THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Susan Crites Price

“Young people need to understand that their rights are never safe.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, May 2023

JW:  Susan, would you introduce yourself, please, and tell us when and where you were born?

SP:  I am Susan Crites Price and I was born in December of 1949. I actually was born in Cincinnati, but we immediately moved back to my dad’s hometown in Circleville, Ohio. So, I grew up in a small town just below Columbus.

JW:  Tell us a little about your childhood and maybe what you think were some of the influences that led you to what you became.

SP:  The two things that I remember that were important to me later, were that my parents were politically active. My mother was always working at the polls on Election Day. She was the president of the Democratic Women’s Club at one point. That was when she was also the room parent, Cub Scout leader, did all the volunteer stuff with the kids. But she also was very active in politics, and so was my dad. He eventually ran for office, unsuccessfully, against an incumbent for county treasurer. He loved going out and campaigning, so I kind of had that in my blood from the beginning, and I have worked on political campaigns for favorite candidates in every place I’ve lived. So, that’s been a small part of my life, but that was one thing I got from that.

The other thing I got, was my mother’s role model, as not only as a volunteer, but eventually she decided to go back to work. So, I had a working mother when a lot of my friends did not, and it worked fine. We were probably in middle school by that time. We could manage. And what I realized, was it wasn’t just that she wanted to supplement the family income, but she really liked working.

JW:  When did you get involved in the women’s movement? Or when did your awareness occur?

SP:  I don’t think my awareness really occurred until after I went to college. 1968, I went to Ohio University, and my world opened up. I went to a college that’s in the southeast part of the state, in Athens. Athens is the town around a giant university of 18,000 people at that point. So, it was a hotbed of anti-war activity. It was a very diverse campus. I felt like this was sort of where I woke up to the fact that there were a lot of really important things going on in the world, and that I needed to be a part of them.

I’d had a little taste of this the year before, when I was a senior. My friend had a sister who went to OU, and she invited my friend Janice and me to come down for a little sibling’s weekend. Her mom drove us down on a Friday, and when we got to town, the entire main intersection was full of demonstrators. It was mostly Black, some White. This was the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated, and there was concern that this was going to get out of hand, but they were able to kind of keep it together.

That night, we went to a concert with Peter, Paul and Mary. They had been very close to Dr. King, and so they developed this whole program with their familiar songs, but with the feeling that we need to do more in this world to make it better. I felt like that was the moment when I said, “This is the right place for me and I’m going to learn how to do this.” So, that was sort of the beginning of my opening up to the world as, it is possible to be changed. I think when I was still in Circleville, I didn’t know how much needs to be changed.

I chose OU because I wanted to be a newspaper reporter. I had worked on the high school newspaper, I had edited the yearbook, and I thought, “This is what I want to do. I want to be a writer and a reporter.” They had a very strong journalism school; they still do today. I went immediately to the campus newspaper and signed up to be a reporter there, and that was a lot of my formative education.

The times were not great for the idea of women becoming reporters because at that point, there were still ads in the newspaper that said, “Men Wanted and Women Wanted.” So, the classified ads were segregated. And if it was the newspaper itself that was advertising, they were looking for women to be classified ad salesmen, and maybe a reporter for the women’s department but that was sort of where you got channeled. So, “What the heck? I just want to be a reporter.”

At the campus paper, I was able to cover all kinds of issues, and it was a really great, broad experience, way beyond my journalism classes; of which there were no women faculty. But that was really when the women’s movement was getting really going. Ms. Magazine is created, we’re getting stories out in the world about all the things that women need to work on, and so I really embraced that. At one point, the women on the staff said to the guys, “We want to take over a whole issue of the paper, and we just want to write about women’s stuff.” And they said, “Oh, okay.”

So, we wrote about birth control. I mean, in 1970, women didn’t know about, or have much access to birth control. You couldn’t get a legal abortion, not until 1970 when New York started allowing it. And then, I had friends who drove to New York for abortions, but boy, at the beginning there was nothing. And so, we really covered the waterfront and we got about this much interest. I went back and looked. There were no letters to the editor, nothing like, “Great job.” So, we hoped that it made a little impact, but that was sort of my introduction to journalism.

JW:  What did you write about specifically in that piece?

SP:  Well, one of the things I did was the history at Ohio University. I mean, we were early on having a woman graduate, having a Black man graduate in the 1800s. So, in some ways, we were a little bit ahead. But we also wrote about the status of women at Ohio University. There were so many little things, I can’t even begin to recount them all. For example, the people who cleaned the dorms, they were either housekeepers or custodians. The women were all assigned to the housekeeper jobs, and the men were all called custodians. And guess which one paid more? There was absolutely no basis for that discrimination. There were so many things that were important to know about our history, but then also to know about the current status of women at the university, and we covered that.

And so that was ’68, ’69. 1970, as a sophomore, I got an internship at the Dayton Journal Herald. That year was important too, because the anti-war movement had gotten so strong. And that was the year of Kent State. Our school had riots, and we closed. We were one of the campuses that closed early. So, I actually got to start my job early. I had a four-month internship and I learned a lot.

Once again, two students from our school were chosen to work at the newspaper. One of them, a guy, got the general assignment job, and I got the women’s department, which at the time, was called Modern Living, because they’d stepped up their game and changed the name. We were this little enclave in the newsroom with our own offices, a woman editor, who was great, but we were the only ones who had a dress code. We were not allowed to wear pants. Pantsuits were big then, but we had to wear dresses or skirts to work, and that was not true for any of the other reporters.

They also had, interestingly, they had a cafeteria in the newspaper for women only. And the reason for that was that many years ago, when Governor James Cox founded this newspaper, he wasn’t the governor at the time but he became the governor, he thought it wasn’t good for the women to be out on the streets trying to find places to get food because it might not be safe, so he created this women’s cafeteria. And so, in 1970, we were the only ones who were getting this really great hot meal for cheap.

After I left there, some of the guys got finally ticked off and said, “This is discrimination, we want to be in there too.” They made a big fuss and the newspaper decided to close the cafeteria and install vending machines. So, their little protest backfired. But while I was there, I had four months of opportunities to do stories. I mean, because it was the women’s section, we did cover fashion, of which I knew nothing, we did cover makeup and that sort of thing; but we also covered education, and health, and the women’s movement activities. So, I got to write about lots of things, and it was a wonderful experience, and I love Dayton for having hired me to do that.

JW:  That was during college?

SP:  Yes. I came back for my junior year, and I was contacted by the city editor of the Athens Ohio Messenger who said, “Would you like to start working full time as a reporter, and finish part time as an independent study?” And I said, “Heck yes.” So, I started working at the Messenger. I covered cops, and courts, you name it, I covered it. It was all a really interesting mix of things, but what I realized was, I wasn’t very happy.

At the time even, it occurred to me that I’m going to cover a League of Women Voters meeting, and they’re talking about strategy on some women’s subject, and what I want to say is, “Wait, have you thought about this, or do you know about this person over here?” But what I had to do was just sit there and be quiet, and take notes, and go back and write an objective story.

That was all fine and dandy until the story that really put me over the top. I covered a rape trial. I covered a lot of trials, but this one really got me because I was sure the guy was guilty. The evidence just all pointed to it, but it was he said/she said, and the guy was not found guilty. And the worst part, was this poor young woman was crucified on the stand by the defense attorney. Because at that time, you were allowed to ask women about all of their past sexual history.

“What were you wearing? How many boyfriends did you have? How often have you had intercourse? When were you not a virgin anymore?” It was horrible. Sometime later, the state legislature prohibited that kind of cross examination. But at the time, who’s surprised that women never asked to file a charge on a rape, because they knew they were going to get creamed in court? So, that’s when I said, “Tom” my boss, “Can’t do this anymore. I’m going to go off and get my graduate degree and find a job where I can be active.” And so that’s what I did.

JW:  So, you did finish college? I wasn’t quite following the chronology.

SP:  Yes. I started full time work in my junior year, but I was a few credits ahead. I took some independent study classes, and I managed to graduate in ’72. A little late, but I graduated in the year that I was supposed to. And then, after quitting the paper, I immediately went back and got my master’s in a year. And so, by that time, then I was ready to have a new job.

JW:  Okay, master’s in what?

SP:  International affairs.

JW:  Oh, so you did switch?

SP:  I did, and I’ll be honest, it was because back then, they wanted people to learn languages. The federal government was providing international studies grants so that people could learn languages and maybe be helpful if we ended up in conflicts with these places. I just thought it sounded interesting, and I got a full ride, so what the heck? And so then, I needed a job.

JW:  Right, and so did you use any of that in your job?

SP:  No, not very much, but what I used was my writing. I’ve basically been a writer my whole career, although I’ve had some other jobs. I went to work for the university’s public information office. So, then I’m writing newsletters, and I’m writing for alumni and parents, I’m writing press releases, I’m talking to the media and answering questions. So, it was kind of the perfect fit for me.

I was there for five years, and that gave me a platform to be able to be involved in all the stuff that was still going on at the university, and at that point, things were really starting to happen women wise. I started that job in ’72, I think, and that was the year that the ERA was introduced. I never could understand why it was such a problem for people. It seemed like the most basic thing. I don’t know, people must have thought it was, like, pages long, but all it was, was equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Now, how could that be controversial? We were thinking, “We got to do this. This is so exciting.” We had the congress approving it, and we had so many people with explanations of what it was going to do.

At that point, that’s when we got the conservatives who started coming in with Phyllis Schlafly, and the Eagle Forum, and others, who were saying, “Oh, it’ll mean that women will have to go to war. They’ll have to be drafted; they won’t be able to stay home.” I mean, there were a whole lot of things. But at the time, I was very taken by this concept and I did a lot of letter writing. I did speaking, I did a TV debate, I even spoke at the Ohio penitentiary in Lucasville. You might ask why?

The university had a continuing education program in the prison, and they asked me if I’d come and speak to the class about the ERA. And I thought, “What the heck, these guys don’t even vote.” But then it occurred to me that a lot of these guys had wives and mothers and daughters and sisters, all of whom are being discriminated against. In credit, in employment, in equal pay, you name it. And so, I’d go where anybody asked me to come. That was one of the real high points, because it was kind of fascinating, and I got a lot of questions, and people were really interested. I don’t know if it did any good, but it was the kind of thing that we did.

And then I decided Athens, since I’m still now a resident and an employee, needed a way to connect women who were in the town, as well as the gown. And so, I was the co-convener of the NOW chapter. The National Organization for Women, which I think started in the late ’60s, were starting to really pop up all over the state of Ohio. So, we started our group there. We had a myriad of issues that the national had suggested we work on, and of course, the ERA was one of them.

We had a very collegial group, and I was the representative that went to the statewide meetings, because the other chapters all got together in Columbus for these statewide meetings. That’s where I got known in the state of Ohio, and connected with a lot of other feminist women. I think that led to what eventually became, what is still for me, the most seminal experience in my career working on women’s issues. And that was the International Women’s Year conference.

So, as you know, Judy, the conference which grew out of the UN Year of the Woman, the Congress passed a law that allowed us to have, I think it was $5 million dollars, to have meetings in every state to talk about the issues that women care about and, what do women want, and then elect delegates to go to a national convention in Houston in November of 1977. And so, I got involved on the organizing committee for Ohio, and we planned a big convention at the Fairgrounds. We had I think it was 2800 people who came.

Unfortunately, a whole bunch of those people were Eagle Forum and Right to Life. The history of the International Women’s Year conference was that there were a small number of states that were totally taken over by the conservatives. And this is sort of where the first experience of the split, the conservative versus the liberal in the women’s movement, became clear. I mean, a lot of Republican women were totally in support of the ERA.

JW:  Absolutely.

SP:  All these other issues, and certainly reproductive rights.

JW:  Absolutely.

SP:  And yet these two organizations came, they coalesced, and they ended up electing, of the 56 delegates that we could send to Houston, eleven of us were pro-choice and pro-ERA. We had these buttons made, that said the Original Ohio Eleven, and we wore them the whole conference. Because we all had name tags that said we were from Ohio, and we didn’t want people to think that we were the bad people. We wore our buttons and we made sure people understood that we were for women’s rights.

Our conference in the state didn’t turn out the way we hoped, but the International Women’s Year conference in Houston was a pivotal moment, I think, in the country’s history. And I am so grateful that I got a chance to be there, because it was unlike anything the country had ever seen, bringing together women who are farm workers, welfare mothers, corporate executives, legislators. Every conceivable person was there. And almost all of the delegates were women, but there were a few men. We all had a charge to let the country, and particularly our legislators, know what women want. We had this whole slate of resolutions that we were going to work on and pass.

Fortunately, about three fourths of the delegates were feminists, if I can use the word. We passed on a very good platform. Many of the points were later enacted into law, so we got a lot of positive action out of that. But also, for me, it was just like, “Oh, my gosh, here’s the platform today and on it is the First Lady, Roslyn Carter, and Lady Bird Johnson, and Linda Bird, too. And oh, yeah, Gerald Ford’s wife, Betty. And then there’s Bella Abzug and there’s Gloria Steinem and there’s Billy Jean King and there’s Coretta Scott King and there’s Margaret Mead.” Every famous woman you can think of, I got to see at that conference. I took so many pictures. I have a whole archive of pictures because I just felt so humbled to be in the presence of greatness. That’s what that felt like to me.

There were hard fought battles on a lot of the issues and we didn’t take our responsibility lightly. I think for me, the most profound moment, probably for a lot of people, was that towards the end, we had to pass a resolution about protecting the rights of minority women. And the way it had been crafted, it was a little controversial, so some of the women stayed up late in the night before, and crafted a really good resolution. There were little sections. I mean, it was like five paragraphs and each of the five was like, Puerto Rican women, Asian American women, Black women, and one of them representing each group read their little section.

The last one was the section on Black women, and it was read by Coretta Scott King and it was beautiful. She gave us all chills. And then we voted. Passed it overwhelmingly, and somebody started singing, We Shall Overcome. I’m getting teary just thinking about it. Everybody’s holding hands and singing, and we’re ready to leave that conference and go out and make change happen. And we did. We just didn’t make all the changes. We didn’t pass the ERA; we’re going backwards on women’s reproductive rights, but at the time, I think it was a watershed moment in the country.

We can’t forget that at the time that meeting was going on, there was this other arena in Houston. We had 20,000 people show up at our conference, and all the big media people were there so we got a lot of coverage, but so did the Eagle Forum. Because Phyllis Schlafly and the Right to Life people had another 20,000 over in the other side of Houston, and they had a whole little separate conference. So, it was when we finally woke up to the fact that this ain’t going to be no easy ride.

JW:  And so, what did you do when you left?

SP:  When I left, I went back to Athens, got involved in several other university women’s issues and so forth. But basically, in 1978, the year after the conference, I moved to Dayton to be with my future husband. Tom Price and I had had starter marriages, as many people of my generation did, and a few years later we found ourselves divorced. He had been the city editor of the Athens Messenger who had hired me, who says, he ruined me for journalism since I quit after a year and a half. But we stayed together and I moved to Dayton and we got married, and we’ve been married for 41 years.

So, now I have to get another job. I got a job with the Mead Corporation, which was a Fortune 200 company, so, big place, and they’re starting to make little inroads with bringing women into management jobs. But it’s a big company and so we knew that there were things we could do to make it better. I was in a little group that started Women at Mead. This was for all the women secretaries to the VPs that were women, I think we only had one of those, and the Women at Mead group was just there to help us navigate the corporate life.

We had things like assertiveness training, we had self-defense training, it was sort of like a little consciousness raising group for corporate employees who were women. Our big moment came when Barbara Jordan got elected to the Mead board of directors. We contacted her and said, “Barbara, sometime when you’re in town, would you be willing to come to our little Women at Mead Group” – which wasn’t that little, actually – “and speak to us about what we should be doing?” And she said, “Well, heck yes.”

So, she came, and I got to be the person interviewing her because the person who was going to do it had to leave town on business. I was so thrilled that I got to interview Barbara Jordan and then field the questions. Once again, not without controversy, because we had men in the organization who had kind of made a little joke here and there about Women at Mead, and all of a sudden, they wanted to come to hear Barbara Jordan. And we said, “No, no, this is for the women.” So, once in a while we needed those little small victories, and it was great. 

JW:  And did the audience respond to her?

SP:  Yes. Her voice and her eloquence was priceless. It was amazing.

JW:  Oh, that’s great. Did you get changes in the organization?

SP:  I think probably a lot of awareness happened, and yes, I think to some degree, but I was only there five years. Also, during that time, another woman, I think she was a VP at Mead, was on the Planned Parenthood board in Dayton, and so I was asked by her to join the board. I’d always been interested in reproductive rights issues, but that’s where I really got laser focused. I just decided this is going to be my issue. I served on that Planned Parenthood board right after Faye Wattleton had left to become the national president. She had been the executive director in Dayton. She moved on, but I joined the board and was there until we moved to Washington.

We moved because Tom got invited to be the Washington correspondent for the Dayton Daily News. That’s how we ended up in Washington in 1982, and we are still here. When I moved to Washington, the Washington DC affiliate of Planned Parenthood asked me to join their board, and I served on that board for several years. I chaired it at the end, and then I moved on to the national board and I was on the national board of Planned Parenthood Federation for six years, and also was on the board of the Action Fund, which was able to, as a 501 C4, endorse candidates and raise money. And so, it kind of merged my interests in reproductive choice and also the political side.

I have to say too, that at the time that I joined our board, and certainly not in Dayton either, we did not provide abortions. Many Planned Parenthood affiliates at that point, which was 1978 when I joined, ’79, ’80, were not doing abortions. They were referring to other providers. But we were being encouraged to start doing it ourselves because we wanted to have a consistency of quality in our service. And Planned Parenthood Federation said, “We need to be not referring our patients out to others. We need to do abortions ourselves.”

Before that even happened, one of our clinics was bombed. It was in an office building, it was at night, nobody got hurt. But it was a little fire bomb, and it was not at all unusual for Planned Parenthoods. And so, we were able at one point, to merge with a provider that was going out of business, and so we ended up being an abortion provider while I was on the board. That was an important milestone for our Planned Parenthood, I think.

I remember, speaking of the bombing, I remember that Tom and I had a child in 1985. We had our daughter Julie. I remember going downtown to the headquarters where we also had a clinic, and took her with me. A little baby. Stuck her on a blanket, because I was chairing the nominating committee, stuck her on a blanket with some toys, and she had a little nice time and everybody was great. We’re all about children because we’re Planned Parenthood.

And my mother-in-law found out that I did that and said, “Don’t take our grandchild to Planned Parenthood buildings ever again because they get bombed.” I’m not sure she was worried about me, but she certainly was worried about Julie. So, I never took Julie after that. But the idea that in this country we had to worry about being in a building where abortion was being provided, a totally legal at that time service, is kind of outrageous to me, and it’s gotten a whole lot worse since.

JW:  Did you feel a difference between being on a local board as compared to the national federation? Different issues, or what differences did you see?

SP:  The local issues were mostly all about service. We’ve got to provide all these health services, and how are we going to do it, and how are we going to run the clinics and so forth. So, it’s about service. The national organization was much more focused on both making sure the standards were high, so we had accreditation as part of our responsibility, to make sure all the affiliates are running well. But mostly, it was about how to keep this country swinging towards pro-choice.

We talked endlessly at our meetings about how to engage young people in the movement. At this point, I’m in my 30s or 40s, and we’re talking about people who never lived under when Roe wasn’t the law. We wanted college kids. They didn’t know what it was like to have friends who had illegal abortions. They didn’t know about all these people who died. Back then, our DC General Hospital had a whole ward of women who had infections from illegal abortions. We felt like our job was to try to bring more young people into the movement. We had a huge legal department, too. We were fighting all of these erosions in our rights, all of these limits on access.

JW:  This was the ’80s?

SP:  I was on the board late ’80s, early ’90s, I think.

JW:   I assume you stayed somehow involved in women’s issues or women’s point of view after Planned Parenthood. Tell us about that.

SP:  Well, I have done lots of little things. I mean, after I graduated from Planned Parenthood, I’ve still been involved in other groups here in DC. I stayed interested, obviously, in politics, and one of my favorite moments was in 1984 when I went to the Democratic Women’s Convention. Fortunately, Tom was covering it, and he knew a guy, and I was able to get a ticket in the peanut gallery and heard Geraldine Ferraro give her acceptance speech. That’s one of those moments when you think, “Oh my gosh, this is so great, look what’s going to happen.” It didn’t quite happen, but it didn’t matter, because you need those little charges every once in a while.

The fact that I live in Washington means that there’s a march all the time. Even when I lived in Ohio, we came to the marches. The ERA march, the Pro-Choice march, all of those big events, we came. I think I’ve learned a lot of this is just about showing up. But our Planned Parenthood locally, which I still am connected with peripherally, we still host people to come to marches. We host events at the Supreme Court. We do a lot of visual things just because of where we’re located. And our Planned Parenthood has also often been the location where staffers in Congress get to come and sort of understand what we’re doing and why and so forth.

There are so many things that can still be done locally. I’ve been a little bit more low profile, but always vigilant. I think I have moved on to a couple of other issues that are sort of consuming me now. I finally retired four or five years ago, and immediately became immersed in two other issues. One, affordable housing; and one, homelessness. So, I’m now on the board of Friendship Place, which is a leading homeless prevention and homeless services organization in DC, so, we’re doing a lot on that.

And then the affordable housing issue is really focused very locally in my area. I live in Chevy Chase, upper northwest DC, the least diverse of any part of the city in every way in terms of race, economic status and so forth. And so, we’re trying to get more affordable housing built in this area, which is a priority of the mayor and it’s not a priority of a lot of people who have had nice big homes and don’t want apartments. So, it’s been interesting.

I’m very busy, but I can’t point to a lot of things now that are strictly related to the women’s movement. I still do help out with candidates during the election. And, I guess I don’t want to sound like I’m jaded, I’m not; I’ve seen the euphoria followed by the crash and so forth. And I of course, was at the Women’s March in 2017 after Trump was elected. I couldn’t believe, what, there were 500,000 people just in Washington, and then when I got home and I turned on the TV and I saw, “Oh my gosh, there’s millions of people all over the world who are women who are marching.” And so, it was an experience. You sit back and say, “Was this helpful? What did it do?” I hope it engaged a lot more young people, that they need to be part of this movement and they need to understand that their rights are never safe.

I just recently read Michelle Obama’s latest book The Light We Carry. In it, the last chapter, she explains what she meant at the Democratic Convention when she said, “When they go low, we go high.” I felt this way after the Dobbs decision. “Oh, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened. I’m so angry, I don’t know what to do.” And she’s basically saying, yes, you’re going to have those hits because they did it to you. And you have to say, okay, I can be angry for a few minutes, and then I have to start planning the next steps and what am I going to do now? And that emotion is not a plan of action. And it really hit me, that if all I do is make sure my daughter has that in her head, and she does – I’m in my 70s now. I’m starting to feel like we’re the grandmothers. But there are these moments when you think you just have to keep working.

Just last month, Chuck Schumer introduced a bill in Congress to try to get the ERA passed again, because, as you remember, we were 35 states ratified, and we needed 38. We never had gotten the 38 until after the deadline, and Virginia just passed it like five years ago. And so, Chuck says, “Hey, we got 38 states now” because there had been a couple of others who come in, “So, let’s try to see if we can get it enacted.” That’s the thing, the big dream. That’s, “When they go low, we go high.”

So, it occurs to me that Alice Paul introduced this in 1923 or got it introduced in Congress in 1923, and now we’re at 2023, and we’re still trying to get the stupid ERA passed. And it’s not stupid, but you can imagine that there’s frustration. But it also means that you keep plugging along, and when they go low, we have to go high. We have to have a plan of action. We have to persevere. Long after I’m dead, we’ll probably get the ERA, and I will cheer from heaven.

JW:  I say the same about the right to abortion, long after. I know we’ll get it back. We just got to keep at it.

SP:  And that too. Yes, absolutely. And so, I’m just hoping that some new generations of young people, men and women, will come to our defense and say women should be allowed to control their own bodies.

JW:  Yes, I’m confident they will. I really am.