THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Paula Braveman

“I had no clue about women’s oppression until I started being involved with women who had a clue. It just put a lens there that never has gone away.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, May 2025

PB:  My name is Paula Anne Braveman, and I was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on July 11th, 1948. And to be more precise, I was born in Dorchester.

JW:  Briefly, tell us about your childhood, like siblings, ethnicity, different influences in your childhood.

PB:  During my childhood, I’d say my family’s means were very, very limited. Fact is we were poor. When I was born, my family was living in JP, and JP was not trendy. Let me tell.

JW:  We should say Jamaica Plane for the audience. It was not trendy in those days.

PB:  Definitely not trendy. In fact, I think where we lived was torn down, not too long after we left it. The first couple of years of my life [we] lived in a slum, and then my family became upwardly mobile, and we lived in trailer parks. As my father tried to set himself up in a business, [we] lived in different places all across the Eastern half of the US, and ultimately settled in Miami, Florida. And because of the GI Bill, my parents went not from rags or to riches, but from very, very limited means to middle class. And I felt very secure growing up. But I actually didn’t feel middle class. That was kind of an aspiration of my family.

I guess we felt, I don’t think we had the terms for it, but I think we might have said lower middle class, but I felt secure in any case. My father hadn’t finished the 10th grade just because he was so rebellious and couldn’t stand having anybody tell him what to do. My mother finished high school and would have given her eye teeth to go to college, but her family couldn’t afford that. So she worked as a secretary until she got married to my father. My brother, Barry, who’s a year and a half older than I was not well physically a lot of the time growing up and did very poorly in school. And as a young adult became psychotic. It’s been a sad story since then with him.

JW:  Wow. A lot going on. Well, when did you get interested in the women’s movement?

PB:  Well, I went to Swarthmore College. My main mentor there was somebody named Daniel Bennett. I was majoring in philosophy. Dan actually tried to interest me in focusing on the women’s movement, becoming a part of – or what he had in mind was becoming a leader of the women’s movement. And, at that time, I wasn’t really drawn to it. Though I first became engaged in the women’s movement in the couple of years after I graduated from college, I think, and had to sort of connect. I think it was a combination of connecting the dots from my own experience and experience of other women and doing some reading that opened my eyes.

The first, I’d say, example or the most outward example of involvement in the women’s movement for me was when I was living in Portland, Oregon, and worked with a large group of women to start a women’s clinic. But it was one of those… It was a self-help women’s clinic. None of us were health professionals. None of us knew anything about health. The focus was really on giving women access to the materials and experiences that would let them understand and take more control over their own bodies. I’d say that was my principle involvement with the women’s movement for several years. While I was living in Portland, where I lived for four years, and then I moved to San Francisco go to medical school.

JW:  Well, before we go there, what was your role at the self-help clinic?

PB:  I was just one of the several women who were trying to develop materials and doing a lot of talking about consciousness raising.

JW:  I see. And introducing women who were new to the whole idea. Is that it?

PB:  Yeah. I don’t think we ever really succeeded in going beyond the circles of the women who had started out as left identified. Certainly, our vision was that this was going to be something that would be a contribution for women, you know, certainly across the economic spectrum. I don’t think we ever really succeeded in that. There were some women in our group who had more disadvantaged backgrounds, but we all identified as leftists to start.

JW:  What kind of services were delivered?

PB:  It was really classes, but minimizing the didactic, so classes with very little lecture. It was also referrals, being available to make referrals to different services. A lot of time finding out what the different resources were in Portland for women for different issues.

JW:  I see. Then you moved to San Francisco for medical school.

PB:  Right. I was very, very frightened that going to medical school was going to turn me into somebody I really wouldn’t like.

JW:  What year was this?

PB:  1975. I was very conservative politically growing up. I think my parents were very antiracist, but I think they were… we didn’t talk politics much, but I think they were pretty conservative, too. Anyhow, I was politicized by being on a campus in the 1970s. I felt like it was very important that I be involved in some ongoing activities that had continuity with what I had been doing before. One of those, and there were two main activities I was involved in. One of those two was being involved with a women’s clinic.

JW:  I see. Even when you went to San Francisco, you got involved with a women’s clinic?

PB:  Right. This one was further along. It had already been established, I think, when I got involved. Also, I knew that as a medical student, I was not going to in a leadership role. I would just be in a supportive role. There was a lot going on. Women were teaching how to do self-exams. It was that whole phenomenon. The other involvement that I wanted to get involved [with were] activities that were in coordination with the worker struggles on campus. So, very active unions. That’s how Ellen Schafer and I met. She was a leader and asked me. I forget how we initially met. Maybe we even met at a demonstration. Anyhow, what we forged was a worker-student alliance against the Bakke decision.

JW: Against what? I missed it.

PB: The Bakke decision was one of the decisions where somebody who didn’t get into medical school, a white man who didn’t get into medical school at UC Davis sued the University of California for reverse discrimination. In many ways, it ended or at least severely constrained any affirmative action efforts.

JW:  Because he won the case.

PB:  He won the case, yeah. That was actually, more of my activist time went to that than to the women’s clinic. But both were important.

JW:  You were doing a lot of stuff, though, during medical school, it sounds like.

PB:  Yes, that was important to me. It was to keep a hold of my identity as somebody who cared about social justice.

JW:  Then you went into a specialty, right?

PB:  It’s a specialty that specializes in not being a specialty. It’s family and community medicine.

JW:  Oh, I see.

PB:  It’s the doctor for the whole family. The whole family. For the whole family. I did like that idea, but that’s not the main thing that attracted me to it. The main attraction was that there was a whole very strong movement in family and community medicine that was very local about social justice issues.

JW:  Like what? Tell me, how did that relate?

PB:  During that period, there was the Medical Committee for Human Rights. There were countless struggles and actions, and people from family medicine were always there in the front lines, providing the support and not shying away from stating their commitments. And that was so unlike any other field in medicine. And specifically, some very progressive people had started a family medicine residency in San Francisco at the county hospital, and they were just very vocal about serving the disenfranchised and the disadvantaged and supportive of the…well, not just very supportive of the community health center movement. They were really a part of that. I wanted to go to that. I wanted to go to that program.

JW:  Yeah, I can see that. You continued in that field, your whole career?

PB:  Yes. Although I actually stopped practicing medicine, clinical medicine, quite a while ago, in 1995, because at that point, my research had really taken off, and I had become very involved with the World Health Organization in Geneva, and I had the opportunity to cohort, to co-lead a global initiative on health equity with WHO staff. But I couldn’t do that and still be practicing.

JW:  You’d be busy.

PB:  Yeah, it was being busy, and it was also that I couldn’t reserve the slots. I mean, you have to make a commitment as a clinician. You’re going to be there. But if you’re involved in something else where you have to be accessible, you know, for meetings and emergencies that come up and you can’t keep to an inflexible schedule. At that point, I was really excited, particularly about the work I was doing with WHO.

JW:  You continued that for a while?

PB:  Yes, I did. I did for several years. I’m still doing some work with WHO now, but it’s very limited. It’s just as a, I don’t even want to say consultant because I don’t get paid for it.

JW:  Maybe to sum up, how do you think those early years, feminist’s clinic, consciousness raising, how did that affect you throughout your life?

PB:  I think that I had no clue about women’s oppression until I started being involved with women who had a clue. It just put a lens there that never has gone away. It’s sort of shocking to think that it wasn’t there before, especially when I think about my parents’ relationship. My father was so autocratic, you know. My mother would bring him [his] slippers, but I didn’t get it. I didn’t get it. Yeah, I think that it was really through involvement in the women’s movement that I became more aware of why there was a women’s movement, why there needed to be a women’s movement, and also a better understanding, I think, of power and power imbalance in other dimensions.