THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Sonya Michel

“The women’s movement saved my life and became the substance of my career.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, January 2025

SM:  My name is Sonya Michel. I was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 14th, 1942.

JW:  Tell us a little about your childhood? Ethnicity, siblings, parents, anything you think maybe influenced you to become the person you became.

SM:  I’m White and Jewish, and I came from a Jewish family. My parents both grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. My father was in the hotel and motel business, restaurant business, and we moved around Connecticut quite a bit. I have one sister, an older sister. Our mother died when I was 12. She had lung cancer, and so that was pretty devastating. Then my father remarried and he married a woman named Katherine Hadley-Michel, who came from quite a different background. She came from a very upper-class, White, Protestant background, but she had gone to Vasser College and converted to Judaism while she was there and she became quite an ardent Zionist.

She was an incredible stepmother to me. She really took me under her wing and nurtured me very kindly and supported me. But she also wanted to make a go of it with our father, she was quite a bit younger. She wanted to have children, so they had several children together. She herself had gone to a girls boarding school, and she thought that would be a good thing for my sister and I to do. When they got married, my sister was going to be a senior in high school, and I was going to be a freshman.

They sent us to Mary Burnham School, which was a small, girls boarding school in Northampton, Massachusetts, right across from Smith College. My sister went there for her senior year, and I went there for all four years of high school. I got a wonderful education, absolutely wonderful. My French teachers husband taught French at Smith. My English teacher was one of the people who wrote the college board exam in English. She trained me very well, and I got an 800. In retrospect, when I think back to it, that’s one of the most precious gifts I ever got. I’ve been a writer and an editor, and some people think I’m a pain in the ass for doing it, but I have very good English, and I can’t help correcting people.

JW:  I have a book for you. It’s called something like the Misplaced Adjective something like that.

SM:  I could probably write that book, although I have written a number of other ones. Anyway, my sister and I were among the only Jewish kids at this school but we still had a very good experience. My sister went on to Wellesley. I graduated, and I initially went to Stanford for two years, but I had been living in a dorm under very strict parietal rules for four years in boarding school, and I had to go through the same thing at Stanford, and I decided I didn’t want to do that anymore. So, I transferred to Barnard because I knew I could live off campus in New York City.

And then between my junior and senior years, I met a man who became my first husband. I quickly got pregnant, and I was pregnant during my senior year in college. And my son, who became a doctor, was born the last day of classes of my senior year, and I ended up taking my exams later. Then I had another child, another son. I majored in philosophy, which was very useful. And about six years later, my husband decided that he didn’t want to be married to me anymore. So, at the age of 25, I was left with a BA in Philosophy and two children, ages three and five, living in New York City, and didn’t quite know what to do with myself. In came the women’s movement, which basically saved my life.

JW:  What did you join?

SM:  Well, I had been active in the civil rights movement, I had marched around, and my husband and I had both been very active in the anti-war movement. But of course, for a White Jewish person, those movements were about other people. I was a woman, so I wasn’t worried about the draft. I was a White person, so I wasn’t worried; I was concerned about civil rights, but it didn’t directly have anything to do with me.

But the women’s movement absolutely spoke to my own situation. I had met a number of other women activists through those other movements, and I was very active in Women’s Strike for Peace, which was an organization that was very prominent. Through those connections, I got to the women’s movement. I can’t remember exactly how I came to my first consciousness raising group, but I did, and it was timed perfectly to help me deal with my own personal situation. Help me develop an identity, a sense of who I was, made me feel important, made me feel competent. I had had a few secretarial jobs. I got some more meaningful jobs, and eventually, it helped me decide to go on to graduate school.

Let me back up a little bit. While I was in the CR group, I also ended up taking my first women’s studies course. A friend of mine was getting a degree in general studies at Columbia University, and one of the courses that she was taking was one of the first women’s studies courses that was ever taught, I think. A course called, Images of Women in American Literature. It was taught by a woman named Myra Riskin.

My friend Charlotte Chidi was taking that course, and she asked Myra if I could sit in on it, and Myra kindly said that I could, and so I did. One of the books we read was Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth, and Charlotte, who was also Jewish, and I, were very disturbed by the images of the Jewish mother and the Jewish princess. She and I wrote a paper for that class. Charlotte had connections in publishing, and so she got us a contract to write what became my first book, The Jewish Woman in America.

JW:  Oh, my goodness. I need to have that.

SM:  You need to have it. You do indeed. That was published in 1976. That was my first book. In the meantime, I had started a relationship with someone else who was in graduate school in sociology at Berkeley, and I had moved out to Berkeley with my two kids. I got to know all these graduate students, and I realized that I was just as smart as they were and I could be going on to graduate school.

First, I went to San Francisco State, and I got a master’s in English. My master’s thesis was on the image of women in American Jewish literature, not just Portnoy’s Complaint. I sat on my couch in Oakland, California, and I read every American Jewish novel that I could lay my hands on. 20, 30, however many there were at that point. Again, Charlotte and I were co-authors authoring the book at that point.

We had also roped in a woman named Paula Hyman, who became a very well-known American Jewish historian who was getting her PhD at Columbia, and she became our co-author on the Jewish Women in America. Her advisor at Columbia was very disturbed that she was working on American Jewish women. He thought it was going to be a detriment to her career, and he strongly advised her not to participate in this collaboration. But we supported her, and kept her in, and she stuck with us. Paula did the historical parts. I did the literary analysis part. Charlotte did the color writing. She had a very good sense of humor and great writing style, and she whipped it into shape, so it became a trade book.

My part of it was my master’s thesis at San Francisco State, but by that point, I decided I wanted to go on and get a PhD. I knew people in sociology, I had been doing literary analysis through Paula and I was getting to know a lot more about history. I somehow came to know about the field of American studies, which is interdisciplinary, and I thought that would be a good home for me.

I applied to various PhD programs at various places in American Studies. The place that won the jackpot was Indiana University, which offered me the biggest fellowship. Having lived on both coasts, I wound up in the Midwest in Bloomington, Indiana, where I was not a happy camper. I felt very landlocked, culturally deprived. And as it happened, my kids ended up staying with their father, who had by that time moved to California.

So, I went off to graduate school by myself, a single mom, but not living with my kids. I stayed in Bloomington for I think two years. Then I decided to transfer again, and I transferred to Brown University in Providence to the PhD program there, which happened to have a very good women’s historian, Mary Jo Buhl, who was one of the pioneering women’s historians, and I knew that I could pursue women’s history there.

I was taking classes in Providence, but I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When I was there, I met my second and current husband, Jeffrey Herf, who is also a historian, but he’s a German historian. His focus is on the Holocaust, the post Holocaust period, and especially on German Jewish relations. We were both impecunious graduate students living in Cambridge. He’s younger than I am, and he wanted to have a child. And so, I became pregnant with my third child, my daughter, who was born in 1982.

We were so poor that we had to choose between housing and childcare. By that point, we were also both teaching at Harvard as adjuncts. We were able to live as resident tutors in one of the dormitories at Harvard, and they gave us a free apartment and free food. That was the only way we could afford to pay for childcare. Our daughter was sort of the little darling of this dorm until she got chicken pox in the spring of her third year. Most of the kids in the house had had chicken pox, but the few that didn’t caught it from her and several people showed up at graduation with red spots all over their faces. But that was a godsend. It was really a saving grace.

Harvard was a terrific, absolutely terrific place for us to be for many, many reasons. First of all, teaching there and teaching the students there, was a real privilege and very exciting. I was finishing up my PhD at Brown, writing my thesis and so forth. But I was teaching first in an interdisciplinary program called History and Literature, and I was able to specialize in women’s history and women’s literature.

I got to know a woman named Susan Solomon, who was a full professor in French and Comp Lit, and she wanted to start a women’s studies program at Harvard. Harvard did not have a Women’s Studies program at that point. I always say Harvard’s motto should be, “The first should be last” when it comes to women’s studies. Most of the other Ivy League schools had developed Women’s Studies by then, but not Harvard.

Anyway, I worked with Susan. She was the general, and I was her lieutenant in developing a Women’s Studies program, and once it was up and going, she was the director of it, and I was the head tutor. I was kind of her assistant in running the program. We did that for several years, and it took off and it was very successful.

JW:  Let me stop you a minute and ask you, what issues did you cover in this program?

SM:  Well, it was an academic program, so there were courses on Women in Literature, various literatures, and there were courses in history. Mostly, it was Susan and me. Then there were people in other departments who were doing various kinds of women’s studies. Research and teaching had joint appointments in Women’s Studies, so if you wanted to major in Women’s Studies at Harvard, we had a few core courses that were taught by the department; by me and Susan mostly, sort of an intro to women’s studies, but then people would take courses in other departments that were cross-listed. It was History, Sociology, Anthropology, Literature. I don’t think we had very much in Women in Science at that point, so, it was mostly in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

In the meantime, I had finished my dissertation at Brown, and besides my courses with Mary Joe on Women’s History in general, I had taken some courses in History with a professor named James Patterson, who did the History of American Social Policy and I became very interested in that, and bringing a feminist perspective to social policy. Of course, given my own situation, I was very interested in the issue of childcare, so I wrote my dissertation on the history of childcare, or as it happened, no childcare. And generally, on the development of the welfare state in the US and its impact on women, but I was especially interested in the issue of childcare.

So, I finished my dissertation, and also while I was writing it, one of the opportunities I had at Harvard was to become affiliated with something there called The Center for European Studies, partly through my husband, because he was doing German History and he was involved there. But they had different study groups and one of the study groups was on women’s history and women’s current situation.

And so, through that connection, I got to know a lot about women’s situation and about welfare states all around Europe, and began to develop a comparative perspective. And I had the opportunity to interact with a lot of people who were working on women in welfare states in a lot of other countries.

One of the things I understood was that a number of the European countries which did have robust welfare states, also had robust childcare programs. Especially the Scandinavian countries, but also France and to a certain extent, Britain and other places. And so, unlike a lot of other American historians, I began to develop a comparative perspective on the US. So, I was interested in women, gender, welfare states, and a comparative perspective on US policy.

Anyway, I finished my dissertation and I started going on the job market. My husband had also finished his dissertation, and he was on the job market. I was in a tenure track job in US Women’s History at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Champaign. So, there I was, back to the Midwest, but this time I had a very good job, and it was really one of the last major research universities at that point.

This was in 1986, and they did not have anyone doing women’s history. And so, I relocated there and my husband had a number of different jobs all over the place. We commuted for about 14 years until we finally got in the same place, which was not terribly pleasant but we did what we had to do. I relocated to Urbana, Champagne. I was able to finish my first book which was based on my thesis, a history of child care in the United States, but it had a comparative perspective.

I taught Women’s History and Women’s Studies, and I became the director of the Women’s Studies program there at a certain point. They already had a Women’s Studies program. I also started with other people, some of my other colleagues, who were doing Women’s History and Women’s Studies and Women’s Social Policy in Comparative Perspective and we started a journal in 2005. It was called Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State, and Society. It was published by Oxford University Press. It’s still going, twenty years later. So again, my writing and editorial skills, as well as my training in women’s history, in women’s studies, in women’s policy all came in handy.

Over the course of this period and in the subsequent years, I’ve written, or co-edited, or co-authored, 11 books in various aspects of women’s history and women’s studies, with this special focus on social policy. Partly in the childcare book but also in a separate book, I focused a lot on the issue of women in war, and the ways in which women were positioned in war. Very rarely as fighters, but in support positions, and the impact that had on their social and political status.

Also, of course, one of the things I discovered in the course of writing my book on childcare was that really, until fairly recently, the only public federal support for childcare came during World War II, when women became Rosie the Riveters, had to go into the defense plants, and the federal government and Congress realized that if women were going to take those jobs, they had to have childcare.

In fact, the best childcare that the US has ever seen was during World War II, when the federal government recruited early childhood education experts to design a curriculum. They had architects design and build beautiful childcare centers. The childcare centers at the Kaiser Shipyards in Seattle, Washington were a model of childcare centers. They were really terrific, and they were either free or very inexpensive.

That was something that could have been a model for childcare subsequently. But of course, in the postwar period, that didn’t happen. Women were urged to go back home. The childcare centers were shut down. When women went back into the labor force, starting in the wake of the women’s movement, in the wake of second-wave feminism, they had to do it largely without the support of public safety.

JW:  And still don’t have the support.

SM:  That’s one of the issues I’ve written about, and I’ve been an activist to talk to Congressional committees. I’ve marched. I’ve done whatever I could to try to address this shortage in childcare. So that’s what I did, and then finally, in 2002, my husband and I both got jobs at the University of Maryland in College Park, and we moved to the DC area. I taught there from 2002 until 2016, when I retired. One of the things, while at Mary Burnham, in addition to getting my 800 in English, I took a lot of studio art classes.

My mother had been a talented artist, and I always loved art and loved painting, but during my academic career, I really didn’t have time to pursue that. But I had it in the back of my mind to retire early enough to be able to pursue my art, and so I did. I took a few courses at Maryland before retiring, and then I set up a studio at home. First, I propped an easel in front of the bookshelves in my study, and then finally, I sort of outgrew that space. The next biggest room in our nice suburban house, was my daughter’s old bedroom. And so, I called her up and I said, “Do you mind if I turn your old bedroom into a studio?” She said, “Mom, I’m married. I have two kids and I live in Seattle. I’m not coming home anytime soon.”

JW:  But nice of you to ask.

SM:  She was very gracious in letting me have it, so that is where I’m working now. For nine years now, I’ve been doing art. And of course, one of the things I realized as a feminist coming into the field of art, was that as in so many other areas of life, women had a hard time gaining prominence, gaining presence in the world of art. But I was fortunate.

A place like Washington, and I think this is probably true in other parts of the country, there are many inroads, there are many ways to get into the art world, certainly at the lower level. I mean, I’m not about to have my work shown in MoMA or the Metropolitan, but there are many small galleries, cooperative galleries. There are many juried shows that one can enter. I was invited to show in a Gallery in downtown DC, where I was for a few years. I had a solo show there in 2022.

JW:  Which one?

SM:  Touchstone Gallery on New York Avenue. I have a website you can look at, sonyamichelart.com. I’ve had a number of works shown all around the area, both in person and virtually. I now belong to something called the Maryland Federation of Art, and they have a lot of juried shows. In fact, just a week ago, I brought a piece that is in an exhibit in Low House, which is the home of the American State Legislature, and they have an exhibit up for the whole time the legislator is in session. So, I have a piece in that show.

JW:  Is the piece on your wall behind you, yours?

SM:  Yes, that’s one of my pieces. This is the work I do. That one is called, “What is Left?” I do a lot of mixed media collages and assemblages. The support for it is wood that came from trees that were blown down during the various storms, so it’s about the impact of climate change. I use the wood from that and then I do a lot of recycling.

Most of my work is not specifically or explicitly feminist. There are a few pieces that are, and I’ll get to that in a minute. But my inspiration is a feminist one, and that is that I like to use the stuff of everyday life. I like to use the materials, the things that women encounter in their everyday lives. I like to recycle. I like to reuse. I’m an abstract artist.

I don’t do many figurative things, but I hope that my work gets people to see their everyday lives and their surroundings in a fresh way. That by seeing what’s beautiful in a piece of cardboard, or a piece of wrapping paper, or whatever, and how it can be turned into an interesting composition. That after they see my work, they’ll look around their own houses in their own surroundings and see things in a different way.

And quite recently, I’ve started doing workshops in temples and synagogues. Shabbat workshops. Because the Sabbath, Shabbat, is about taking time out from the week and seeing the week in a different way. And so, I’m trying to get people to look around their houses, collect anything visual that strikes their fancy, bring it to the workshop, and turn it into a collage or assemblage. And through that process begin to do what I do to see the everyday world in a different way. That’s one of the things that I look at.

JW:  Wow. So, your feminism started early and has touched every part of your life, it sounds like.

SM:  It definitely has. To put it succinctly, it saved my life. Certainly, that CR group back in the ’70s was incredibly valuable. And then it became the substance for my career. I mean, without the women’s movement and feminism, I wouldn’t have had the ideas, and I wouldn’t have had the opportunities that I’ve had. I do think I’ve also contributed to it in a great many ways through my books, and I’ve had many graduate students who have gone on to do very good work in research in Women’s History.

JW:  I really feel that way, too. My husband calls me the classic female baby boomer in that I always was a leader in school, but I became an elementary school teacher. The Women’s Movement, M-I-C-R Group, opened me up to the thought that my mother always said I’d be a lawyer if I were a boy. It wasn’t that things changed, it’s that the opportunities opened up for me.

SM:  Well, the opportunities opened up, but we also made the opportunities. We created the opportunities. Certainly, your project is an opportunity that you created and you’re contributing to it and that opens the way for other people to stand on our shoulders.

JW:  Well, I do want to go back to one thing in the beginning, because your book on Jewish Women in America, of course, being Jewish myself, I’m particularly interested. But I wonder if you saw any theme that encouraged women to get into the women’s movement. I mean, many, many of the women I interview for this project are Jewish so there’s some theme there, and I wondered if you hit upon it.

SM:  Well, there are a couple of things. One is historically, as you probably know, in the Jewish culture, men were supposed to be the scholars and women were supposed to work. They were supposed to support the family financially. And they did. But that made them different from women in a lot of other ethnic groups because in those cases, the man was supposed to be the breadwinner, and women stayed home.

But Jewish women didn’t do that. They didn’t do it back in Eastern Europe, and they didn’t do it when they came to the United States. Because they were used to being in the labor force, that made them seem different. It made them seem unusual. So, they had to struggle to maintain the dual roles of breadwinner and homemaker, and yet they did it. So that was one thing.

But also, the fact that they were in the labor force maybe made them less ladylike, and more outspoken than other women. But that again put them at odds and maybe made them the target of criticism or whatever. I mean, what is the Jewish mother’s stereotype? It’s about a woman who’s too outspoken. She’s a loudmouth.

But Jewish women were used to interacting with the public. So, we were perhaps a little more prepared to do that on the one hand, but at the same time, we maybe ran into more criticism because of our outspokenness. Maybe that’s what drew us to the women’s movement and made us leaders in the women’s movement. I mean, look at who the leaders were. Betty Friedan was obviously one of them. In fact, I knew her personally in New York, and she was Jewish and very outspoken.

Among other things, I think it gave us a space and a platform for being able to be outspoken, for being able to express ourselves. Of course, the other thing is that Jewish culture always valued education. For Jewish women especially; I don’t know what the figures are, but Jewish women probably disproportionately receive higher education. We succeeded at it, and then we used it, and it became the basis for our careers. Many of us do have careers in academia.

One of the things that has disappointed me in recent years, and some of my artwork deals with this, is that the fact that given the role of Jewish women in feminism and in the women’s movement, and in women’s studies, that Women’s Studies has become, in many instances, very anti-Zionist. Very opposed to Israel. Very opposed to the existence of Israel.

And in fact, many women’s studies programs after October 7^th, doubted that Jewish women had, in fact, been attacked in the way that they were by Hamas. Yes, that’s happened. And it’s been very distressing. It’s especially distressing to me as a Jewish person, but also, it’s distressing to me that Women’s Studies is giving a pass to radical Islamist ideology, which, truth to tell, is very oppressive to women. And yet somehow, other women’s studies programs, and a lot of women’s feminist scholars, suspend judgment about that when it comes to embracing all the other tenets of post-colonialism and I find that very distressing. So, I have to say I’m probably more distanced from academic feminism at this point in my life than I ever was. But fortunately, I have my art to serve as a haven.

JW:  That’s great. Well, is there anything you’d like to say as we sum up?

SM:  As I said, the women’s movement saved my life and became the substance of my career, and enabled me to do a lot of things that I’m sure I would not have been able to do otherwise. So, I’m very grateful for it. But at the same time, I wish in some ways it would be more self-reflexive and maybe return to some of its roots. I think it’s allowed itself to become swept up with a larger trend in academia, which is this trend toward postmodernism and post colonialism.

I think academia has become much more politicized than it once was. Partly, maybe the women’s movement and academic feminism has to take some responsibility for that, but at this point, I think it’s kind of out of control. I don’t think there’s any going back. Well, I shouldn’t say that. As you know, one of the things that second-wave feminism did, aside from its pursuits in academia, was that we railed against the dress code. We railed against being treated as sex objects. We demanded to be taken seriously.

One of the things that meant, was that we didn’t want to always be dressed up in a certain way. To appeal to the male gaze. And we adopted what actually my granddaughter told me is, the female gaze. That is, we began to dress for ourselves. We began to wear clothes that made us feel comfortable, but still attractive. I mean, it was this phase of dress for success, where women started dressing like men and wearing severe suits and carry briefcases, and I always thought that was pretty boring. So, I began to dress the way I wanted to dress, which was I thought, professional, but also interesting and creative. And especially as an artist, I always wanted to wear things that were beautiful but not necessarily sexy.

I’ve become very distressed that a lot of women in public life, especially in the media, certainly women rock stars. I don’t know whether they’ve allowed themselves to be turned into, or they have turned themselves into sex objects once again. That’s one thing. But even in the media, women on public TV, women news commentators, they are also now dressing in what I would regard as a somewhat provocative way, with these hairdos.

On the one hand, they’re telling you about all the terrible things that are going on in the world, and their hair says, I look like I just got out of bed. And lipstick. I mean, lipstick has come back with a vengeance, and makeup of all kinds. So, I find that rather distressing. Call me old fashioned. I mean, I’m an old second wave fuddy-duty. I think we have to realize that feminism does evolve over time. Hopefully, it will evolve, but it won’t disappear. I mean, I hope that it will continue to thrive and provide the kind of support that women obviously need.

JW:  And childcare would be a great addition.

SM:  I mean, here we have Mr. Trump worrying about the population decline and trying to prevent women from having access to abortions, but is there support for childcare? No.

JW:  Well, this has been fabulous. I appreciate it so much.

SM:  Thank you for your wonderful questions and allowing me to speak my piece.