THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT
Virginia Kerr
“The Struggle Continues.”
Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, May 2024
VK: My name is Virginia Kerr. I was born in November, 1944 in Terre Haute, Indiana.
JW: So briefly, tell us about your childhood, ethnic background, religion, siblings. What do you think maybe led you to become the person you were?
VK: I lived the first four or five years of my life in a small town called Crawfordsville, Indiana, which is where Wabash College is. Then we moved out to a farm, which was in my mother’s family. It was around the corner from the farm that my father grew up on. I had an older brother, three years older, and so, from age five until I went to college, I lived on a farm. That was one of the facts about my life that is important, because I had a lot of freedom. I had a goat, I had ponies, had a dog, ultimately had a horse.
My family was Presbyterian, so I was taken off to the local Presbyterian Church. It was a small town nearby, 350 population. Three churches, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist. I went to a school in the same building for 12 years in this little town in a class of 21 people, and I think there were, in my class, one or two kids who were Catholic. There were no Jewish kids. There was one Jewish family in higher Township. It was the essence of non-diverse. My father was a Roosevelt Democrat. My parents were Democrats. I was a real minority in my class. I can remember marching in after Kennedy won with a gigantic Kennedy button.
I grew up with what I consider to be Christianity, which is looking out for the poor and the oppressed. I was never told that my goal in life was to grow up and find a man. That wasn’t what I was told. My father was a child of the Depression, both of my parents were. My mother’s family was more affluent. They had a little local bank, and when the crash hit, they paid off their depositors so people didn’t lose their money and lost that, and my mother had to drop out of college.
And my father, they mortgaged the farm up to the hilt and managed to hold on to it, But he just said, “Money doesn’t grow on trees. You’ve got to grow up, you’ve got to earn a living.” I was, I suppose in those days the word would be tomboy. I mean, I was out on the farm all the time and I had the kind of personal freedom that my own daughter, growing up in cities, just didn’t have. I was a cheerleader in high school, and I ended up going to Bryn Mawr College.
My mother’s first cousin and her sister had gone to Wellesley, and one of them was an economics professor at IU. Mary Crawford was her name. That was way back in the day. So, on my mother’s side of the family, that family goes back to before the Revolution, except for my grandfather on my mother’s side who came from Germany in 1870. Anyway, her family, they were doctors, and they knew all about the Seven Sisters and everything.
This was when I graduated, my new principal said, I was going to this really good finishing school in the East. So, I went to Bryn Mawr, and it was really a bit of a shock. I was a very bookish person, and so I was just really eager to go to a place where there were lots of bookish people. Lots of conversations about boys and meetups and stuff like that I found a little – I didn’t find it disappointing, but what I did find terrifying, were the classes because I was in a group of students who had had much more robust educations. And so, I just kept my mouth shut and kept my nose in the books.
JW: But you were accepted. That’s the thing.
VK: Yes, I was. My SATs were good. I came from an absolutely nowhere school, but I had a geographic distribution advantage, I think. There were only three of us in the class from Indiana. I got involved in the civil rights movement in college. Bryn Mawr sent a small group of us to Tougaloo College in 1963. Now, that’s an all-Black college outside of Jackson, Mississippi. We drove down with students from Haverford, which is our brother school.
It was an eye opener for me. They were at war. That was the heyday of the civil rights movement, the sit-ins. Their pastor had a bomb thrown at his car when he was driving. Half of his face was really ravaged by that. We spent a week on campus. We went into Jackson. We talked with a guy who was with White Citizens Council, and he was just like, central casting White Southerner; believed all of this stuff sighting verses from the Bible to say “Black people are inferior.” Well, that wasn’t my religion.
We went back to the college and we took Tougaloo students with us, one of whom was Joyce Ladner. I don’t know whether you’ve heard of her, she was at Howard. There was a civil rights conference that year and Stokely Carmichael was there. I think he’s the one who said, “The only position for a woman in SNCC is prone,” which really didn’t sit well.
I was reading Simone de Beauvoir, and doing my work, and we did a lot of organizing on campus. Mary Tom; she was one of the original founders of Ms. Magazine, she was in my class. She died, five, six years ago, in a motorcycle accident, maybe 10 years. I can’t remember exactly how long it was, but she was there at the founding of Ms. Magazine.
Mary and I were involved in something called the Student Action Committee at Bryn Mawr, and we raised some money to send to the South. I lived in New York the summer after my sophomore year I believe it was, and we would go to downtown New York and do volunteer work for the Congress of Racial Equality. We’d stand on the corner and shake with a can to raise money to send to Mississippi. I was in a march on the Lower East Side, which I remember very well because I think it was an Italian community, where the people started throwing bottles and stuff at us and we had to disperse.
Near the end of my college time, the anti-war movement was growing so I was in some anti-war marches. Then when I got out of college, I went with a friend abroad. I hadn’t been abroad and I lived in Scotland for a while and I taught school. We were hitching and I got a job teaching school in what was the Glasgow, Scotland equivalent of an inner city. I did that for six months and traveled. My mother came over and got me and I went back. I lived in New York. My father, not long after I was back, he had cancer, and he died. That was really hard.
I got a job in New York where I wanted to be, at an organization called Morningside Hates, which was supposed to bridge the work on the tensions between Columbia and the University. I decided to get a degree at Teachers College, and I got a job in the development office. The director of development there was a really progressive guy. He was a Republican, like a little organizer, but very progressive. He just said, “Okay, you’re in charge of special programs here,” and I helped do some fundraising for special faculty projects.
That was very lucky as just a work experience. I mean, the Morningside Hates job, I resented it in a way. They still had, I think, Help Wanted Male, Help Wanted Female. I was there doing basically clerical work, putting the newsletter together, and there was this guy coming in who had much more interesting stuff to do. I didn’t complain. I also had a moment after my father died with the executive director of that organization. He said, “Why don’t you come for dinner?” And I thought, “Oh, that’s so nice.” And then his wife wasn’t there and I ended up having to evade this ridiculous pass. Every woman at one time or another probably has these experiences.
The Director of Development went back to Washington, and he was handling political campaigns for what look now like radical candidates. They were Republicans, but that’s when the Republican Party was still reasonable. In any event, he told me about this job at the Daycare and Child Development Council and I interviewed for that job. I got the job. I was actually a field organizer, and they had a grant from the Ford Foundation.
They were working on trying to get childcare legislation passed in Congress and it was really not what that grant was. The grant was for providing technical assistance to local communities to eke out whatever grant money was available. We were also supposed to work on creating these organized groups who would help lobby. The program got audited by Ford, and I think they decided that this really was a little outside of the lines of the grant. And so, I lost my job. I mean, a number of us lost our jobs. I didn’t particularly know what I was doing anyway when you came right down to it, but while I was in that job, there was a big conference in Washington, DC on child care. The White House Conference on – I don’t know what it was called, Children and Youth? So, I went to that conference.
JW: Let me interrupt. What year?
VK: Well, I think we’re talking about 1971. I am not completely sure and I really didn’t do my homework for this. I could tell you Wilma Scott-Heide was there. She was in NOW, and Joanne – I’m trying to think of her name – a number of National NOW leaders were there. So that was my first encounter with organized second-wave feminism. They were there to push for childcare legislation, among other things, but I can remember the tension.
There was a plenary session, and I can remember the tension when it was either Wilma Scott-Heide or Joanne started speaking, and then somebody made this nasty comment from one of the men there, I think it was a Black man. There are tensions within the civil rights movement over the treatment of women both of color and not, but I haven’t forgotten that.
As a result of that conference, I don’t know whether Liz Carpenter was there or not, but anyway, they were just setting up the National Women’s Political Caucus. And I was told, You can go volunteer and, We can’t pay you very much. So, I went and I helped set up the National office for the National Women’s Political Caucus. And there were, let’s see, Debbie Leff eventually came there, and Doris Meissner, but I was there at the beginning of that and I worked with Liz Carpenter. The things that we did that I remember most, we prepared testimony on legislation, particularly to get childcare legislation through. And that year, it was ’71 or ’72, there was a childcare bill that was passed, and Nixon vetoed it.
JW: I was going to say, And you did it. You got it passed.
VK: We got it passed. I was at a party in Washington, and I was talking about how outrageous it was that it was vetoed and the person I was talking to, I don’t know whether it was Ben Bradley; was he the editor then? He said, “Why don’t you write an op-ed?” And I said, “Okay.” So, I wrote an op-ed about the veto and talking about what Nixon said. I had been working with a woman named Pam Roby, whom I must have met at the child care conference. She’s a sociologist, and she and I co-wrote an article for The Nation, on the politics of prostitution. Just about the waves of how politicians in New York were using crackdowns on prostitutes as sort of election gimmicks, and we were collaborating.
She was doing a book called Childcare, Who Cares, and I wrote a History of Daycare, Who Cares. Child Care, Long American History or something like that. So that’s how I knew when this bill was vetoed and Nixon was talking about socialistic forms of childcare, I’d just done all this research. And I knew, for example, that during World War II when women were wanted in the workforce, suddenly you had all of this support, promotion, and most importantly, many of the war factories would have childcare in the factories and they would have food, prepared meals, that women could take. It was so enlightened. And Nixon’s speech pretends that this just came out of Communism. And the French had had the creches.
We also prepared legislation on Supreme Court candidates, and here’s my best story from that experience. When it was either Hugo Black or Harland; one of them resigned, one of them died, and there was a Supreme Court vacancy, Nixon said, “Well, I’m going to put the best qualified man in the job.” So, Liz Carpenter, she was Lady Bird Johnson’s press secretary. Liz was from Texas and she was as funny as all get out. Just a wonderful, wonderful press person, and she was part of the policy council of the caucus. She was fantastic.
She calls me up and she says, “Ginny,” Bryn Mawr gave me this nickname. She says, “Ginny, we need a press release. I want you to write a press release because the caucus is going to call Nixon out for saying this is a male-only job on the Supreme Court.” And she said, “I don’t want it to sound like a Bryn Mawr paper. Make it readable, snappy.”
So, I wrote out this press release. I had my typewriter, I had carbon copies, and she said, “Meet me at the Calvert Café,” I think it was Sunday morning. She said, “Meet me there.” So, I got the press release. I went to the Calvert Cafe, and she was there with Eileen Shanahan from the New York Times, and Isabel Shelton from the Washington Star, and Helen Thomas, who was the AP at that point; these three reporters. And so, they got the press release. We had some food, and that made the Monday papers.
I also got interviewed briefly on TV. It was for me, a real lesson in how somebody who knows what to do when there’s a story. And how the press works, how a great time to put out something is Sunday. Liz Carpenter had these contacts, and the result of that, was that there was this whole organized coalition calling Nixon out, because it wasn’t just the caucus. The story gets in the papers, and one of the things I did, was call around and I got the D-A-R to join. Because the Women’s Political Caucus was bipartisan, we had a policy council of Democrats and Republicans. There was disagreement on a number of issues, on gay rights and abortion. Those are the two, not everybody was on the same page. Anyway, ultimately, Liz gave testimony objecting to the appointment of Rehnquist, I think, who was eventually appointed.
I then left the caucus to work on Shirley Chisholm’s campaign, briefly. My one field trip was to go out to California. There was a big fight between NOW and the National Women’s Political Caucus, and Black organizations, over who was going to be the leader. My job was to tell Chisholm, and I was like, what do you say? But then I got sick. I had to stop that job, and I could not see the campaign through. In retrospect when I think about it, the campaign office was this little place, and people would send dollar bills in just a handwritten envelope. A dollar bill, $2. It was very grassroots.
I moved back to Philadelphia. I actually started a relationship, with a man who recently died. I was then just trying to support myself with temp jobs but I got a job coordinating. The first was the governor of Pennsylvania at that point. That was fun because I had a lot of connections through having been to Washington and I put this conference together. It’s like all conferences, people can network and see who’s doing what. And then I decided to go to law school.
I went to Villanova my first year and then I transferred. I needed money and I applied for a scholarship for the second year. They didn’t really give me very much money, but I applied to Penn which gave me very generous financial support, so I went to Penn. I did very well. At Bryn Mawr, I survived. I got my degree with honors but I wasn’t any kind of superstar. I did well at law school. I was older than a lot of my colleagues in the class and probably had experience. I mean, a lot of law is experience and understanding how to tell stories about things.
JW: Let me ask you, what year did you graduate?
VK: 1977. Lou Pollak was the dean of the law school, and he told me, “So, I got a clerkship with a justice named Sidney Schreiber,” who was a justice on the New Jersey Supreme Court. Lou Pollak, the dean, told me to apply for a Supreme Court clerkship, which I never would have dreamed of doing. So, I clerked for Schreiber, and I ended up getting another clerkship with Potter Stewart on the Supreme Court.
My brother was not well at that point. I got the phone call that my brother had died while I was in Stewarts’ chambers. I think it was November. I’d been there since June or July. So, that affected me profoundly in all sorts of ways. But what can I say about that experience? The court, of course, was very different. Ironically, Rehnquist was on the court, and I’d written this testimony opposing him. Potter Stewart knew all about my op-ed. He made some real mistakes. I mean, his worst opinion ever was Geduldig versus Aiello. That’s the one where he said, “Pregnancy classifications aren’t sex based.” I don’t know if you know that.
JW: I do. Interestingly, now, people say that pregnancy isn’t sex based.
VK: It’s all gotten very complicated for those of us who know this history. But in any event, I did that, and then after that clerkship I went to UPenn as a law professor, where I taught Civil Procedure, Employment Discrimination, Gender and the Law.
JW: Oh, really?
VK: Yes, and I made my own syllabus on Gender and the Law.
JW: Now, what year was that?
VK: So, 1977, ’78, I clerked for Schreiber, and ’78, ’79 I clerked for Stewart, so it was 1980. But also, I got married. My daughter was born in my second semester of teaching, and Penn had no policies. One of my little badges of shame is that I just kind of accepted this. So, I taught classes in advance so I could have some time, like a couple of weeks.
JW: How did you do it? You didn’t do it on video. What did you do?
VK: No, I just doubled up my classes so that when I had to miss, I had this accumulated group of classes. But in retrospect, how absurd. I would watch my male colleagues, one child, two child, and I was struggling. I was struggling in lots of ways and quite honestly, I was just still not over my brothers’ death. So, I was at Penn, and basically, I didn’t get tenure. I didn’t do what I needed to do. I wrote an essay on comparable worth, and I was trying to work on a daycare paper, and I really just had a problem. I wasn’t quite sure. Anyway, it would have been great, but it didn’t get written. So, I left at the end of the seventh year. There are lots of things I could say about being in that academic environment which was toxic as far as I was concerned.
JW: Really? Towards women?
VK: Well, I felt that it was toxic. First of all, the asymmetries, particularly if you are a parent and female. If you’ve got a colleague who’s male and a parent, and he has a spouse who’s doing all of this stuff. I also realized late in the time when I was there that I was being underpaid. They gave me suddenly this big raise. I’m like, “Why did they give me this big raise?” I figured somebody said, “Oh, you’re being underpaid.” I did write an article for Ms. About Sandra Day O’Connor, which they called The Woman Whose Word is Law. Wrote an essay for Signs magazine. I did some freelance writing for Ms. before I went to law school, and one article was on fundraising, because of the dollars and cents of fundraising, and then Ellen and I wrote this legislative roadmap.
I then went to work for a large Philadelphia law firm, which was a disaster. I mean, I’m temperamentally not suited. The other thing that happened while I was teaching, was that my marriage wasn’t working the way it should have. So, we separated and ultimately divorced. Although, as I said, time passed and I put my issues on the shelf because of my daughter, and we’ve just been good friends. But it was good. It was good for this family for a whole set of reasons.
I decided to come to New Jersey because I like the court system, so I’ve been in New Jersey since 1992, doing work as a solo practitioner. I have some involvement in local politics but I really have shifted my focus to prison issues. I told you, going back to my childhood, I was like a cradle Presbyterian. I went to the Presbyterian Church a few times when I was a freshman in college, but here, is a real center of Presbyterian. The Theological Seminary is here, and there’s Nassau Presbyterian Church, which is the big one. Witherspoon; it’s the African-American Church, and there is a whole interesting history. I just decided to do some church shopping.
Anyway, there were a couple of women when I went to Nassau who said, “We’re working with prisoners. If you’re interested, come. We’re going to talk about it afterwards.” They were helping a literacy program at a maximum-security prison. They showed this film, The Last Graduation, which was just heartbreaking. And I said, “Okay, I’m going to volunteer for that.” So, I did go into this prison. I didn’t do the literacy work but I did teach some classes. Poetry, Harlem Renaissance, Shakespeare, with another person.
There are always threads in your life that may play into why you would do this. My brother was a really unusual person and he’d had a few brushes with the law. I mean, kind of kid stuff. And then I had a cousin whose son stupidly got involved in drugs. He ended up in prison. So, it was just eye-opening to me. It was this maximum-security prison. It was built in 1832, a Panopticon type of thing. It was very rewarding. It was probably just as, if not more rewarding, than teaching law students, quite honestly. I thought, This is crazy. I have this law degree. I have all this experience. I’ve never actually been in a prison other than visiting my cousin’s son out in Indiana.
I’ve been involved here recently trying to get the New Jersey Constitution amended to abolish slavery because there’s an exception for punishment for crime in the 13th Amendment. So, there’s a national campaign to amend the 13th, but it’s much more plausible to make this happen state by state by state. And that campaign has been successful. And then I’m working with something called, the Mass Incarceration Task Force.
The social justice mission of this church is very solid. I was just there this morning for the adult-ed, and the chaplains at the University were talking about their inclusiveness, and working with the College of New Jersey on welcoming gay people. They went through the whole fight about women’s roles. It’s very progressive in this Protestant sphere, which of course is complicated because the churches are losing membership, and the ones that seem to be gaining membership are the ones with views.
JW: Extreme views.
VK: So, that’s pretty much it.
JW: I do have one question. Are you working mostly with men prisoners, or women, too?
VK: Well, New Jersey State Prison is a maximum-security prison, but I have been to Edna Mahan, which is the women’s prison. I helped one of the prisoners there with a legal appeal that she had; it didn’t work out the way it should have. There are a number of groups in New Jersey. There’s something called, New Jersey Prison Watch. There’s an organization called Salvation and Social Justice, and the American Friends Service Committee, which has been very active in prison reform for years, has a woman named Barb Ness, who’s just an amazing person.
I don’t know whether you heard about the scandal at Edna Mahan prison in New Jersey. Well, there’s just rampant sex abuse. The DOJ investigated, and they now have a board of trustees for Edna Mahan, and I think conditions there for women have improved. Our Commissioner of Corrections, her name is Victoria Coon. She’s come up through the system, but as people go, working in correction, she’s really pretty good.
Apart from this volunteer work, I taught classes in women’s history one summer as an adjunct at Mercer County Community College. It’s part of something called the New Jersey STEP program. That program allows prisoners to take college-level classes and they can earn associate’s degrees. And if they get the degree, Rutgers will give them admission when they get out. It’s a really great program. So, I taught it to different medium-security institutions, but they were men. That must have been the summer of the awful year, 2016 when Hillary was running.
JW: Well, I just wanted to sum up. I mean, it does sound like the early exposure to women’s issues, college and past, seem to have followed through your life. Would you say that that affected your life?
VK: Well, I think so, but I will go back to how I grew up, and my dad. I was raised as a free person. I have friends who were schooled that, You go to college, you get married, you have kids. That wasn’t how I saw myself. Probably didn’t help my marriage.
I love my daughter, I have two grandchildren, and if we want to talk about my life’s priority right now, I’m doing these advocacy things. I’m involved with helping another lawyer on a Riker’s Island wrongful death suit, and I’m also helping with an appeal on a constitutional issue in New Jersey. It’s really about the relationship between funding for affordable housing and the schools, and how the formulas are taking money away from the schools. It’s kind of complicated. But basically, my priority is my grandchildren and helping my daughter, who’s teaching law at Yukon Law School.
JW: Oh, how great.
VK: I had no idea she would ever decide to go to law school because I don’t think she took a political science course, but she ultimately applied, and she got into every law school, except she was waitlisted at Penn. Going back to the toxicity, I think probably when there aren’t very many women in a formerly male-dominated institution, it’s very complicated, and the ethos is complicated.
JW: Well, anything you’d like to say, to sum up?
VK: I don’t know. I mean, the struggle continues. Looking at the law, and the current court, the Dobbs decision; the bottom line was terrible, but the anger, and Alito, the grudge comes through that opinion. And what they’ve done with affirmative action and voting rights, all of these, it’s very, very concerning. I am a junky for law. I listen to the Supreme Court oral arguments as I walk my dog. So, we’re going to see what they’re going to do with the domestic violence gun case.
JW: Yes. This court is abominable. What can I say? I feel like it will turn around, but not in my lifetime. I mean, we’ve got to get rid of this court. And as I tell everybody, “Vote. Whatever you do.”
VK: Well, they have to. And I think younger women, they don’t recognize; well, Dobbs, I think, was a big eye opener. We can have a whole other conversation about feminism today, and we don’t have time in the rest of the year to adequately explore.
JW: We’ll have to have coffee someday.
VK: Yes, that would be nice.