THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Marilyn Marcosson

“Once an Organizer, Always an Organizer.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, January 2024

JW:  Marilyn, would you please introduce yourself with your full name and date of birth.

MM:  My name is Marilyn Marcosson, May 17, 1948.

JW:  Great. Well, can you briefly tell us about your childhood, where you lived, ethnicity, siblings? What do you think laid the groundwork for the person you became?

MM:  I was born in Rockville Center, New York, a suburb of New York City, and lived there for ten years. When my father died and we sold the house, I was the youngest of three. My two older brothers were significantly older. One was twelve and a half years older than I, and the other nine years older than I, so I was the caboose. So, it was my mother and I, and not a lot of money, and we moved to Queens where my mother started working as a school secretary.

I attended public schools in New York. I graduated from Francis Lewis High School in Queens. It was the height of the baby boom. It was a brand-new high school, and we were on triple session to start. There were 5000 students in my high school. There were 1500 in my graduating class. Sophomores went from 11:10 to 5:30, so I’d said it was like going to night school in the winter.

JW:  Not even that safe, really.

MM:  You took the bus. Juniors went from a normal hour and seniors went from like 8:00 to 2:00. There was not a lot of money in the household, my mother obviously working full time as a school secretary, and so, I was very happy to go to Hunter College, which was at the time, free. It was a little bit of a differentiator between me and my high school classmates, most of whom went to Queens College, and I chose to go to hunter. It was a subway ride into Hunter College, into Manhattan. And so, while 1000 kids from my school went to Queens, I think there were seven of us that went to Hunter.

Hunter at the time, had just converted from being an all-girls school to being co-ed. It was, for most of its life, the girls’ version of City College of New York. It produced a lot of teachers, though you were not allowed to have a teaching major. There was no teaching major allowed, but that’s where a lot of them would come. It was also known for being a Catholic oriented school. Every president of Hunter was a catholic man up to that point, and the prior president had gone on to be a provost at Notre Dame.

I graduated high school in 1965 and had been involved with some of the civil rights activities, and some of what were the nascent anti-war activities. When I got to Hunter College, I continued my anti-war activities. And that, if you will, was sort of the club that I joined. So, my first anti-war demonstration was November of 1965, when we could not even get busses to take us to Washington. And so, several of us, somebody who knew how to drive and had a license, rented a car.

JW:  You were determined, though, to get there.

MM:  We were determined. It was at Hunter I then also became engaged in student government and the newspaper. I joked that I majored in extracurricular, but in fact, with hindsight, realized that what I was doing was preparing for the true liberal arts education. I took classes in 20 out of 27 departments. If the course sounded good in the catalog, I took it.

JW:  And they let you. That’s amazing.

MM:  You did your required classes, then you had to have a minimum number for a major. And so, I did that, and then I wandered far afield; only the required math and sciences, but the rest of them. During that time period, I had become more active in the anti-war movement. At that period, 1966, ’67, ’68, was sort of the very active anti-war period. Was active in the moratorium, which was in ’69, and did not have a clear idea of what I was going to do when I graduated. Did not apply to law schools, didn’t even think about law schools. There was no money. And at that moment, I was approached by a guy named Steve Max, who wanted to know if I wanted to work in Bella Abzug’s campaign and having nothing better to do. I said, “Yes.”

JW:  You weren’t going to be a teacher then?

MM:  Well, no. That was of course, what my mother and my aunts and uncles all wanted. I was a very active student athlete as well, and all the gym teachers wanted me to be a gym teacher. So, no, I wasn’t going to be a gym teacher, or a teacher. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do and Steve Max said, “Do you want to come work for Bella?” And I said, “Sure.” At that time, she was running for congress in a primary, in what was then the 19th congressional district. It was sort of the Upper West Side, and then a hook around the lower part of Manhattan to the Lower East Side.

This was her first campaign. She was running in a primary against the sitting chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Leonard Farbstein. Before I got into the campaign, the liberal democrat reform clubs in Manhattan had agreed that they would internally have caucuses, and they would put up one candidate so that there was not going to be a multi-person primary where the liberal votes would split and Farbstein would win.

And so, Bella’s organizing skills, which she had honed in the civil rights movement, the labor movement, and with Women’s Strike for Peace, gave her the democratic single person to run in the primary against Farbstein, and I came in. I started out running what was then a little offset press. They were saving money. The campaign headquarters was in the old Village Voice office at Sheridan Square on Christopher Street and they had a little offset press there. We would get plates made and I would run off various literature for the volunteers to hand out. So, I had sort of ink in my hair and the rest of that.

I hung around enough and was apparently willing to say yes to anything that was asked of me, and I wound up being Bella’s body person. Which meant that I would go with her to every campaign stop all the time. My job was to keep her on time, to hold a pocketbook if she needed to be doing two handed work and take notes if that was required. It’s a difficult job for anybody who’s ever had it. You really must understand your boss and what they like, what they don’t like, what sets them off, what they want to hear, what they don’t want to hear.

Bella had a reputation, well deserved, for being a hard taskmaster. She was a hard taskmaster to herself and expected everybody to work like that. That was hard for some people to get to. I had no problem with it. I thought it was perfectly fine. And so, I got to see this very dynamic woman, very close up for 14 or 16 hours a day.

JW:  What were some of the things she wanted to hear or not want to hear?

MM:  She wanted to know what was going on, who was going to be at the next meeting, where were we going? She did not want to hear complaints. “We don’t have this piece of literature”; “Well, get that piece of literature.” This was pre-email, pre-cellphones. This was a period where there were sort of two big slogans that were going on.

One, was obviously ending the war in Vietnam, which was obvious; it was 1970 and it was still going on. And the most popular campaign paraphernalia we had were paper shopping bags that said, “A Woman’s Place is in the House—the House of Representatives.” And as far as I know, I think she was the first person to use that. It was catchy. And so those were sort of the two elements.

The Women’s Strike for Peace people were her biggest volunteers. An incredible bunch of women who were organized. Her alter ego, best friend from high school and college, and her chief speech writer, Mim Kelber, was very active. Ronnie Eldridge – Ronnie was a political person; I don’t think she was City Council at that time – was very active in the campaign. So, it was a campaign that clearly had men and women in it, but a lot of women in high positions. And so that was sort of another element of this.

The feminist version of it was that you just did these things. That there was no issue. You ran campaigns, you ran for Congress, you organized, you won, you kept going. And what Bella wanted was people who understood. And she taught me so well. That is, 1 foot in front of the other. You just keep going. You just keep going. You put 1 foot in front of the other and you go on to the next thing.

In that tv show, West Wing, the president was always saying, “What’s next?” Bella never used those words, but that’s what was expected. What’s next? What are we going to do now? Where are we going? She also, and this was a part that I got from her and saw it, was the level of super preparation. Whether her training as a lawyer, and her personal views, she was going to be super prepared for every event. A debate, a discussion, whatever it was, that she wanted to be briefed and read everything that she could about any possible subject that was going to come on. There was no winging it. It had to be absolutely briefed and prepared.

She, in 1970, beat Farbstein. And the lesson there was, she carried the districts that she had to carry, and she cut into his margin of victory in the districts that were primarily his. So, lots of ways you can win. If he had won the Lower East Side Jewish districts with 80% and she cut him to 60, he still won with 60%; but by getting 40% there, it was enough to tip the balance. And so, she beat him in that district. Then, as now, there was really not a major republican opposition. The Republicans did have a person on the ticket who also had the liberal party line; usually went to the Democrats, in this case the liberal party did not. In hindsight, I believe that to be a sexist decision. But they picked a radio host called Barry Farber. And so, she ran against this guy Barry Farber, and won the election in November of ’70.

She’s gotten a ton of publicity. She’s the big hat, she’s loud, she’s got the New York Times and she goes through that. At that time, I did not want to come down to Washington, and she offered me a job in New York, and I took the job as her first district rep. I was no more qualified for that job than I was to fly to the moon. I was in over my head and we knew it pretty quickly.

And so, she went and got a more seasoned New York person to do that job and I was there for about three or four months. And she said, “What else do you want to do?” She was friends with John Lindsay; I got a job working for the WNYC TV, which at that time was a city owned station. And so, I had a little production assistant kind of job, nothing big.

JW:  John Lindsay, being the mayor. Just want to record that.

MM:  The mayor, right. The first two years, go in, she’s doing a great job in Congress, she’s getting all this attention. My mother passed away in 1970 during the campaign, so I was sort of by myself at this time and working for the city and figuring out what I was going to do. We come up to the 1970 census, and New York state lost population. There’s a redistricting. Bella is redistricted into another congressional district with another liberal congressman named William Fitts Ryan. In fact, four elected congress people were vying for two congressional seats.

There was another race in the Bronx that had the same thing, and this time it was the ugly internecion warfare of liberal politics. There’s a primary, and Bella loses the primary to William Ryan; a June primary. I helped out a little in the campaign. She calls me up and says, “You want to come to Washington and help and help out?” And I said, “Yes, but I’ll come after Labor Day.” I was going to give myself some time off. “I’ll come after Labor Day.”

I thought to myself that I would have a four-month head start on finding another job for people who are going to come down in January. I come to Washington Labor Day of 1972 with a suitcase and a clock radio, and Bella has said she’ll have a place for me to stay. That turned out not quite to be true. She was going to have one of her other young staffers put me up, who already had three roommates and there was no room. But I had other friends and so I came to Washington. I stayed as a border in a friend’s house.

About three weeks after I got here, Bill Ryan dies of cancer. He had had cancer all along. They hadn’t talked about it. So now Bella becomes, through the party process, the nominee and is reelected in 1972. I’m in Washington, I’m working for her, and I’m now sort of being the press secretary and legislative assistant. Thinking that I had the job for four months, and now here I am in the thick of it. And it was terrific. All of that work, being across so many disciplines in college, prepared me for the breadth of things that you could do in Congress. So, 1972, she is elected. I get to work on a wonderful variety of issues, and again, it was the sense of having to prepare and work on anything.

ERISA, is this Employment Retirement Income Security Act. It was one of the first bills that had a joint referral. It went to both the Ways and Means and the ED and Labor committee, as opposed to creating a special committee. It was created, for a little bit of economic and political history, because of the failure of Studebaker Motors. Guys who had worked; mostly men, had worked for Studebaker for 20 and 30 years, their company fails, they are left without a pension. And that was really the impetus to do some sort of pension reform.

What Bella saw, perhaps from her labor background and her feminist background, is that women in the labor force had a particularly different set of time criteria than men. And that we should in some ways, take account of that in pension work. So, I’m 26 years old, and she says, “Go figure this out. What are we going to do?” So, I learned more than I ever needed to and should have, on things like vesting and pensions and time served and all of this. And we realized that the original legislation only started counting vesting at age 25 and above. So, any work you did before age 25 didn’t count towards vesting. Well, who does that hurt? It hurts working people who go into the labor market at 18.

JW:  Right.

MM:  And it hurts women who go into the market and leave. You also had to have been, at that time starting at age 25, working for ten continuous years in order to vest. Okay, who does that hurt? Well, that hurts women who may start working, leave the labor force, and come back. And so, as I delved into this and looked at issues where it would have a negative impact on women, and what to do about it. I brief her a little bit about this one night. Now, Bella, her working hours were eight in the morning, until eleven at night. And that was considered normal.

JW:  So that was your work hours, too, I guess, right?

MM:  I didn’t come in at eight, but, yes. After most of our briefings, somebody would go out and bring dinner in, and we’d eat at the office, and we would go over whatever the issues were for the next day’s legislation or any of the larger issues that we were working on. Or, if she was preparing for a speech or whatever she was doing, that was our serious work time. And so, I would brief her on what I had learned and where we were on this, and she said, “Okay, call so and so.” “Who is he?” “Well, he’s a professor of insurance at Indiana University.” And again, I’m this 26-year-old pishkeh kid. I don’t know anything. And so, I call up, it turns out he’s the leading law professor on pensions. But I’m calling from Bella Abzug’s’ office so they would talk to me.

He gives me a wonderful brief education, and I go back and I say, “Okay, these are the three things that we need to concentrate on.” We want to start vesting at age 21. We didn’t think we could get it down to 18, and we want to make it five years. And there may have been another one about breaks in service, but those are the three issues that we wanted to get into the ERISA legislation. Well, ERISA is so complicated, and I think it’s more complicated than the tax code now, that they were going to bring it out with a closed rule.

JW:  Explain what that is.

MM:  Closed rule means, by order of the House of Representatives, there will be no amendments allowed. So, we have to try to get it in before it gets to the final legislation, because there’s going to be no amendments on the floor. So, we do Dear Colleague letters, we go to the democratic study group, which was sort of the liberal caucus, and we get people to sign up for our three amendments that we know we’re probably not going to be able to offer. But we’ve got momentum going and Bella works the floor, and we work the other people to say, “Come on, guys, this is the feminist view of pension reform. You’ve got to do this.” And we get a bunch of co-signers.

I get a call from the chief of staff of the joint committee, more than I usually get from being just the staffer, and so, I go over and I see this guy and he says, “Pick one.” And I said, “Well, I can’t do that. Let me go back.” I go back and I say, “They’re going to give us one.” I think we said, we’ll do it to age 25 instead of age 30. Whatever it was, 21 instead of 25, 25 instead of 30. But we’re going to do it on the age thing. And I go back and they develop what’s called the colloquy, which is prepared text of one person asking and the other person agreeing of what’s going to be on this little change. It’s an agreed to amendment not requiring a vote so they can do it without the rule.

And so, we get this, and I’m just happy as a clam. This is my really first serious feminist victory. Women’s rights go on. We lost it in about a nanosecond in conference. We had nobody in the Senate who was going to propose it. We could not find a senator, at that time in 1972, ’73 who would have proposed these amendments. By the by, in 1986, they did some amendments to ERISA and all of them that we had proposed, were now in the new bill. I remember in 1986 sending Bella note saying, “It took us 14 years.”

JW:  That’s not that bad, really, having watched Congress a lot. 14 years.

MM:  The person who worked on the Equal Credit Act could probably tell you similar stories. That there were all of these issues that Bella took on that were women’s issues, were working people’s issues, that she was absolutely willing to move the ball forward on each of these issues. And she was such a good team player that they made her a whip. We always used to say that she was the whip for the lefties and crazies.

JW:  Say what a whip is.

MM:  A whip is one of the people in the political leadership of the House. That’s w-h-i-p, who is generally charged with vote counting, and rounding up votes on legislation that needs approval. So, it’s a speaker, majority leader, whip, and then there are generally three or four assistant whips. And Bella was a whip. She was very friendly with Tip O’Neill. She did incredible work on the House Public Works Committee, and she played pork barrel politics with the best of them.

 For every time you walk down a curb on a corner and there is a curb cut, you can thank Bella Abzug. That was the legislation in the 1974 highway bill, back when we would have open markups. When that one was proposed and passed, she said, “There’s one for the good guys.” And the room laughed. She was so well prepared on the Public Works Committee and on government operations and doing the whip work, that she got stuff done that was surprising. She wasn’t just all bluster that the public persona might have seen, but there was the element of the hard work and preparation that did it.

JW:  Well, what was your role in those things?

MM:  I did legislative work, like on the ERISA. I wrote some testimony. If she was going to go testify, I helped prepare the floor file. Bella insisted that she know exactly what was going to happen on the floor on every vote. “What was this vote about? What was the democratic study group’s position? What was the speaker’s position? What had happened on this vote two years earlier,” if it was one that came up every year? I worked on some of the public press releases. I would talk to the press to get her lined up to do press. In those days, there was no such thing in her office, of having any press person other than she speak. So, there was no spokesperson for Bella.

JW:  She did it herself.

MM:  She did it herself. So, she would return phone calls, she would do all that. But if we wanted to get out a press release about some event that occurred, that was the kind of thing I would do. And I would call to alert some of the press people that I had come to know, and so that was my job. I got to work with a great editor in Bella’s friend, Mim Kelber. In those days, we had fax machines. And so, if I would write up something that needed review, I would put it on the fax machine, send it up to New York where Mim Kelber worked, and then she would make her edits and send it back to me.

So, I became a better writer because of working in Bella’s office. Having a good editor early in your career is a wonderful advantage. So that was the other thing I got to do, was to do a little bit of writing. Mim did most of the writing, but I was able to do some and get better editing from that.

Then I left in ’74. I met my now husband. It was a little bit of a burnout. Two and a half years for Bella is like seven years anywhere else. I went to work for a little nonprofit called the American Parents Committee which was funded as a children’s organization, but it was a hard money organization. So, I could do things like – and we were now family and children’s issues – create a scorecard that the 501c3’s couldn’t do. I could do a scorecard.

JW:  Explain what a scorecard is.

MM:  An outside organization will rate and rank members of Congress on issues of concern and give them a ranking. So, the National Rifle Association does a scorecard on votes regarding guns. I don’t know, the ACLU might have it, I don’t know if they’re able to get away with it. There are rules about what you are allowed and not allowed to do, and most nonprofits are not allowed to do that. That’s considered too political. But because the American Parents Committee was a hard money organization, I was allowed to do it.

And so, again, working on some of the issues that I had worked on in Bella’s office which included Title 20, which in Social Security world is the only place you can get a little bit of childcare money, I was able to do things like put childcare, or Title 20 issues, on the scorecard. And I put abortion on as a family and parents’ issue. The issue there, was the Hyde Amendment. The Hyde Amendment was introduced by Henry Hyde, a Republican of Illinois, who went on to become Speaker of the House and then the disgraced Speaker of the House; I always like saying that.

He had proposed legislation that would ban any federal money to be used for abortions. Basically, this was to allow no state to use Medicaid money to pay for abortions. And that was originally passed in, you could go back and maybe you know better, I think it was 1973 when it was first passed, and it has unfortunately been in every appropriations bill since.

Though, you might not know this, Judy, it actually failed once. If you go back and look at the record, it failed once on the first time. And I am told, and I do not know this for a fact, that when he proposed it, and this is an absolute supposition, and reportedly, and whatever other caveats I can put on this story; supposedly Bella walked into the cloak room, which is where outside of the chambers, the House of Representatives, the members, can sit down and there is like an awful hot dog stand and you get a cup of coffee and sit down, and supposedly, she walked into the democratic cloak room and said, “Fellas, if you’ve ever paid for one, you better vote wrong on this one.”

JW:  I love that story.

MM:  Perhaps apocryphal.

JW:  Maybe, but it’s perfect.

MM:  And it did. It failed once, and then he brought it back up and it passed, and it’s passed every 50 years since. That was the Hyde Amendment. But I was able in my scorecard, to put a vote on the Hyde Amendment as a parents and family issue, and was able to do that. The thing that I liked most about that, is that you then wanted to put your scorecard out to members so that they could promote it. This was how it was used. I could go to a member of Congress and present them or their senior staff, a nice plaque that we had made up that said, “Scored 100% on the 1975 American Parents Committee Achievers Award”, whatever we called it.

Actually, I would write press releases so they could just put them out themselves. And in one of the cases, I remember I organized it, and I said, “The Best Vote Among the Big Ten.” And so, I went to all the members of Congress whose district was in the college football conference of the big ten. This was a way that they could get a little hook that might get them in the press a little bit more, and that if there was any pushback, they could say, “Oh, well, look here. It was all these other midwestern members of Congress who got these, where I was the best kid on that, the best member of Congress on that.” So, I did that.

Bella had asked me when I was on her staff, to be the liaison to the very young National Women’s Political Caucus. And so, I met all of the staff people from the National Women’s Political Caucus, many of them are still around, some of them who are on your list. Jane Pearson, and Betsy Crone, and a bunch of those. I was the liaison from Bella’s office to them. So that’s how I got to know them, and many of them became good friends and have remained friends and colleagues since then.

I was doing some work there with American Parents Committee, keeping up with the Women’s Political Caucus, and then I had volunteered to do a briefing for Barbara Mikulski, who was running for Congress in Baltimore. I had said that; I guess I knew her through the Women’s Political Caucus, it must have been that way; that I would put together a bunch of people to bring her up to speed on congressional issues.

She was a city councilwoman in Baltimore and wasn’t familiar with the Washington national issues. Obviously, she knew the Baltimore issues really well. And so, we came in, and I brought in a woman from Kaiser Permanente to do a health briefing. My husband did economics and tax, I did some of the social services issues on the federal level, and there may have been two other people there. But it was a good briefing for somebody who, I think was in preparation for a debate that she was going to have.

So, if they asked her questions with a more Washington orientation, she would feel comfortable in answering those. And she went on to win, and then she asked me to be her chief of staff. Or in the old days as we were titled, an administrative assistant. So, I was Barbara Mikulski’s first AA in 1976. She got tons and tons of applications, and we found a number of people. The Washington staff I hired; I originally offered Anne Kolker the job of being her legislative assistant. Anne turned me down because of the young children that she had, and Anne recommended Joanne Howes. So, Joanne was legislative assistant to Barbara Mikulski in Barbara’s first term.

In the ’76 convention, we’ll skip back a little bit through the Women’s Political Caucus. I was working on the Women’s Political Caucus Platform Committee representation, and Joanne was doing the rules committee, or whatever they call it, the procedure committee, in 1976. Well, she did much better than I did. It was Joanne and Millie Jeffrey and a bunch of other people who got the equal division rule initiated in 1976.

The rules of the Democratic Party require that all delegates for whoever is running for president, all proposed delegates, must have an equal number between men and women. And so, at every convention after 1976, every state delegation had an equal number of men and women. It changed the nature of the party and changed the clout of women to do that. That occurred in 1976, and Joanne Howes and Billy Jeffries and a bunch of other people were very instrumental in getting that to happen. I worked for Barbara Mikulski. She fired me after four months.

JW:  Wait, I need that story. But first, didn’t you have a role at the ’76 convention?

MM:  Not me, no. I was there. We did not do very well in getting the platform to be more liberal and more feminine.

JW:  You didn’t do that well, I see.

MM:  No. Basically, Stu Eisenstadt who was Carter’s guy on the platform committee, controlled the whole operation. There were a few of us, some of the union people and the Women’s Political Caucus, and some of the Blacks, were trying to move the platform a little bit more over, and we didn’t get that. It was basically Carter’s operation. But they did do better over in the rules committee than we did in the platform committee.

JW:  I see. Okay, so now let’s go back to you got fired after four months.

MM:  Yes, I got fired after four months. I think it was because I expected Barbara Mikulski to work as hard as Bella. And Barbara Mikulski was not prepared to work as hard as Bella. So, I had had a standard of what a member of Congress did. I only had one member of Congress that I had worked for. So that was my standard. And so that included being prepared for everything that was coming up and having a floor file and briefing her on what every vote was going to be and getting her ready for every committee meeting. That was not what she was most interested in. I also was not that interested in office procedure or bureaucracy. There were seven of us, four of whom shared one large office with me, and the other three were next door. I did not think I needed to have staff meetings.

JW:  Since you talk to each other every day, I assume.

MM:  And hear each other all the time. There was no privacy in this room. I knew what was going on. Everybody else knew what was going on. But Barbara came from her background of 16 years of catholic education and social work. Procedure was important. And so, she let me go, and that was fine. She was very generous as to severance. She came to my wedding. Bella came to my wedding. It was all very copacetic. I think that would be my version of why she fired me. She would probably have a different version. She went on to hire terrific people. Anne Lewis worked for Barbara as administrative assistant, and then probably her best hire ever was Wendy Sherman, who had that position. I don’t know if Wendy ever worked in the House side or just in the Senate side, but Barbara had terrific people working for her.

JW:  Yes, she had a reputation to be very difficult to work for.

MM:  Both of those women. I also didn’t mention I briefly worked for Liz Holtzman as well.

JW:  In New York.

MM:  In New York in her campaign.

JW:  I see.

MM:  Not in her congressional. I said, “You know, I could work for anybody. I worked for Bella, Liz Holtzman and Barbara Mikulski.” With Bella, you either got her and could work with her, and you could work for a long time for her, or it didn’t work quickly. So, there are people who work for Bella for years, including me and others. So, it was either on or off. But Barbara was, as I said, you know, I was the first of many.

JW:  Yes. I’m sure that’s true.

MM:  So, it was the start of the Carter administration in 1977. I did not want to be the assistant to the assistant secretary for cats and dogs without a law degree. That’s what I would have been. Lots of people I knew were at the HEW. The former head of the UAW lobbying group, Doug, whose name just went out of my head, but was the assistant secretary for legislation, and lots of people I knew were over there. I wasn’t interested in doing that.

I had been a little bit of an investor. Bella’s husband, Martin, was a stockbroker, and I’d actually talked to him. I’d been an investor through the Women’s Political Caucus. I met a woman who was a broker at Ferriss and Company, and when Barbara fired me, I called Royce Cohen at Ferriss and Company, and I said, “How do I get into your line of work?” And she said, “Oh, go with one of the big companies. They do training.” I said, “Ok.”

I grew up in New York and one of the long-standing ad campaigns of the New York Times was a big display ad that said, “I got my job through the New York Times.” I thought that’s how people got jobs. I’d never had to apply for a job, they found me before this. So, I look in the Washington Post and there’s an ad from Merrill Lynch. And at the bottom of the ad, it said, “We encourage applications from women and minorities.” To which I said, “Alright, they lost an EEOC suit.” And so, I applied for, and got a job at Merrill Lynch and found a career, and was there for 40 years.

JW:  Wow. What was your role?

MM:  I was a financial advisor to individuals, families, small businesses and nonprofits. But was able with that to, in a funny way, leverage my knowledge of things like ERISA that I learned there, and my knowledge of organizations. So that I had lots of organizations as clients. And so that kept my hand in doing it, and if not the organizations, I certainly had a lot of the staff people as clients. And so that kept me close to the women’s movement and the other activities that you still want to do. And then had the resources to become a donor and do other things with some of the other organizations like Planned Parenthood.

JW:  Yes. So that was what I was going to ask you next. What were the other things you wanted to do? I mean, you wanted to support the women’s movement and other things. What kinds of things did you get involved in?

MM:  Well, it was promoting women in my profession. It is still a profession that is dominated by men. It is still a profession that has too much of a locker room mentality and I had worked very hard to overcome that. I formed an organization – it didn’t last very long – of women brokers from all the firms. And like most businesses, nobody ever wants to talk about pay, and money, and how you’re paid. And so, by going across to other firms and then saying, “Bring us your pay schedule,” we were able to see what the difference was between, at the time, Payne Webber and Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch and Shearson and, “Oh, well, that’s really interesting you do that.” So that was very useful.

I worked on trying to recruit women into the business because it is a career where by and large you are rewarded for your effort. And it is still; little less so now, an individual effort. So unlike in many organizations where how well you do depends on how well your team does, or your unit, or your division. In my industry, how well you do determines how well you do. And that’s very rewarding if you’re a good worker. Excellence and ability can be rewarded more directly than in other organizations where you’re part of a larger unit. I am in favor of commission pay. I think incentive pay matters. And so, I was trying to encourage women to get into this. I think it’s a wonderful job for women where you can make good money and not have to travel. And so, for women with kids, it’s a terrific career.

JW:  You probably can do it from home now.

MM:  Yes, there are some legal requirements as to what the firms must do for the ability to supervise, but yes. They come to your house and look at your setup. But that said, it is wonderful. So, I did that. I was part of the class action suit against Merrill Lynch for the kinds of discrimination that did exist. The somewhat old boys’ networks issues that came up, and I encouraged the other women to participate. And for those who were worried about retribution and retaliation, the old girls network helped.

I guess it was up during the Obama administration, and it was assigned to Judge Urbina, a federal judge in Chicago. I told my women colleagues, I said, “You know, all you have to do is write a letter that said that there was retaliation, just directly to the federal judge. And you’ll be fine. There will be no retaliation after you complain to the federal judge.” And I said, “But let me just double check.”

And so, being the old girls’ network, I called a friend who was acting undersecretary of labor and said, “Tell me about this federal judge.” And she said, “Oh, he’s terrific. He’s on the shortlist for the court.” I said, “Okay.” And I went back to everybody and said, “Don’t worry about it. If there’s any issue, you go ahead and do it.” And we got reasonably good settlements. And more importantly, we were able to get procedural changes.

The issue was, when a broker leaves to go to another firm, that person’s clients are up for grabs. In the old days, they might have been handed out to the manager’s friends. Under the new system, post the class action suit, there were procedures for the distribution of accounts. They were transparent, and above board, and you could see who got what. Now bigger producers were given the first choices, but it was known.

And then you could go down the list and see they didn’t get them all, and there were criteria for what order accounts were going to be distributed in. And so those were the kinds of small victories that, being part of the women’s movement, was able to come through professionally, in the otherwise world of finance and wealth management.

JW:  Well, it sounds like you were still doing politics. A little differently, not on the house floor, but you were still doing politics.

MM:  What I learned from the Hill, and Bella, was that it’s the ability to convince people. You have to be able to convince people to do something. That’s what politics is all about. Convince them to vote in a certain way, convince them to sponsor legislation, convince them to oppose legislation. That’s what we do is about. And professionally, being in wealth management, I’ve got to figure out what would be good for the client and convince them that I have their best interest at heart. “This is what it is, and you get to pick, but here’s what I recommend.” And so that ability to convince and sell is what politics is about. And to do it in a way that promotes, equality is such a loaded word, but promotes fairness, is what I’ve tried to do for the last 50 years.

JW:  Well, it sounds like you’ve done a good job.

MM:  Thank you.

JW:  No question. So, my last question is, has your involvement in the movement affected the rest of your career? And you really just said that. You carried through the ideals from the women’s movement from the second wave, all the way through, in various ways, through your other career path.

MM:  Are we counting the first wave to be the Cady Stanton and that crowd? So that’s the first wave?

JW:  Right.

MM:  Okay. I just wanted to make sure.

JW:  Yes. They’re the first wave. We’re the second wave.

MM:  Okay. Yesterday, I went with a little group I’ve put together, once an organizer, always an organizer. We go to a different place once a month and then follow it with a lunch. These are places that we’ve never been to or haven’t been to in a long time. And so yesterday, it was the Frederick Douglass House over in Anacostia. Wonderful tour. Interesting place. Obviously, he’s a fascinating man. In his study, there are two pictures that are about the same size. One of Lincoln and one of Cady Stanton.

JW:  Very interesting.

MM:  And I did not know that Frederick Douglass was at the Seneca Falls Convention and signed the declaration. I didn’t know that. Or certainly didn’t remember it if I ever knew it. So, what goes around comes around.