could do basic programming. I could run a database. I could do a spreadsheet. I guess in 1987, it wasn’t so common, and when I came up to the national office with my IBM PC, I was amazed to discover that nearly all but one of the computers at the office were used as dumb terminals for entering membership data. They weren’t used for anything else, any of the many things that you can use computers for. That’s why they wanted me to come up and take over the membership database operation. So that’s what I did. But when I arrived, it was in the middle of the Bork campaign.
MJC: Oh, tell us about that.
KG: It was wild. I ended up being involved in it almost immediately because they were trying to get the democratic southern senators to oppose Bork. And without that, they were not going to succeed in defeating the nomination of somebody who was at least as bad as some of the folks who were on there now, like Sam Alito and others.
MJC: It was a heavy lift to defeat.
KG: Oh, yes. Because you just didn’t do that much. It was rare to defeat a Supreme Court nominee. I think it had only happened once at that point but I had a good relationship with both of the senators from Louisiana just because I had been so politically involved. And so, I reached out to Jay Bennett Johnston, the senior senator from Louisiana, and convinced him to oppose Bork. I hadn’t thought about that in forever. I think I just repressed that whole thing. But, yes, he did. And it made a difference for other southern senators who then came on board and opposed Bork.
MJC: Right. It was a huge campaign, I remember.
KG: Yes, it was a huge campaign.
MJC: A surprising victory at that time, right?
KG: Yes, it was very surprising. I’m not sure we thought we could pull it off. That was my first time working with the leadership conference on Civil Rights and some of the other national organizations that I would go on to do a lot of work with over the years.
MJC: That was a little baptism by fire when you got there.
KG: Yes, it was. But, you know, I think I was fairly naive when I arrived, despite having been active for 14 years in Louisiana and being, I think, a very political animal. Think James Carville. I mean, everything was political because that’s how Louisiana was. I still was not prepared for DC. It was just different. It was a whole other animal.
MJC: Right. So, Bork was a big victory, and you’re working on getting the database worked out, what else did you work on as membership chair?
KG: I think, you know, everybody worked on everything. There were a lot of issues of all kinds that we were involved in. Abortion, obviously, was a major issue. The Webster case came not long after that. You will, I know remember the 1989 march, where our internal commentary was, The Supreme Court reads the newspapers. The Supreme Court looks out their window. They need to know that people don’t want this. They need to know that there will be repercussions if they limit abortion rights to such an extreme degree. And it was successful. We had, I forget the number, I think it was 600,000 for the ‘89 March, which was really just unheard of.
I remember internally, I was responsible for NOWs direct mail, and our fundraising program by that time, and Molly Yard and I met with Roger Craver, who was the direct mail guru, who’s doing NOWs direct mail, and told him that we wanted, I forget how many million, but it was a huge number. It was like 6 million pieces of direct mail. And he’s like, “Well, we need to test it first.”
And Molly said, “There’s no time to test it. We just have to do it.” And he said, “Well, you know, if it bombs, he’s still got to pay for all that printing and postage.” And she’s like, “Well, if people come to Washington, it’ll be worth it, even if they don’t send money as long as they come.” And so, it was a direct mail piece. It was to raise money for the march, but it was also to get people to come to the march. And it was extraordinarily successful. It was, I think, beyond Rogers imagining, and ours, too, because we were holding our breath the whole time.
MJC: Right. Yes, well, it was a little different strategy for direct mail to ask it to turn out people. That isn’t really what direct mail is supposed to do, so, good for you for the combination.
KG: I think that was Molly’s idea to put that, because I was just trying to raise money to pay for the damn thing. Molly was like, “Well, we’re sending it out. May as well ask them to come.” It’s like, “Oh, well, yes, good point.”
MJC: Good point, yes. So, that was good. That was a very large activity during that period of your service as secretary. Then comes another election, and you’re elected to what?
KG: I was re-elected national secretary, but then an agreement was made to have a transition in the middle of the term that Molly Yard, who later had a stroke, would leave office in the halfway point of her term.
MJC: She was considerably older than you.
KG: I think she was 76 when elected.
MJC: Oh, that doesn’t seem old now, but at the time…
KG: Yes. So, by that time, I guess she was 80ish, and she was going strong, I have to say. I mean, Molly was a very, very active, older person. Patricia Ireland was the executive vice president at the time. And so, Patricia was to transition to president on December 31 of 1991, and I was moving to exec VP, and Jenny Montez was coming in as national secretary. It was sort of a negotiated thing. It was voted on, but it was negotiated in advance of that. So that’s how I became exec VP, and how I managed to be exec VP for ten years, despite the term limit of two four-year terms. Those first two years didn’t count. So, then I served two more full terms as exec VP.
MJC: How did that job differ from the secretary’s job? What were your major responsibilities?
KG: I continued to do most of the direct mail and the fundraising. I did keep that. And then Jenny took on a lot of the political and action work. People did things based on their skills and their interests. We had very, very skilled, highly effective people in office, very skilled national staff. And so, people did what they were good at, but everybody did work very much together on it. There were just so many issues, so many things all happening all at once.
MJC: Who’s president now? Do you remember?
KG: Reagan was president when I was elected in ‘87, and he’s the one who appointed Bork. ‘88 was when Dukakis ran, and George H.W Bush was elected in ‘88. Which, interestingly, he had been pro-choice as a senator. Barbara Bush was very, very much pro-choice, and he changed his position when Ronald Reagan asked him to be his running mate.
MJC: Reagan’s really the beginning of the right wing taking over the republican party, which we’re seeing the awful effects of to this day, right?
KG: Yes.
MJC: It’s just gotten worse over time.
KG: Definitely, without a doubt. There’d been a lot of bad decisions. Reagan had done a lot of court stacking during his eight years as president, and there were some really bad decisions that came down from the courts. We had the Civil Rights Act of 1988 which restored Ttitle IX, because they had basically decimated Title IX in a court decision, so we were able to pass that legislation. I think it didn’t finally pass till ‘89, but it still had that name on it. And then I think one of the things that made a huge impact all over the country, and that I’m, I think, personally proud of, is the Civil Rights Act of 1991, where we were instrumental.
And I made the argument and Molly backed me up, that if we were going to embark on this huge civil rights bill around employment, that it had to include women. Because at that point, women had no right to receive damages for employment discrimination or sexual harassment on the job or anything like that. All they could get is actual damages, like medical bills, for example. You couldn’t get any kind of punitive damages. It was not allowed for women. You could get it for religious discrimination, race discrimination, under other provisions, but not for sex discrimination.
The leadership conference on civil rights, which was the lead organization, agreed with us that it was important to do that. And actually, I think what the director said was, “If that’s what it’s going to take to get the women on board, then that’s what it’s going to take.” We hadn’t threatened to not support it, we just said, “It’s really important. And if you want women to get really excited about this, you should do it.” And it did pass, and it was quite dramatic that companies had to start taking sex discrimination in employment seriously, because before that, you couldn’t really justify a whole lawsuit for just back pay or just medical bills.
MJC: That’s a good point.
KG: Yes, I mean, a lawyer wouldn’t take it because unless you’ve been out of work for years, there’s not enough money there for the lawyers 1/3rd to be worth going up against a big company. So, employment discrimination cases, unless it was a class action, were really impossible. But the Civil Rights act of 1991 made it possible for individual women who were discriminated against to be able to sue and receive damages. There was a cap on the damages, which continued to be problematic for many decades after that, but it was something.
MJC: It was a major achievement then.
KG: Yes, it was very major. And that was something that would not have happened but for our being in the room.
MJC: It sounds like being a lawyer and a NOW officer was really helpful to your work in trying to change the laws here. Would you say that’s true?
KG: Yes, absolutely. The fact that I was a lawyer really did make a difference. And Ralph Neas, to his credit, he was, I guess, executive director at the time of the leadership conference, immediately put me on the drafting committee for that bill.
MJC: He spotted talent. We know that.
KG: He was great. He was always very supportive. We did a lot of legislative work in those years because we had some possibilities. We had the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. We had the Family and Medical Leave Act. George H.W. Bush vetoed one of them and then we came back again, and Bill Clinton was elected by that time, and he signed it. I think one of our regrets was that we couldn’t convince our colleagues to make the Family Medical Leave Act stronger. It passed right before Bill Clinton’s election and he was coming into office, being sworn in in January and I got a call from someone close to him who said, “You know, this Family Medical Leave Act is a piece of shit.”
It was kind of watered down. We watered it down so that George H.W. Bush would sign it. I say, “we” watered it down; we were among the ones who did not want to water it down but it was watered down so that he would sign it. And the people who advocated that, felt that it was in fact, sufficiently watered down that he would sign it. And he didn’t. He still didn’t sign it.
I’m trying to think who it was that called me, but she said, “You know, he’s going to sign what you put in front of him and if you give him this Family and Medical Leave Act, he’ll sign it. If you give him a strong one that includes, oh, paid leave, for example, he’ll sign that. So, you all have to decide what you’re going to put in front of him.” And we lost that fight with our colleagues, they were just like, “We have fought for this for years and years and years. We are on the precipice of having it signed by the president. We’re not going back. We’re not going to unwater it.”
MJC: Okay, so that was President Clinton signing it?
KG: He signed it. Yes. Along with the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances act, those were two of the things that happened right as he came in. It’s like when Obama first came in, signing the Lilly Ledbetter act.
MJC: That’s right. So, are you president yet?
KG: No. That was ’90. I don’t become president until 2001. Clinton came in in January of 93. So, January of ‘93 is when he signed it.
MJC: Okay. So, you’ve got a long way to go yet.
KG: Yes, I have. All those years are just a blur. We had the big march in 1992, 750,000, I think.
MJC: They just kept getting bigger.
KG: We had 1.15 million in 2004. That was when I was president. We continued to have the marches and introduced legislation; we were doing a lot of work around equal marriage during that time. I was on the advisory committee to the Freedom to Marry organization that Evan Wolfson started. We came out very, very early in support of equal marriage. Before the Human Rights Campaign endorsed marriage equality, we did. And publicly. But, you know, it was like drinking from a fire hose. There were so many issues and so many fronts and, just fighting on every level.
And the challenging thing I think, you know, it was a luxury that some people had. If you were with NARAL, you could just focus on abortion rights all the time, or Planned Parenthood, or if you were with Freedom to Marry, you could focus on marriage all the time. Or the National Network to end Domestic Violence; which I later led after I left NOW, could just focus on legislation and activism around domestic violence. We were trying to do all of it, and trying to be leaders on all of it.
MJC: Talk about how that was an asset and maybe a problem.
KG: It was, Yes. I mean, it was a challenge, and somehow, we managed it. I remember one meeting that Rosemary Dempsey was in. I don’t think it was about the Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights Act, I think it was later. But one of the other groups there, sort of questioned our leadership on the issue. Sort of a, Why are you here? And Rosemary pulled herself up to her full height and said, “We’ve got more lesbians than all of you put together.” And you know what? They didn’t say a thing. They were like, Okay, all right.
But you know, I do think we had an impact in all of those areas, frankly. We moved most of them to a more progressive position. Whatever the issue was, NOW was the one moving the issue. Like the Violence Against Women Act. Huge, huge accomplishment, but which took a lot of fighting to get to the place where it needed to be. Joe Biden, I think, still thinks of that as one of his signature accomplishments, and it legitimately was.
I remember vividly the internal fights with the other organizations over how much money to put in the bill. And, I mean, I was just like, “Sky’s the limit. Trillions. Can we just ask for the world?” Let’s see what we can get, was always my theory. But there was this back and forth and back and forth. Well, we can’t ask for that. That will look ridiculous if we ask for that much. But these other women’s organizations were constantly trying to narrow, narrow, narrow.
I remember the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund did a, I don’t want to call it a study, but they did an analysis looking at what was needed, and they said, “Okay, in order to really begin to address domestic violence in the United States, we need to be able to do this and this and this and this and this. This is the minimum that we need. More is good, but really, this is the minimum that we need.” And so, Biden is like, “Yes, sure, let’s do it.” And there was such pushback from the other organizations. I mean, really, very hard pushback.
And to his credit, and I have to say, Ellie Smeal was at the Feminist Majority at the time, but she was extremely influential. She and Biden were extremely close. Still are. And years later, because I went to many annual celebrations of the Violence Against Women Act, and whether she was there or not, Joe Biden would always say, “We have this because of Ellie Smeal.” Because Ellie is the one who got all the women’s groups to stop fighting about it. I don’t even know how she did it, but somehow, she did.
I think it was $1.2 billion dollars in the legislation. And there was some serious freaking out, like, Oh, my goodness, we’ll look ridiculous asking for a billion dollars for something related to women. We can’t possibly do that. I think there was an across the board cut of 5% or 10% to a whole bunch of pending things budgetarily. But for that, it passed. It ended up being, I don’t know, 1.12 billion something.
It was transformative to the landscape of women’s lives. And suddenly there were state coalitions that had funding to work on getting the state laws. There was funding for entry level emergency shelters, for second stage transitional shelters, of which I was on the founding board of the first one in Louisiana. This is before I went to Washington. But we just did that on our own. We didn’t have any money. We didn’t have any funding for it. But now there was going to be funding for transitional shelters.
I mean, really, the Violence Against Women Act had a dramatic, dramatic impact, but that was years and years of fighting, not just with the other women’s groups, but fighting the legislation, and it ended up going in, not in a good way. It ended up being attached to the crime bill, which was not a great piece of legislation, and we didn’t support it. But the crime bill was going to pass anyway, and the question was, Are we going to ride that train, or are we just going to let the crime bill pass anyway? Because it was going to pass.
There was no way we were stopping the crime bill. So, we were like, Why sacrifice something good, for something that’s going to pass anyway? So, we were accused of not being sufficiently pure, but I’m like, I never advertised myself as sufficiently pure. I want to get something done that’s going to make a difference in people’s lives, and that made a difference, and it has continued to.
After I retired from NOW – I was term limited as president of NOW – I spent seven years leading the National Network to End Domestic Violence, which was a national coalition of the 56 state and territorial coalitions against domestic violence and there are over 2000 local programs. And so, I got to see from a different perspective how much impact that Violence Against Women Act had made over all those intervening years. And it was dramatic. So, like, how would we choose what to give up? NOW worked on all of these issues. Are we going to give up domestic violence? Are we going to give up abortion? What are we going to do?
MJC: Well, I think NOW cast itself at its founding, to be representative of women across the board, and has kept up that vision and that commitment for all these years.
KG: As challenging as it was to try to be all things to all people. And, you know, granted, you’re not ever going to be as good at any of them probably, but we made a mark on all of them and had an impact on all of them, and moving things in a more positive direction.
MJC: And taught women who might have come in on one issue to understand and learn about the other issues as well, and support other women. I think that was an invaluable, and still is, an invaluable contribution. Obviously, the women’s movement has had an enormous impact on your life and you’ve made an enormous contribution to women’s lives. Thank you for that. Are there any closing thoughts that you would like to share with us moving forward?
KG: Moving forward, I think that one of the most important things for us to do is find ways for women to work together across racial lines. I think that has been one of the biggest challenges, and it was less true in the early days of NOW where there was a lot more racial diversity. I think it’s probably the thing that I most focused my personal time on during the years that I was president, making sure that the African American women, Latinas who were heads of other organizations, were at the table and were included, and that they knew that we were making sure that they were included. And sadly, they were not being included by other people. But it meant that not only were we supporting issues they cared about because they were important issues, but also, they supported issues that they might not have otherwise. LGBT issues were probably not big for the National Council of Negro Women, but guess what? You’d get somebody to show up because they were showing up for you.