THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Lyn Nevins

“There’s not a workshop that I do that doesn’t have a little bit of gender equity in it, a little bit of career choice in it. I just find a way.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, January 2024

LN:  My name is Lyn Nevins, and I was born in 1948 in Chelsea, Massachusetts.

JW:  Great. Where are you now?

LN:  I am in Darien, Connecticut.

JW:  Okay, super. Well, we always start the same way with a little brief description of your childhood. Whatever you feel comfortable telling us.

LN:  Sure. Well, I grew up in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Lived there straight through college. I mean, I went away to college, but that was still my residence. Chelsea is an urban area right outside of Boston and so, I grew up as a city kid. I lived in a three-decker apartment building. No elevators. It was all of us running up and down the stairs, of course, and it was fun. Everybody in the neighborhood knew each other. It was a very ethnically diverse neighborhood. Just many different ethnic groups represented.

My mother was 100% Polish, so I identify with that. My dad really didn’t know too much about the history of his family. Eastern European, for sure. I’ve heard Russia mentioned. I’ve heard Estonia. I’ve heard Latvia. So, it’s something along those lines; eastern European. My dad was a factory worker and my mom stayed home with us until we went to school. Pretty typical for the time. Money was an issue, and she needed to work. It was important for her to work.

Interestingly, she took a job as a waitress at a restaurant that was right across the street from the school that my sister and I went to. So, our job was to cross the street and go tell her how our day was and then continue walking home from there. We had no school busses. It was all walking to school. It was very cozy. It was very nice. It was a whole different world.

JW:  Were you older or younger than your sister?

LN:  Older.

JW:  Tell us about how you first learned about the women’s movement and how you got involved.

LN:  Yes, that really made me reminisce. When did this all begin for me? I graduated from the University of Massachusetts, UMass, back in 1970. My first job straight out of college was as a middle school social studies teacher and that was in Greenwich, Connecticut. I decided, “I’ve spent 22 years in Massachusetts, let’s try something else and see what it’s like.” Chelsea and Greenwich were night and day. One very urban, one very wealthy suburban. I was very surprised by how different the two towns could be but I was young and naive.

JW:  I assume they weren’t that far apart.

LN:  In terms of mileage?

JW:  Yes, distance.

LN:  Distance? No. About maybe 150 miles.

JW:  Oh, okay. Still considerable.

LN:  Yes. But very interesting. It was a good learning experience for me to see how different places could be. As a social studies teacher I was given a curriculum and there was a lot of wiggle room in the curriculum in those days. Now, everything is pretty set. We taught by concept, and the concept of revolution was one of them. Typically, teachers would teach the American revolution. But I took the detailed definition of revolution and I taught about what I called, the Black revolution at the time, and the women’s revolution.

Nobody had ever thought to include women. Blacks, yes, but women, no. And I mean, I was just a brand-new teacher, but I thought, “This is silly, that fits within the concept.” So, I started trying out a few lessons here and there with my own students, so that was the beginnings of things.

JW:  How did it go over with students?

LN:  Mixed. It was controversial, but I welcomed that because I knew it was important. And I still have students to this day who write to me and say, “Thanks for showing us things that we just hadn’t considered” and that’s pretty nice.

JW:  You didn’t get any backlash from the administration?

LN:  It was a different time. They did tell me to be careful. I had one student come in and say, “My mom says you’re brainwashing us.”

JW:  Oh my God, can you imagine now what would happen?

LN:  I would have shown up on the news somewhere. It was interesting, because I kept the lessons very engaging for the students so that they participated in their learning, which all good teachers do. For instance, I was middle school, so, it was a junior high school at the time; I went to their 6th grade schools and just asked for a few samples of textbooks. And for one lesson, I had them sit in groups and just write down, “How many pictures of females do you see? How many pictures of males do you see? Just make a tally.”

And I had them then just write a one- or two-word description of, “What are those males and females doing in the picture? You could say sitting, running, looking, whatever it might be.” And they did it. And they were stunned at how many more males were in all of the textbooks that I got from 6th grade, and how much more active the males were. The females, there was a lot of sitting, looking, petting a cat.

JW:  Maybe cooking, I’m going to guess maybe cooking.

LN:  Yes, with mom. Of course, with mom. But I loved it. They were outraged. They said, “They’re tricking us. How can they do this?” I really was able to sit back and say, “What can we do about this? What do you think?” And I have to tell you, one boy who was probably twelve or thirteen; all of them were, said to me, “So what we just found out is they’re not just teaching us math or spelling, they’re teaching us sexism.” I thought, “Oh, my gosh, he said it, not me.”

JW:  Well, that kind of was right. This was in 1970, is that when it was?

LN:  Yes, early 1970s.

JW:  Wow, that’s really incredible.

LN:  It made me feel good that they wanted to know more. Now, were there some who were not interested at all? Of course. But I didn’t overload it with lessons. It was just, here and there, I’d put something in that raised their awareness,

JW:  Wonderful. And then you did get involved in some women’s organizations around then, right?

LN:  Very much so, because at that time, NOW, National Organization for Women, was extremely active here in Connecticut. I know they were in lots of parts of the country, but we had not only National NOW, we had State NOW, and we had Greenwich NOW. So, I joined up with all three of them. And, boy, it’s like any organization where you’re volunteering, if you say, “I know this”, they say, “Good, you do that. Okay.” The whole thing kind of surprised me because I was the youngest one there. I was fresh out of college, or now, one year, two year, three years out of college. Everybody else was older than me, which is interesting now, because everywhere I go now, everybody else is younger than I am.

JW:  I know that feeling.

LN:  It happens fast, too. But honestly, my work with NOW really began defining not just who I am, but what I was good at, what I could do. So, I knew I was a pretty good teacher from teaching my middle school, junior high kids. And I started doing presentations about sexism in school. I kept it all very focused on education because that was what I did. Sexism in schools, sexism in textbooks.

Those were the kinds of topics, and people wanted to hear it. I forgot how many local chapters there were in Connecticut at that time. I spoke at all of them. I counted them, I think there were nine. So, I spoke to all of those chapters about it. They wanted to bring it to their schools. It just kept snowballing, so it was exciting. Those were really heady times.

JW:  Well, you talked about the books. What other sexism did you talk about? Do you remember?

LN:  I’m still talking about it now. I really am. Not in necessarily a formal setting, but it comes up a lot. Teachers calling on boys more than girls. There was a lot of research being done in the ’70s on that very topic. Boys crying out more for attention, yelling out answers while the girls were waiting with their hands raised. People didn’t believe that that could be true.

And I said, “Okay, if you ever want to do something, sit in the back of a classroom with the teacher’s permission and just tally.” It’s easy to do, and it’s just stunning. The boys reached out for the teacher’s attention, and even if it was misbehaving, it still got the teacher’s attention. So that really opened a lot of eyes. That, “Wow, what are we doing to our girls?” And you can see how much it’s changed now. You walk into any classroom and everybody’s involved.

JW:  What about, you did more stuff on the state and national level, talk about that.

LN:  Sure. I was really involved in state NOW. Since I was the only educator around, I became the chair of the Education Task Force. And so, we sent out surveys to school districts and asked them what they were doing to deal with sexism in their schools. Now, did we hear from everybody? No. In Connecticut, we have 169 school districts. If we heard from 50, that was a lot, a real lot. But at least we got the conversation started. And then, the state Department of Education became interested in what we were doing, so we shared our findings with them.

There was a national task force on education. A woman named Anne Grant was running that, and so she’d check in with us to see what’s going on in our states. She produced a newsletter, and it was pretty organized, so we began to make some inroads. We began to get some notice. But honestly, it was slow. Superintendents: now that I know superintendents personally I could see them saying, “Not now” and tossing it. So, we at least heard from some, and we had some data that we could share.

JW:  Wow, excellent. And so now let’s talk about national. I know you did stuff on the national level, too, right?

LN:  National NOW, I mean, I was a member. I went to a lot of conferences. And then I was able to bring back what I learned at the conferences and present it in Connecticut. Yes, I did things, but I wasn’t really at the national level presenting. I was surprised one day when my phone rang and it was Wilma Scott Heide, remember her? She was one of the national presidents of NOW. She lived here in Connecticut.

And so apparently, somehow, she had heard about the work we were doing and wanted to know more because she thought it was a great idea. And she said, “I’m going to find something for you to do with me.” And I said, “I’m all yours, you name it.” Unfortunately, that’s when she was diagnosed with cancer and her life changed, and sadly ended. She was quite a personality. And in those days, we didn’t have caller id. So, you pick up the phone.

JW:  Oh, my goodness. Exactly. Well, you continued to do that work a lot, didn’t you?

LN:  Oh, yes.

JW:  Tell us more about what else you continued to do.

LN:  I stayed in teaching for four years, and then I realized I wanted to get more credentials. I looked around for a master’s degree program, and the one that I liked the best; there weren’t that many out there yet, was right in your neck of the woods, Judy. George Washington University had a Master’s in Women’s Studies. So, I left the classroom, and went and got my master’s in women’s studies. Part of getting your masters involved doing a practicum, and so I was able through some of the contacts I had made before I left, to work out a practicum working as a liaison for the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women; which was very new here in Connecticut, and the Connecticut State Department of Education.

They realized they needed to put their two organizations together, and they needed somebody really to just kind of make phone calls, write up reports, do that. But that was the very first year that that existed, and I helped a little bit. I wasn’t on any policy making teams, but I got to meet a lot of people. They actually listened to input from me, but they were the ones making the decisions.

JW:  I see. What year was that?

LN:  This was ’75. I taught four years and loved it, missed it. That was a hard decision, but I just thought I needed the credentials, that it wasn’t just something I think is important. And it did help. I was glad I did that. And then, working with those two agencies helped me get more work in Hartford, our capital. Doing things especially with our state Department of Education. That was great because at the time, the federal government and the state governments were throwing a lot of money at this issue, because suddenly it was big. So, there were a lot of grants being given.

There were a lot of conferences, so I spoke at many state conferences. Again, sticking with my topic, sexism and education, bias in materials, bias in attitudes, all of those. And I think over the years that I worked with them; well, one thing that happened that was actually really, I thought it was exciting, one of the coordinators at the state department of Title IX called and asked if I would help roll out Title IX. Start getting workshops out there, so people knew what they had to do to comply with Title IX.

JW:  Okay, so this is a few years after it passed and Connecticut NOW is getting it done.

LN:  Yes. Because it sure wasn’t happening in ’72 or three or four. So, this was around ’75, ’76 that they asked me, and they said, “Would you work at our state vocational technical high schools?” And I said, “Whatever you want.” I thought that was daunting, because these were a lot of shop teachers who liked their shops just the way they were, and that meant no girls in most of them. Electrical shops, woodworking shops, mechanics, those kinds of shops. So, they were required to come to this workshop and they were not happy. There were a lot of lessons that I learned.

JW:  Let’s hear some. What were lessons that you learned?

LN:  Well, how to dignify an answer even if you don’t agree with it even a little bit, and then help them move forward. That was very hard.

JW:  That’s a skill, all right.

LN:  Here’s an example; I was at one of the vocational technical high schools and they were sitting with their arms folded. Again, I’m still young, I’m in my twenty’s, and how do I get them to realize, “I actually know something and this could be good for your students.” So, one gentleman said, “There’s no way this is going to work here. I’m telling you right now, it’s not going to work because we don’t have a ladies’ room in this wing of the building.”

And I took a breath and I said, “Can we take that idea and say, what could we do? How can we help that not be an impediment, but how can we make it work? And let’s try that.” They weren’t happy, let’s be honest. So that was one of my more interesting ones. And they did say, “You know, there is a ladies’ room down the hall, it’s way at the end, but I guess they could go there.” And I thought, “Good, that sounds great. See, these things can be worked out.”

There’s another one. You may have to edit this out, Judy. Someone came up to me and said, “Sweetheart, you know you don’t even believe in what you’re saying to us. You’re just doing this because it’s part of your work.” And I looked at him and he said, “I’ll bet you have a bun in the oven right now.” Back then, I don’t think I had ever heard that phrase before. I could tell by his look and his tone; I guessed what it meant. And we just chatted about how that was personal and that isn’t what we’re here to talk about. So, a lot happened. All of the vocational technical high schools now are in compliance. A lot of the people who were at those workshops are not at the schools anymore. But that was a long time ago.

JW:  I also want to hear about some of the projects. You created I know, a sex equity training. Talk about that.

LN:  Well, yes. That was kind of my pride and joy. There were, like I said, a lot of grants being handed out if you could show that this could have an impact on people. By now, I was working at a regional education service center. I don’t know if you’re familiar with those, Judy. New York has what they call BOCES, (Board of Cooperative Educational Services), if you’ve ever heard of that. Not every state has, but it’s to help the state department of education.

You know, they have all these big initiatives, but they don’t have enough staff to deliver everything, so they relied on these regional service centers to help get word out. Whether it was Title IX, or later it was career education, or it was mentoring new teachers, a lot of the list of priorities. So, we wrote grants at our organization, and one of them was to deliver Project SET. S-E-T, Sex Equity Training, throughout the state. And we named other regional service centers so people could come from all over the state. We named community groups, Y’s; a lot of YWCAs were very involved early on in all of this.

So, lo and behold, every time we wrote a grant, we got it. And we weren’t the only ones. This was big and the money was available. So, I was able to travel all around the state. I just made up the name, Sex Equity Training. Nothing was called gender yet. Now, we tend to say it’s gender biased. It’s training on gender roles. I think it’s a calmer term.

JW:  It’s a wider definition.

LN:  Yes, absolutely. So again, like I did with my students, getting them involved in looking at their own textbooks. It was five sessions long and we looked at, “What is Title IX? What does it do? What doesn’t it do?” I had guest speakers come in. I had films that I found on, bias in the media, bias in advertising. Those were real eye openers for people. That was a lot of fun to do.

We’d give them a month between session four and session five to do a lesson based on what you’ve learned in the first four sessions. “Do one lesson with your own kids and come back prepared to talk about it, and to share ideas with each other,” so that then they were learning from their own students how something went over, and then learning from the other participants. People walked out saying, “I’ve never thought like this before. This is interesting. I want to do more of this.”

JW:  The lesson would just be on sexism in schools, or would it be different than that?

LN:  I left it totally up to them. “If this sounds like a standalone lesson you might want to try, go for it. If you see a spot in your curriculum where you could take some of this and adapt it to your curriculum,” so, it really came back as a big mix. It’s interesting, people say things like, “There’s no sexism in math. Math is math. You’re working with numbers.” And I said, “How about word problems? And how about diagrams, pictures that are in the books?” And they did tallies with their kids.

JW:  What is the message being said here?

LN:  Exactly. So, the message was the same across the board, which is really upsetting, but it raised that awareness. And really back in the ’70s, we were at the awareness phase. People were stunned. Just stunned. “What do you mean? No, this is just the way it is, right?” No.

JW:  So, you did a whole lot of activities. I’m reading from this list you sent, Reasons for the Changing Role and Image of Women. You had a curriculum on that. Tell us about that.

LN:  Yes, I think that was the beginnings for me of realizing, “Oh my gosh, this is important and others are recognizing it.” When I tried out some lessons with my own students, I saw how it made a difference. Again, not all of them loving it, that’s for sure, but it made an impact. So, I went to the social studies coordinator for the Greenwich public schools, and she was a very bright woman. And she said, “I like what you’re doing. How about you write it up over the summer and then I’ll edit it with you and we’ll get it out there as part of the social studies curriculum for 7th grade.”

It isn’t what I was expecting. I was expecting her to say, “Well, maybe you could write up a couple of lessons and we’ll see if it flies.” So, I wrote up all of the things I had been trying and put them together, and it became a part of the 7th grade curriculum. It was optional, because again, we had a lot of wiggle room in our curriculum. Revolution could mean nothing but the American revolution to one, and more diversified if you took a bigger look at it. It’s out there. I found it as part of getting ready to talk with you, and oh my gosh; it was typed and some of the letters were actually filled in the e’s and the o’s. It was fun. So that was very important in my development. That somebody else recognized that this was important and supported me in putting it together.

JW:  Yes, I can imagine. Because in those years, it was really the beginning, beginning. And you did get involved in some intermural sports for girls too, right?

LN:  I did. There were no sports for girls in the ’70s. There was some track and field, but for the most part, it was a boys’ world. I did coach softball. We played the other junior highs in our town, but I created a touch football program for girls.

JW:  Wow, how brave of you.

LN:  Well, you know what? I’ve been an athlete my whole life, and this is something I love and it means so much to me. The first year I did it, we had 40 girls show up, and the second year I did it, we had 70 girls show up.

JW:  Oh my God. And these are all middle school students?

LN:  Yes. So, 7th, 8th and 9th graders at that time was junior high. It was great fun. And because there were 70 of them and me, I had to break them into groups and appoint group leaders to organize how they were going to play, and I rotated around. It was great for them in more than just touch football.

JW:  They also had to learn the rules, I bet.

LN:  Oh, absolutely. They knew more than you would think, and they knew it was something that should be fun. I had a ball and I think they did too.

JW:  I’ll bet you did. So, what did you continue to do after the beginnings of this? You stayed in education, right?

LN:  Oh, yes. I’ve been in education for 53 years and I’ve loved it. But, as things evolved, the Title IX funding, after things were up and running, kind of dissipated. The next big thing that came in was career education, and that got a lot of attention at the federal and state level, a lot of funding. Next, I became the career ed coordinator for my agency, and it was a perfect fit. I mean, if we’re talking about career education, it was time to say, “Well, you know, young women can be more than secretaries, teachers, nurses.” Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those jobs. They’re all pretty wonderful. But there are other things, too. I infused a lot of what I had done in gender equity into career education.

JW:  And then it got dissipated into the schools in your district or the state?

LN:  That’s exactly right. I was in a regional service center, so 17 school districts were my area that I worked with. And then the other regional service centers, would call me in to work with their districts as they saw the need. So, the state was where I worked; all over the state. It was very interesting. We have rural parts of Connecticut. We have urban parts of Connecticut. Sometimes right next to each other.

JW:  I’m wondering about the receptivity of the girls to having, I’ll say, a wider window in a way, to look at. Were the girls receptive?

LN:  It was mixed. It was definitely mixed because it was a hard discussion at home sometimes. Sometimes they’d be very excited when we talked about them in a workshop setting, and people at home might not have had the same feelings, the same openness, to their daughters being, “What do you mean you want to work with your hands? You want to get out there and get dirty all the time?”

JW:  Right. It’s not lady like.

LN:  Well, we heard that phrase a lot. Our state Department of Ed had developed a film; and it was literally a film that you had to thread through the projector, on, “Let’s look at what else girls can do,” and they showed them on a construction site. Now, they weren’t girls, they were women. And they interviewed those women and they said, “I’m so much happier being outdoors. I’m so much happier building things rather than sitting at a desk.” For the same reasons you hear men say why they love that kind of thing. “I can be more independent. I can be outside.”

JW:  I make more money, maybe.

LN:  Yes, that, too. It’s an important one. Absolutely. It’s hard when it’s first introduced to just say, “Yes, I want to do that.” So, we have to nurture it along and try to get more people on board.

JW:  The roles were pretty set in those days.

LN:  Absolutely. Even the names. You could become a police man. Not a police officer, a police man. Why would a young woman start to think, “I could do that” because the name even said to you, “No, you can’t.”

JW:  That’s not your job.

LN:  Right.

JW:  So, you continued for 53 years, and I assume you kept up some of this stuff throughout, right?

LN:  Oh, absolutely. There’s not a workshop that I do that doesn’t have a little bit of gender equity in it, a little bit of career choice in it. I just find a way. By the way, in the ’80s, Connecticut passed a law on sexual harassment; talking about how things have evolved, and I went and got trained in becoming a sexual harassment workshop leader. And so, we just started little discussions, and then, lo and behold, in 1991, our state passed a new law that said, any person who’s an administrator, whether in business, in schools, wherever, had to have a two-hour workshop on sexual harassment. Basically, an awareness workshop to make sure you couldn’t say, “Oh, I didn’t know that was sexual harassment.” So, that became law in 1992. So, by 1992, schools, everybody had to do this. I went out and went district by district in my region of the state and did these two-hour workshops. Again, trying to make it interactive. This can be a very difficult topic.

JW:  Yes. I can see that. I can see people being very defensive.

LN:  You’ve got to cut through that, or work around it. I found some scenarios, I looked through different legal cases, and I made up; not made up, they were real short scenarios, like three or four lines. Like, the science teacher was leaning over girls to look in their microscope during class time, and the girls just thought it was creepy and horrible, and they went to the principal and said, “We can’t stand it. We can’t even stand being in his class.” And what the message was for administrators is, “So what should you do? Could that be sexual harassment? Did he mean it? Did he not mean it? What are the questions you have to ask to help so that those young women feel comfortable in that class?”

And that got them talking, and that got them saying, “You know, that actually happened in our district, or my school,” or wherever, because now it happened someplace else, so it’s okay to talk about it. So, I found that introduction to the workshop. It’s not part of the curriculum that you’re supposed to follow, but I knew this would open people up, and it did. And people said, “Oh, my God, we’re actually talking. We’re not hiding.”

And then I even introduced a little bit of humor just to make sure they stayed with me. We had a scenario about a football coach who would call his players “Ladies” and the field hockey team was running their laps around the field, and they said, “Wait.” They said, “We heard him say, you’re playing like a girl right now,” which is a very popular phrase, but not a good one. So, the principal had to go talk to the football coach, and they worked it out, and he said, “You’ve got to stop. You can’t do that. That’s not fair to those young women.” And they worked it out.

But what I did to just lighten the mood was say, “You know what, I thought when he said you’re playing like a bunch of girls, he meant it as a compliment” because if you’ve seen how your field hockey teams are doing; and I’ll have to say, here in Connecticut, we have our University of Connecticut women’s basketball program.

JW:  Oh, I’ve heard of them.

LN:  Yes. Thank you. I’m a season ticket holder. That’s how much I love them. I said, “You know, I go to all the Yukon women’s basketball games, and if they play like them, they’re going to do just great.” Everybody understood. Calm down, calm down. I’ll tell you, I’ve gone to the final four of the women’s basketball, I think I’ve been to 17 or 18 of them, and I still get the chills when I see all these people watching the young women just do so well. So, yes, it’s thrilling to me. It really is.

JW:  Wow, that’s wonderful. So, you retired just a couple of years ago, I guess.

LN:  Last May, actually.

JW:  Oh, not that long ago.

LN:  I Tried retiring a couple of times and they kept saying, “Could you just help us with this?” Which is very flattering. This time I said, “No, I’ve got a lot of trips lined up so if you can fit me in; so, we’ll see if anything comes of it. For the moment, I’m retired.

JW:  Well, I’ll bet you have your fingers in some things.

LN:  A few things. They’re percolating.

JW:  I’m sure of it. That is wonderful. Well, you’ve made such a major contribution, and I thank you for that.

LN:  Thank you. I appreciate it. I really do.

JW:  Well, do we have anything to add?

LN:  I’ll tell you, this is a real honor to be able to sit and talk with you, have my information out there with Gloria Steinem, and Betty Friedan, people who inspired me. It’s thrilling. It really is.

JW:  Well, I appreciate that. I mean, I’d say that, me too. But the point of this, is there were hundreds, if not thousands of us doing our bit.

LN:  Exactly.

JW:  And this is the story. These are the stories we want people to know in the future.

LN:  I loved reading the information that said, “This is an aging group that was in the second wave of feminism” and you’re trying to capture the stories while we’re all still here to tell them, so I think it’s great.

JW:  Well, thank you so much. I had a great time.

LN:  Me too. It’s a real pleasure, Judy.