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, and I attended the local Presbyterian Church from an early age in Newtown, Indiana, a small town three miles from the farm, population 350. Back then, Newtown had three churches, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist. I went to school in Newtown. Our school was small. All 12 grades were in the same building. There were 21 in my class, and it was the essence of non-diverse. We were all white, mainly Protestant. I think there were, in my class, one or two kids who were Catholic. There were no Jewish kids, and in fact there was only one Jewish family in the Township. My father and mother were both Roosevelt Democrats, but I think my mother’s parents were Republicans, as were my aunt and uncle on my father’s side. I was a real minority in my class and probably somewhat obnoxious about my politics. I can remember marching in to school after Kennedy won the 1960 election wearing a gigantic 3-D Kennedy button.
I grew up with a core Christian belief system that teaches looking out for people who are less fortunate. When I was a child, I thought I would like to be a missionary, although my idea of what that meant was pretty shallow – I think I pictured myself on some sort of tropical island.
My father was a child of the Depression. Both of my parents were, but my mother’s family was more affluent. They had a little local bank, and when the crash hit, my great-grandfather paid off the depositors so people didn’t lose their money. But, the family lost the bank, and my mother had to drop out of college. She came back to Covington, Ind. (her hometown) and got a job in the Post Office. My father, his brother and sister (their father died at age 51) grew up on a 300 acre farm that had been land-granted in the 1830s. During the Depression, they mortgaged the farm and managed to hold on to it. But – and I think this was his Depression experience speaking – my father always said to me, “Money doesn’t grow on trees. When you grow up, you’ve got to earn a living.” I never got the message from either of my parents that my goal was to find a man to support me.
I was, pretty much a tomboy. I was outside on the farm all the time hanging out with my ponies (Shetlands) and other animals. I had the kind of personal freedom that my own daughter, growing up in cities, just didn’t have. I was a good student, played in the band, was a cheerleader, and my teenage years were typical of the 50s in the rural Midwest– dates at the drive-in, root beer afterwards, parking and making out. I was insulated from so much. Oddly enough, I ended up going to Bryn Mawr College. That decision was very much my mother’s influence. Her first cousin and her sister had gone to Wellesley in the early 1900s. One of them, Mary Crawford, became an economics professor at Indiana University. So my mother really wanted me to go to one of the Seven Sisters.
It was something of a miracle that I was accepted at Bryn Mawr since my high school education was very basic. The gap between the rural community where I grew up and Bryn Mawr is pretty much summed up in my high school principal’s comment when I graduated. He said I was going to this “really good finishing school in the East.” I knew Bryn Mawr wasn’t a finishing school, and his words seemed funny though kind of embarrassing. Tomboy notwithstanding, I was a very bookish person, and I was eager to go to a college where there would be stimulating intellectual conversations. But when I got there, the talk was all about boys, who was dating whom, mixers and the like. I found this a little disappointing. What I found terrifying, though, 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. There were only three of us in the class from Indiana. But, I managed to hold my own academically, though (to my regret now) I shied away from science and math courses.
The spring of my sophomore year was transformative. Bryn Mawr sent a small group of us to Tougaloo College in 1964. Tougaloo is an all-Black college outside of Jackson, Mississippi. Three of us from Bryn Mawr drove down in two cars with three students from Haverford, Bryn Mawr’s brother school at the time. The trip was an eye-opener for me. This was in the heyday of the civil rights movement, and Tougaloo students were actively engaged in sit-ins and other forms of protest. Their pastor had a bomb thrown at his car; half of his face was ravaged by that. The Tougaloo students lived in fear, although that did not deter them from actions that directly challenged the Jim Crow segregationist policies.
We spent a week on campus. We went into Jackson where we talked with the leader of the White Citizens Council — an appointment we would not have gotten had we disclosed we were staying at Tougaloo. He was a central casting white Southerner: somewhat portly, with a full head of white hair and a gracious demeanor. But, he was an unapologetic white supremacist who justified his views by reciting Bible verses he interpreted to mean that Black people were meant to serve whites. This was shocking to me—this was not the religion I was brought up with.
With Tougaloo students we visited the Medgar Evers trial twice; both times, when we walked in as a mixed race group, we got hateful stares from others in the courtroom. There was a real sense of menace. When we drove back north we took Tougaloo students with us for a huge civil rights conference being held at Haverford. It was a relief to get out of the South. One of the Tougaloo students was Joyce Ladner. I don’t know whether you’ve heard of her; she wrote a wonderful book called “Tomorrow’s Tomorrow” and eventually taught sociology at Howard. She and her sister Dorie have been featured in documentaries about the civil rights movement. Stokely Carmichael was one of the speakers at the Haverford Conference. He’s the civil rights leader who said, “The only position for a woman in SNCC is prone.” That did not sit well with me or my friends.
In college, I read Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, which was my first introduction to systematic feminist thought. But there was no feminist movement on campus at that time. As a result of the Tougaloo trip , I changed my major to history and became an activist for civil rights. We did a lot of organizing on campus. Mary Thom– one of the original founders of Ms. Magazine–was in my class and one of my best friends. Mary died over a decade ago in a motorcycle accident. Her death was devastating for me and other close friends. She was working on projects related to Ms. until the end.[1] At Bryn Mawr, Mary and I were involved in a group called the Student Action Committee. Among other things we raised money to send to civil rights groups in the South. My memory is hazy, but I believe we got fellow students to give up meals and donate the money saved to civil rights groups.
I lived in New York the summer after my sophomore year and shared an apartment with Mary and another Bryn Mawr friend (Sarah Dunlap). Mary and I spent our free time doing volunteer work for CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) which had an office in the lower East side. We fundraised for CORE by standing on the street and shaking a can for donations to fund civil rights work in Mississippi. We were in a march on the Lower East Side, which I remember very well because in that neighborhood the people were hostile and threw bottles and rocks at us. I remember running to the subway to get away from the attacks.
Near the end of my college time, the anti-war movement was growing. Haverford students through SDS were at the center of organizing. I was in what I think was the first anti-Vietnam war march in New York City in April 1965. It is familiar history that the civil rights and anti-war movements were rife with sexism, but for me at the time this was just something to put up with. After I graduated, I went with Sarah on my very first trip abroad. We started by hitchhiking around Scotland and were picked up by a busload of Scottish schoolteachers who said there was a teacher shortage in Glasgow.
I applied and got a job teaching English and math in what was the Glasgow equivalent of an inner city school. After travel in Europe, I came back to Scotland and taught there for three months. I then met up with a different college friend in London, and we traveled again in Europe—most memorably to what was then Yugoslavia. My mother came over to meet me in Paris and, among other countries, we went to Germany to find the town her grandfather had grown up in.
When I came back to the U.S. I got a clerical job in New York. This was after a job search guided by want ads that were still Help Wanted Male/Help Wanted Female, with the ads steering women to secretarial/helpmeet positions. I was hired at an organization called Morningside Heights, Inc., a non-profit that was supposed to ease tensions between Columbia University and the surrounding neighborhoods. I was told I was overqualified, but that didn’t lead them to offer me anything at my skill level. But it was a job. I had a male co-worker who had more interesting work and I’m sure was paid more. I’m also sure that my skills were equal to his.
My father, not long after I was back, was diagnosed with prostate cancer. It had metastasized and he died after suffering a lot of pain. That was in 1968. It was really hard. When I returned from the funeral, the director invited me to dinner. And I thought, “Oh, that’s so nice.” And when I got to his apartment, it turned out his wife wasn’t there, and I spent the evening evading passes. Every woman at one time or another probably has had this kind of experience.
I left the clerical job, enrolled at Columbia’s Teachers College, and got a job in the Teachers College development office. The Director of Development, Ed Grefe[2] had been a Republican fundraiser and consultant– but was very progressive He was a firm believer in women’s rights— he attributed this to his mother. When I was hired, he looked at my resume and just said, “Okay, you’re in charge of special programs here.” What that meant was that I was assigned to faculty members with special projects in need of funding. My job was to help raise the money. The work was interesting, and I learned a lot from it.
When I graduated from Teachers College, I got a job as a substitute English teacher at Charles Evans Hughes HS on the Lower West Side—probably the most difficult job I have ever had. I had no plans to leave, but that summer, while I was on a road trip to Mexico with my brother, I heard about a job in Washington, D.C., at the Daycare and Child Development Council (DCDC) in Washington, D.C. I interviewed and got the job as a field organizer.
The Council was working on trying to get childcare legislation passed in Congress, but they were funded by the Ford Foundation to provide technical assistance to local communities in how to obtain federal grant money. As a result of an audit by Ford, most of the field organizers, including me, were fired. We had been asked to form local groups to lobby for child care legislation. The auditors decided that this work was outside of the lines of the grant. Anyway, before I left DCDC, I went to a big conference in D.C. that included a focus on day care issues. I believe it was called The White House Conference on Children and Youth.
JW: Let me interrupt. What year?
VK: Well, I think we’re talking about 1971. I am not completely sure. Wilma Scott-Heide was there. She was with the NOW delegation, along with Joanne Evans Gardner and a number of other national NOW leaders. So that was my first encounter with key players in second-wave feminism. They were there to push for childcare legislation, among other things. and they were fearless. There was a plenary session, and I can remember the tension when it was either Wilma or Joanne who stood up to speak. Someone in the audience made a snide comment suggesting that the speaker was a lesbian. I think it was a Black man who made the remark. There were tensions within the civil rights movement over the treatment of women both of color and not, and that was my introduction to the very fraught politics of race and gender. Shirley Chisholm always said that as between the racism she had to deal with and the sexism, the sexism was worse.
Not long after the conference, I was looking for a job and someone I had met told me that the newly formed National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) was just setting up an office in Washington. Whoever it was told me: You can go volunteer and/or, We can’t pay you very much. So, I showed up at the address and helped set up the national office. I believe there was one other person there, though I don’t remember her name. Debbie Leff joined the staff at some point, and Doris Meissner eventually was brought in as the Executive Director, but I was there at the beginning. Among other things, I worked with Liz Carpenter on testimony supporting the childcare legislation that was in the pipeline and eventually passed, only to be vetoed by Nixon.
JW: I was going to say, And you did it. You got it passed.
VK: We got it passed. After the veto, I was at a party in Washington, and I was talking about how outrageous it was that it was vetoed. 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 criticizing Nixon’s veto message. I had been working with Pam Roby[3], 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. The article covered how politicians in New York during election years used crackdowns on prostitutes to burnish their tough-on-crime credentials. We collaborated well. Pam had the information, and I supplied the editorial skills.
Pam was working on a book called Childcare, Who Cares, and I wrote a chapter on the history of daycare policy in the U.S. titled One Step Forward: Two Steps Back: Child Care‘s Long American History..[4] So that’s how when the child care bill was vetoed and Nixon was talking about socialistic forms of childcare, I knew he had ignored a big chunk of history.[5] I knew, for example, that during World War II when women were wanted in the workforce, suddenly there was all of this support for them. Most importantly, many of the war factories would have childcare on site, and those child care centers would supply prepared meals that women could take home at the end of their shifts. It was so enlightened. And Nixon’s speech pretended that this was just some communistic thing that came out of nowhere. Going back even farther, the French had the creche system and of course the Scandinavian countries have been doing this for a long time.
The NWPC also prepared legislation on Supreme Court candidates, and here’s my favorite story from that experience.[6] In 1971, when Justice Hugo Black died and Justice Harlan announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, Nixon was quoted in the press saying, “Well, I’m going to put the best qualified man in the job.” Liz Carpenter, a Texan and Lady Bird Johnson’s former press secretary, jumped on that immediately. Liz was a fantastic press person and was on the Policy Council of the Caucus. She called me up and said, “Ginny,” (using a nickname I acquired at Bryn Mawr) “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, “Don’t make it sound like a Bryn Mawr paper. Make it readable, snappy.” She told me to meet her at the Calvert Café the next day, a Sunday, and bring copies. So, I wrote the press release on my manual typewriter with quite a few carbon copies.
I prepared the press release and went off to the Calvert Café. Liz was there with Eileen Shanahan from the New York Times, Isabel Shelton from the Washington Star, and Helen Thomas, who was with the AP at that point. And so, I handed them the press release. We had some food, and the story made the Monday papers and the network news. I was interviewed briefly on one of the networks – by Dan Rather I think. It was for me a real lesson in how somebody who knows what to do when there’s a story can get media attention. And in how a great time to put out something is Sunday—a slow news day. Liz Carpenter had deep relationships with the press corps – most particularly the women writing for major news outlets–and the result was that the story made a splash and helped generate huge public outcry calling Nixon out for treating the Court as a male-only preserve.
The Caucus, and this is something I worked on, put together a coalition of groups to call for the appointment of a woman to the Court. The groups included NOW and major civil rights groups. One of the organizations I recruited was the D.A.R. The Caucus was bi-partisan—the policy Council included Democrats and Republicans, and there were sharp disagreements on a number of issues, notably on gay rights and abortion. Anyway, our goal on the Supreme Court appointment was to put pressure on Nixon from his own party.
Anyway, Nixon immediately backtracked and did include women in the list of possible appointees. By some accounts, Mildred Lillie (a conservative California judge) almost made the final cut, but Nixon ended up appointing Lewis Powell to replace Black and William Rehnquist to replace Harlan. The NWPC presented testimony opposing Rehnquist.
I left the caucus to work on Shirley Chisholm’s Presidential campaign, briefly. My one field trip was to to California to try to resolve a fight between NOW and the National Women’s Political Caucus on the one hand and Black organizations on the other over who was going to head her campaign there. My job was to tell Chisholm who should prevail, and I was conflicted myself. So, I wasn’t much help to her in resolving that problem. But then I got mono and had to leave the campaign. In retrospect when I think about her candidacy it was remarkable in its impact even though it was laughably understaffed and underfunded. The campaign office was this dingy little two-room place, with just a few of us there to work. We received lots of correspondence. There were no big donors. People would send dollar bills in handwritten envelopes with handwritten notes. It was all grassroots. Yet, she won 152 delegates and continues to be inspiration to women who want to enter politics and to all outsider candidates.
I moved back to Philadelphia in 1972. I had actually started a relationship, with the man I eventually married. He lived in the Philadelphia area. I was then supporting myself with temp jobs and freelance writing, including stories for Ms. One was about fundraising. Another, with Ellen Sudow, was about women’s rights legislation. But, then I was hired by Lynn Scheffey, then a Co-Chair of the Pa. Governor’s Commission on the Status of Women, to put together the Third Annual Conference of the Interstate Association of Commissions on the Status of Women. That was rewarding and fun. I had a lot of connections with people who could be great speakers through my time in Washington. So, as conferences go, this one was a great success. Like all conferences, it gave people a chance to network and support one another. It was at this point that I decided to go to law school.
I went to Villanova my first year, and then transferred to Penn. I needed money, and I applied for a scholarship for the second year. Villanova’s offer was really low, but Penn gave me very generous financial support, so I transferred. I still had to earn money, and I did some freelance writing for a friend who worked for Smith Kline (documenting a new medical test) and also for a psychology professor. I did very well in law school. At Bryn Mawr, I got my degree with honors, but I wasn’t any kind of superstar. Law school was different. I was older than a lot of my classmates and had so much more real world experience. A lot of law is experience and understanding how to weave stories into arguments backed by legal principles.
JW: Let me ask you, what year did you graduate?
VK: 1977. Lou Pollak was the dean of the law school, and he encouraged me to apply for clerkships. In one of my interviews, I remember a District Judge told me I reminded him of his wife. No offer from that person. But, I got a clerkship with Sidney Schreiber who was a justice on the New Jersey Supreme Court and a wonderful man. Lou Pollak also told me to apply for a Supreme Court clerkship, which I never would have dreamed of doing had he not encouraged me. 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 Stewart’s chambers. I think it was November of 1978. I’d been there since June or July. So, that affected me profoundly —it was shattering really.
But what can I say about the clerkship experience? The court, it goes without saying, was very different from today’s court. Ironically, Rehnquist was on the court, and I’d been involved in developing the Caucus testimony opposing him, but that never came up. Potter Stewart certainly knew all about my feminist activism. It was right there to see in my resume. When I interviewed with him, he asked me what I thought about his opinion in Geduldig v. Aeillo. I told him I disagreed with it. Geduldig was, in my book, his worst opinion ever. That’s the one where he said, a pregnancy classification isn’t sex based because it divides pregnant persons from non-pregnant persons and both men and women can be non-pregnant persons. I don’t know whether you know that.
JW: I do. Interestingly, now, people say that pregnancy isn’t sex based.
VK: Yes. It’s all gotten very complicated for those of us who know this history. It’s also infuriating that Justice Alito revived Geduldig in his Dobbs opinion. But, in any event, my clerkship year was a mixed one. My brother’s death cast a heavy shadow. After that clerkship I worked for a few months for the Philadelphia District Attorney in the Appeals Division and then went to UPenn as a law professor, where I taught Civil Procedure, Employment Discrimination, Gender and the Law, among other classes.
JW: Oh, really?
VK: Yes. For Gender and the Law, I developed my own materials. That was a labor of love.
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 in the summer of 1979. My daughter was born in my first semester of teaching, and Penn had zero policies for maternity leave. One of my little badges of shame is that I just accepted this. So, I taught classes in advance so I could have some time off – two weeks I think it was.
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 leave to give birth, I had this accumulated time. I taught up until the day before I had to head to the hospital. But in retrospect, how absurd! I would watch my male colleagues, have one child, two children, and they would crank out articles. I was struggling. I was struggling in lots of ways; quite honestly, I was not over my brothers’ death. In the meantime, I was at Penn in a tenure track position where all that matters are publications, but—because the activist gene is strong in me—I took on a prisoner pro bono case and also helped someone who felt he had been wronged by the University. Child care was also a constant challenge. Ironically, I spent a big portion of my salary on child care even though I was researching an article on child care. My husband was also on the tenure track, and my marriage was strained. We separated when my daughter was three.
The upshot was that I did not do the writing I needed to do to qualify for tenure. I wrote an essay on comparable worth and a piece for Ms. on Sandra Day O’Oconnor (who replaced Stewart on the Court), but the childcare paper just would not write. I continue to think about that unwritten paper, but it has never gotten written. So, having not published what I needed to, I left Penn at the end of my 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, he has an advantage I also realized late in the time when I was there that I was probably being underpaid. They gave me suddenly this big raise. I’m like, “Why did they give me this big raise?” I figured someone in the administration did an equal pay review and thought they needed to correct the inequity. There were another aspects of my experience there that lead me to use the word “toxic.” It probably comes down again to the fact that the faculty was overwhelmingly male with an ethos to go with it. Men define what is normal and – to channel Carol Gilligan – what is normal for men may not be for women. Complicated topic as it applies in an academic institution. I’m sure it is very different now because there are enough women to make a critical mass on the faculty.
I left Penn to work for a large Philadelphia law firm, which was a disaster because I was temperamentally not suited to work in big law. After my divorce was final, I decided to move to New Jersey because I like the state court system, which I think is one of the best in the country. Also, living in New Jersey would put my daughter at a closer distance to her father who worked at Rutgers. All things considered, it was the right decision. I’ve been in New Jersey since 1992, doing work as a solo practitioner. I have had some involvement in local political issues but in recent years I have shifted my focus to prison issues. This grew out of volunteer work I did at a maximum security men’s prison in Trenton for a prisoner-run literacy project. Two special education teachers who attended Nassau Presbyterian Church had started a literacy project to help the prisoners who were tutors with techniques for working with students who had learning differences, such as dylexia. I went in not as a literacy tutor but to teach classes for the prisoners -not law but poetry, history, and a Shakespeare series.
There are always threads in your life that may play into why you would be drawn to prison work. My brother was a really unusual person who had had a few brushes with the law. I mean, kind of kid stuff. And then I had a cousin whose son got involved in drugs and was placed on probation but stupidly left the state without permission . He ended up in a medium-security prison in Indiana. I had visited him there, and I know the struggles he had had to get even minimally adequate health care. But, it was another level of awful in the maximum security prison in Trenton. The original prison was built in 1832 and the older part of the prison is in terrible shape. But, the teaching was very rewarding.
The program I volunteered for was shut down in 2012 under the Christie administration. A real shame. It had operated for 25 years and had been named a Point of Light under the first Bush Administration. It should not have been terminated, but that is a long, long story.
I’m now on the steering committee of a group at Nassau that focuses on prison issues. I follow legislation and work on advocacy strategies. One effort is trying to push for get a ballot question that would amend the New Jersey Constitution to abolish slavery. There’s an exception for “punishment for crime” in the federal 13th Amendment, and there’s a national campaign to amend the 13th to “end the exception.” But the state by state campaigns have a better chance of success in this political environment. If successful, these amendments will help both women and men. As it stands, the “exception” has been interpreted to mean that prisoners have to work for a pittance at whatever jobs they’re assigned.
The social justice mission of Nassau Presbyterian 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. 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 that are anti-gay, anti-trans, and in my opinion anti-woman.
JW: Extreme views.
VK: Yes. 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 men’s 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, but I am still in touch with her. She has been turned down for parole several times – without a valid justification in my opinion – and now she is waiting for another hearing and has also applied for clemency. One shocking fact about women in prison is that a huge percentage (well over 50%) have been sexually abused as children.
A number of years ago I taught a poetry class to women in our county jail. The stories that came of that class about abuse were horrific. I don’t know whether you have heard about the sex abuse scandal at Edna Mahan. The DOJ investigated, and they now have a board of trustees for Edna Mahan that is providing meaningful oversight. Conditions there for women have improved. Our Commissioner of Corrections, Victoria Kuhn, had come up through the system, and as DOC Commissioners go, she seems to be dedicated to improving conditions. But the problems are vast.
Apart from this volunteer work, I taught classes in women’s history in 2015 as an adjunct at Mercer County Community College. This was part of the New Jersey STEP program. STEP program allows prisoners to take college-level classes and earn associate’s degrees. If they get the degree, Rutgers will accept the credits and offer them admission to a full-degree program. I taught the women’s history courses at two different medium-security institutions for men. There is much to say about those classes: One moment stands out. This was when one of the students talked about how important Planned Parenthood was to him. He took his girlfriend there for contraceptive advice.
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, yes, but I will go back to how I grew up, and my father and mother. 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 was raised. I always spoke my mind – from an early age. Don’t think I’ve ever been able to say “Yes, dear,” except as a joke. Probably didn’t help my marriage. I have two grandchildren, and if we want to talk about my life’s priority right now,–more so than the advocacy and legal work I’m involved with — is my grandchildren and being there when needed to help my daughter and son-in-law. They are both academics who live in New Haven. My son-in-law is an economics professor at BU’s School of Management and my daughter is a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law.
JW: Oh, how great. 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, Alito’s sense of grievance and his grudges just ooze through that opinion. And what they’ve done with affirmative action and voting rights, all of these, are very, very concerning. I am a law junky. I listen to the Supreme Court oral arguments as I walk my dog. They have dismantled so much.
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 have taken their rights for granted. 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.
Footnotes:
[1] Her obit was in the Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/business/media/mary-thom-a-chronicler-of-the-feminist-movement-dies-at-68.html
[2] Ed Grefe. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/washingtonpost/name/edward-grefe-obituary?id=6081585
[3] https://sociology.ucsc.edu/about/directory-emeriti.php?uid=roby
[4]https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=%E2%80%9COne+Step+Forward%E2%80%94Two+Steps+Back%3A+Child+Care%27s+Long+American+History%2C%E2%80%9D&pages=157-171
[5] I recently learned that the op-ed was reprinted in the Congressional Record in 1972.
[6] Sally Kenney wrote a story about this in Women’s E-news. https://womensenews.org/2009/05/nixon-gaffe-sparks-era-judicial-advance/