THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Mary K. Reilly

“Early activism instilled in me such a strong sense of what it meant to be a sisterhood.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, April 2025

MR:  My name is Mary Reilly, Mary Kathleen Reilly. I was born in Chicago, Illinois.

JW:  And the date?

MR:  October 21, 1951.

JW:  Tell us a little about like your childhood, your ethnic background, where you lived, siblings, stuff like that.

MR:  I was one of five. I was smack dab in the middle, the well acclaimed middle child. And I own every bit of that in my family. We were a middle class family, Irish Catholic. My parents were definitely not social progressives. But they were Democrats. We grew up in a great neighborhood. Part of a parish community that really defined community for us as we were growing up. My, parents were very involved in that we had a lot of religious influence in our family. And you know, to me it was a really pretty great childhood. I mean, I know I was privileged, but it was a pretty great childhood.

JW:  That’s great. So when did you become aware of the Women’s Movement?

MR:  I was aware generally when I was in high school, but not really aware and engaged until I went to college.

JW:  Okay, and where was that? 

MR:  I went to the University of Dayton in Ohio.

JW:  So did you get involved right away? What did you get involved in?

MR:  I think for me, I think for many people, but I know for me, the opportunity to go away to college to break those strong ties with home and everything that represented was a terrific opportunity to just look around and see that the world was a lot bigger than the bubble I’d grown up in and to really feel the independence of pursuing what was important to me and of interest to me.

So my freshman year, it was kind of just a gradual unfolding of all that and it’s pretty intense. That experience of all of a sudden you’re on your own and you’re encountering all different kinds of people and all different kinds of points of view. And so I was gradually exposed and drawn towards the activism that was going on, on campus. There was still a lot of anti war stuff that was going on, civil rights stuff. And I got gradually more engaged with those things. And then towards the end of my freshman year I started seeing that women that were involved in the civil rights movement and also the anti war movement were pretty much relegated to secondary roles and certainly not playing leadership roles.

I started to question that and started to get really kind of restless with that and frustrated. And so then I started thinking more broadly about what is happening with women and what’s important to us, what should be important to us. How can we stand up for our place so that we have a seat at the table too. And that’s when I really became more engaged in what was going on in the women’s movement and started doing a lot of reading on my own. I was one of the original subscribers to Ms. Magazine.

I still have the original copy of Our Bodies Ourselves. I’m so glad I have those because those are really foundational documents of the movement. It’s just incredible to think about that all these years later. I started getting more involved in that. And in the city of Dayton, there was something called Dayton Women’s Liberation. And they were sponsoring consciousness raising groups. And hopefully most of the people that will hear this know what those are, but they’re really opportunities to bring groups of women together and to talk about what we care about, what’s important to us and what are the obstacles and what’s getting in the way. How do we deal with them?

And then to share on a real personal level because there are just really frustrating things going on in our personal lives that we wanted to share too, that were certainly personal but also political. Several friends of mine and I decided we were going to sign up to participate in one of these groups. And we did. And for the next, I would say, two to three years – I can’t remember if it went through the time I graduated or not, but there’s a good chance it did. We were meeting regularly with a group of women who were not associated with the campus at all.

They were women living in the community. They were older than we were for the most part. Some of them were working, some of them were raising kids, some of them were doing both. One of them went to law school at one point during our time together. It was an incredible experience because [it] just drew me out. It just drew me further out of the kind of cocoon I’d been living in. And then the cocoon that was the university life.

Just talking to people who are living their lives in the real world and encountering a lot of the same things that we were and also helping us get a sense of what’s in the future for us and how are we going to deal with the things that they’re dealing with in the roles they had. So that was a great experience for me personally and fostered my interest and my commitment and the kinds of things that would make me engage more fully in the movement.

JW:  What year did you graduate college?

MR:  I graduated in ‘73. In my junior year of college, I had an opportunity to participate in a self directed learning program. I had the opportunity to create my own curriculum for that period of time and receive credit for it. Of course it was under the mentorship and of an advisor. And one of the things I chose to do was to do deeper research into the women’s movement. I was an economics major, but I wanted to study feminist economy. How does the economy play into women’s lives and how do we make that more supportive and available to women so that women don’t have to get their husband’s permission to open a bank account and that kind of thing, which was still kind of happening around securing debt.

I developed this curriculum for myself. It was a lot of independent study, but it was also focused on what could I do in the place where I was at that time of my life. And one of the things that I got the idea to do was to create a women’s center on campus. We had nothing for women, and we also did not have any women’s studies per se on campus. So I decided to create, with the help of friends – I certainly couldn’t have done that alone – a place called the University Women’s Center. And initially it was just a space for women. It was a space to hold women. People could come in, drop in, hang out. We had a daily log. Somebody could just pop in for a minute and write anything they wanted to in the log. This is how I’m feeling today. This is how some jerk treated me. I’m going to go crazy with these final exams, whatever it might be. And so it was that kind of a place.

We had some programming where people would come together and talk about specific issues. We tried to keep information available to women about what was going on in the city and resources that were available. It turned out to be for the women on Campus at the time who were interested. I mean, obviously every woman wasn’t. I think it turned out to be a really valuable resource because it was just a place that was ours and we could create a sacred space there.

Two important things happened there that really guided me. One day we came in and found that someone had – because the center was pretty much open all the time, there wasn’t really anything of value in it that somebody could take. Nor did we have those issues quite as much as we have them today. And some woman had come in and just one of those pop in and pop out kind of things. And she had written that she’d been raped day before. And for not all of us, but for most of us that was our first close encounter with rape. And that to me really took the wind out of my sails. Because that was bringing these issues very close to home. It was obviously an important situation that we had on our hands. I mean, this woman needed our support. This woman needed women. We knew who she was.

JW:  You did? Oh, I was going to ask that. She identified herself?

MR:  We knew she was. Not at first, but then she came forward and we just tried to hold her both physically and emotionally. We put her in touch with resources, helped her find resources. So that was an earth shattering moment for us. Again, a lot of us came from pretty sheltered backgrounds. We had not encountered a lot of that. But we realized this is the world and this is life and this is our reality. So that was a real kind of watershed moment for a lot of us.

The other thing we did as part of that center, we decided we would hold a women’s weekend on campus. It was a two day, both educational and celebratory opportunity to bring people in from the community, not just on campus, to examine issues that were important to us. Free exchange of ideas and information, a little bit of entertainment. And then the highlight for most of us was that we were able to bring Shirley Chisholm in as our keynote speaker. This was the year after she ran for president.

We raised money for it. We went to the administration; we asked them to help us pay for it. They did. And she was quite a draw. We did get people from all over the community that wanted to hear her talk. That was a great experience. I got to spend some time with her. I got to introduce her. I was up on the stage with her, and she was incredibly inspiring and very strong and very determined and didn’t seem like her run for the presidency had been a setback to her at all. She was as determined as ever and talking about what we have to fight for and very inspiring to the group.

The other thing I got to do, given my independent work, was to investigate the opportunity to develop a women’s studies program on campus. I went to the administration, the Provost, and I pitched the idea and managed to get them to pay for me to travel to the west coast and visit women’s studies centers at other universities. I went to San Diego. I was, of course, in Berkeley. I was in San Francisco, because those were the most at the time. And remember, we didn’t have Internet resources to help us research. So at the time, those were the ones that were most engaged and active that I knew of.

And then there were some other ones back east, and I was able to get in touch with them. I was able to take that information and bring it back to the campus and put together a construct of an idea to create a program. I talked to women faculty members to see who would want to engage and whether there would be interest in it. I’m doing all this as my tenure on campus is winding down. So, what the women faculty felt they could do and wanted to do was to offer specific courses within their own departments. There was never anything that evolved from that, that became a woman’s studies program per se.

However, I had the opportunity just a couple years ago to go back and look at the website for the university, and I found that you can now minor and maybe also major in women’s studies there. So [after] a very long gestation period, it worked. But something happened. I like to think that was a seed that was planted and over time just finally flourished.

JW:  Can you tell me what were some of the courses that were initiated back then, like, in economics or history or whatever?

MR:  There was a literature studies course that was devoted to women authors. There was a women’s history course that was created. A lot of these faculty members had been trying to in their own way, present this material anyway, but all of a sudden they had an opportunity to do a very focused and kind of almost exclusive look at these issues. I don’t remember anything happening in the economics department or in the business school or anything like that. But I do know in the liberal arts, there were.

There may have been in the humanities, I think there may have been a philosophy course and a theology course, women in religion. And that’s because we had a very receptive priest on campus that was teaching in theology, and he kind of got excited about that idea. And I don’t know what the full range of classes are now that they have available. I know for sure you can at least minor and possibly even major in women’s studies.

JW:  That’s amazing. I mean, obviously it has taken off around the country in many schools, but you were there at the beginning.

MR:  There were people definitely ahead of us.

JW:  But you took it and ran with it.

MR:  I think the difference is a Midwest religious university. I was going to San Diego State and I was going to Berkeley. Of course, the big public schools are going to be more inclined to do that. But it wasn’t a slam dunk bringing that kind of an institution. This could be something worthwhile. And when they’re giving you money to do something they don’t do it because they’re eager to waste their money. They were open.

JW:  Right. They want to expand, get more students and that sort of thing.

MR:  Exactly.

JW:  What did you do after college?

MR:  After college, I went to graduate school in Pittsburgh. I got to Pittsburgh having been involved in so many of these things. One of the first questions I asked myself was, where are the women here? How do I get involved? How do I get engaged? So I just started looking for things posted on campus and trying to get phone numbers and that kind of thing. I found a women’s health collective that was operating there, and so I gave them a call.

My primary goal initially was I want to connect with women, whatever they’re doing, I want to get in that space. So, I called this group and I was able to talk to this woman who’s a primary contact and she said, yes, we’d love to have you. We have a meeting coming up. This is the date, this is the place. And she said it’s a really exciting program. She said we’re going to teach each other how to use speculum. And I’m on the other end of the phone. …I’m going to do speculum?

JW:  What is a speculum?

MR:  I knew that. But I thought, I’m not sure that I’m quite ready to jump off at that place right now. I think maybe I will look elsewhere. I totally support that, but on a personal level, I was just a little bit intimidated by that and a little shy about that. And I just said, maybe if I’d known you all for a couple years, I might feel a little more comfortable. I thought to myself, you’re all strangers. I’ve only been here a month. I’m not sure I’m ready for that.

I kept looking and I found something called Pittsburgh Action Against Rape. And you know, this hearkens back a little bit to the experience in college where I saw some of the raw reality of that and I got involved with them as a hotline worker and as a victim advocate. I would go to court with people, I would go to the police with people if that’s what they wanted to do. I would check in on them just to see how they were doing and see what kind of support they might need.

And so I did that for a few years and then I eventually became chair of the board of that organization. So that was kind of my engagement when I was in Pittsburgh. And then, of course, just then finding my people too, getting to hang out with people that were like minded and have that kind of informal support group was really, really important to me. I ended up getting married in Pittsburgh. I had my first child in Pittsburgh. 15 years after I arrived there, I moved to Maryland. And I’m sort of in the process of my childbearing phase, so I had another child here. I got an appointment to the Maryland Commission for Women. So I served on that state commission for, I think it was three years. And then when I left that I had two little kids, I had a full time job.

JW:  Let’s hear about the commission. What, what things happened when you were on it?

MR:  I was a little disappointed with the experience. If I could back up for a minute, another thing I did before I left Pittsburgh was through a series of events. The mayor decided he wanted to start a task force for women, and he asked me to chair it. At one point, I had worked for city government, I worked for the mayor. I knew the mayor. He asked me to chair it. And that task force ended up having five different committees. Public safety, education, employment, child care. There’s another one.

And it was the job of each of those task forces to develop a plan around their designated area. And we brought women in, and some men from all over the city who had expertise in these areas. They were to help develop a plan and hold public meetings and get the input of the community. Based on their own expertise and that input, develop a plan. And so each one of those committees developed plans.

A number of things happened in the city as a result. For example, in the public safety group, we got city council to require that all public garages had to paint the inside a certain bright color and to elevate the lighting they made available. Women were really afraid to go into the public garages in the city. So we were able to move that along so that it became a safer experience for women when they were alone getting their cars.

We got some big organizations to act as the financial conduit for smaller groups that were trying to do childcare and communities and provide those kinds of things. We got some very large educational institutions, University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon, the smaller schools, Chatham College for Women, Carlo College to start addressing issues of child care on their campus. Some meaningful things happened and what I saw from that opportunity was because we were close to the ground, meaning we were a local level government, we had access to the decision makers, and we could move things along. That was a good experience. And after I left Pittsburgh, that morphed into a Pittsburgh Commission for Women.

So the idea was create the task force, see where it goes and then we’ll see what happens with it. And it just so happened that we decided to leave Pittsburgh and shortly thereafter it, it did become the Commission for Women, which was great, very exciting. But back to Maryland and the State Commission for Women. It may be because I had this experience with this local commission and I had worked in local government in Pittsburgh, I appreciated being close to the ground.

As I said earlier, I just felt being on a state level commission was just too far removed from real issues, real people. I mean, very good intent. I don’t mean to denigrate any of it or the people that served on it, but for me, given my background, [it] wasn’t immediate enough. It was conceptual, it was policy, all good things. But I didn’t really get a sense that the governor’s office was all that plugged in and I didn’t see a lot coming from it. That was basically the reason I left, because if I was going to spend that time having little kids and a job and being on this commission, I wanted to be more effective. It’s not to say that they didn’t get some good things done. It was around for a while before I got here and a while after I left. So again, good intentioned people and I know some things were happening. It just was not immediate enough for me.

JW:  So this was during the 80s by now?

MR:  Yes.

JW:  Obviously your interest and zeal continued.

MR:  Yes and I tried to stay engaged when we had little kids and when I was working. But I think there are two issues. Well, there are several issues. I mean, one, having little kids and working is…enough said. But on top of that, we were also living in the suburbs and there was not – there is now, but there wasn’t a lot of activism in the suburbs, so it wasn’t easily accessible.

JW:  Which suburbs? I’m very curious.

MR:  Howard County. Now that’s changed. I am very involved in Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense. And there’s a very strong local group in Howard County. I stayed active in women’s things. I did stay active where I could find opportunities on other political and civil society issues. I’m a member of Indivisible. I’ve been out on the streets a lot already since January.

JW:  I’m sure I’ll run into you one of these places.

MR:  If we keep getting over a hundred thousand people in Washington, which I am so excited about, it’d be great if that happened. But we could arrange it. We could prearrange next time. We’ll do that. I’m so hopeful. It’s interesting because some people will say, oh, I just can’t do that, it’s too much, I have to pull out, I can’t pay attention to it. And my feeling is I can’t not pay attention to it. Going to a Baltimore Indivisible meeting and seeing 200 people there.

JW:  Really?

MR:  Yes. First of all, it gives me comfort. It’s like being in a support group.

JW:  I know what you mean. Like, okay, I’m not alone in this.

MR:  Right. And being active to me is the way I cope with the stuff that’s going on. Just knowing that when it hit the fan, at least I stood up. And I know everybody isn’t built that way, and they’re not compelled, but I’m compelled. I feel compelled. I feel that I’d be going against my basic nature if I didn’t do it.

JW:  That’s great. So as we close, can you think about what that early involvement in the women’s movement affected your later life overall? Maybe personally, maybe professionally? Certainly, you’re still an activist.

MR:  I would say that early activism instilled in me such a strong sense of what it meant to be a sisterhood. My attitude about women and my relationship to women. My spiritual bend now points toward Buddhism and the notion that we’re all connected and there is no separate self and those kinds of things. But much earlier than that, some light went on and said, I am women. We are all together in this. Even today, if I meet a woman, I feel an immediate connection to her. I may not know what it is, and she may have no idea about it at all. But I’m always inclined, when I meet a woman to immediately have a positive view of who she is and to feel a sense of identification, such a strong sense of identification.

And that’s what that early stuff did for me. And I’ll tell you; I couldn’t have had a better life lesson. It’s carried me through so much. It’s helped me with my friendships with women. It helped me as a professional in dealing with women in the workplace and understanding what it means to be mutually supportive and not dragging one another down, but building each other up. That was definitely an early lesson, on a personal level. And I would say on a professional level, although I would say it’s still a way to go on this, it gave me more confidence. It helped me stand up for myself. It helped me recognize when I was not being treated fairly and to speak up as much as I felt I could. I wouldn’t have traded any of those experiences.

JW:  Wonderful. Any final comment before we close?

MR:  No. I’m just so grateful that you wanted to talk to me. To think that I did anything that was important in the context of all the amazing things that so many women have done. But anything worth even knowing makes me very humbled and grateful to you for allowing me.

JW:  Believe me, my pleasure it has been fabulous.