Woman: Answer.
Interviewer: Okay, this is on feminism.
Woman: On feminism, all right.
So you want me to start there,
number three I'd prefer not to answer
Interviewer: Okay.
Woman: All right, I told you the reason why.
Interviewer: Sure, all right.
Woman: Number four, I wouldn't wanna answer so much
for Avery Institute for Social Change
because that was something I just did in transition
until I could go back to doing my work
with the black women's health imperative.
Interviewer: Okay, okay.
Woman: I can talk about it, I don't mind.
Interviewer: No it's not necessary.
Woman: I don't know that it needs to take up
a whole lotta air space.
-: No, lets-- -: It was just
a transitional period for me.
Interviewer: Okay.
Woman: And then the fifth question is fine, okay?
Interviewer: Okay, so we'll do one, two, and five.
Woman: I don't mind doing four.
-: Oh, okay. -: It's just that I don't know
that it's that...I don't want to do three.
-: Okay. -: But four, I don't mind
doing it, I'm just wondering if,
it was just a transition for me.
Interviewer: Maybe you could talk about
why the Black Women's Health Initiative
and now in period of, feed your soul when you get
to that question.
Woman: Oh, now that's a better question.
Interviewer: Yep.
Woman: Because I didn't see where you were
asking much in there about it.
Interviewer: Yeah, and I'd really like
to hear you talk about that, 'cause that's what came after.
Woman: That's a topic
Interviewer: Right, okay.
So we'll talk about...
Woman: Okay, so you want me to start
or you wanna just ask me questions, or what,
how do you want to start?
Interviewer: Well, let me go ahead and ask a question
since you're looking at the question,
but it won't be on the tape.
The first question says: it's unusual among
feminist memoirs that you were radicalized
by your husband's death, and not by some sexist event,
so how did your interest in women's health issues
apropos of your husband's sudden death
get translated into a feminist approach
to women's health issues?
I'll let you-- -: That's a good question,
nobody ever asked me that question before.
When my husband died, I became very aware
of how vulnerable we all are, even at a young age,
he was 33 years old, and I became really aware
of how important it is to have information about your health
and the fact that we did not have any health information
at that time, in any way that Wesley's death
could have been prevented.
This was before the campaign about how blood pressure
being the silent killer, that he had had a physical
in which his blood pressure was high
and they laid him down for 20 minutes
and took it and it was normal, and that had happened to him
at least a couple of times, but it wasn't put into the way
that high blood pressure, untreated over time,
could harm a person.
So these things happened 10 years earlier for him
when he was 23 years old, then I became important
of how important it was for health information.
Now, that all happened to me while I was working
at Shands teaching hospital on the unit that dealt
with child psychiatry, but we really were looking at
new ways of thinking about health and health messages
and educating the public, and people were only then
even thinking about asking about
information about their bodies.
And so, along comes the women's health movement
in which we were questioning everything.
The women's movement, which questioned everything,
and then the women's health movement,
which kept that going based on the same premise
that we had a right to know and own our bodies
and know about our lives.
So, as I started with the women's health movement,
where we were learning everything from looking at doing
vaginal self exams, to breast exams,
to understanding our bodies, to reading our bodies ourselves
and that's the piece that really worked for me.
It was the lack of information, as it related to our health,
and then putting the feminist analogy around it.
Interviewer: Okay, that's good.
And I wondered if people at the
children's mental health center pushed you in that direction
of feminism, or what pushed you
in the direction of feminism?
Woman: Well, the whole women's movement was happening
right around me, and as you might recall,
one of the last books that Wesley read
was "The Feminine Mystique", and he kept telling me
he thought I should read that book,
that I would really like it, and so when I finally read it
I thought, "Oh my God, here it is.
"This is what he was trying to tell me,"
and I wish that I'd had a chance
to have the conversations with him.
So, the women's movement was happening all around us,
and you had to be a stone somewhere or anti
not to hear it and participate in it.
So, I wouldn't say they pushed me or anything,
I would say I ran willingly.
-: Okay (laughing)
-: I really enjoyed it.
It was new, it was fresh, it was exciting,
it was exhilarating, it was empowering,
it was a philosophy that I felt
I could live my life by, my entire life.
So, I went willingly.
Interviewer: Okay, okay.
I love all that, that was great.
In the Smith interview, there's a place
where you say you think black women are
more feminist than white women
and you mention a survey or poll,
and I would love to hear you say more about that,
especially in light of what Pam Smith
had to say about Deborah David,
the staff member at the clinic, who felt like white women
didn't really need the women's movement.
That's what Pam thought.
Woman: You have to think about perspective
and people's position.
What the women movement was espousing was
it was white women who were at home, bored,
and wanting to go to work and wanting to get out
in the work force, and a lot of them
were well-off financially and had what black women thought
was independence because they were certainly
tied down further than that.
So, of course black women wouldn't think
white women needed it.
They thought they had everything that they needed.
So, it was just a matter of perspective
and point of view, it really has to do with point of view.
Where people sit in society, and how they view
what's happening.
Whether it's true or not has not has nothing to do with it.
What black women couldn't see was over into the homes
of white women who, to them, with them working
in their homes as maids, they saw them going off
and having tea and doing all these things
and acting like they were having fun,
and little did they know that they were miserable.
They wanted more out of life and they wanted
different things, and people didn't talk with each other
about what their inner feelings were
unless some of them are around obvious things
that people could see that was going on.
But remember this was all a new awareness,
it was a new awareness time and people hadn't shared things
in ways that we're sharing now.
So people go on what they think,
and on that perspective, their point of view.
And what I meant by black women being feminist
is that, in terms of having a womanist approach to life,
I always grew up before I ever learned the word feminism
to be able to depend on myself, to count on myself,
and that women needed to be educated
and women needed to know how to do everything.
And it didn't so much come from a feminist base,
but it came from more of a base around racism.
Because the culture treated black men so poorly,
until black women knew that we had to be
the ones responsible for taking care of our families
because the black men, as in the past, had been hauled away,
or now they're part of the prison-industrial complex.
That's what I meant, it really was more an approach
around women taking the lead, women being strong,
women be independent, et cetera.
'Course, feminism is much more than that,
but people relate to the slice of it
that works for them at the moment.
Interviewer: I see.
So what you're talking about,
let me see if I'm understanding that,
is that the self-reliance, and independence
and personal responsibility that the women's movement
brought to white women, let's say,
was already there in black women,
-: Right. -: and didn't have
to be nurtured so much.
Woman: Yeah, because as you think,
if you look at the black women,
there were very limited jobs for black men,
a lot didn't finish school, so you had black women
like my mother who had a master's degree,
was never married to a man who,
I don't think either of the men she was married to
had even finished high school,
so it wasn't kinda like you were marrying someone
who was your quote-unquote equal, education-wise,
even though they might have been able
to make a good income, it just didn't happen that way.
Very seldom did you find teachers marrying doctors
and that kinda thing, you see what I'm saying?
-: Sure -: Cause most of the doctors
were men and it didn't matter what the education
a woman has, but most of the women had the education
'cause the black community really stressed
on the girls getting the education more than the boys.
That meant that the girls ended up marrying, basically,
the boys who had less education, do you see what I'm saying?
Interviewer: It's just the opposite from...
Woman: Yeah, our lives were structured so differently.
Interviewer: So that cultural divide,
I'm wondering, did I lose you?
I did. -: Hello?
Interviewer: Oh, I thought I'd lost you, sorry.
Woman: No I'm here.
Interviewer: Okay, this phone isn't always reliable.
That cultural divide (whistle) (sigh).
I'm still trying to figure out what happened
with that Deborah David that caused
Woman: She thought white women had everything:
you're free, white, and you're 21,
so what do you need to have to be liberated?
You got money, you got a house,
you got a man taking care of you,
whatever, that's liberation.
That's what she took away from feminism.
Interviewer: I see.
Woman: That's what I'm saying,
it's all the people's point of view.
White women were wanting to go out and work,
black women were working all the time,
they'd love to be at home, you see what I'm saying?
Just from that basic statement alone.
Interviewer: So you could see her point of view, but--
Woman: Absolutely, absolutely.
But she didn't know the other side of it.
She didn't know that white women were unhappy,
hadn't made advances, most of them had college degrees
and they had to act like they were buffoons
and it was just not having exposure.
It's a really interesting thing when I go back to DeLand,
and this is not for the interview, but
-: Okay -: It's interesting,
when I go back to DeLand and I try to show folks,
I was trying to show my partner and my kids
where I used to live and all, what I don't know
anything about is the white side of town.
I have no idea of what streets were,
how you enter, anything.
You didn't go over into that part of town.
We had no reason to go over there, and so you don't know it.
It's the same thing with Deborah David back in the '70s,
she had no idea what white women's lives were.
We were only just coming out from
just being integrated at all, less than 10 years.
Even now, a lot of people still do parallel living,
but you can't think about integration today
and place that on what it was like
just coming out of segregation.
Interviewer: Yeah, I see what you're saying.
Woman: The timing of that, that was the early '70s
and we hadn't been sitting down eating with white people
a long time before that.
-: What was the date-- -: Deborah was also
a cultural nationalist, which is another whole slice
of racism on top of the feminism.
Racist ideology on top of feminist ideology.
Interviewer: Yeah, so that's sort of
analogous to lesbian separatism.
Woman: Absolutely, yeah.
Interviewer: Was the Gainesville Women's Health Center
serving many black women?
Woman: For abortions, yes.
About 50% of our clients who came in
for abortions were black.
But not very many for the well women's GYN clinic
which is why I wanted to find out more
about black women's health and what were we doing
and how were our lives being shaped.
Interviewer: I see, well that's good.
I'm taking some notes here just to help me
find these things on the tape.
Let's go ahead and talk about that question about
what was it about the Gainesville Women's Health Center
that fed your soul, and I suppose that
the Black Women's Health Initiative
continued to do that?
Woman: Well, it was both Gainesville Women's
Health Center and BirthPlace, I think.
At Gainesville Women's Health Center, we did a lot
of education of women about their bodies
and a lot of work shops and a lot of things
that help us understand who we are
along with consciousness raising and all of that
and I noticed that black women were not
participating in that, and I couldn't understand why
because I was there, we tried to make black women
feel comfortable, but they were just
very, very uncomfortable.
At BirthPlace, the power of birth,
that's that one of the best experiences I've had in my life.
It was totally awesome, just incredible learning
and excitement, and understanding the intuitive
and the spirituality around birth, and the importance
of educating entire families around healthcare,
around the whole experience of birth was just
very enlightening and exhilarating.
It was a incredible experience there at BirthPlace.
I don't know if you read in, I wrote about it
in "Bearing Witness to Birth" in Women's Quarterly.
Interviewer: Oh, I'll look that up.
I haven't seen that.
Woman: Let me see, maybe I can give you
a better reference for it, I thought I saw it here
the other day on my shelf.
I keep forgetting exactly what it looks like,
but I think it was about three years ago,
and that issue is on bearing witness
and I wrote about bearing witness to birth at BirthPlace.
It was just really pretty incredible.
Here it is, "Witness", it's called "Witness"
and it's volume 34, numbers one and two
and it came out in summer-spring 2008.
Interviewer: Okay, I'll get that
and I'll be sure to cite it.
Woman: Yeah, that'll give you
my whole birthing thing there.
So, there I learned the importance of education
around health care procedures and all that kinda thing.
My whole transition from the birthing center
to Black Women's Health was interesting.
It took a different route.
I started working as a director for a CETA program
at Santa Fe Community College there in Gainesville
and I started looking at the lives
of these young black women who were
registered in the program.
Because I was the director, I knew most about
when they were out and the absenteeism
I was concerned about, and I would bring these women in
to talk about, "why couldn't you come to class?"
They were paying them minimum wage to come to class,
and when they didn't come they didn't get paid,
so I knew there had to be something
that was keeping them from coming,
and I found out so many of them were ill,
a lot of them were ill.
A lot of them had children who were sick,
who needed to be taken care of, who just had
all kinds of responsibilities and I realized that
working women who have children need 10 sick days
for each of the children, and 10 days for themselves.
You only get 10 sick days and you got kids who are sick
and they just had so many circumstances
that I had never thought about,
including poor health, and it was there that I really knew
that I had to do something about
bringing black women together to look at health issues.
I tried to do it in Gainesville,
and I couldn't get the local black women there,
they were kind of suspicious of me.
It wasn't that they didn't like me,
they didn't understand me.
'Cause here I was with abortion,
and then we did the birthing center
and I was with these white women and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
They were not ever disrespectful to me or anything,
it's just that we were very uncomfortable with each other
because they couldn't understand what I was into.
And that happens sometimes, so that's why I moved
from Gainesville to Atlanta.
When I moved to Atlanta, it was magical.
Every door I touched opened, every person sent me
to see three or four more people who were helpful,
and it was all just really
quite an extraordinary experience.
That really propelled me to really do work
on black women's health more than anything else,
was that experience combined with what had happened before,
so it was kinda like my life had little building blocks
to get me from one place to the next,
or really a path that got me from one place to the next.
Interviewer: So your work with the birthing center,
I think it changed its name somewhere in there.
Woman: Yeah it was called BirthPlace when we were there,
it was called BirthPlace.
-: BirthPlace -: And then it changed its name
to the Birthing Center, I think,
and I think they closed down.
Interviewer: No, I think it still exists,
or at least Barbara thought it did.
Woman: Oh good, I hope it does because they were doing
some really creative things there.
They should put them in place for a lot
with the affordable care act, but anyway,
that's another subject.
Interviewer: Yeah, yeah.
I wanna make sure I got clear on this:
your consciousness was raised around black women's
health issues because of seeing how few of them
were taking advantage of the well women's services
at the Gainesville Women's Health Center.
Woman: Yeah, and used the crisis services.
Interviewer: And how many of them used crisis services?
Interviewer: Most of them used the crisis services,
which was the abortion--
-: Oh, I see. -: Which was in a crisis.
Interviewer: They were ham for the abortion clinic
Woman: And I think still applies to a lot of crisis.
Interviewer: And then when you started talking with them
as director of the CETA program,
those things were consciousness-raising,
but it's when you moved to Atlanta that the miracle occurred
and you really were able to...
Woman: Yeah, we were able to bring black women together
who we first we organized the first national conference
on black women's health issues.
We met for two years at Spelman College and organized.
It was just really quite wonderful.
Everything just fell into place. Can you hold on just a--
Interviewer: Sure.
Woman: One second, I'm gonna walk downstairs.
Someone is delivering something here to the house, okay?
Interviewer: Okay, sure.
Woman: Okay?
Interviewer: Yeah, sure.
Woman: Okay.
Interviewer: Okay, I'm starting the recorder again.
Woman: Okay.
Interviewer: We were talking about Atlanta,
and how different that was.
Woman: Yeah, it was a thing that was
supposed to happen there and the response
from all the women was incredible.
It was magical, and Atlanta was a chocolate town,
so this person would send me to talk to another person,
who would send me to another person, I can just remember,
and I was just amazed that all
of the people I was talking to
who were in these positions of power were black,
and all willing to help, and all on board
with what I was talking about, and it was just magical.
Interviewer: Wow.
Woman: We planned for two years on a conference
and in June of,
goodness, 30 years ago.
Interviewer: Yeah, I can get that date, don't worry.
Woman: Had our first conference.
We had our first conference.
Interviewer: So that would be 1970-something,
I'll figure that out.
Woman: In '82, '83, and it was just wonderful,
We thought we'd have 200-to-300 women come
and we had close to 2000.
Interviewer: Woo!
Woman: Oh yeah, and they were from all over, everywhere,
including Canada and the Bahamas, and it was great,
it was a great start.
Interviewer: Did you say 2000 people?
Woman: Pardon?
Interviewer: Did you day 2000 people?
Woman: Yeah, we had buses rolling in there from all over.
Women would pay $25 in New York City and ride a bus
all the way to Atlanta.
It was good, it was really something, and after that,
we started organizing black women all over the country
and they would have these black women's health conferences,
and we did a film called "On Becoming a Woman:
"Mothers and Daughters Talking Together",
about menstruation, about our feelings,
and that's in circulation.
I think they're still using it in several places.
For the last thirty years, we've been pounding away.
Interviewer: Is the mission the same now as it was then?
Woman: Absolutely, yeah, but our strategy
for working is different.
I'm still involved, and we relocated our offices to D.C.,
mostly 'cause we really learning now that public policy
is the place that we can make a lot of changes
and the first part of our work was really about
individual empowerment, learning about black women's lives.
It was just like CR, only we were
doing it all with black women.
In that way, we could look at what were our main issues,
like, one of the first things we talked about was,
balance was our number-one health issue,
and we identified that back in 1984-1985,
and later on we had places like CDC
and all of 'em talking about violence as a health issue,
but we were the first to identify
violence as a health issue.
Interviewer: That's good.
Woman: Because that's what was happening
with most of the women.
Those were the things that were killing them.
Interviewer: And what feeds your soul about it?
What is it that feeds your soul?
This project I'm doing feeds my soul
because I like talking to people,
I got an excuse to talk to people like you!
Woman: What fed my soul was watching women grow,
watching people feel good about themselves,
watching people fall in love with themselves,
watching people develop strategies
that would help them survive, and give them a philosophy
and a way of thinking and being about a life
that can be shared with our families.
The fact that the women took the courage to break
the conspiracy of silence about physical abuse,
about sexual abuse, which we found was rampant,
about all of these things that we kept inside of us
and felt bad about, that we learned how to turn that around,
how to look at our fears and gain strength from our fears
rather than letting our fears continue to disempower us.
Watching people grow and change and take charge
of their lives was just totally awesome
and then just being with the women,
being in the company of the women,
all talking and being loving and caring,
and all to each other, I find very wonderful.
Interviewer: That's gonna be good for the interview,
or for the essay.
What I'm gonna do...
Woman: Award from Planned Parenthood,
and she got up and said, "Well, I'm not gonna
have y'all sit there any longer
"and listen to anymore speeches, so I'll say
"thank you very much, and I'll sit down"
Interviewer: Oh, wow! (laughing)
Woman: She doesn't like to do that kinda thing
Interviewer: Well, what she did when she looked at that
and decided to write some more,
I thought it was really good.
It felt-- -: Yeah, she's better
in that format.
Interviewer: Okay, let's see...
Now, have you skipped something?
I think we might have skipped, no...
Oh, no, I think we're down to on working with white women
and being a lesbian.
In the interview, you mention that going to
the University of Florida, was that in 1968
that you went to Florida?
Woman: Uh-huh.
Interviewer: Was the first time that you'd worked
mostly with white women, and that that campus had only about
30 black people at all, and then later on you say that
those white women were more accepting of you as a lesbian,
but that your sexual orientation didn't matter with the
Black Women's Health Project, and I was not quite sure
what to make of that.
I know Barbara Esrig said in her interview that
when she was working at the
Gainesville Women's Health Center,
it was her whole world and she felt like
everybody in the world was a lesbian.
Woman: Well, that's what you kinda feel
when you surround yourself with that.
I was saying that I found a lot of
acceptance among white women,
and I had to really do class...
but my exposure to working and being around white people
was at the University of Florida.
All of my classmates were young white women,
and we all hung together, three or four of us,
and it was really nice, but it was a sort of gentle way
for me to learn about white culture,
and how people do things, and there were things I needed
to understand when I went there that my husband told me,
"Please go down there and find out how white people
"can go to school and be married," because we were both
working and having a hard time paying our bills
and everything and we didn't know you could get money
to go to school and you could live in housing
that cost $70 a month that came fully furnished.
We didn't know about all those perks and all in the world.
So that was my job, was to learn about that,
so it really was a whole cultural education
being at the University of Florida, and I stayed there.
And through the women at the
Gainesville Women's Health Center,
me, Margaret and Judy, we became real close.
Coming out as lesbian was an interesting process,
to say the least.
I felt a lot of acceptance, and I never felt like
the black women rejected me, they just didn't know
what to do with me, I think, was more than anything else.
And then when I got to the Black Women's Health Project
there were several people who were lesbians,
so it became less of an issue at that time.
Much, much less.
There were several women who were involved
in our planning committee, and one of the things
we worked on real hard was homophobia,
and dealing with homophobia, 'cause we had to be together
and we had to work on it with black women
because we took them up into the North Georgia mountains
at Forrest Hills, and the way we went there was
two people sleeping in the double bed together for $75,
and you'd get two nights and five meals for $75 dollars,
which was pretty good, so people had to immediately
get comfortable with sleeping in a bed
with someone of the same sex.
So we would all deal with that the night before,
"Okay, this is what's happening, do you know who you are?"
And who you are, not being afraid,
and some women were totally freaked out and couldn't do it,
but most of them did and it was no big deal.
It was really a growth experience.
Interviewer: And it's the 1980s by now, and...
Woman: Yeah, it's the mid-'80s, yeah.
Interviewer: So it's more acceptable,
to be a lesbian was more acceptable.
Although backlash is going on.
Woman: Oh yeah, and it always will be.
Interviewer: When you say that about,
in the Black Women's Health Project,
there were black lesbians, was it through the
Black Women's Health Project that you began to meet
black lesbians, or what?
Woman: I knew a few, but it was through
the Black Women's Health Project
that I began to meet black women, general.
I didn't know but so many.
I didn't know women all over the country
or anything like that until I got involved with
the National Women's Health Network
and I started traveling around the country
and meeting people and knowing people
and through the project I got to know women from everywhere,
literally all over the world.
Literally, all over the world.
Brazil, Africa, the Caribbean, you name it.
We went everywhere.
Interviewer: How were you funded
for all that kinda travel?
Woman: We raised the money through foundations.
They would fund us to work with groups.
We worked with groups in Nigeria,
we worked with groups in Africa, that's what we were doing.
They would fund us to go and work with
these groups around the world.
Interviewer: So your organization, is it a 501c3?
Woman: Oh, absolutely, yes.
We had a whole international division and everything.
We did a lot of stuff.
Interviewer: It was a really big deal,
and what kinda budget were you working with,
just to give a sense of--
Woman: Back then, if I can remember, probably...
I think we got our first million dollars about 25 years ago,
so we were 5 years into it,
we got our first million dollars.
(mumbles) Depends, a million, million-and-a-half,
something like that.
Interviewer: And that's how much you'd bring in
in foundation money.
Woman: Uh-huh, at that time.
Kellogg gave us our first million dollar grant,
and I think it was a million dollars
over like two or three years.
I bet we have a million dollar budget,
it wasn't much of a budget.
Interviewer: And you would use this to go out
and do these educational projects.
Woman: Yeah, we'd get money to go out,
maybe we'd get x amount, a hundred thousand dollars
from the MacArthur Foundation to work with people
in Nigeria, to work with people in Brazil,
to work with folks in the Caribbean,
and we all participated in the women's conferences,
the one in China, and the one in Africa.
We took a delegation of 25 women
to Africa for the conference there,
but there were close to 2000 black women
at the women's conference in Africa.
Interviewer: So that was close to 2000 women from Africa?
Woman: That was a very awesome one, it was in Kenya.
It was really something.
Interviewer: When was that?
Is that still in the '80s, or?
Woman: The first conference was in '80,
I don't remember.
It was in the '80s, it was in the '80s.
Interviewer: Okay, that's okay, I'm just trying to see
if it's still within our study.
We're trying to cut it off at '94.
Woman: Oh yeah, that's enough,
oh, I'm taking you over into the '80s.
Interviewer: Well, we go up to '94.
Woman: So I'm sorry, you're doing the '70s
Interviewer: No, I'm interested
all the way into '94.
We're trying to cut up at '94 just to contain this.
Woman: That was in the '80's,
I think we can Google it and find out.
Interviewer: Okay, I will.
Woman: Trying to remember, it was a part
of the UN conferences for women.
The UN prepared and there would be conferences for women
and the first one was in Mexico City,
and the second one was in Nairobi, Kenya,
and I think five years later
the next one was in Beijing.
Interviewer: Okay, so this was not
a stand-alone conference, it was a conference
in association with that national conference, I wonder?
Woman: Yeah, it was the UN's conferences,
the end decade for women.
The UN conferences on the end decade for women.
E-N-D decade for women.
-: E-N-D -: So you can find it that way.
Interviewer: Okay.
Woman: The only one I missed was Mexico,
I went to all the rest of them.
Interviewer: Wow, I wish I had gone to Beijing,
I had an opportunity and I didn't do it.
Woman: Oh, really?
Interviewer: Kick myself
Woman: Yeah, that was really incredible.
Those women worked really hard and they had to organize
under extraneous conditions because the officials,
the government didn't let them have meetings,
so they would have to slip and have meetings in the park
and pass notes to each other, and there the Chinese men
sat in on all the lesbian workshops and everything,
they were all sitting in everything.
You couldn't do nothing without them being
right in your face.
So people kinda showed out for them (laughs)
-: Yeah, I guess so. -: It was outrageous. (laughs)
Kinda serves them well, kinda funny.
Interviewer: Were you ever involved with
Southerners on New Ground?
Was that going on when you were there?
Woman: No, I never heard of them.
Interviewer: That's an interracial lesbian organization
that does activism around homophobia and racism.
Woman: Oh really, that's good.
Interviewer: I know six people who're involved with it,
but I'm having trouble getting those interviews.
Woman: Oh, really?
I don't know them, when did they come about?
Interviewer: Almost outside our study period.
I think it's '93, but I really wanted to get it
because it's so relevant to our whole topic
about southern lesbian feminists, activism,
and that's kind of neat because that's around racism
and homophobia, and the women's movement kinda gets
a kick-start with the civil rights movement.
Woman: Right, right.
Do you know about "Makers"?
Interviewer: No.
Woman: "Makers" is a documentary that has been produced
by PBS, AOL, and Unilever (mumbles) Simple corporation.
It's gonna be aired on PBS on February 26th.
Interviewer: Wow, okay.
Woman: February 26th, and it's all about
the history of the women's movement
and it's three hours long, and we just went last week,
I think it was the sixth of February,
they had the red carpet premier
at the Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center.
So we went down to New York for that,
but everybody is in it, it's just wonderful.
Interviewer: Oh, great!
Woman: You're going to love it, just gonna love it.
You see all of the old stuff, and they showed us
the part one, which is the history of the movement,
and then I think all the women's health stuff
probably comes in part two, and then they gave
a little preview of part three.
They didn't show any of part two.
I talk about part two, but part three starts off with
interviewing people like the president at Google
and all these women CEOs and asking them
do they think they're feminists and what does feminism
mean to them today.
It's real interesting stuff, with Alicia Keys singing
"This Girl is on Fire".
So it really is extraordinary, you will love it.
You need to tell people about it.
Interviewer: I will, I'm gonna go Facebook that
as soon as I get off the phone.
Woman: Yeah, and they have Makers.com,
which they have in-depth interviews with all,
there were 60-something makers, and not all makers
got in the film, but they do have all of their interviews
on Makers.com.
Interviewer: Okay, okay.
Woman: So some of the folks you might not be able
to get ahold of, you might be able to get their interviews
from there, but they show the whole interviews on there.
So it's really very well done, and it's real interesting,
there's a woman CEO at the head
of the corporation for public broadcasting,
there's a woman who's in a vice-presidential position
at AOL who pushed for it, and there was another woman
who was with this company, Simple.
It was really nice, seeing all those women,
and two of them were part of the women's movement.
What happened is, they originally wanted
to do a film on Gloria Steinem's life,
and Gloria said, "No, that's not what's needed,
"what we need is something to document the history
"of the women's movement."
So they started these interviews, and they've been working
on it for almost two years, but we were in lockdown on it.
Can't say anything about it dun-duh-duh-duh-duh,
so most, I've kinda forgot it until they called
and asked us to come and do the interviews,
but it was really quite extraordinary.
Interviewer: Gosh, well that's exciting.
I'm eager to go look that up.
Woman: I was just speaking at
Rice University last weekend.
They're gonna organize big viewing parties
and have pizza and all and have
the women's studies department and all,
people are getting into it.
So there are folks who know about it.
Interviewer: "Miss Representation", our women studies
program is doing a showing of that next week,
or maybe it's this week, it's the 22nd.
Woman: Oh really?
Interviewer: Yeah, but that's last year's show,
this sounds like this year's show.
Woman: Yeah, This is gonna be something,
so I think you oughta tune into it.
Interviewer: Sure enough.
Let me take you back to one of the points,
I'm almost done with this, I think our hour is about up.
You said that the mission of the
Black Women's Health Imperative is the same
as you started with, but the strategy is different.
Can you say more about that?
Woman: I said the mission is the same,
but we just work in a different way.
When we started out we did a lot of work
around personal empowerment and all,
but now we're doing more about working on
community empowerment and working with communities
to be able to help make health changes.
In the personal empowerment work, we organized
self-help groups among women and a lot of those groups ran
for as much as 10 or 15 years years, some of them,
and then somehow we were unable to continue to raise money
to support the whole self-help part of the program.
The funders felt like, "They should be self-supporting,
somehow," and we weren't quite smart enough to make them be
self-supporting right from the beginning.
That was something that I wish I could've done differently,
but you're only who you are when you're doing it.
The 20/20 vision, hindsight thing doesn't work very well,
so we moved to D.C. and switched over to working on
public policy and working with communities
to make changes like, we have several programs now
we just got funding to do work around diabetes
and diabetes education.
We just got a four-year $4 million grant from the CDC
to do that kinda work.
We're working also on reproductive justice,
and we're still working on abortion,
and now we're looking at how can we
change the conversation around Rowe.
Instead of just always saying black women
have more abortions than others,
but look at what are those circumstances
and what are those things.
Women have to choose abortion, and also dealing with us
and our silence around it.
The conspiracy of silence, and how
we just don't think to talk about it.
It's not that people have anything against it,
it's just not something that we talk about.
So we're looking at ways of dealing with issues that way.
What we're currently embarking on,
and I know I'm taking you way into the--
Interviewer: That's Okay.
Woman: But at least you'll have information,
you don't need to include it, you'll have it anyway.
We're starting to look at black maternal health,
that black women are dying disproportionately
within the first year of life after having a baby.
We want to bring that to everyone's attention.
And we've done a lot of work on health care reform.
That was the work that I started with the Avery Institute.
We're part of a collaboration called Raising Women's Voices
for the Healthcare we Need.
You should check out our website, it's dot net.
In that, we have 22 regional coordinators
who are working on health with the
Affordable Care Act implementation through the
health exchanges et cetera, on advisory boards,
meeting with the health commissioners and all of that
in their local states, so that's where we are now.
Interviewer: You know what strikes me about this,
what you're doing now, in the early days,
the ones we're writing mostly about,
the '70s and so on, the women's movement made
powerful social change that helped everybody,
not just women, and it kinda looks to me like this
Black Women's Health Initiative is doing something
like that.
Those are powerful social changes you're talking about
that help all families.
Woman: Yes, absolutely, and it has to be something
that helps the family, the total family.
I learned that lesson at BirthPlace,
that it really is that whole unit and that we learn
our practices and all from our families.
So many people, either your family didn't do anything
and it affected you or your family did everything.
You learned about how important it was to go to the doctor,
to get your annual or when you needed it,
or you actually didn't wait until something
reach a crisis situation and it was important
to have healthcare and have access.
That's sorta how we still feel.
Interviewer: Well, I think I have enough.
I think I have enough.
I would really enjoy talking with you.
Woman: I'm glad we were able to make it happen.
And I'm glad and I know you'll be sending me stuff
Interviewer: I will and my intention is
to do it very promptly, and if I'm not able to do that,
I'll email you to say I'm having to re-figure,
and you'll be welcome to make any changes,
whatever you want to.
I'll start with notes, and if it works out right
I'll excerpt those note, well, I'll send you all the notes
so that you can correct any mistakes.
Woman: Now, did you talk to Betsy Randall-David?
Interviewer: No, who's that?
Woman: Oh my God, it would be such a oversight
to leave Betsy outta this.
Betsy is right there in Durham.
Interviewer: Okay.
Woman: And she was one of the people who was
an early-on founder of Gainesville Women's Health Center.
I'm surprised you don't know Betsy.
Interviewer: Well, her name has not come up.
We do not have many North Carolina connections.
Woman: Oh my goodness, yeah.
She was living in Gainesville at that time,
but you need to talk to Betsy.
Let me see if I have her email address.
Let me see...
Interviewer: You mentioned her in that other interview.
I remember the name from that interview.
Woman: Yeah, try this email address.
Her full name Betsy Randall-David.
Betsy R-A-N-D-A-L-L David at gmail dot com.
Interviewer: Okay.
Woman: And tell her I referred you to you.
Yeah, tell her I referred you to her.
But she was one of the co-founders, along with me
and all of us at the Gainesville Women's Health Center.
She was a nursing student over at the University of Florida
when we were doing the Gainesville Women's Health Center
and she came and she worked there.
She was the head of nursing and she's just had
a wonderful, wonderful, but,
she branched off and did a lot of work at HIV,
but she was down there with us all
through all that struggle and she's a lesbian
and got two sons.
Her sons, you might know who they are,
they're the David twins, they're both, what are they called?
District Attorneys.
And they're twins and they've been
written up a lot in the paper.
She lives right there on Markham, right down from Duke.
Markham Avenue, isn't it Markham?
Yeah.
Interviewer: Okay Betsy, now there's a Betsy that's
been mentioned in Pam Smith's and I don't--
Woman: Yeah that's her.
Well, there were two Betsy's.
Interviewer: I don't know which was which.
Woman: She probably was talking about
Betsy Randall-David, and then there was Betsy McGrady,
but she wouldn't be the person you would be talking about,
so it was Betsy she was talking about,
Betsy Randall-David.
Interviewer: Yeah, here it is, Betsy David, here it is.
Woman: Be sure and get in tough with Betsy
Interviewer: I will.
Woman: 'Cause she was pretty incredible.
Interviewer: I'm gonna email her right this minute.
Woman: Okay
Interviewer: Wow, well this was just--
Woman: Be sure to tell her I told you
to get in touch with her.