Norma Swenson and Paula Doress-Worters

00:03 My name is Norma Swenson.

00:07 I am 86 years old and I will be 87 on my next birthday. Today's date is Friday, July 13th, 2018.

00:19 We are in Boston in the South End of Boston, Massachusetts, and I'm talking today with my dear friend colleague traveling companion and co-founder of our bodies ourselves Paula doress-worters.

00:39 I am Hall address Waters.

00:43 I I am 79 for the next several weeks when I have my next birthday and I will be 80 today's date is July 13th, 2018.

01:01 We are located in Boston, Massachusetts and I am with my partner and many many many parts of our Lives. We travel together. We sleep spoken at events together and she is my dear friend and colleague Norma Swenson.

01:49 Paula as we were coming here today, I found myself thinking

01:54 Is it really 40 or 45 years that we've known each other that is a very long time and I was we were talking about when did we first meet and when did we first start working together? And I think it's more than 40 years ago and has to be and I would say and I'm saying this because I wasn't driving when I first met you and you often gave me rides to meetings that we were going to together that I first met you in 1970 to 71 or 72. What do you think about that? Do you think that's right?

02:32 I think it was about nineteen seventy-two because had we already published our first assignment & Schuster Edition know okay, so then it was before that because up until that point we had those newsprint additions and on our way here. Actually we went by the building where the where the Press was based that printed our first efforts which had to do with a course. We were giving we have this idea. We would give a course and then the people who took the course would bring it to their communities. We weren't even thinking about a book at that point and

03:16 And I guess you came to one of those meetings. I'm not sure. I remember that Miriam and Ruth hunted you up and you came to a meeting that was at Esther's house.

03:29 And you

03:32 And then you decided to become part of our group. I can't remember how that decision. Wow. I can tell you it wasn't like that because what I remember is that there was some discussion within the core group that there was it's it's sort of like the Russian nesting dolls that there was a small group of you who really where the core group and then some people fell away and others came in but it's like a series of circles and that I was really a complete outside or to that Circle. First of all, I was not a boomer as the rest of you were and that made a difference and I had been working for a decade trying to change maternity care and you are we're having struggles with giving birth and having your babies at a hospital in Cambridge, which seem to be the only Progressive place in town at the time, but

04:32 We had never heard of each other that I didn't know very much about what was going on in Cambridge and you all knew nothing about what was going on in the suburbs and all of that. So it was like I was an outsider to your group generationally and also in terms of the work we are pursuing because one way I always described the collective is which was at that time name the Boston women's health book Collective and we were known as the collective for a number of years before we shifted to our bodies ourselves. Then be a 501 c 3 XL a little more practical. Well actually didn't we didn't change your name into long after that. But anyway,

05:21 I think it was a discussion in the group about whether it would be okay to bring in this old lady outside or and I believe it was Miriam who said yes, she knows a lot about the health system that she certainly knows a lot about childbirth. So that's free. And that was really important because a lot of us were having our first or second child. We were very interested in childbirth and in making changes on the way childbirth was typically John we wanted to be awake when we had her babies not be given a lot of drugs a whole lot of things and those are the things we talked about at that first conference at Emmanuel College the conference on women in their bodies. So yeah, I think it was more that you might have felt older and actually I wasn't strictly speaking of baby boomer because I believe the Baby Boomers were born after World War II

06:21 And I was wondering 1938 just as the war was getting going. So I was I was a baby boomer by adoption, I guess because I saw that the people of that generation were much more lively and involved in doing interesting things and I thought you know, what's five or six years. I'm going to do this.

06:46 And that's how I became part of the group and Jay and also is like right between us. She's one year from her. She's a year old. Thinking about anyway.

07:03 But one of the things that that made the work that we did possible it seems to me is the fact that we took the time to talk about our experiences of growing up and the struggles that we had that we hoped other women would not have to go through and that was really the foundation of the work especially during the time when there were just these discussion groups in the courses and that's really how I got to know what everybody says else was because I had met some of you when I was showing roof Film Center Church in Brookline, and then later invited people to come to a meeting in Newton and what if you were Ruth Bell Alexander, one of our Founders was so frustrated with the way I was talking and it she shouted at me and said you are not a feminist and you will never be a feminist in you.

08:03 Need to go to school and I was stricken by that but also feeling like maybe she was right. Maybe there was there was some way that I needed to know more things than I thought. I knew because I was already an expert on birth. And when I saw the book, which was at that point a little newsprint pamphlet no color and just black ink and brown paper. I was shocked.

08:35 And I was shocked because I think I had never read on a piece of paper the experiences of real women and talking about body parts in naming thumb and illustrating them and in the Choppers Movement, we talked about birth everything you could think of about birth. We did not talk about sexuality. We did not talk about abortion. We did not talk about birth control.

09:06 I was awakened so I decided I would go to one of the courses.

09:24 So a college of mine and in the childbirth movement named Hillary Sauk was living in Bedford at the time and she was living not far from Ruth Bell was her name the one who shouted at me and she got ahold of the book and she threw it on my desk and she said what do you think of this as I say, I was really shocked because in the Choppers Movement we were always able to say anything and describe anything about the birth process, but we were kept away from talking about birth control abortion sexuality everything that comes before finally giving birth. So at that moment I realized that

10:16 I was coming to the end of what I could do with just focusing on birth. And also with the colleagues of my own generation that this was the limit of what they were able to resist about and you all were prepared to resist about everything and including the medical profession, which was really important to me because I felt as if somehow they were in charge of women's lives in a way they shouldn't be

10:46 Norma I guess I'm a little confused or maybe listeners would be and what about the way they can you tell Paula? What about the way you were presenting the first film did someone say you're not a feminist?

11:05 I think we're into the politics now of how social movements work. And because I really was not a feminist at that point. I don't think I had enough insight into our methods of trying to make progress and changing maternity care and our methods were really to charm the doctors. If we could to say to them. We really want a different kind of birth and there were doctors who are prepared to step forward and take care of us as a kind of clientele. I think within the collective at that point, which was not really a collective at the time. It was just a loose collection of authors who were in small groups or individuals.

11:59 To confront the entire establishment and to be confrontational to say you really have no right to have a quota system for women in medicine. You have no right to tell women that they have to have a certain number of children before they can have a sterilization procedure. I mean is it just some of the things that we're going on at the time and the fact that we couldn't have abortions that all you have to remember that abortion was a felony.

12:31 Which is a special category of legal crime in every state in the Union before Roe v Wade. Well also involved in Massachusetts and Connecticut birth control. I mean, your birth control was illegal technically, so

12:51 You know, we have that to deal with as well and I became particularly aware of that because before yet, you know, starting our bodies ourselves, I worked in our community and box braids and I went around interviewing people door-to-door and I found that a lot of low-income women were they were very keen on getting birth control and then when they did not and if they happen to be on welfare, then they would demonized as having children out of wedlock when that was the only option for them. So is there a lot of there were just so many issues that we were dealing with when we started to put this book together and it made a big difference and somebody recently a a book review book review where I guess I was commenting that that original news print edition with far angrier than the later book.

13:51 That were edited in the more, you know mainstream fashion, and she meant it as a compliment that we were rightfully angry and we should have been angry and that's what kicked it all off.

14:07 I think that's right. And I also

14:12 I also wonder because we have a lot of the kind of talking we did about our earlier lives came out in bits and pieces because our meetings were divided into a business that we had to take care of because we had at that time there was a book out there that had to be accounted for but also we wanted to be a support group and in that support group, we talked a lot about our earlier experiences growing up and then things that made growing up so hard and I often feel that the core group of women who started our bodies ourselves and I think you said so some of you worried that somehow you weren't able with your good education's to get the basic information that you needed to make responsible decisions about your lives and your bodies and that that was

15:12 How much the impetus for our bodies ourselves but that they were personal memories attached to that feeling of frustration. And I wonder if you can say anything about what you remember now from your own growing up that stuck in your craw. So to speak that made you feel outraged and then something had to be done about it. Oh how where to begin the first let me say about our meeting that I remember it. We were meeting every week for a really long time and we began we would alternate between the business meetings that had to do with publishing a book and then the following week we would talk without using consciousness-raising techniques, which were very big in the women's movement even before our bodies ourselves. And so we would pick a topic, you know, what where our fathers like what were our mothers like that we have siblings were boys and girls treated differently in our family.

16:12 Pretty much. Yeah, and you know, so there were a lot of things and then I came from a family that my parents were immigrants. We didn't have much money and there wasn't enough money for me to go to a 4-year college. So I went to a 2-year business school and the climate for women was so bad because I chose the field that was I guess primarily considered to be for Manwich was accounting and it was almost like hazing I mean every day I come into work and there was this man who he was a young married man and his wife had recently had a baby and every time we found ourselves on the stairs at the same time, he would urge me to come on a trip to Domaine with him or I would do no die an old maid or something and I was about 20 or 21 at the time. So that was just outrageous and

17:12 To mention the other outrageousness which will appear in my Memoir. But but to those were the kind of things that mean you just couldn't get anywhere as a professional and you know, those jobs were held for man. And so I think and simile and medicine as you were saying, I don't know I didn't realize there was an actual quota system, but I think one of the real contribution of our book is after a few years of different editions women started flooding in to the medical schools, and I don't know whether it was a coincidence, but I think it may have influenced a lot of people to consider medical school and it's it's made a lot of difference of women going to doctors and not having to talk to somebody who looks like their uncle and doesn't want to give them birth control.

18:06 I'm thinking about what you're saying and and remembering.

18:11 The work that I was able to do when I finally got to school of Public Health and the interesting thing is that I was really coming into the collective at the same time that I was starting my public health education and there were people in public health at that time who told me not to tell anyone that I had anything to do with you all who were making our bodies ourselves that I should keep that quiet under wraps and just present myself as a community health worker sometime and I thought that was quite outrageous and these were you know, radical people who thought my chances of career or whatever it would be damaged, but I didn't take their advice and I made a lot of friends when I got to Public Health school who understood perfectly what we were doing and believed in it and

19:11 That was the beginning of understanding that the best thing about most graduate experiences is the student body and not the faculty. But the lack of birth control was a major issue. If you have no access to birth control as a single woman if abortion is not only illegal but a felony all we had when I was growing up and now we're talkin adolescence was the idea that the guy might have a condom in his wallet and he might not so then there was the question of you certainly wouldn't dare ask him. How far would the petting go before you begin to wonder about these kinds of questions and petting may sound strange to some people listening, but that's what we call the kind of sexual exploration that we were doing as teenager.

20:11 Isn't as young college girls without any protection whatsoever that the guys had cars and we didn't so we had to be brought in the reunion. It was certainly a different time.

20:34 You mentioned that you consider yourself a different generation. And how did that influence your growing up and understanding of sexuality or Women's Health? What was your experience telephone?

20:50 Is it okay if I Ask Paula to answer that question first? Yeah.

20:56 So

21:00 By the time I came to Boston, I was 9 years old and that would have been about the time you were.

21:11 Being born I guess or a little bit after that. So my growing up in Boston and yours would be quite different because I came from the countryside in New Hampshire and I lived in a small town where

21:29 There were railroad tracks that were active and today we still have in our language people from across the tracks and most people don't even know what that means. But what it meant was in the town where I grew up that there were people who lived on the wrong side of the tracks and they would be the immigrants. They would be the poor people. If there were any people of color we didn't have any people of color. I never saw any people of color until I came to Boston and stood down here on Sunny Huntington Avenue and saw them coming toward me in large numbers and they all looked like I had no idea how I was ever going to figure out one person from another so I had really sheltered upbringing in that respect.

22:19 But

22:23 Anyway

22:30 Not reading my paper.

22:33 You both are following instructions, beautifully. Thank you.

22:44 Take us to the water.

22:55 So you knew more about urban life very early than I ever did.

23:02 Yes, my life was entirely Urban and actually my first memories of growing up on Huntington Avenue. I have another memory that when someone in my family was graduating from the English language courses, they gave to immigrants at that time and there was one black man in the audience. He was one of the graduates and my brother was just a baby and he's never seen a black man. And I don't know that I ever had either but I did not, since but my brother started crying and saying dirty hands dirty face and my mother was just so mortified as power has the man was very he just laughed. He didn't think anything of it because there were very few African-American people in Boston at that time.

24:02 Courageous to come here

24:07 So yeah, and that's how my father came to this country as a tan in his early teens. He was 13. He came with his mother and his brothers to meet his father Hood gone ahead to raise money to bring the family to Boston and my mother came on her own in her twenties and they met each other in the West End which was an area for a settlement for immigrants at that time, particularly Jews and Italians. And anyway, they married they got an apartment on Huntington Avenue. I remember a lot of times my mother and I was just willing they have a stroller up and down the street we walk all the way to Brookline which we called pretty Brookline cuz we didn't have tracks but it was the right size and my father had a little Variety Store and I'd be taking there to pick up my day's stash of kantian chips and whatnot. So if you ever work in the store

25:07 I was sick, but I mean they had the store when you were growing up. I know they didn't go nowhere then we moved to rocketry. So that was our second Roxbury was just opening up as an area of Jewish settlements and it was almost Suburban even though it was supposed to be Jack or how beautiful gardens and things and I remember when I was in graduate school somebody once described Roxbury is the most beautiful swim in the nation because we have the the grass the Greenbelt and Franklin Park and all of that. It was a very pleasant place to grow up.

25:47 So then the whole question of dating and all that surprisingly, I was allowed to go out with boys. I may be a third teen fourth. Well, the 13-14 age range. That was a boy. I met who just followed me home from my girlfriend's house and it reminded me of those scenes in children's books or movies with a say. Mommy the kitty followed me home. Can I kick?

26:18 My parents thought it was a little naughty. But anyway, nothing much but he gave me his brothers High School ring and we were going steady for a year, but not much. Well, this is going way back. So then later I started to babysit for a cousin who lived on the next street and her parents were very they were american-born. They were very, you know modern they went out on Saturday nights and there a little girl who is I was twelve by then and she was like, I think she was for I think the first thing she'd always say to me when I arrived his cousin Paula. Will you drive me a picture of a sexy girl?

27:02 That's what she said. I don't think it had quite the connotation. It does now a Hollywood think so. I make a little sketch of a woman and she'd be wearing a pretty outfit and you know have a nice figure and so forth and I think that was kind of the role model she was looking for so as we were talking about earlier, we we always worked in some way or another you mean work earning money babysitting.

27:42 All right, and then so, you know when it got to be when I got to be the age when a boy that wanted to take me out had a car my father cautioned me about a boy talk a lot of trash about girls. Sometimes after they date them and I should be cautious of that and he knew that from his growing up in the West End has that you know.

28:08 Blossoming America and so, you know, they pay pretty close attention, even though they both work very hard away from home with Ford else in my family. Also, my mother's sister and her husband so they came when I was an infant, so I never even realized that they you know, we just had a family of four adults and two children and and then as soon as we got closer to being teenagers my aunt and uncle started to put their two cents in about what I should both of us my brother and I would be allowed to do you are not allowed to do and then we started to Rebelle and then we you know, we we split up the two homes that's not really that much related. But so when I went out with boys, I had a very strong feeling about the kind of why I wanted so I was interested in and what I was and wasn't willing to do and what I had to do to protect myself so that I could get an edge.

29:08 Haitian I had a sense of some kind of a future and I didn't have to clear a sense of what it was but I know it was important and that I had to be cautious and it was but you know and then sit still or times like, you know coming home from movies is something we might pull into a little section in Franklin Park and we might a little smooching eventually got to maybe cutting when I was a little older but nothing beyond that and it never occurred to me that somebody would you know

29:43 Try to have sex with me if I didn't want to because I've been the whole question of birth control and condoms really never came up for you until much later until I until I was in my 20s. Yeah, that's when I was at that point because they even the birth control was so primitive until we were a little older. Well, yeah it just that you couldn't rely on it to really prevent you from getting pregnant. I didn't feel I don't believe so. Yeah. Yeah.

30:21 Do you remember how anyone in your life give you kind of The Facts of Life, your station Oh Yes, actually that came surprisingly early. I was my whole family went to the beach, which was unusual thing that we all got to go. And so my mother and I were in the women's changing room at City Point Beach and Boston and my mother had this very groovy bathing suit for someone of her generation and I was very pretty with pink and black and it was two piece but not a bikini with bikinis weren't around you and

31:02 And I thought you I was proud of her. I thought she looked really sharp. And then just as we were about to go out the door. She said to me would you look at the back of my swimsuit and see if there's any blood on there and I was mortally fearful of blood in General Tso. And then she took that as a teachable moment and she explained to me about menstruation. And and then and once you began to have these. You would you could get pregnant and you had to be careful about that and I was just I was so I was kind of excited I was like she was telling me all this grown-up stuff that she had never told me before and I was only seven years old. So I felt like I just felt very knowledgeable.

32:02 I like the whole steel and I didn't get my. Till. I was 12. So that didn't seem like we were rushing into anything with that but I always remember that because she was

32:19 I'll always remember that because normally she didn't talk about such things and

32:28 And yet, you know what the people in our family we had to married couples and they

32:34 Not right

32:45 I'll always remember that.

32:47 I'll always remember that because I was just so pleased that she had cheered all this information with me that I didn't think any of my friends had and I felt very grown-up and very knowledgeable and it was just really cool.

33:03 And of course, I didn't actually get my. Till I was 12, so it wasn't anything I had to deal with right away.

33:14 Better protected you from the scary part about the blood did not tell that it was coming. Well, that's right. So when I did get my. Well, you know, sometimes I have cramps said there were things are unpleasant about it, but I didn't I wasn't scared and it turned out my mother told me later. The reason she told me well, I don't know if it was really the reason but she she told me that when she didn't get her. Till she was sixteen because she was very small and thin she had grown up during the first world war and you are a and there was food shortages and when people I don't have enough fat, I think I learned that from you nor when they don't have enough that they don't get their periods actually throws first, but it doesn't matter. Okay credit where it's due until you for passing it on. So, yeah, so and then actually when I was in junior high school there was a gaggle of girls who are always asking each other.

34:13 Do you think it hurts and what they meant?

34:25 That could be the police interrupting as a fraction.

34:46 Conveniently located near Lake police station or something

34:53 Hey ya station 16. It's not far from here. See that comes up from the depths.

35:01 The wideye livre

35:07 Yeah, so the girls didn't know this was Middle School the girls at Middle School would whisper to each other and two others of us with we would listen. What does it hurt? And what does it hurt men's does it hurt when you have sex and this never occurred to me. I had I had gone to Hebrew day school for a while before I came back into public school and I still believed in a benign see it and I thought well, why would it hurt because then people wouldn't want to have sex in them. I wouldn't have children and just didn't make any sense to me. So that's a good story. I never heard that.

35:49 So anyway

36:00 Sure.

36:05 I was particularly interested in your talking about.

36:12 Those early moments of transition.

36:16 And and also how you felt about your body because I think

36:23 Well, I think every generation of girl's coming-of-age going to obsess about their body that just going to obsess about it in a different way and that's certainly happened to me. But I think I was much more deeply influenced by the movies. Maybe then you were because my mother was a complete movie Freak and I thought I thought the whole thing was a waste of time. We live very close to a theater called the Kenwood Theater and she wanted to go to the movies. So as soon as it seemed reasonable she took me with her, so I was quite Young when I began to feel at home in a dark movie theater and to watch a lot of movies and I I think I was more obsessed with trying to look like a movie star in the first ten years of my life and maybe it's still there. I don't know that some

37:20 Some residual sensitive of how to look or how to walk or any of that and I know that I didn't yet have breasts when somehow I was sitting alone in a darkened movie theater and a guy sitting next to me had managed to unbutton my whole blouse, but I have I had a kids undershirt underneath

37:51 And I didn't at the time, you know, it didn't mean a whole lot. I was amazed that he had managed to do this, but I didn't I didn't feel threatened by the thing but as I look back on it, I realize that I was quite vulnerable to this kind of thing which way through your mother at all. I was going to the movies alone years old and my father gave me a nickel and explain the subway system to me and from that time on I was really and it was not so unusual at that time for me to do that because

38:42 I came to Boston in 1941 and Pearl Harbor was in December of that year. So I really grew up in a war time. We have to say that the rules were different. I think the oncoming Generations were in a better position to be to feel like their kids with honorable, but I can remember on the streetcar. They were these men who would piss you and at first I didn't understand what was happening and then I realized that this glassy-eyed I was trying to pinch my bottom and I'd have to move away from in and get off and take another car. That was par for the course in those days. There was any question about it, but the question of where I got my information about what The Facts of Life we really all about it was certainly not any talk and I think that idea of that talk came also out of the movies, I think very few parents in fact

39:42 No, I would say that parents are the least well-equipped of any of the adults that most kids meet to give them the information they need whether we want to talk about it incest barrier weather with what we want to talk about. It doesn't matter. I think that people deserve that information, but I'm not sure that they can receive it best from parents which is what less Progressive people feel which is why they fought so hard to get sex education out of the schools instead of into the school. It happened. So I think that

40:25 Moving furniture

40:37 I think that I learned this information from other older kids who were probably newly obsessed with what they had found out and wanted it on I know but I I think I was about 11 years old at the time and I could not get it through my head that this is how the whole thing happened babies came in all of that and the idea of birth control was way not even on the horizon. I do remember because I went to a very good girl school at that time. We could have good girls schools and here in Boston. It was called the girls Latin School and someone thought that to be responsible to us girls. We should have a lecture by a doctor.

41:27 And this doctor came in her Sandy brown suit and her Sandy Brown voice and said a lot of things that some of us understood because we had enough Latin to understand it but really didn't explain anything and I remember thinking to myself this is ridiculous when it went out learning anything from her that we're going to learn it some other way. I remember discovering what masturbation was and realizing that it had a bad reputation because in the countryside I can tell you we games of kids had our playtime Cyrus X gameplay times in in small gangs and small groups. It was just what kids did and they did it on the other side of town to where I was living. I never finished this

42:27 About the tracks, but across the tracks were the factory workers that the the shoe factory and the textile Factory in the town of Exeter put the immigrants that they hired to do that work and my mother and her mother and father came out of that community. So I had access to both sides of the track throwing up and and early of sore that there were these differences in the way they went about

43:00 Everything but certainly my my introduction to sexual activity came as a very young child in a gang of other kids. That's just how it was. So I had that in the back of my mind but those games didn't seem to have anything to do with how babies were made and I didn't couldn't make any sense out of that either and took me a long time to absorb it. So all I had was that Sandy Brown lady and then I decided that I really could find out something if I went to the dictionary, so in my school, I went to the dictionary and with a little effort found the spelling of masturbation and you can't imagine what it said. I don't know if I've ever told you this. No I haven't but this the first definition of masturbation was self-pollution of

44:00 And I looked at that and I thought to myself how can that be? I was literally enough to think that pollution was not a good thing, but I didn't I don't think I knew what pollution was and South pollution. So there it was that that was my self-education sex education that I got and then the rest of it came from novels and because I was in early reader I was reading way way ahead of where everybody else was and us spending a fair amount of time with a doll sets and only child. So I listen to keyholes We we all of us kids did that and heard some of the discussion that was going on about birth control in and miscarriage for example was a weird you could not speak so the women talking about it would whisper it would say she had a miscarriage

45:00 No idea what a miscarriage was and why it should be whispered about but all of this stuff.

45:08 Taught me that secrecy and sex had to go together and one of the things that was so liberating and inspiring about the childbirth work was that we were going to tear away that secrecy and we were in good company and the interesting thing. Is that a maternity Center in New York was like the center of the universe at that time for childbirth education, which is the work that I did for so many years and they the women of that. Now we're talking about what was going on in the 20s when we had the Roaring Twenties and we had a sense that there was a fair amount of sex going on among people who are not marry that reputation certainly came through. So what they did was hire

46:04 And here I'm stumbling. I think he was Hungarian background and his name was Ebron belsky and he was a famous sculptor and he was hired to make by reliefs of all of the stages of pregnancy. Nothing nothing about the connection between men and women that has to happen before then. But but we had certainly a pregnant, you know, we had an unpregnant uterus and then we had the early pregnancy and all the way up to birth and postpartum in a by relief and I discovered years later that there were riots on the streets of New York at the time of the opening of that exhibit now it would be one thing if they were having, you know, some kind of Kamasutra exhibit where they was showing out people actually had sex. No, it was just showing the stages of pregnancy and the birth the fact that the labia were there in the picture or

47:04 You know, you have two it boggles the imagination to think of how even in Sophisticated New York. It could create such an opera. So all I'm saying is that like most of my generation and some of yours?

47:21 I think we learned more about sex from experimenting than we did from anything. We would ever taught by anybody and from what we read in novels if we could decode the description says Needs activities and from the terrible stories about abortion. And by the time I got to college still illegal, we had this frightening experience while I was in college of suddenly this guy riding around the campus driving a hearse if you please and we were told that in back of the hearse was a woman who was bleeding from a from an abortion and he was looking for his brother who was a big tennis star on campus on whom I had a terrible Crush at the time and the whole thing freaked everybody out. That was his closest we came.

48:19 To what later was revealed as the fact that girls were in fact getting pregnant and they were leaving school and they were who knows what happened to them. We know now from the book called the girls who went away what happened to so many of them but all of that was shrouded in secrecy and I think one of the good things about my parents attitudes was that too much of what went on in politics and everywhere else and Society was secret and that people had a right to information and a right to know how things were managed and what decisions would being made in their name and all of that. So I had that as part of my growing up background. My grandfather was a kind of a political animal in the town and was always fighting what he called the Republican machine.

49:18 And that was one of the things that Drew me to the group that I felt like I was reconnecting with that Spirit the way it was in small-town New Hampshire before the the Second World War. I don't know if I've covered everything.

49:37 Could share experiences of struggling to obtain birth control or stories? You heard about people back then?

49:46 Or when you became aware you can.

49:50 Well, there are number of things that occurred leading up to that. There was the Masters and Johnson studies my go-to way of getting information to soften through books. And so I remember those books of hearing close to the time that we were doing our book as well and

50:26 Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well by the time I was in a relationship where it looked as though we were going to get married that was when I tried starting to seriously look look for birth control, but you know by that point I had and I was almost done with college and

50:50 And there was two there was just more choices available. But I do remember that because of the the ban on.

50:59 Getting getting birth control from a clinic or something like that. Just this with the women. I think I spoke of them earlier who couldn't get birth control because they couldn't afford to go to a private doctor. But some girls would go to a private doctor who could pay for the they made the appointment, but they would buy a five-and-dime store things items that look like a diamond ring. I just wasn't lambaste explain to the doctor that you know, they were engaged and you know, they just wanted to be careful until they were married and so they would get birth control that way but for those women who couldn't afford those, you know, I couldn't afford to go to a private doctor they were really

51:55 An in a bad situation because they could very easily get pregnant if they got into a relationship.

52:06 Started having regular and of course his diaphragm at that point so you could have diaphragm from the doctor because you were either married or about to get married right? That was the only way it could work pretty much. Yeah, and the doctor at that point. I was working for a downtown firm and he happened to know the doctor that I went to job people knew I was engaged and soon to get married and one of the bosses on the firm said to me, did you get your rum?

52:42 Something like that you get your degree in birth control.

52:46 Really really and I think it was his way of saying I hope you're not going to go out and get pregnant right away because we are not going to go out in a lot of sex that you shouldn't be enjoying. I mean that was the other idea that was in everybody's head at the time. The reason why birth control should not be available because it would produce promiscuity which I still find something like that. Yeah. I I don't think he meant that about being with a lot. No I said I said cuz he knew I was engaged and it doesn't this is one of the nice offices. I worked in and people, you know came to the wedding and you know, we're all friendly. I think he thought he was being funny or something. But I also know and you know, there was a woman who

53:46 Birth control if she was not married for sure had to be promiscuous. She was either an outright prostitute or she was simply a slut and I can remember that there was a woman on my campus who had that reputation that she would sleep with anybody. Nobody ever talked about the birth control. But that was that was the perception of that. There are a lot of you know terms like that used about about women. Of course never about the man that there were these few guys who would try to take advantage of all women but you know in the context of me too and what's happening now, it's dazzling to me that we had this system of understanding of what the male population was about and how there was still a Remnant left from the Victorian.

54:46 . I would say that it was it could be risky to be alone with the man and that's the car really changed all of that because up until that time if you were all on your feet and in houses and on streets, then being alone was not such a risk, but the minute you could get into a car then theoretically Anything could happen and boys will be boys. That was the attitude that the girl was always to blame and had to keep being over at actor molested or I got help with scraped and we have to remember, you know, one of the things that I find so frustrating about doing this work now is that

55:36 We produced a lot of high-quality reading material during the second wave and I'm thinking right now if Susan Brownell is booked and I think she called it against rape. Does that sound right to you? And it was something like that. Yeah. I'm going like that and it was considered the landmark book on how women were being abused and were being taken advantage of and were made pregnant and we're whatever you want to call it and how difficult it was for any woman to be believed if she tried to complain whether the guy was a boss whether he was a doctor and some of them were doctors whether he was a teacher. I mean, this is still going on in Africa now where it has to be a male teacher, but if he's at a girl's school he can soon be found in prey.

56:36 Dating all the girls. I mean this is what seemed to be a kind of Norm under which we were growing up that if we found out about these things and if they were possible they were messages that we could not

56:52 Be successful if we tried to complain that that it wouldn't lead anywhere. So what does that lead you to do? It leads you to tell nobody or if you had a really good close friendship with a girl you might tell her but would you and that you know, that kind of I don't know.

57:15 You're coming along behind me 7 years. What do you think? Well, I think one thing at that started to change with, you know with having more information out there about sexuality are information, but also other kinds of information and I remember I think maybe I read this in a novel or something that there was a time when you wouldn't tell anybody if you were having sex, but then there was a time when you'd be embarrassed to tell your peers that you've never had sex and then sometimes people actually made things out for May 28th of their way to have sex so that they would appear more knowledgeable to their friends. So

57:58 But this is what my day. This is what the guys did you had this idea that it was legitimate for them to sleep around or to try to seduce people so that they would have the experience they needed when they got married exactly what they had a noble purpose then it was like that. So it was part of why it was okay for guys and not okay for girls we had didn't we have a section about the culture virginity at one point. I don't remember that but I just wanted to say that it during the. When I was dating and before it was particularly serious that there was this little thing by thread here.

58:52 Oh, yeah, but lines that boys and men older man would lose their was you don't have to worry. Yeah, they know so I remember I went to San Francisco One Summer to it was such a caring the. People with driving back and forth across the country and I stayed in this apartment building not far from where my friends were and there was a man it was near the opera house and he was an opera singer and a 20 chatted me up one time and hallway, and he's he made some sort of you know,

59:35 Attempt to interest me and him and he said and you don't have to worry about getting pregnant because I have a war injury, but you wouldn't believe how many men had this particular war in Terraria?

59:48 That was very popular. That would have been I guess between the 50s and the 60s 1960s. Then there was one boy that I was actually going out with and he kept trying to encourage me to go a little further and he said at one point he said we should try this. I'm sure you'll like it.

01:00:13 It's like, you know, all right, and then I'll get pregnant and you will go wherever and I won't get to go to school and make something of myself. I mean, I just I had like a I had this thing that I protected myself in order to achieve the things that I wanted to achieve so I would

01:00:38 I was wondering if you guys could talk about like the turning points for you like when?

01:00:55 Or information scared to get involved with women's rights. Yeah, that's that's good. We should talk about load of how really long time ago, right, but it is fun to remember. It's been really terrific to to get a sense of of to get a sense of you because as I listen, I feel like I I did not have I mean I think both of us have parents who wanted us to have a good education and to marry somebody with a good education and I don't know if a job was so high on the list at that time because women didn't have a lot of jobs. They could be secretaries. It could be Librarians or nurses and that was about it at that time that was kind of the compact of the 19th century and

01:01:55 For that you would give up being married. You couldn't be both. So the whole thing of being being married and being a working woman at the same time was still all to come will my mother had it open to store when I was in first grade at the children's clothing store. So everyone in my family work the man where the women worked and so I guess I just assumed that I would probably want to work or have to work because we were working so young. I mean I was 14 when I get my Social Security card and I was working. I think my first job was some kind of lingerie store in Brookline of all places where I was showing Fisher slips to wealthy ladies and learning how to fold them up and stuff like that. But at the sense that we had to come

01:02:55 Tribute to our own upkeep probably gave both of us the feeling that we might continue to do that but the but the post-war. Was one of there was this terrible taboo that came down on women's working that they were supposed to work outside the home and most of them did have three children so we know that it would have been difficult to do that. It was also the idea that you had to make the job even the women, you know, the Rosie the Riveter and those kind of jobs. They they were pushed out of the workforce because the men were coming back from the armed services at the time it was happening. I don't know about you while we know I didn't know any other wasn't something I think I think you're in a better position probably than I am to tell those early stories about how how feminism really came to Boston the women's liberation.

01:03:55 Which is what it was called when it first arrived because I was I had been 10 years trying to reform maternity care and that was about all my generation was willing to tackle in terms of resistance to how things were but I think you were in on the ground floor really of all that happened here in Boston. Well in in the 1960s there for a whole series of social movements and some of us got to know each other through those organizations, you're going to civil rights demonstrations. They are taking petitions for us to stop the war in Vietnam all that kind of thing. And then when the women's movement came along and it just kind of landed in Boston with you know, and they were all these women in Boston who had come to live here because their husbands were going to graduate school or you know, and and or maybe

01:04:55 Their husbands had a job at a college and then the college's wouldn't hire them because that would be nepotism. If they gave the person's wife is shop hand and there's a lot of the college has had courses for faculty wives. We will call faculty wives and we could learn about Gloria Estefan music and flowers and who-knows-what and the Society of James. Oh, I can't believe that I can believe it. So

01:05:28 Yeah, so all that stuff was going on but for me because even though in this sort of Cyril e Gala Terrian household, we're both the men and the women were there was also this idea that women would take some time out and stay home with children and the men with working and so

01:05:56 So I would

01:06:01 I just assumed that I would work and I didn't really think about after I had children what I still work but those with an umbrella. I saw these different Role Models as there were these different options and

01:06:17 And my mother had this children's clothing store. So I always had nice clothes and she hardly ever bought anything for herself after that pink bathing suit clothes, but you didn't of course when your kids are growing and you have to get new clothes fairly often. So yeah, there was a surprise I didn't even when I knew you I was still making clothes. I wish I had continued with some of that because when I was pregnant, I made some maternity dresses cuz they were easy to just have these loose dresses and my mother would say, why are you wasting your time? You can buy for my sister Eileen Spaceman clothes that we made would be superior to anything we could buy that was the feeling because we could choose the fabric and it would be a fabric but so then the moment

01:07:16 Hugo when it it for you it came after you had already had at least one child when you got together with the other people at forgotten that part of the women's Liberation movement disorder general movement to bring all women together and I was very excited about that because of the imbalance between men's and women's rights that I have perceived very early and felt it was unfair you said you perceived it in your own household kitchen and I was like, well, what about him and I'll boys don't have to do that. My brother got it. Yeah, and my father actually was very helpful in the kitchen. But anyway, I proceeded that way that this there was something unfair and I didn't like it and and so when the women's movement actually came along and landed right in my city

01:08:16 Other places I just felt like this isn't this is the moment we can do this and I just was so thrilled with it and I wanted to be involved as much as possible by then. I had a had been born and some of the other people in the group like Miriam's Josh have been born a number of our older children have been born and then this conference came up because there were these

01:09:11 So there seems to be two factions of women's movement in Boston, and there was the social feminists and the radical feminism.

01:09:21 Our year 1969 and someone had an idea that we would be much more powerful if we could get together. So this right and woman wait, we always thought it was a professor at Emmanuel College who got us the building for the conference, but it turns out it was an undergraduate who I recently became reacquainted with and she I had worked it out with a nun and if it was a Catholic College run by nuns and they made I don't know they set it up so that we could use the building on a weekend and so Miriam who was then known as Nancy Holly and another woman named Nancy Shaw, who is the professor read a manual?

01:10:21 I knew from the civil rights movement and I know Miriam from playgroup and it was in a play group with Josh and others. And so anyway, they were the two percenters at this. They were the two presenters at the conference and the conference Workshop rather. There were many many workshops on many subjects. But this particular one was called women in their bodies and people spoke about pregnancy and birth and abortion legalizing abortion questions about birth control and what you could ask for that you might ask the doctor for a diaphragm of the doctor with patches on my head and you know, maybe just seem to be a pattern in your head but saying that do you know, I really think would be better if you took the pill you ask for the pill they probably recommend the diaphragm you just did and you just didn't know how to

01:11:21 What you actually want it or why you were asking for it. We didn't have access to that kind of information. So anyway, we just talked and talked and talked quite a variety of women in the room different ages, you know, Professor students and most in a lot of young mom and by the end of the workshop we said somebody said we should continue it was May and we should meet through the summer and we should learn more about all these things. We can you know, baby we can give a course in the fall and that's how it started. It started in Cambridge were a lot of us were living then and yeah, it was terrific. I was just going to say like and then we started trying to go to countway library to to look things up in medical books and they wouldn't let us in.

01:12:19 Because it was meant for the medical students and the doctors some people were clever enough to borrow card from a doctor who they were friendly with we had one woman who was a medical student who joined our group that was losing handed and so given, you know, one thing and another we did manage to get in there. I found out that be you did not have that much of a barrier to lay people coming in. So I did a little research there a time and now we got together what we needed and we discussed it at Great length of various meeting different topic at each meeting and we created a course and I think it was that very next summer that we that we got started with it and my teeth they gave us some space.

01:13:08 All I was wondering if you could save how did it feel to suddenly hear people talking about all those subjects out loud in person that first conference if you could tell Mama

01:13:23 Well, we were so convinced that we wanted to know these things and we were going to teach them in the course and it was to be to other women that wasn't a mixed course. So I don't remember there being such a deal about it. I mean unless somebody brought up something for other people in the group. We've always talked about how shocked they were to walk into the room at MIT and hear this woman talking about masterbation out loud. Yes. I mean she is ready to crawl into the nearest chair, but she also was gripped by the whole thing. I mean you and perhaps I'd although I wasn't there would have been a little more sophisticated than that wouldn't have been the shock point, but I'm sure there were other than Miriam was very sophisticated to so I think the three two or three of us are whoever, you know, I think somehow we managed to keep the focus.

01:14:23 On what we were researching. We also had some point talked about did we get any sex education in our early years in high school? And there was not much. Yeah, not anything really so that was another factor that we wanted to put information out there. So younger women my you know, Lisa creation myths that were talking about and I was not present at the creation but I remember hearing that one of the tasks that that group came out of the conference with was the idea that so many people had told these very distressing and discouraging experiences with doctors that one after another or the women would get up and describe the way they would being treated or even things they were told it weren't true or other things that they were told that they didn't need.

01:15:23 No, and this whole atmosphere of paternalism and condescension was really hurtful and even harmful in some cases so that as I understand it the first and the first rumors that I heard about the group before I ever saw the book was that they were going to make a good doctors list that they were going to make a list of the really good doctors that you could go to and who would treat you right and you could trust and so forth and that when they came back after the summer and talked about the list with a there was not one doctor that could be put on the list that everybody had some negative or unfortunate sense of how they were being treated in the doctor, So one of the early sections of our book is I remember it was about the doctor-patient relationship that we spent a lot of time talking about that and what what we were in Thai

01:16:23 What we're entitled to know and how we're entitled to be treated because because that was the only model that we understood and in a way you can say now easily that that was kind of a middle-class or wheat or we were all we had some college all of us. I think that's what college graduates by that point. But I think the idea was after the failure of the doctor's list was that we had to find out this information and it was up to us and that's how it's evolved into a book from that's how the trip to the library started and I had already unbeknownst to you while I was working on childbirth education. Also wanted to go to countway library because I could see that we were being told nothing our we were being told what surgeons know, which was only half the story there when do midwives the thing was a mess. And so

01:17:23 I wanted to go to countway library and I wanted to know why I couldn't get access to those files and I was gradually told that I could because that library was supported by federal money and as a citizen I had a right to go and ask to see what they had clouded then what it was about and I have to this day a beautiful Oak box filled with little file cards that they gave me as part of the search that I asked for the time but I think that was only maybe a year or two before I hooked up with you all but that time I was getting kind of sophisticated and thinking I needed to know more in order to challenge doctor expects to get the right information was a piece of work and that's when I think

01:18:17 Tell me if I'm wrong that we set ourselves the highest possible standards that unlike even the medical lettuce that you see today that we were going to document every single thing. We said that we were not going to be vulnerable to criticism because what's unique about a book is the fact that we were the first women who were not professionally medically nursing whatever trained in anyway, who was simply trying to explain this to each other? That's what it was about but it had to be accurate and that could be accurate was 2 to go to the source and then we made friends with doctors and we said we want to be sure this is right. What do you think? Yes, we have radar.

01:19:11 When you first started working together and how out of the group coalesced into the the twelve or fourteen or however many that that moment and then the first publication.

01:19:25 Well, why don't I talk about the first edition and then you've talked about when you came in and talked about I ever do that is kind of picked up from what normal was saying about the job after the doctor list what you were saying on my dad.

01:19:49 That we try to make a doctors list and then we gave a course and I think you said you came to one of the cords and I still believe that you were taking me to some of those meetings, but I can't prove it. I don't know I didn't drive at the time right now. I am no I I recall meeting you at Esther's house when you actually decided to join our group, but I always thought I met you somewhere before and I think I may have heard you speak somewhere before I do that anyway, so when we started working on the material for the

01:20:24 Of course, I mean even then I think we tried to document the footnotes. And as I said, we were pretty much all college graduates, we know how to do that and you know, it just didn't let you know if we have the book we were using in front of us or whatever. So we we just kept track and so when we even publish when we publish the news print edition we had some I'll go every chapter was different and so I had more and so yeah, so and we put out two or possibly three editions of that newsprint Edition before we started getting the, you know, the request from Publishers like we never had to look for a publisher because all of a sudden all these

01:21:13 How was your age were were around courting us. And so then we did some research on publisher that we wanted to find out which publishes have the best access to the most leadership and and that's how we came to choose Simon & Schuster some other criteria and our other criteria for Publishers was what were their politics Elia on them? Where did they get their money? How did they decide to behave as a as a corporation? And that was really important to us and I can't do it now, but we could research and we could tell people that in fact.

01:22:04 There was a bidding war that was going on between random house and Simon & Schuster. Right? And we we there was something random house was doing at the time that didn't appeal to us. So we pick Simon & Schuster, but then the very next year they got embroiled in something they were connected to some movie business or if we begin with the assumption that there is no such thing as clean money now a piece of the story that I particularly loved and since we're in the South End of Boston and we went by the building, I'd like to just tell that piece even though I wasn't around at the time I had seen this book and what happened was that nobody ever intended to make any money from that book The whole idea was to get it out there and make it as cheap as possible. It was advertised in something called the whole earth catalog and the whole earth catalog.

01:23:04 If you never seen it and never heard of it has to be seen as kind of like the Encyclopedia of movements of the time. There were the anti-war people there with the free-speech people there with the back to the land people. There were people criticizing every institution in the American culture, which is where the critiques of Education came from that were popular at the time.

01:23:34 Jonathan somebody your weather was

01:23:52 Norma I'm just concerned this isn't recording of the story. I want to tell when you and I drove by the building today, it reminded me of what happened as the as the price of the book went down. It was the number one.

01:24:12 Cellar in the New England Free Press which was primarily of far-left organization publishing far-left articles and stories and books and things of that kind and as you may recall the decision was made to give them the money to publish a book because they said it was not political and they wouldn't publish it themselves. Well, they also said that most of the pamphlet they sold or just a little foldovers they sold them for I don't know 15 or 20 send and when they saw the material we had from the course they said

01:24:56 1 second. Just wait for my

01:25:02 Motorcycle

01:25:14 States when they saw all the pages they said well, you know, we would have to charge $0.75 for a book like

01:25:26 Seems ridiculous and overtime it's sold so much. So they kept dropping the price Road and people some people are surprised. I said, why would they dropping the price was not selling know they were dropping the price cuz it was selling and they've also have this value that they wanted it to be accessible the nonprofit a fact that they thought it was not political. I do remember that absolutely and not only that but saying it was not political was the beginning of another level of Consciousness. I think of everybody in the group that

01:26:09 That's when the personal is political became the match word and we said this is political because so many women had come out of the left anyway, so that's the reason that women in the group put up the money to have it printed because they wouldn't contribute anything. They said they would pay them for it. So here we are the book is going around out there and

01:26:42 The Publishers New England Free Press Lefty Publishers found out that we were dallying with Simon & Schuster and random house and they wrote a nasty letter saying we were selling out to the capitalist establishment.

01:27:00 And

01:27:02 That we only found out because they were putting this page and two copies of the book that would being sent out every copy that went out had this pain castigating us for even speaking to them to let alone seriously thinking of making a contract which we eventually did and that's when I think we got the idea that there was no clean money in the system anywhere corporate or otherwise and that the most important thing we could do was make sure that as many women as possible could have access to our book that was the dream and that's the reason why we signed with a commercial publisher and there are people who have not forgiven us to this day, but the best part of that story is that once this letter started to circulate saying how evil we were for even thinking of working with a commercial publisher a professor at Boston University decide.

01:28:02 That he was going to defend us he understood what we were trying to do and so he wrote a wonderful letter rebutting all of the points that were made by the New England Free Press and say there is no clean money. What these women want to do is get the book into the hands of as many women as possible as cheaply as possible and I salute them for their politics in their decisions so that we confronted New England Free Press and we said this letter has to go in or we won't work with you anymore. So then the next batch of books that went out had that letter in it. I don't remember that at all important part of the story and I guess so yeah. Yeah, but also I think that it worked out to the advantage of everybody in a way because they then started cranking out as many copies of the book as they could manage and that's it. So it's sold a quarter of a

01:29:02 He's just a matter of time frame until Simon & Schuster turn their ass out. So it just it just went all over and and be all over at that time. This may be hard to imagine but there was so much disenchantment in the university community and the student Community with every single institution of government and particularly the Vietnam War and many other things that we're going on at that time that that disenchantment gave people the feeling that

01:29:41 They really were in charge of their own education their own Survival their own political upbringing in a way that I think we're seeing a guy have now in a way that the mistrust of government and put people back on their own resources in a way that was very strengthening and empowering and some of the women in the group said openly that the reason why they were they chose Health rather than something else was that it would be a good organizing tool to wake people up to how Healthcare was organized and how the drug industry and the other corporations were benefiting and how poor people were being disadvantaged by the way, the system was structure and there were all these are there was a free school movement and a lot of colleges. That's what I was given was part of the free school.

01:30:37 All right. Well at MIT in Cambridge, yeah, but yeah, so people really were looking for other sources of information.

01:30:53 Does the Ladies Room your career? I was wondering if you guys as you were going to the publication process people Express shock to you or was this unladylike? What was the response when people?

01:31:11 Affiliated with the cause

01:31:15 Found out what you were doing.

01:31:20 Tell Rachel if you brought her to me.

01:31:24 I don't remember anything that early I think it was once the book came out and people got to look at it sometimes.

01:31:35 Let me just think how are Grandmas.

01:31:39 I think it we have to you have to imagine. I mean one of the things that amaze me and you were earlier Paula when you were talking about Masters and Johnson there was a way in which sexuality could be could begin to be spoken about that had not happened before and that Ordinary People could speak about it. And I remember being at the 1975 conference in Houston where within the women's movement in. This is partly about Betty Friedan and her book.

01:32:28 But I use a Feminine Mystique the Feminine Mystique that

01:32:34 People will not sure the women's movement could survive if we talked openly about lesbianism.

01:32:40 Re that was one of the stinking points and I was at that conference and one of the wonderful things that they did at the conference while this wrangling was going on Backstage amongst the lead was suddenly releasing.

01:32:57 Lavender balloons that said we are everywhere.

01:33:02 And suddenly everyone had you can send the lavender. She sure assistant that I see that which is a newly out there now and it's a reference point I think for the whole movement at this time. But anyway that that's feminism had to evolve but it had to make a place for our own diversity. And so that moment was the beginning of a sense that and then there was a book called Lesbian Nation. I think that came out after that jewelry something around that was her name and so late all of that was kind of rumbling along at the same time and our book when it went onto the bestseller list in 1976 was neck-and-neck with The Joy of Sex.

01:33:55 And it it fit I mean we had that we had a feminist Manifesto at the same time that we had a question of what was the place of sexuality and how did it get to be so dirty and what is dirty anyway and a lot of information was suddenly exploding everywhere and I think one of the strongest things about a book and I continue to try to say this every time I talk about it is that we refused health and sexuality in a way. They had never been done before that Health was in one compartment and then there was everything that was wrong with sex is part of that and what healthy sexuality was. Nobody had even thought about and we were trumpeting it we were promoting was also the same time that Mary Calderon who was the daughter of the photographer Edward steichen who became one of the select Physicians

01:34:55 Who are allowed to become physician send to the quota system of that time decided that position should take the leadership in sexuality education and she came to a church in Newton and I remember hearing her speak there about how important this was. She founded the sexuality information and education Council of the United States and that's supposed to beginning of the right-wing backlash that as she announced this was going to be K through 12 and it was going to be in every school in the country and then the southerners and the right-wingers came forth and said this woman has to be stopped Seekers has to be stopped and that was also the beginning of Phyllis Schlafly and the Eagles Forum which had as part of its Mission censoring AR book and not to mention Reverend Falwell a woodchuck chuck.

01:35:55 Pages from a book and covered over certain words with any one of those heavy black pants, you know what the way you couldn't even see what it said, but it it may have that implication that it was all dirty stuff. So we have this whole right-wing backlash. And normally you are very creative. I think it was your idea to make those t-shirts or store tote bags or that these were some of the ways that we reacted. We you know, we had a t-shirt that says don't be on our bodies and on the back we had an image of the book cover.

01:36:36 And we wore them to a lot of different places rooms creation actually, okay, you know they were faced with whether or not they there are book could be in school libraries and the Librarians where the the Librarians chose our book. Are just ahead of that. As one of the best books for teens. So that was a big breakthrough and then the that caused the book to appear in a lot of schools. But a lot of schools weren't ready for it and that started the whole controversy and the right-wing groups coming in and trying to to stop the use of the book.

01:37:22 Could you guys said share with each other like how you grow how you grew through this process together? What? How did this change you?

01:37:39 Well, I I think I definitely got more comfortable with public speaking. I think I used to be.

01:37:45 On the on the Edge of Seventeen terrified by it.

01:37:50 So yeah, I know it's kind of exciting and I like that I like being part of a movement that was really making a difference is sometimes it paused like with my first husband, he would often say that like I would say, oh I have to go to this meeting my collectible Collective is doing such and such and he would say

01:38:17 This is what you sound like blah, blah blah Collective blah blah blah.

01:38:26 This is a really nasty. So but you know, we were very supportive to each other. I think that we really were determined to keep going and I think that's so is strengthen Us by the group process and you know working together and in a way that was more Gallatin. We had rules definitely about that rules about rules about about making sure that everyone had a chance to speak and I everyone's voice had an equal weight that it was the moment of leader lessness eventually get over that but at the time it was an important an integral part of the whole thing.

01:39:20 Norma, how did it change you as a person?

01:39:25 Well for me because I had already spent 10 years in a very radical divisive movement. That was simply about ordinary women having something to say about the way they gave birth. That was as far as resistance could go and in my generation, I became the president of the Boston organization that was sponsoring eventually we had as many as a dozen class series for pregnant parents going on all over the Greater Boston area and we were training the teachers who gave those courses and that training included how to manage your doctor among other things and how

01:40:18 People in other parts of the country and other countries were raising some of the same questions that we were raising and I think that's true of our experience in the collective to the book set off a flood of letters and

01:40:42 It's only going to get worse as time goes by to probably wrap up soon.

01:40:50 But I want to hear how it changed you.

01:40:53 And then also some stories.

01:41:08 When I'm not on but I feel better when I

01:41:15 But I hope the level is okay.

01:41:34 I want you to have like white out machines. Did you ever try that with your interviews?

01:41:45 Yeah, I that's why I think they're called. I never had one myself. I went to Mount Holyoke to do some research for a book. I was writing at the time. I stayed with a friend of my cousins and it'll because it was a college town. There was all this noise all the time. So this woman had some sort of a white out machine.

01:42:06 White Noise White Noise. Yeah, white noise, right?

01:42:12 Where was I?

01:42:16 Yeah, I had I had spent 10 years in this of the movements so and from

01:42:25 As an only child it was always assumed that I would be in some kind of leadership.

01:42:31 Roll and

01:42:35 I think that I died was not that visible in that kind of a role either in high school and college. I will I was you know, I was in the Glee Club and I did this that and the other thing but I don't think that I had any sense at that moment that I could be your would be in such a public leadership role. But by the time I came out of the childbirth movement, I had already been present at the Boston group and had run the training programs and I had become the international president and all of that was behind me when I decided that I'd come to the end of that and wanted to cast my lot with you all who were willing to ask questions and to make criticisms of just about everything to do without the medical hearing and that was right up my alley at that point.

01:43:28 So but I was transformed by the way, we went about our business which was much more to challenge the entire medical establishment to challenge the drug industry in pharmaceutical industry that was lying behind so much of of what passed for medical care The Unbelievable Injustice of the fact which is as true today as it was when we started that 50% of the Brewers in this country.

01:44:06 Are paid for by tax dollars in Medicaid supported hospitals. So half the women are getting one here and the other half I getting a different classes of year and that is still something that needs to be changed. But but it's such a structural barrier that I think it'll be a long time before we change it but in any case, so I was comfortable comfortable in front of a microphone comfortable traveling more or less even though I was still mired as every other woman was in the pre feminist consciousness of how to make progress with changing systems, which was mainly to turn people and the confrontational model was new to me and I found it exhilarating.

01:45:04 Going to be there for a while.

01:45:13 Pause for a second.

01:45:20 Ma tracking. Transformation

01:45:27 In spite of what I felt. I had accomplished working with the maternity care Reform movement. Then I think actually we did accomplish a lot and it's in a whole separate story to talk about what were the limitations of that and what happened next, but when I came into the collective as the oldest person there would continuously be situations where it was clear that I could be very supportive and I could be I could talk the talk and and tell the history is as well as anybody else.

01:46:10 And in a sense, I think that I went through two different kinds of transformation one of them was.

01:46:22 Really identifying deeply as a boomer and identifying with the age range that most of you were Jane being of course on the upper end of that and people like Judy being 17 years my junior and yet we became the pair that went around a lot of the first five or six years of the work at the collective that we did a lot of the public speaking the rest of the group went off and did another book almost immediately after I bought us a house was published. So we had to make a lot of decisions about or offer people yes or no decisions on how the group was going to be run. So that transformation I think is probably the deepest one and I think it is still with me that I think even though I just have to say that I have I always found it.

01:47:22 What do identify with my own generation and now I can do it on one of them but it's not where I feel I belong so that was very deep and I are past is a boomerang soft inside. But the time came when it was clear that I could not and I did feel strongly that the leadership along with the generations that were coming up behind me. So I had several opportunities to play a larger leadership roles, which I did not take and I feel fine about that. I think that's right the way it should be but the larger transformation came for me when or the transformation that was as large. Perhaps came for me when very early Judy and I went to look in on the European additions that were popping.

01:48:21 At that time and I don't think they would have popped if we hadn't come on the bestseller list because of Europeans. I like publishes everywhere. If it's on the bestseller list in the United States, maybe it can be in Europe if we just get something out there with this name. So we realize we had to make terms for how they were going to make the book and what was going to be on the cover and what could not be on the cover and all these accept terms because we were in a bargaining position to do that. But what resulted from all that as the popularity of the book continued and as our own us editions continued and we we got a more global view of the situation and

01:49:07 I felt and I feel now that this Arena that we took charge of and made an impact with is something Universal that it's not just the feminist moment out of which it came that human beings everywhere want to know how their bodies work. They want to know that they can control them. They want to feel pride in them and not shame. They want a sense of entitlement about

01:49:45 What they can do and what they can decide about their own sexuality and their own birth experience or whatever it is that that something can be violated if that need is not respected. So I'll just give you a quick story my daughter married an Italian last summer in Italy. And before I went over she said there's a couple of the feminist would like to have lunch with you and I said she wrote that be fine by the time I got there a hundred and twenty-five people had signed up. They had to hire a hall. They would people out in the rain never rains and the chick that it rained that night and the response was so strong the women brought their old books. They cried telling the stories of how they first saw the book and what it meant to them.

01:50:42 And last Sunday, I went to speak at a church Unitarian Universalist Church in Newton and I got the same response that there's a way that's the level we intimate level at which we were able to reach people with that book because of our honesty because I determination because of our documentation was really transforming for so many other people and to know that and to know that we did it in the best way that we could is it a no sense of satisfaction. I feel like and I think there are other people who feel this in the group that if I did nothing else in my life. I did this and I was part of it and I was only one, but I was one part.

01:51:35 What do you think? I'll just ask this and then I'll let you guys kind of wrap up how you'd like to wrap up butt.

01:51:45 Where would you where would you like to see this work go from here?

01:51:50 Where are you now? How is you know?

01:51:55 Who started the conversation, video chat, do you know adolescence and well, I think you know there is a Resurgence of interest in some quarters because we've got the hundredth Universe anniversary of women getting the vote coming up in 2020. And so I think people are paying more attention to a feminist issues and also because this been all this controversy of you know, what we write more books Would we not what we put everything on the website? What I would like to see is if we could raise enough money to bring in a younger generation of women who would do some of that work that we did to do it for their generation and for this time because I mean obviously I don't have to worry about birth control anymore or the

01:52:55 This type of thing. I know I'm doing other things and and I did actually I wrote two editions of a book about women growing older that were sequels to this park and that Norma help with a lot and so

01:53:13 You know, I just I I am not I like to be I like to do a lot of different things. So that's just the way I am I research new things of my generous things. So so I don't feel like this is you know, I'm happy to do things for the group like keeping in touch with you over time and want to do this gig and everything, but I think it's time for another generation to take it over if we can reach them and if we can raise raise the funding for them because we are part of the time.

01:53:54 We got you know, we had boil teas that we paid each other with certain times and other times.

01:54:02 Be well at first we just gave it to group The needed money cuz we didn't think there was any way to divvy it up, but then we figured out a way and it really was our they know I work for time.

01:54:17 I'd like to see it go on because the take away recently. There's been so much enthusiasm about the book and people remembering how useful it was to them and how much it meant to them. And you know, there must be some people out there who could you know do the work and some people around there who around here who could fund some of the work and I look so, I'd like to see it go on but it's hard to know at this point to what extent would you still have the website of up there and we have a few of our staff still working on the website. So it's it's a beginning, but I'd like to see more of that.

01:54:59 Right now

01:55:03 I feel as if we were in the middle of the knee normous.

01:55:07 Transition in the whole counter and it certainly was very visible right after Trump was elected, but it was visible before that and the whole question of

01:55:23 Transforming what feminism is into something that's informed by the cumbersome term intersectionality is one of the projects that is underway, but it has to be a realized more fully that is to say that we have always been.

01:55:47 Writing as sensitively as we could about what it means to come out of the particular ethnic or racial or religious background or class background and how that changes your experience of your body and your understanding of your freedom and the kind of health and medical care you can get but to keep that emphasis and to enlarge it so that the whole range of social justice issues becomes as Central in our work as it is to people who never had anything to do with them and is Amanda not sure they would have anything to do with it now, but that it's it's part of the meaning of feminism that feminism is not just what we did in the last century, but that it's it's a social justice belief that includes ever.

01:56:46 So there are people in the group who feel strongly that what we need is an intergenerational organization. We're young women are working with us and that we are able to offer resources and mentoring so that they have the way of expressing. However it is that they want to express and it may not be in words what they want to change what they think women are entitled to I think they're doing it. Anyway. The question is can we be a voice for the kind of transformation that they looking for? I think we can and I think that until we find ways of doing that that we have to go on talking about the issues that concern us. And in that sense. I think the Women's Health movement has always been slightly oblique to mainstream feminism that we

01:57:47 Or we spring the issues in the same way that they've always been much more conscious of the the class differences and the the disadvantage that so many women have when they they're seeking health care. So I also think our 50th anniversary is coming up. I'm certain that we're going to celebrate it. I think we're going to celebrate it in more than one way and in more than one place so that everybody understands that we are still here that we want people to join us that we want to join other people this even talk of other books. I think we could make a book just out of the stories that we've heard from people who felt that their lives were transformed by reading it whether they read it under the covers of whether they were part of a group someplace or or however, they did at that it made a real difference in their lives.

01:58:47 What gave us the authority to write the book in the first place? If we hadn't done that? I think we would not never have made it with the medical community. But we were we were corralling the voices that they did not always hear or listen to and that was part of it. So I think that we will have a future what that future will be. How many of us will be involved in it. How many other groups and other individuals will work with his all to be revealed as the Dickens would say

01:59:24 Would you guys like to thank each other and then any last remarks you going to make it to one another and what's your friendship has meant over the years?

01:59:39 Been a long collaboration. Yes remembering that. We went to Philadelphia together. And what I remember is that we had room service and we didn't like the eggs. We only found out after it was it was because they had been cooked in olive oil vinegar, which we didn't get a lot of hotels. We went to a lot of different cities.

02:00:11 Unlimited travel in pairs. So it made it better know a way to build our friendships by traveling together and became together. We now was that the time we invited pretty much all of the Philadelphia women's movement to come to the hotel and have dinner with us or was that the one I went to with ister. I'm going to say that was when you had to do was ask her and ask her is Esther Brown who who is no longer alive, but who made so many important contributions to our work and to Women's Health, generally.

02:00:54 Absolutely. I said she did so much around the the toxic shock illness that went around and it was exactly challenge. The manufacturer was on that one did he was very creative.

02:01:15 Sao Paulo, I don't know if we would have done this if we hadn't been given the chance to talk like this.

02:01:24 If we would have done if we sometimes do that when we're just riding somewhere, but this is much more. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, this is really really appreciate it.