THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Torie Osborn

“I really believe that women are the future. Feminism instilled in me a new and different way of looking at the world, and I can’t get rid of it. It’s in every cell, it’s in every fiber of my being.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, August 2025

TO:  I’m Torie Osborn and I was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1950. I’m 75 years old. The contrast between social-democratic Copenhagen, where I lived from 0 to four-ish, and fascist Spain, where I moved and lived from four to six, is part of my story.

JW:  Tell us about your childhood and some things that led you to who you became.

TO:  I think that I was a sitting duck for the 1960s. I’m a little young to have been active in the civil rights movement. But the contrast between Spain and Copenhagen formed me! My first memory at age three was of looking at a child’s picture book: King Christian, with the Jewish yellow star pinned to his chest, is striding down the main street in Copenhagen, exhorting the crowds to rise up – and the Danes then smuggled thousands of Danish Jews onto fishing boats and sent them off to freedom in Sweden and Finland…. I was born right after World War II, so the world that I knew as a kid was divided into resistance fighters and Nazis. The Nazis were bad, and the resistance fighters were good.

We lived in Spain and Denmark where my Dad worked for the Marshall Plan. They started out in Paris; my Mom also worked for the Marshall Plan — in the typing pool, of course, which was all that women could do in 1948, even well-educated women. And then she married my father who was in the economic section. She went to the Cordon Bleu with Julia Child, which is a whole other story. (She had her first Thanksgiving in Paris at Julia Child’s house.) That was 1948 to 1950 in Paris and they were married in 1949. The American Embassy transferred the family to Copenhagen shortly after.

And then we moved when I was four years old to Spain, to Madrid, and lived a life of privilege. The first Spanish words that I remember were “pesetas, por favor,” because we were rich Americans and poverty was everywhere — as were “Franco’s guns” – the armed police.  It was like an occupied city, fascism everywhere. And it made me a sitting duck for the 1960s, I believe. And it made me a lifelong anti-fascist…

JW:  How long were you in Spain?

TO:  Well, just two years, but it was a formative two years, from age four to six. I went to a strict British school that was in contrast with the very free-wheeling school that I had been to as a pre-K in Denmark. ….Fast forward to 1964 when I was 13 years old and I wanted to join Freedom Summer — where white students were going down south to register Black voters – part of the civil rights movement. But my father said, you’re only 13 years old, and he forbade me from going. But that was the beginning of my awakening.

JW:  Where did you live then?

TO:  After Spain, my parents moved in 1956 to the middle-class suburb of Haverford, outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. When my parents were still alive, I would go back regularly – it’s just so beautiful…. you take for granted what you grow up with.

JW:  I hear you got involved in the civil rights movement but eventually transferred to the women’s movement.

TO:  I wasn’t really involved in the civil rights movement. I was a wannabe civil rights activist, but it was really the anti-war movement that was my first social movement, and then the women’s movement. As a freshman, I went to Barnard College for two years and then I transferred to Middlebury College where I graduated.

I remember during my freshman year at Barnard, the Women’s Liberation Front did dorm organizing. And I remember a woman coming and talking about “women’s liberation”. I think it was in the spring of 1969. Kate Millett was a professor at Barnard. I went to one of her lectures and it was so powerful, but I thought that I was not a feminist (or “women’s liberationist”) because I thought I didn’t need!  I thought I had it together.

JW:  What happened that changed your mind?

TO:  1970 was the first time that I was really active in feminism. I was living in a commune in Haverford that summer and I went to the first Women’s Equality Day march in Philly.  It was the same day, August 26 — as the big march in New York. I was just a follower really. When I transferred to Middlebury in my junior year, I founded the Middlebury College Women’s Union. That was the beginning of my leadership.

JW:  What was that about and why did you do it?

TO:  The first thing that happened when I went to Middlebury was that I personally experienced sexual harassment. I only had been to a women’s college and a women’s high school and I didn’t know sexual harassment. I had never experienced anything like that. The first week that I was at Middlebury, they assigned me an advisor who was a well-known poet. He will remain nameless.

I went to his office, knocked on his door. He said, come on in and sit right here. And he patted his lap. I’ll never forget it! I wheeled around and went to the head of the department who was next door, and I said “Get me out of here, I want a new advisor.”  That was my first experience with sexism directly. And there was more at Middlebury.

JW:  Why had you transferred to Middlebury?

TO:  There were a bunch of reasons why. The main reason was that I was disillusioned with the anti-war movement. The reason I went to Barnard — early decision — was because it was the center of the student movement. But by the time I showed up, the student movement, SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, had devolved into two factions, Progressive Labor and the Weathermen.

SDS was no longer, but by then I was a big activist. I was going to anti-war demonstrations, and I remember the very first earth day in 1970 at Columbia. But I was never a big environment person and still am not. I have friends who are, but the reason that I transferred to Middlebury was I thought it was like Swarthmore, a small, progressive co-ed school where I would flourish as opposed to the big city.

There was a contrast between Barnard, where I had lived independently, and Middlebury, where I was put into a freshman dorm and they had a curfew for the women, but not for the men! That didn’t exist at Barnard, because by the time I got there, the student movement had succeeded in getting rid of it a couple of years before. So I had never experienced “curfews” or heard the word
“parietals”.

Middlebury turned out to be good for me; I got to be a big fish in a small pond. The first thing I did – maybe in the second week I was there – was to lead a bunch of women to the dean’s office to protest that curfew. A sit-in would be too formal a word for what we did, but we met with the dean of students, and the curfew disappeared immediately. And so, I got a sense of my power.

JW:  What was your next action?

TO:   The health service at Middlebury was anti-woman and again, the contrast between Barnard and Middlebury was instructive. At Barnard, as part of the freshman orientation, we had been sent to Planned Parenthood to get birth control. Not so when I transferred to Middlebury. The aging doctor who headed health services was sexist and old-fashioned, Catholic, anti-abortion and anti-birth control.

By then I was bisexual, sleeping with women at night but had a boyfriend during the day. Getting rid of the dorm curfew had empowered me, and I went after the head of health services.  Pretty soon there was prescribed birth control. Abortion was still illegal then – it was 1971, but I led the abortion underground.

JW:  You said you started the Middlebury College Women’s Union?

TO:  Yes, and the reason I called it a Women’s Union was after the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. I later became friends with Heather Booth, principal founder of CWLU. She’s still a good friend. I called the Middlebury College Women’s Union a union because of the labor movement, but more because of the grassroots feminism that was around me. And the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union was the best example at the time.

JW:  Where did you go after graduation?

TO:  I didn’t move to a city — I lived in communes for many years in Vermont. I stayed in Vermont till 1976 and lived mostly in women’s communes or anti-war communes. Back then we collectivized our income. Honestly, today we look at those days and we think, “whoa, really?” But that was the culture then. So I did various jobs: I painted, I was a bus driver, I worked as a secretary. There are many different jobs that I did to share the income.

JW:  Was there work for activists at that time?

TO:  No, not until later, for women anyway… My boyfriend at the time became the anti-war organizer for the American Friends Service Committee. He traveled around the state of Vermont; I was committed to staying in Vermont for a while. My identity was as an organizer. I was active in the anti-war movement, and I was active in the growing women’s movement. Vermont is such a small state that you can see the impact of your work, so I stayed.

The first women’s conference I helped to organize involved Gloria Steinem and Margaret Sloan Hunter, who came to Middlebury after I graduated in June 1972. I helped put on the event and we filled the gym with thousands of people. Then in January of 1973, there was the first feminist conference at Mount Philo Inn, near me in Middlebury:  that conference marked my “coming out” as a lesbian….!

But mostly I was critical of it because in those days I identified as a socialist- feminist. Then, there were really big differences between lesbian-feminism, socialist-feminism, cultural-feminism or radical feminism.  I was on the leftist side. We laugh now but then it made a big difference then which grouping you identified with.

Women’s liberation was important, but ending the war was my first priority. Reproductive rights were key, but so were welfare rights.  There was one big “movement” that encompassed all of us; we were part of the same movement as feminists or environmentalists or educators or Black Power supporters or prison reformers….

This was Vermont, right?  So we accepted everybody. I lived in lesbian communes where there were moderates and there were socialists. On September 11, 1973, when Allende was overthrown in Chile, I remember gravitating to one roommate who was the only person who understood what I was feeling. I was crying and she was crying. Two of the other people who lived in the house asked: who is Allende? Why do you care? What is Chile to feminism?

JW:  How long were you in Vermont?

TO:  6 years altogether; I lived there until 1976. I moved to Chicago with my woman partner at the time to be on the founding staff of In These Times newspaper.  I was there for a year, and I left over the sexism. So that was my “goodbye to all that”.

JW:  What sexism was going on?

TO:  I was on the founding staff of In These Times. There was one woman who was a reporter, and there were no women editors and no women in power. It was all men, white men. I had left Vermont because it was too white, 97% white (Bernie Sanders was running for Congress on a third-party ticket at the time, the Liberty Union Party.) My loyalty was with the left in 1976 when I moved to Chicago. But then I had this experience of the sexism…..

I was the circulation manager. The person who founded the newspaper, Jimmy Weinstein, was a scholar of the Socialist Party and he believed that In These Times was going to be distributed like the Appeal to Reason had been for the Socialist Party, which was through people who were active in the left. But his timing was way off. Circulation at that time in the ‘70s was boosted by direct mail, so I became a direct mail expert.

There was one all-purpose conference room in our offices where we did mailings. I went up one day at lunchtime to do a direct-mail mailing. As I opened the door, there were all the guys sitting around the table, and I said to them: “Oh, is this a men’s caucus meeting?” I’ll never forget Jimmy’s look. He was the owner and editor. He looked at the managing editor and the managing editor looked at him and Jimmy said, “Oh, did you forget to invite the women?” It was a staff meeting. So I walked out, never to go back to the newspaper again.

The one revenge that I had was that I had been sent to New York for In These Times to interview Gloria Steinem who at the time was co-chair of Michael Harrington’s group Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee or DSOC, (which later merged with New American Movement and became DSA, Democratic Socialists of America.) I interviewed Gloria Steinem in 1977, I think on April 15.  I remember it well because I went to the Ms. Magazine offices. She was kind and solicitous, as always.

Oh, that reminds me that I became one of the original responders to the Hite Report because I was a founding subscriber to Ms.

JW:  Tell our audience what the Hite Report was.

TO:  (NOTE: The Hite Report was published in 1976 with its then-controversial conclusion that many women achieve orgasm other than through intercourse. Ms. Magazine supported Hite’s findings on female sexuality and defended the report against public and media backlash. Shere Hite was the main researcher.]

I had answered an ad in Ms. Magazine when I was living in a lesbian commune in Vermont in 1974. I remember, in answering the survey, I tried to see how many organisms I could have with my vibrator. That was one of the questions in the Ms survey: how many orgasms do you have?  I think I ended up with seven or eight.

By then I was identifying as a lesbian. After that women’s conference in 1973, I came out to myself and to my parents. So, my one revenge with men who ran In These Times was that I never wrote up the Steinem interview or gave them the audio tape.

JW:  Where did you go after leaving In These Times?

TO:  I went back to Vermont briefly and then left for Chicago. My next big chunk is “women’s music”. Blazing Star, which had been the lesbian work group of the by-now-defunct Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, was then a chapter of the national socialist-feminist group, the New American Movement (now DSA). It was the only work group that survived the colonization by the Workers World Party, which was then taking over all these progressive women’s groups.

I was asked by NAMers to be the liaison at their national convention to singer-songwriter Holly Near because we were producing Holly’s concerts, so I thought, I’d better listen to her records. I had gotten the first record (“Hang In There”, an anti-war album) several years earlier as a gift from a young lesbian friend of mine in Vermont. I’d listened to it once and thought it wasn’t my cup of tea. At the time, I was heavily into the new lesbian-feminist “women’s music”, which at that time meant Alix Dobkin, Kay Gardner, Meg Christian, Cris Williamson and Olivia Records.

Holly and I connected personally at that conference, and wanted somebody for Redwood who was a leftist as well as a lesbian, so she hired me and I moved to California in 1978. I became a producer and promoter and worked at Redwood Records for a couple of years. And Holly and I became really good friends and stayed close.

JW:  Who else did you promote or manage?

TO:  I didn’t really manage Holly but I got to be at the center of Women’s Music during an historic time!  And Redwood Records produced the Black a cappella group, Sweet Honey in the Rock’s second album, “B’lieve I’ll Run On…See What the End’s Gonna Be”. And we were going to produce a third group on another record and it all fell apart, in much lesbian drama. Then Redwood became a nonprofit that put out a bunch of other music like Inti-Illimani from Chile, other “Nuevo Cancion” music, as well as Holly’s albums.  I was there when she did her most feminist album, “Imagine My Surprise”. And if you have the album, I’m all over the liner notes. Women’s Music was my life for years.

JW:  What did you do after that?

TO:  After 1981, when Holly and I separated on a business level, I continued to produce women’s music. I produced Kate Clinton, Ferron, Sweet Honey and a bunch of people in Los Angeles.

JW:  Are you still in Los Angeles?

TO:  I’m still in LA but I was in DC during the Clinton years. Ellen Malcolm of Emily’s List was my partner at the time. She was the reason that I stayed in New York and in DC for longer than I would have. I went there originally because I was head of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

JW:  What was that like?

TO:  I left after 10 months because NGLTF  was so dysfunctional. I was used to a more formal, traditional nonprofit at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, where I went after my fulltime work in Women’s Music.

JW:  But then you moved back to LA, it sounds like.

TO:  Then I moved back to LA in 1997. Most of my career since my UCLA MBA in 1984, has been spent as Executive Director of nonprofits, two LGBTQ groups, the LA Gay and Lesbian Center and NGLTF, and one AIDS (Food and Friends in DC), and then the Liberty Hill Foundation, which was a member of the Funding Exchange, a network of about 10 progressive foundations. Liberty Hill Foundation is still around in LA. I was there for eight years; we redistributed money from the westside to people South and East LA. And I learned about the rising economic and racial justice movement. So, most of my career was spent heading up social-justice nonprofit groups. But in the last 15 years until I retired in 2022, I was in local government.

JW:  What was your role?

TO:  I was deputy mayor to Antonio Villaraigosa, 2006-2008 and 2012-2013. I bookended his terms. And I ended my career (in 2022) for eight years as top policy person for Sheila Kuehl, who’s my best friend and an ex-, and was on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

JW:  Did you get to do feminist policy?

TO:  The Women and Girls Initiative, which we initiated, was our attempt to change the county in a feminist direction, although all five supervisors now are women. But the Women and Girls Initiative was an attempt to bring the economic lens of women’s economics and different parts of feminism to the county, to all 47 departments.

JW:  What would you say about feminism and your life?

TO:  Feminism has changed my life. I think that the women’s movement gave me self-confidence in a way that is totally different from any other social movement. I’ve spent my life being an activist, but there’s something about the women’s movement. It was personal and it was professional. To this day, I can’t stand men who “mansplain”, who like to take up space. Don’t even start with the current situation in DC….. I really believe that women are the future. Feminism instilled in me a different way of looking at the world, and I can’t get rid of it. It’s in every cell, it’s in every fiber of my being.