An Act Surprising: Wednesday Night

 

For me it really began at dinner. That's when I first met Robin Morgan. That's when the bigger picture started to develop in my head.

 

Women’s Coalition held a potluck for Robin before her speech for Minority Opinions Forum (MOF) that night. I love it that women’s organizations have pot luck dinners. Many that I have attended have been true agape feasts, banquets where companionship and love are more important than the menu, nurture and nutrition, a sharing and meeting of our basic needs, in short, communion. If the collective soul of the women’s movement is a pasta salad, I want to be fresh basil. 1[1]

So we gathered to meet the speaker before the speech. We knew Robin Morgan as the editor of Sisterhood is Powerful and the author of Monster. (She has, of course, published many books since.) She was billed by Minority Opinions Forum as a radical feminist. We knew her work and were eager to meet her. Perhaps we were looking for an infusion of energy. She was very congenial, quick witted, and without pretension. We all felt immediately at home with her.

Minority Opinions Forum was a student run organization that brought controversial and colorful as well as people with a truly different outlook on life and its issues.

I suppose the potluck was publicized by mimeographed posters around campus and by word of mouth. Coalition often held these dinners for guests but also sometimes just for the community. We gathered as usual in the United Ministries building hidden from the campus proper by the School of Religion (you can’t ask for better symbolism than that). There were 20 or 30 of us, perhaps, and a few children. The tiny Coalition office which also service as a Women’s Center, was in the basement and daycare was provided somewhere during women’s events. But for the dinner the children were with us. Because it was built on a hill the floor we were on was ground level to the campus and the lower story was ground level to Louisiana Street downhill. That night we were on the upper floor in a room large that we took up only a corner and we seemed like a small group huddled against the cold and bleakness outside.

One clear image is Robin with her severely short hair and twinkling eyes sitting at the head of those cafeteria tables. She smiled a lot, was joyous person. As we sent through the line and found our places at the tables, the conversation was pleasant, getting-to-know-you stuff, the food (delicious), the weather (cold), yada yada, yada. Robin talked very little about herself. She told a few stories about her son and her life in New York. We talked about plans to stop smoking and how to accomplish that.

Then, as we leaned over laden plates, Robin asked THE question. “So, what’s going on here?” And then she listened.

So we began to relate what was happening at KU. There were many, many stories told over this dinner. I don’t understand, looking back, how we had time for them all. There was health care, childcare, violence against women on campus. There were attempts to start a Women’s Studies Program, suggestions of women for the open Academic Affairs vice-chancellorship and the lack of athletic funds for women.

At that time I had been working with a group trying to get complete health care for women students on campus. Ginger would have told our story. She had been heading a group which has been working on the problem for a couple of years before I joined them. I had worked with her in 1967 demanding representation of married students at the All Women’s Student Council. The Dean of Women’s office had decided that married women were not included in All Women. Thank you, Ginger!

Here is some background on the state of health care for women at the University of Kansas in February, 1972. University teaching and support staff had regular insurance and went off campus. For the 18,500 students health care wasn’t bad. Student insurance paid for most ailments and accidents along with whatever prescriptions were required. Watkins hospital served as both outpatient clinic and overnight facility. While no major surgery was performed there, it was adequate for most problems. For the 39% of the student body with vaginas, however, this met only part of their needs.

Pregnant students could get their first four to six months of care at the student health center but then were passed onto city doctors who were not covered by their student insurance. There was no neo-natal care at Watkins. It really would have been necessary to have a whole floor devoted just to that. You can’t have newborns in the room next to mono patients, after all. Dr. Schwegler, the head of the health facility, was a retired OB/GYN, so he would knows. Not being pregnant was a bit harder. The university did not issue birth control pill or devices to students, even married ones. Period! Contemporary rumor attributed this to a number of Roman Catholics on the hospital board rather than to the moral climate of the general public and most certainly the will of the student population. There was often a feeling of being looked down upon for have female trouble or equipment at all.

Mary (with WILPF) had been at the meeting were one of the doctors said he had done so many pelvic exams he felt like he worked in a whore house. So it was the quality of care as well as its lack that concerned us. 2[2]

The Douglas County Health Clinic would issue birth control pills rather cheaply but hadn’t the staff or facilities to do the requisite physical examinations for 7,200 students. The county funded the clinic for county residents; they also provided immunizations to babies and travelers ran well baby clinics and offered services to the indigent. The county simply could not afford to provide care that students should be getting on campus.

So, a student goes to the Student Health Clinic and asks for a pelvic exam. Sometimes she lies, mentioning non-existent cramps or erratic periods. If she doesn’t lie, but explains that the county won’t give her birth control without it, she may be subjected to a lecture on morality and may be denied the exam as well. 3[3] Once she received a bill of general good health, she would make an appointed at the county clinic and get a prescription which she could fill at any downtown drug store but not at the campus pharmacy. Next year she gets to do it all over again.

Abortions were semi-legal in Kansas. They could be performed if the mothers’ physical or mental health was in jeopardy. Certainly women were not demanding them from Health Services. Now and again one heard rumors that the Dean of Women’s office could find money for a needed abortion, but I do not know a single person who had any actual experience with this policy.

The women at Robin’s potluck would have known all this. The real story was what we had tried to do about it. Ginger’s Ad Hoc committee had met twice with Student Health Clinic administrators, visited with the county health clinic personnel, appealed to the student government and twice talked with chancellor, Laurence Chambers, over the course of two years. And each meeting seemed to be preparation for the next one. We gathered all the statistics requested of us. We estimated costs and consequences and studied other models. In fact we had obediently doing everything that was asked of us. All we ever got back was the run around. “I didn’t realize there was a problem”…”We’ll look into it…”Have you tried talking to”…”are you sure? No one has ever complained”.

Then a WILPF sister told about their attempt to get full healthcare for student women. They have gone the same route making it twice to the Health Center and once the chancellor. Once they had led a march on campus and given away M&Ms as candy birth control pills. And they had gotten to same nonsense, “The citizens of Kansas would be outraged”…This is all new information; we need time to think about it”.

I believe there was a third group represented who had also been working on healthcare. I do not remember these sisters but their story was very similar...meetings, fact gathering...it must not effect very many students or we would have heard about it before this.

Three groups, one story. Three sets of people, a dozen actions and one run around. This is what amazed us more than the content. Three sets of actions, one run around. We saw the pattern clearly. What were three separate stories became one group of women.

Then the childcare people told their stories. There were two groups, staff and students. Separately each had been the round of offices, deans, vice-chancellors, and student organizations. Alone each had experienced a complete lack of sympathy, much less help. What's more the university was quite incapable of understanding that staff and students might have the same needs. After all students and students and staff is staff. Students are captive customers, staff is overhead. That was that.

I understand how the administration could without even realizing it; dismiss a group of complaining women out of its consciousness the second the women walked out of the door. All they heard was "nagging women", like babies crying it could be forgotten when the crying was out of earshot. Soothing hysterics is what a man does...until the crying is out of earshot. The fact that they were unable to see a connection between health care, childcare and scholarship is exactly what is expected of the bureaucratic mind. We, citizens of the state of Kansas, hire people who specifically cannot see patterns only priority in their own narrow sphere. It is the nature of government. It may also be patterns are much harder to discern looking down from the top than up from the bottom.

Then the other stories were told, scholarship problems and no response; lack of women in the administration and no response. Over and over the same story. The pattern became more distinct. As the realization sank in, we became first angry and then determined, hardened is, perhaps a better word. The administration could no longer claim that they had never heard of these problems or that we were too few to matter. They had heard the complaint a hundred times from so many women.

More issues arose. The federal mandate to be an equal opportunity institution was being ignored. If one suggested Women's Studies Department people actually laughed. We added a course on women in history, how could there be anything else to teach. There's a class on women's psychology, isn't there? Forget suggesting that the university hire a woman for the empty vice-chancellor position, no one even bothered to look up. Group W (for Women) of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) was looking into scholarship discrimination. Let's wait for their report.

It is significant, I think, that none of these stories included trips to the Dean of Women's Office (DOW - like the maker of napalm). There were a great many women active in the women's movement on campus at this time who worked in the DOW. There would have been several at this pot luck. Yet, at that time, the Dean of Women's office was not seen as an advocacy institution. We did not look there for help.

Never once in all these meetings with the university had any person of authority told any of the groups that there were other groups of women working on the same issues. Never once did anyone suggest to us that we all get together in one large group, even by men apparently sympathetic to our plight. But we understood that the few of us were, in fact, legion. We represented hundreds of women, all of us here together. So many bodies on the line. So much dust in the wind.

And Robin listened. She didn't lead the discussion or give pep talks. She didn't suggest action or strategy. She just listed and ate, of course. We all managed to eat, no matter how mad or glad we got. (I still believe that the most powerful organizing tool in the world is the ability to listen.)

We began to understand that nobody else was listening. We were not being taken seriously by anyone at all. The pot luck became something else. It was suddenly a sacred meal, a first supper. The energy level rose to a pleasant simmer.

We had done what we were told, such good little girls; worked through the system, met with all the right people, again and again and again. But we had been brushed aside with lies for our troubles. All or most of us already knew that discrimination was institutionalized and therefore centralized. It was almost time to do something about it. A new feeling was welling up, not the frustration of our victimhood, but the power of our numbers and of our righteousness. We just didn't know what we were ready to do......yet.

Then it was time for the speech. While some cleared the tables, we mothers took our children to the provided childcare downstairs. And we trooped across the street to the student union in small groups, coated and scarved against the cold wind, laughing with the joy of the feast and the possibility of the night ahead. There was power in the air; it has always been there but we had not felt it before.

 

 

 

1[1] Women’s Coalition was a loose association of women’s groups on the Kansas University campus. Coalition received a little money from Student Senate. With it they maintained an office, typewriters, mimeograph equipment, etc. That could be used for any activity in any of the various groups as needed. A monthly newsletter telling about the various events and activities that were happening was published there. The office was on the lower floor of the United Ministries Building just across the street from the student union building.

 

2[2] Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom (WILPF) was an international organization with a local chapter. They worked on many different issues: Peace, Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, etc. I remember then as a “town” organization more than a campus one. I believe the membership included many faculty and faculty wives.

 

3[3] Sometimes irregular periods could get one birth control pills as a regulatory drug. The medical-industrial complex then as now, preferred to medicate rather than educate.