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, motel and restaurant business, and we moved around Connecticut quite a bit as he started new businesses. My family is complicated. My mother died when I was 12. She had lung cancer, and so that was pretty devastating to me and my older sister, Andrea. After her death, we moved to Poughkeepsie, New York, where my father met and remarried, to a woman named Katherine Hadley Michel, who came from quite a different background: very upper-class, White, Protestant. She had gone to Vassar College and while she was there, she converted to Judaism and became quite an ardent Zionist.

Kathy 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 than he, and she wanted to have children, so they had four together–a daughter who died in infancy, and three sons, Peter, Ian and Jeremiah. Jerry died tragically, along with my stepmother, in a plane crash in 1974.(Kathy had become chair of the Board of Governors of the American College in Jerusalem, and she was returning from a meeting there with Jerry, then age nine, on a TWA flight that was sabotaged by Palestinian terrorists. All 79 passengers and nine crew members were murdered.)

But before that, Kathy had helped me enormously. She herself had gone to a girls’ boarding school, Miss Porter’s, and she thought that would be a good thing for my sister and me to do while she and my father settled in. At that time, 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, which was a small girls’ boarding school in Northampton, Massachusetts, right across the street from Smith College. My sister went there just for her senior year, and I attended for all four years of high school. I got a wonderful education, absolutely wonderful. My French teacher was French, and her 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 throughout my career, 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, or 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 and I initially went to Stanford for two years, but at Burnham I had been living in a dorm under very strict parietal rules for four years, and when I had to go through the same thing at Stanford (while the male students had no such restrictions), 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 the man who became my first husband, Michael Weil. I quickly got pregnant, and I was pregnant during my senior year in college. My son Joshua (who became a doctor, of course) was born the last day of classes that year, so I ended up taking my exams in the fall. Then we had another child, another son, Colin. I majored in philosophy, which was very useful (!). 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: 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 about racial discrimination (though I had experienced some subtle forms of antisemitism, but wasn’t so aware of that at the time). So 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 involved in Women Strike for Peace, an organization that was very prominent at the time. 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. It enabled me develop an identity, a sense of who I was, made me feel important, competent. I had had a few secretarial jobs, though I never got very far because I was a lousy typist. I got some more meaningful jobs, and eventually, I decided 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 she was taking one of the first women’s studies courses that was ever offered, I think. It was called “Images of Women in American Literature,” and it was taught by a professor named Myra Riskin.

It was my friend Charlotte Sheedy who was taking that course, and she asked Myra if I could sit in on it, and Myra kindly said that I could. 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 in that novel. She and I wrote a paper on Roth for the course 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, and it was my first book. In the meantime, I had started a relationship with a man who was in graduate school in sociology at Berkeley, and I had moved out to Berkeley with my two kids to be with him. Through him, 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, where 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 read every American Jewish novel that I could lay my hands on—twenty, thirty, however many there were at that point. Again, Charlotte and I were co-authors working on the book at that point.

We had also roped in a woman named Paula Hyman, who became a very well-known American Jewish historian. She was getting her PhD at Columbia, and she became our co-author on The Jewish Woman 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 and Charlotte did the color writing. She had a very good sense of humor and great writing style, and she whipped the manuscript into shape, so it became a trade book, published by Dial Press.

My part of the book also became 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 for the book, and through Paula I was getting to know a lot more about history. I somehow learned 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 in American Studies, and 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 had also 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 two years and then I decided to transfer again, this time to Brown University, which happened to have a very good women’s historian, Mari Jo Buhle, one of the pioneers in the field,, so I knew that I could pursue women’s history there.

I was taking classes in Providence, but I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it was there that I met my second and current husband, Jeffrey Herf, who is also a historian, of modern Germany. 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 child care. By that point, we were both teaching at Harvard as adjuncts. We were able to live as resident tutors in one of the “houses” (dormitories) at Harvard, and they gave us a free apartment and free food. That was the only way we could afford to pay for child care. Our daughter was sort of the little darling of the house until she got chicken pox in the spring of her third year. Most of the students 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 place—Adams House–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 the students there, and having a chance to work closely with the faculty, 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 in an interdisciplinary program called History and Literature, where I was able to specialize in women’s history and women’s literature.

I got to know a woman named Susan Suleiman, who was a full professor in French and Comp Lit, and she wanted to start a women’s studies program. Harvard did not have such a 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 established women’s studies by then, but not Harvard.)

Anyway, I worked with Susan to develop Women’s Studies. She was the general, persuading the rest of the faculty, and I was her lieutenant, working behind the scenes. Once the program was up and going, she became its director, and I served as head tutor,–her assistant in running the program. We did that for several years, and it took off and became 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 in history. If you wanted to major in Women’s Studies at Harvard, we had a few core introductory courses that were offered by the program itself, taught mostly by Susan and me,  but then students would take courses in other departments that were cross-listed, primarily in History, Sociology, Anthropology, the various Language and Literature departments. I don’t think we had very much on women in science at that point; the courses were mostly in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

In the meantime, I had finished my dissertation at Brown. Besides my courses with Mari Jo on women’s history, 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 in bringing a feminist perspective to social policy. Of course, given my own situation, I was very interested in the issue of child care, so I wrote my dissertation on the history of child care, or as it happened, no child care. And generally, on the development of the welfare state in the U.S. and its impact on women, but I was focused on child care.

As I was working on my dissertation, one of the opportunities I had at Harvard was to become affiliated with a program there called the Center for European Studies, partly through my husband, because he was doing German history and was involved there. But they had different study groups, and one of them was on women’s history and women’s current situation.

Through that connection, I got to know a lot about women’s situation and about welfare states more generally around Europe, and I began to develop a comparative perspective. And I had the opportunity to interact with people who were working on women in welfare states in many other countries, and with them, developed a network that would serve as a wonderful intellectual resource in years to come.

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

By this time (1986), my husband and I had both finished our dissertations and we started going on the job market. I was offered a tenure-track job in U.S. 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 that didn’t have a women’s historian at that point, so I considered myself to be very fortunate.

When I decided to relocate there, UIUC already had a modern German historian, so my husband had to look elsewhere. He took a number of different jobs and won several fellowships, all over the country, and we had to commute for about fourteen years until we finally got positions in the same place—the University of Maryland at College Park. Those years were not terribly pleasant, but we did what we had to do in order to maintain our academic careers.]

In Urbana-Champaign, 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 at a certain point I became the director of the Women’s Studies program . (They already had a Women’s Studies program, so I didn’t have to start it.) And in 2005, I also started a journal with colleagues all over the U.S. and worldwide who were doing women’s history and women’s studies and women’s social policy in comparative Perspective–. It was called Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State, and Society, and 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, women’s studies, 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, eleven books in various aspects of women’s history and women’s studies, with this special focus on social policy, moving from child care to elder care in the process. Partly in the child care 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 child care was that really, until fairly recently, the only public federal support for child care in the U.S. 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 child care. In fact, the best child care that the U.S. has ever seen was at that time, when the federal government recruited early childhood education experts to design a curriculum andhad architects design and build beautiful child care centers. The ones set upat the Kaiser Shipyards in Seattle, Washington were a model for child care centers. They were really terrific, and they were either free or very inexpensive.

Those could have been a model for child care subsequently, but of course, in the postwar period, that didn’t happen. Women were urged to go back home, and the federally supported child care centers were shut down. In the 1960s and early ‘70s, when women went back into the labor force, starting in the wake of the women’s movement and second-wave feminism, they had to do it largely without the support of public child care.

JW:  And still don’t have the support.

SM:  That’s one of the issues I’ve written about, and I’ve been active in talking about to Congressional committees. I’ve marched. I’ve done whatever I could to try to address this shortage in child care. And meanwhile I’ve pursued my academic career. 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 bedroom in our nice suburban house, was the one that had been my daughter’s. 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 have had a hard time gaining prominence, gaining presence in the world of art. But I was fortunate. In 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, and many juried shows that one can enter. I was invited to exhibit in a gallery in downtown DC, where I was for a few years, and 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 delivered a piece for an exhibit in Lowe House, the home of the Maryland State Legislature. It will be up for the whole time the legislature 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 kind of work I do. That one is called, “What is Left?” I do a lot of mixed-media collages and assemblages. The support for this one is wood that came from trees that were blown down during the various recent storms, so it’s about the impact of climate change. I used the wood from that and then I do a lot of recycling, or upcycling.

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 means that I like to use the stuff of everyday life,the materials, the things that women encounter in their everyday lives. I like to recycle. I like to re-use. 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, they’ll look around their own houses and 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 they can 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 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, my 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 oral history 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 that 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. 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 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 ran into more criticism because of our outspokenness. Maybe that’s what drew us to the women’s movement and made us leaders in it. 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, to express ourselves. Of course, the other thing is that Jewish culture always valued education. For Jewish women as well as men.I don’t know what the figures are, but Jewish women probably disproportionately received 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, after October 7^th many women’s studies programs expressed doubt that Jewish women hadbeen 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, women’s studies programs, and a lot of 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. I made an assemblage that expressed my feelings about those denials, “Believe Israeli Women.”

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 it 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. Maybe the women’s movement and academic feminism have 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 for women. 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.”

So we adopted what one of my granddaughters 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. First there was this phase of “dress for success,” where women started dressing like men and wearing severe suits and carrying 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 about what’s happened to 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. I find all 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 child care would be a great addition.

SM:  Yes, 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 child care? 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.