THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT
Marcia K. Morgan, Ph.D.
“You never stop taking off a feminist lens.”
Interviewed by Susan Grover Cooper, JD, May 2023. Andrew Jordan, videographer
MM: I’m Marcia K. Morgan. I’m 70 years old. I was born in 1953. I was born and raised in Salem, Oregon. I’m Caucasian and have an English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish background. I grew up in a really pretty happy and healthy family, had two parents at home. My mother was a stay-at-home mom, much like many people after World War II in the 1950s, and my dad worked. He sold Buicks for a while, and then was a banker. And then most of his life, he had started his own small business and would buy old houses and fix them up himself. I have that in my DNA. I just loved that work, watching him and helping him in the summers.
I have one older sister who is an ordained minister. I would say she’s very much concerned about social justice, and probably on the liberal scale. Our family definitely had a social justice bent or value system, very much for the underdog. I would say, of my parents, my dad really was an early feminist. He was very encouraging to my sister and me in our work and school. He would encourage us to do whatever job we wanted.
So my sister became an ordained minister and there were not women ministers back in the day when she went in. And then I went into criminal justice and spent a 45-year career as a criminologist, specializing in gender, sexual violence, and looking at all different levels and different parts of the criminal justice system.
SC: Marcia, it sounds like your career took you almost on a feminist path as you were helping women. Can you tell us a little more background about that, the year you got involved in the movement, if you recall, or maybe when you first became aware of the word feminist?
MM: This is really a walk down memory lane, as I started thinking about these questions. I graduated, and got a bachelor’s degree from Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon, in 1975. I was majoring in sociology with a criminology emphasis. My first job was a correctional officer, jailer, at a small county jail for men and women, mostly men. That lasted a few months, which was kind of fine. Good experience, but not my calling. And what happened next, was there was a federally-funded, brand new program, in Eugene, Oregon, that was an all-female sexual assault unit. And although that doesn’t seem unusual today, it was very unusual in 1975.
There were three police agencies. All had a female detective. There was a female district attorney, also unusual, a woman who was the psychologist/counselor on the team, and then I was the director. I also filled in and did responses to cases when they came up. That wasn’t necessarily a role that I was looking for. I wanted to be in criminal justice somehow, because it was so different than my own upbringing. I was curious about the criminal mind and why people did what they did, but it really changed the trajectory of my life and my whole career.
What was happening in the second wave of feminism, was that rape and sexual violence was a huge issue. There were more cases being reported, and there was a lot of injustice around it: what they were doing to the women who reported, what they weren’t doing with cases. So, it became really a focal point for so many issues in feminism. I kind of fell into the role, and it became a passion for me because it fed into the social justice aspect of my upbringing.
SC: It sounds like you were immersed in the feminist movement when you first really got out of school, and might not have been called feminism at that point, but it was more criminal justice, but directed toward women. Were you also involved with any other organizations outside that you recall back at that time?
MM: You know, not really too much at that time. I was on the Planned Parenthood board for five years, locally in Oregon. And I was on several other boards that dealt with children and the safety of children, that kind of thing. But I think that evolved later, because I was pretty, 24 hours a day, involved in this career, so that that was really important.
Another piece of that time period, being a female in a pretty much all male organization, was the sexual harassment. And when I’ve talked to other young women about this, they’re pretty appalled, but this is way before sexual harassment laws were on the books, and its testament to why this finally did become law. It was not unusual, every single day, to be sexually harassed by coworkers, by the lieutenant that I reported to that did my evaluations that told me to wear a short skirt on the day of the evaluation, who had a cactus that was a phallic symbol that he’d put on my desk sometimes when I’d come in in the morning, or make sexual comments all the time. Or I’d be talking to a victim on the phone, and a detective would walk by and stick his finger in my ear, just constant things.
I will say, this is probably jumping ahead on some of the questions, but years later, I mean, this was 30 years later, way beyond when I left that job, I was invited to a reunion of some of the people that I worked with. Some of the men and women and anybody that was working in those police departments. And I hesitated about going, but I’m so glad I did, because there were several men who were well into their mid to late 70s, probably a couple that were near 80, that were some of the harassers. And they came up to me at this barbecue hamburger feed thing, and they apologized. They said, “I realized what you were doing was important, and I know we gave you a really bad time, and I’m glad you did what you did.” And it’s like, whoa, I was not expecting that at all.
All of us got it, got that harassment, but we just stayed the course, and we were passionate about what we were doing. We were changing policies at the hospital and how to deal with victims. We went to the legislature and wrote bills, changed bills, and they’re still on the books today. And it was exciting. We were doing so much good work, and that’s what kept us going. It was not a kind environment at the time. So, it was kind of a happy ending.
SC: Did you also do some training during those years, for example, in the schools, speaking engagements, that sort of thing?
MM: Yes, that actually was one of my jobs as the head of this program. I think I gave over a thousand talks to kids who were in high school. Really trying to do safety stuff, but not the traditional, “Don’t go out at night,” and what I think so many people had been hearing. We really wanted to change attitudes about, “Everyone has a right to be out, but you do need to take some extra precautions.” And then what the role of men is. It’s not just a woman’s problem, it’s a societal problem. So, it was really about changing attitudes, and that was exciting. I had a lot of harassment, too, in some of the groups I went to; a lot of support as well. So, it was the early days of just trying to push through that.
The other exciting thing, and probably kind of relevant to this feminist project, is that because our program was so unique in Eugene, I was asked to speak around the country. I would often be the keynote speaker at conferences, criminal justice conferences, police, DAs, just all different kinds of conferences, on how we set it up, what it was like, our success with reporting.
It was unique in that it was within the police department. There were a lot of programs, there were advocacy crisis centers outside the department that would advocate for, or be with a woman who reported. So those were great, and they did exist, but not quite the way ours was structured. So that was very exciting. I went to every state but North Dakota, for some reason. So, it was great to see what people were doing, and the enthusiasm around the country.
SC: Can you kind of put together maybe your top three issues that were of the greatest concern to you at that time?
MM: I’d say sexual assault and abuse. I mean, that’s a pretty umbrella term, but I think all those things kind of tie in together, whether it’s domestic violence or whatever. I did focus mostly on sexual assault issues in the general public and also in prisons, and I’ll talk about that in a minute. But yes, I’d say that certainly was the main one going forward. The second one was probably just in general, giving women a voice. And that could be in the community, it could be in their house, it could be anywhere; an organization that was traditionally male. So, it could be all different things. Women have a voice. It was just giving them the opportunity to express it.
And then I’d say, probably the third one kind of ties in with that, and would definitely be a trigger still for me, is just women being dismissed. I’ve certainly felt it in my career. That you might be sitting around a huge table and I was the only female; I did work with the Pentagon, helping to look at some of the issues around rapes, around military installations, justice departments or whatever it might be. I was often the only woman, and they would also always defer to the man. And I was like, “Wait, I’ve got something to say. I’ve got credentials. I know what’s going on.” So, I tried to capture that, I don’t know if anger is the right word, but frustration for sure, and went back to school.
I was still working, but I went back and got two masters and a PhD. And I think that that, as well as time that went on, that’s helped. And so, I don’t feel it much now. I feel it every so often. It’s still out there, but it spurred me to get more credentials and say, “I have something to say about sexual assault and women being at the table.”
SC: But it helped to have that authority behind you of your education.
MM: Yes, I think it did, or at least that motivated me to do that.
SC: Can you tell us some of your most memorable, important experiences, some of the highlights?
MM: Sure. I think the one that comes to mind, is when I was involved in the Rape Team. I had a colleague, Ginger Edwards. She and I developed the anatomical dolls that police, counselors, district attorneys use, when they interview children who’ve been sexually abused. They’re cloth dolls with all the correct sexual body parts. They come in three skin colors. There’s a white, light brown, and a dark brown color. They had adults as well as children dolls. They had all the body parts, so, they had anal opening, vaginal opening, mouth opening with tongue. And the purpose really, was for children to be able to demonstrate what happened to them. If they didn’t know the words, they were afraid to describe it, they were intimidated, somehow holding the doll made them feel more comfortable. They didn’t have to use the words, they could demonstrate for the jury, and it was very graphic.
So, we were finding initially with the Rape Team, it was a university town so we had a lot of college age women who were the victims, survivors of sexual abuse. And then the age had started getting younger and younger, and that’s when I went to the Saturday Market, which you probably have in your town as well, and there was a woman selling “flasher dolls”. This was in 1976, and they were dolls that were kind of grotesque, actually. Pretty good size. They had a little trench coat, and so I bought those, brought them back, and Ginger and I looked at them and thought, “You know, let’s go back to her and see if she can make them smaller, a little less grotesque. No trench coat with real clothes.” And she did.
And so, in August of 1980, Ginger and I started a business, Migima, and we had some women who sewed the dolls for us. They were in 40 countries, and we got to follow them to the countries and give lectures, training, consulting to that country, on how to work with child sexual abuse victims. Unfortunately, people around the world were looking to the U.S. for guidance because we had so many cases. That’s a good thing, bad thing. So, that was really interesting to see the different cultures, have some camaraderie with them.
Also, during that time, I wrote several books on forensic interviewing techniques with children and specifically using the dolls, testified in legal cases. So that’s probably the big one for me because so many people were affected by it in positive ways, except for the offender, which is okay. And we heard from them [police, victims] for years about the value of it all. So that was big.
SC: That’s a major accomplishment.
MM: Yes, I think so.
SC: Highlight of what your work was.
MM: I was 24, I guess, when all that happened. So, it was a long time ago. Probably the other thing is, I’ve always written books and articles and journal articles, and in 1985, I wrote a curriculum called SafeTouch. As a lot of people remember in the ’80s, that’s when a lot started coming out on child sexual abuse, and that was one of the first curricula for schools. It was for K to fifth grade, and it’s still being used in the schools. It’s been updated, and I’m still getting clippings from newspapers and things where some little boy went to the SafeTouch class, and he reported it after class. There’s a counselor here in town that’s told me he’s had 20-30 kids after the many years of using that curriculum that have come forward because of the curriculum to report abuse. So that has really warmed my heart, saddened my heart, both. But I feel good that it’s made a difference with kids as well.
In 1984, I wrote a book called My Feelings, that was a child’s book for young kids, and it was featured on Good Morning America. They started getting some notoriety and some attention. That was also one of the early books for children to trust their feelings and instincts about sexual abuse, so they could run and get away from that. It had able-bodied and disabled kids, and one of the first that had a little boy as one of the main characters. So that was just starting to be looked at as well.
SC: Any other accomplishments that you have in mind you can tell us about?
MM: Well, as you can tell, I’m kind of passionate about the topic. I can talk a lot about it. The last 20 years of my career, I’ve really worked a lot with PREA, which is the Prison Rape Elimination Act. It’s federal legislation that deals with sexual assaults in criminal justice, or in juvenile justice kinds of settings. So, it can be jails and prisons, juvenile camps and that kind of thing. I’ve worked around the country going in to do research on what the issues are. If it’s something like a correctional officer who’s sexually abusing women, or it could be male prisoners as well, but I really kind of specialized in working with women. It could be other people working there. It can also be other inmates in a facility. So, I would go in and do research to look at what the issues are, and the problems are, do training, curricula, and then train the staff.
It’s been called a number of different kinds of approaches, but one of the main ones is a “gender responsive approach”, that we really tried to look at the female offender. About 80% to 90% of women in prison have been sexually abused, have been abused in some manner, so, it’s kind of a full circle. Working with children who were abused and then now doing a lot of work with women in prison. A lot of it was teaching the staff how to be gender responsive and also trauma informed, because so many women had been traumatized.
It’s always kind of interesting when you deal with the staff who maybe have not even thought about it, that since most people are going to get out of prison at some point, how do you want them to be out in the community? Do you want them to be more angry, dysfunctional, or do you want them to be healthier and hopefully a contributing member of society? So, we worked a lot with what works for women so they don’t recidivate and come back. Communication skills, things like that.
One of my favorite anecdotes, I think, was I was giving a talk to a group of correctional officers back east, and we were going on about how to communicate and what to say and different things. And during the break, this old crusty guy came up to me. He’d been a correctional officer for a long time, and he said, “That was really interesting about what you said, how we should communicate better to women. I wish I’d learned this three wives ago.” So, he kind of wished he’d learned some of those skills. But anyway, it was really interesting. So many of these issues are not just in the community, they’re also in correctional settings.
SC: You’ve been talking about addressing the correctional setting as well as the individual there. I wondered if you would tell us about some of the books that you have available both to the field as well as the general public.
MM: I’ve written, I think, about 18 books for the field, for people who work in the criminal justice system: a lot around the prison, rape issues, and some films that went with that. Most of these were federally-funded, so the average person probably wouldn’t see them. But it really feels good to hopefully have made a difference in some of these facilities that the inmates, the detainees, are not being sexually assaulted. I’ve written, I think, about four books for the general public, and the last two that I wrote right before the pandemic and during the pandemic, were totally unrelated to criminal justice. They really weren’t looking at that, but they still were around giving women a voice.
One book was called, Go! How to Get Going and Achieve Your Goals and Dreams At Any Age, and it’s for women. Just those kinds of unique things women experience. Some of those roadblocks and how to get through that to get to what you want. And then the other one is, Should I Change My Name? The impact of your last name on identity, marriage, and happiness. And I’m sure if there’s feminists watching this, they probably know about Lucy Stone, who was one of the suffragists, that was one of her big causes, why do women have to change their names? And it’s always been an interest of mine. So, it was fun writing that book.
SC: Thank you. I’ve read that book and found it very interesting because you give a lot of history on it and a lot of different choices as to how a couple might proceed. How about your activist work? Obviously, you’ve had a very busy and intense career that’s promoting women and helping women to be able to promote themselves. But how about more general activities?
MM: Right now, I’m involved with the League of Women Voters trying to get new registration and voter registration kind of issues. I’ve run campaigns through the years. Was a lobbyist for four years. So, I’ve always kind of dabbled in political stuff, not running for an office, but around that. I think I’ve probably gotten a lot of exercise in the last four to five years because I’ve done more marches than I think I’ve ever done. As people watching this probably know, a lot of women’s rights are being eroded by what’s going on in our political world in the United States. So, I’ve written letters and marched and done a lot of things like that.
Even the other night on TV, it was on the news, they were talking about a woman who had written a memoir, and she’d done all these amazing things. I mean, she’d hiked Kilimanjaro and done all these things, and they were talking about that, and then they said she had an “alleged rape.” And I thought, wait a minute. Why did they put the word “alleged” in this stream of amazing things this woman had done? Why didn’t they say she allegedly climbed Kilimanjaro? It was interesting. Just in our nomenclature, in our words, we’re still perpetuating a lot of question and doubt, which is a disservice to women and to survivors.
It’s interesting, turning 70, you really start reflecting back on your career, and what can you do now? Maybe not as huge, and maybe not as global as you had hoped or maybe did at one point, but I do have two stepdaughters and three granddaughters, so I’m hoping to focus more on that, and maybe what impact in a positive way, you can do it at that level.
SC: Now that you are 70, how has your involvement in the feminist movement affected your later life, personally and professionally?
MM: I think you never stop taking off a feminist lens. That’s a good thing and a bad thing sometimes. You just kind of always see that, “That doesn’t seem right.” Once you kind of have that knowledge of the way society works, relationships work, just social institutions. I just think it’s good to always have that [feminist lens] too. There’s a lot of women that can’t speak for themselves or because of their circumstances, or it’s difficult to be heard. So, I think it’s good to just keep that in mind for the future, and just to keep the juices flowing and writing letters and keeping the awareness out there.
SC: Thank you for all you have done and all you will continue to do.
MM: Thank you. And thanks for doing the interview, Susan. I appreciate it.
SC: Happy to be here.
MM: Thank you.