-: This is Rose Norman, it's December 21st, 2012,
and I'm talking with Donna Burnell,
I always wanna call you Burrell, Burnell
at my home in Huntsville, Alabama.
We're interviewing for the Southern Lesbian Feminist
Herstory Project, and Donna's gonna talk
about her time in Gainesville,
where she went to high school and college,
got into C-R, NOW, ERA activism,
those are the main things we're gonna talk about on this.
-: Well, I started at the University of Florida,
and I was just sort of your typical student those days,
a hippie and protesting the Vietnam War,
and there just came a time in my life
where everybody that I was close to was male.
I'd heard about women's liberation, and I think I,
oh I'd taken a class at the University of Florida
with a professor named Caroline Griffiths,
and we started protest movements, and so I was reading
a little bit about feminism and I thought,
you know, I really should look into that
because I don't have any women friends.
I kind of wished that I was male, so you know,
we didn't have the surgeries in those days,
and so I thought well, I better sort of rearrange this.
I sought out, and it was I believe an ad
in the University of Florida newspaper The Alligator,
advertising the C-R groups, and so I went
to the meeting to form C-R groups.
My memory is that you just chose one
based on a time you could show up,
but you really had to come every time,
you couldn't be sort of a sometime attendee,
you really had to make a commitment to show up.
I went and they capped the group at 10 or something,
I don't know, some sort of number like that.
I didn't have any sense of the history
of Gainesville Women's Liberation groups until...
-: This is '70? -: Today I don't remember,
it was not a strong leadership, it was very consensus,
how does everybody feel about that
when the steering committee or whatever they called it met.
Anyway, I started going to the groups
and I just thrived in consciousness-raising
because I found out I was not such a weird person,
which growing up in the '50s, I felt like an alien,
(wheezes) and I don't mean from another country,
I mean another planet, another solar system.
To find anybody who felt the same way I did
on a number of things was just astounding to me.
'Cause I just really thought nobody feels this way,
and so just shut up and do your own thing
and go your own way but don't talk about it.
I'd had one of the things that anybody during that decade
or gosh, any subsequent decade unfortunately
in Gainesville, is either being raped or a rape experience.
Everybody in our group, Gainesville was number one
in the FBI Uniform Crime Report so many times
and in the '80s it was actually number one
of the top 10 for rape, and I just read
a very disturbing article last month
where that seems to be continuing to be the case.
That's one of the issues that comes up in C-R,
and all of the women there had had
either some really close experience with rape
or had been raped, and again, this was something
I'd had a really close experience but I fought back.
I had no idea why I did, I just did.
I'd had no training, nobody'd ever
talked to me about it, I just did.
To find out that everybody else was in the same boat,
again, it was this eye-opening thing of oh my gosh,
you're not such a weird bad person that this
all this happened to you, this is women's experience.
I mean I really got the whole, what you were
supposed to get from C-R, I got it.
I was very close with that group,
eventually we got an overture and came together
as a steering committee to consider
and hear from this woman named Edna Saffy
who was a graduate student as I recall at the time,
at the University of Florida, and she wanted
to start a National Organization for Women group
on campus and she wanted to let people know
that they could come and be in the NOW group
and also see whatever places they could work together.
She made her presentation and left, and I remember...
My remembrance of it is that I was...
I think most of the women there were fine
with what she had to say and liked her personally,
but they didn't like the idea of how structured NOW was.
It was an organization, and so it was run
in a male-like way, and they kind of objected
to that 'cause we were so unstructured
within Gainesville Women's Liberation.
I liked more hard-hitting political protests
like I was seeing with the anti-Vietnam War protests,
and this actually was another thread into going
to C-R groups was how male chauvinist
and outright piggy the men were in the Vietnam protests
and their total disregard and lack of respect for women.
I'd experienced that side of it, and so I knew
I didn't wanna put any activist energy there,
but I knew that something more had to happen
besides consciousness-raising, I couldn't go around
with all this consciousness raised and not do anything.
So I really liked the idea, and that's what Edna spoke to
is actually don't get mad, get even,
don't agonize, organize, and that really spoke to me.
I wanted to join the NOW group, but maintain
my connection with Gainesville Women's Liberation.
At some point that became a problem, I guess.
Not acceptable, and I kinda think
that I was forced to choose. -: So the C-R groups were
equivalent to Gainesville Women's Liberation.
-: Yeah. -: Okay.
-: Yeah, the C-R groups, that was...
There was no real thrust, I mean like I said,
my memory's there was a steering committee,
and I think why I remember it so strongly was
the first time I'd ever seen sort of inter...
'Cause you know, we all met as the steering committee
in the Student Union, and there was one woman sitting
in another woman's lap, and they were all entwined,
and it was the first time I'd ever seen that
outside of you know, like, a home, (laughs)
a very private area, it was like (gasps)
oh my gosh, people will see you.
And so I was really fascinated by their comfortableness
in expressing that sort of romantic energy in public.
This was the first time I'd seen it,
so I think that's why I remember that.
At any rate, like I said, my memory is very vague,
but I feel that I was forced to choose,
and the C-R groups were winding down, and again,
I felt very liberated, I felt like I really needed
to take this energy and do something with it.
I would have to say that I came down on the NOW side,
I was like, well if you're gonna be that way,
Edna's not making me choose, you all are making me choose,
and so I'm gonna go with the NOW group.
Most of the energy in this NOW group,
they were older, there was Jeanette Blevins
who was staff at the university,
Edna Saffy was a graduate student.
When we would go to the State of Florida beginning meetings
for a state National Organization for Women,
everybody was older than me, and what I found when we had
about a 10-year reunion later on into the '80s is
that I'm constantly running to catch up.
They've all let go of it, and I'm still trying to surpass
'em, and I've surpassed 'em but I don't realize it
'cause I'm always running to catch up.
I had that experience so often with this protest stuff,
most of the people I hung out with
at the Vietnam War protests were older than me.
So I'm constantly trying to be, you know,
get it together 'cause I'm the younger one,
and live up to this ideal that I have in my head.
Like I said, it's only years and decades later
I realized my God, I've actually done more
than they have done, and I'm still
in my mind trying to catch up to them.
(laughs) That's kind of just a funny aside.
Okay, so where are we in the story,
so I leave the consciousness-raising groups,
I join in with NOW, I'm really kind of on the periphery,
I'm graduating from college, I'm getting my first jobs,
this sort of thing is going on,
and I remember being maybe the first treasurer
of the Student University Chapter of NOW
and then I participate in the Florida parades for the ERA,
which was mostly put on by the Gainesville Chapter
and Edna Saffy is the parade leader.
It was one of the first and biggest women's
marches that we had in Tallahassee.
I go through some turmoil in my work life,
I get this fantastic job out at Sunland Training Center,
which is the state school for the mentally retarded.
I'm actually using my Psychology B.A.,
which is unheard of (laughs), and so I become very involved
in that for the longest time, but there's a certain...
The grant ends and also who I'm working with there are
Carol Martin who's involved in the Women's Center,
but I've already told you earlier
that she's kind of on the outs with a lot
of the main wheels of the Women's Center,
but now she writes lesbian mysteries.
-: Oh! -: I'm trying to remember
her writer's name is A.J. Martin, I think?
Also Sallie Ann Harrison works out at Sunland
at that time, but I know both of them,
and I hang out with them, we have a lot
of informal networking in Gainesville.
I maintain that all through this time,
but I'm not really doing a lot of activism.
I sort of come back into the activism
once I quit that job and I'm kind of homeless,
I'm out at the Red House with Corky Culver
for maybe a month, I'm living with Marsha West,
we end up in a pup tent on Lorelei Esser's property
where we eat blueberries all summer and get food stamps.
This has to be the summer of '79.
What I do then is say well, I've got this nice
Psychology degree, which is actually
in Experimental Behavioral Analysis.
I'm in on operant conditioning and Skinner
and behavior modification and hard science.
I've actually been working in that area
for I don't know, it was about '75 to '78,
so about three years maybe-- -: This is Sunland?
-: Yeah, I'm working in that area, but I look around
and I go, gee, I think I'll put in a résumé,
a job application at the Women's Clinic.
And so I turn the Psychology degree into counseling,
actually just let them think it's counseling.
And they do (giggles) but where I do have
counseling experience is one of the things
that Judy, Margaret, and Byllye, Judy Avery, no,
Judy Levy, Byllye Avery, and Margaret Parrish
are in on starting in, say,
1974, so at the end of my college years,
is a rape crisis line. -: Uh-huh.
-: Because of the experience I had with rape,
I knew I never wanted to be raped,
and I knew it would be pretty awful.
Another connection is Alyce McAdam.
Alyce works at The Alligator with me,
that's how I meet up with Alyce,
and she and I are feminists, and one of the things
we'd do at the newspaper is we'd take
our little Exactos and when somebody writes,
well she does the job as well as any man,
we sort of rearrange the writing.
And nobody ever catches onto that, but... (wheezes)
So Alyce and I are friends, I'm hanging out
with Alyce sort of socially, and she has gone
up to the D.C. Rape Crisis Center.
She went to D.C. for awhile, and then she comes back
to Gainesville, and that's all she can talk about.
And she knows self defense, and she's feisty,
and I like Alyce, and she is also,
she's the parade marshal I think, no...
She organizes the security or something
for the ERA parade, so she's a big deal in that.
Alyce is able to feed in a lot
of energy to this Rape Crisis Line.
It's done through the Women's Clinic,
so the Women's Clinic is in existence at that time,
and the only connection I have is I've gone
for training with Judy Levy, who has a PhD
in Psychology as I understand it.
I can draw on that counseling experience
that I've gotten from that Rape Crisis Line.
Now I don't know if anybody has talked
to you about that Rape Crisis Line,
but one of the interesting things is
because of the, especially for that time,
the radicalism of Alyce McAdam,
we will just take calls, and the women remain
anonymous unless they wanna tell us their name.
Alyce then catches onto, from the calls
that we're getting, that there's a number of rapes
in Gainesville that are obviously the same perpetrator.
She takes this information, we know
on such-and-such a date that a rape happened
in this approximate area, and this is the M.O.,
the guy always says this, or he comes through the window,
or he holds a knife to her throat, or whatever it is.
She takes that data to the police,
and they threaten to arrest all of us.
For aiding and abetting 'cause we're not
making these women report to the police.
There's a point at which Alyce and Judy
and all come back to the group,
to the women who are answering this line and say,
if you continue with us, you may get arrested.
Well, I don't have anything to lose.
I don't own a home, (giggles) I have a motorcycle,
you know, I'm like, yeah come get me, you know, whatever.
We stand up to the police, we find out,
Alyce continues the conversation with them,
and she finds out they're asking the women
who do get bold enough to go into the police
station and say, hey I was raped,
did you come, did you like it,
what were you doing there, what were you wearing,
these were their standard questions.
Alyce challenges the police and says,
we would never in a million years send a woman
who was raped to you all with what you do to them.
We end up doing, well mostly Alyce,
doing training in sensitivity to the police.
To try to get them better, but one of the offshoots
out of this Rape Crisis Line is that
because we advertised it in a lot of places,
that there's this crisis line that you can call
and talk to, we start getting women
who are calling saying, I'm 70,
and my father raped me as a child.
So these rapes were 60 years ago,
and we're like, whoa, what's with this whole thing?
We don't realize until we do the Rape Crisis Line
how much incest is going on, how much
these women are suffering for decades.
But also women are calling up going,
I haven't been raped, but my husband
beats me every Saturday night.
The Battered Women's Shelter is
an offshoot of that Rape Crisis Line.
There's an early in I think '75...
Child Sexual Abuse Conference in Gainesville.
Again, because of what we're being told on this line.
-: This is something that Judy Levy organizes, or?
-: The conference I actually organized with,
oh gosh, I'm trying to remember her name...
She was another PhD psychologist.
Things that went on in Gainesville,
there was so much going on during that time period
and even now that it wasn't like, oh
I don't wanna participate, it was more like,
you go up and do it and I'll help you
every way I can and all that, so that's my memory
of it, was that people were very supportive.
I will have to remember her name later,
this PhD psychologist, she had a good friend
who worked at the university as well,
and I wanna say she was like a dean or somethin'
and all I can remember is her nickname was Worm.
Margaret Parrish knows who I'm talkin' about though.
-: I'll ask her, it may be in her interview.
-: Yeah, she'll know who I'm talkin' about there.
I go to the clinic, I put in my résumé,
I let them think that I'm just a dynamite counselor,
'cause now I have a B.A. in Psychology,
and I'm able to use the skills that I've gotten
from the Rape Crisis Line 'cause they were so good.
To listen and to reflect back, I mean,
all things that you still hear today,
they were doing as laypeople, and so I'm hired
at the clinic in that year. -: So this is '79?
-: Uh-huh. -: Okay.
-: The first thing that happens with the,
do you want me to go on with the clinic?
-: Yeah, yeah, keep goin'.
-: The first thing that happens with the clinic is
there's three of us who were hired at the same time.
From very different, yeah, we don't know each other
until we start working, well,
I might have heard of Sharon before.
But there's three of us who were hired
as counselors at the same time,
and we're working, working, working.
We're hired as abortion counselors.
Now I have very little medical experience,
I always swore I'd have nothing to do
with medicine, having watched my roommate
in '74 go through her first year of medical school.
I swore I'd have even less to do with medicine,
(giggles) it was just all corrupt
and all terrible and it was just awful
what they did to train medical students.
And their cohort in medical school
at Shands Teaching Hospital in Gainesville
is the first time they allow women in.
And so I become close friends through
that group with Kathy Cantwell.
-: Is she the one who was in the bad wreck?
-: Yeah. -: Okay.
-: And Kathy Cantwell, at that point
before she goes to medical school,
she had been a nurse, and she's married
to a man who I think is from Chile?
She's you know, going to South America,
and she is like the Martha Stewart, you know,
she's not really well-known, or even
in the feminist community at all,
but she goes to medical school
and I think it kinda radicalizes her.
I hear about that treatment of what's going on,
the surgeons failed every female student.
No matter how well they did, it didn't matter.
-: You're saying these are the first women
to go through the Shand Medical School, wow.
-: Mm-hmm, and so watching medicine...
Oh and I should say too that I had
that same experience with the University of Florida.
When I got done with my Bachelor's in Psychology,
I had been working with Dr. Pennypacker, Dr. Malagodi,
Dr. Adams, a little bit with Dr. Goldstein, all men.
And they loved my work, I worked in the experimental lab,
I got A's in the courses 'cause I really respond...
I thought I would like the counseling side
of psychology, but they were all into Jung,
and I couldn't do it, it made no sense to me.
When I found operant conditioning, I was like,
okay, this sounds like something
that can go somewhere, I understand it,
it's not all about dreams, it's about reality.
I went and my advisor was Dr. Malagodi,
and I would go and ask him about going
to graduate school, and he would get up
and leave the office, should've gotten a hint from that.
I tried to get recommendations from those three,
and to a man, they all told me,
you're just going to get pregnant and married,
or married and pregnant, and drop out,
and we don't want women in graduate school.
So that's December, well, the fall semester,
the fall quarter I guess we were then,
of '74, and when I tell people that today,
they're all like, well didn't you sue?
And it just never even occurred to me.
-: Was it even illegal yet? -: I don't know.
It didn't occur to me to sue,
and so I just accepted it, it was just like,
because I had wanted to get a PhD,
I had always wanted to get a PhD.
When that door just slammed, I was like, well, now what.
That's one of the things that really,
other than just trying to catch up
to the activists that I admired,
that really fueled my feminism.
Somebody once asked me, how are you going
to recruit more feminists, and I said,
the patriarchy just cranks 'em out,
we don't have to go recruit 'em.
(Rose giggles) They make 'em all the time.
And she was actually shocked by that answer.
I was like, how could you be shocked, just look around.
You just have to go and just advertise you're there,
and the pissed off women just come streamin' in.
And I was one of those ones who was just
so disappointed and angry about, again,
through the earlier C-R, you don't just sit
and be angry and frustrated and depressed.
You go out and you do somethin' about it.
So I was like, well, I think this is wrong,
and what I do about wrong is I go and I fix it.
That was another fueling factor there,
thank you Dr. Malagodi. (laughs)
That's why there's 22 years between my getting
a B.A. and my going back to graduate school.
Took me a long time to feel like it was okay again.
And they did let women in shortly thereafter.
After that year, about maybe in 1976
they started letting women into that side
of psychology, and I actually got to hang out
with them all at conferences, 'cause remember
I'm working in the discipline.
We go to the Midwestern Association of Behavioral Analysis
or Applied Behavior Analysis, we go
to the big conference with Nate Azrin
and all the heavyweights in that kind of psychology.
I'm able to see my old professors interacting
with their female graduate students.
The first thing I notice is that these female
graduate students are beyond meek and mild,
so I'm going, well, I don't think I woulda...
I could never have kept that together.
And the second thing is I would stand there
and watch them, oh hi, good buddy,
come over here and meet my graduate students.
And they would introduce the men and skip over the women.
It was like she wasn't even there,
and she'd be standing there smiling,
and again I was like, I couldn't hold it together.
So even if I had fought my way in,
you know, it just wasn't gonna happen.
-: I think all of that's kind of a footnote.
But that's certainly a consciousness-raising one.
-: Yeah people are shocked that the University of Florida
did that, but that's what was goin' on at that time.
-: Yeah, I think that was kind of a footnote
from when you went to the clinic.
There's three counselors hired at the same time,
doing rape counseling. -: Abortion counseling.
-: Abortion counseling, 'cause rape counseling is
how you got into feeling like you could do counseling.
-: I had never really been around medicine.
I was sure as I was doing the tr,
we had this great trainer named Yonah Levin,
she was from up north, maybe New York,
and she's gone back up to New York.
She had some sort of formal training
in psychology or counseling, and she was just,
a lesbian feminist, she was marvelous.
I was sure I was gonna faint, you know, the blood,
the surgery, the needles, something, I was gonna faint.
But I didn't, and I got through it,
and so became more comfortable
with medicine from that point on.
But one of the first things that happened to us
at the clinic was maybe about two or three months
after we were hired, there became a $10,000 deficit.
Because the bookkeeper had ripped off the clinic.
(wheezes) (Rose groans)
And gone off to Alaska.
And we had to sit through this meeting.
And most of the sort of higher-ups,
the clinic wasn't real structured then,
it was sort of a Board of Directors or gosh,
what are they called, called it something,
you know, the committee who ran it.
I don't even think there was a CEO or definite leader.
They kinda treated us like we were
the unwanted children, the three of us.
They looked at us like, maybe we could cure
that $10,000 deficit if we got rid of the three new ones.
They actually had a meeting where they had to decide
whether to keep us on or not, so, (wheezes)
so that really banded us together,
and gave us a good insight, but then the proposal became
that they were gonna have bake sales.
And I was going, are you serious?
You're gonna bake sale your way out of a 10,
that's gonna be a lot of brownies. (giggles)
I can't remember exactly what happened,
but we were able to keep our jobs,
but it was just always rocky at the clinic.
Now that's after the divorce, I'm curious
whether Margaret mentioned the divorce?
-: Her divorce? -: No the clinic had a divorce.
The clinic divorced the Birthing Center.
-: Yeah, she did talk about that.
That was the '80s, though, wasn't it?
-: It had to be in the '70s 'cause it was
before I came, and see, my perspective
on that is very interesting 'cause again,
I'm able to bridge these groups
where I don't have a solid, you know,
handle in one or I'm not known
to be on this side or that side,
and what happens with me is I start working
with Judy, Margaret, and Byllye, who are still
at the Gainesville Women's Health Center in '78.
I start meeting with them over the Mother's Day
March for ERA, and they always wanted to meet
at the clinic 'cause they were always workin' there.
So I go into the clinic, and I can see
the staff is looking at them, not so much Byllye,
Byllye didn't seem to be around a lot,
but Margaret and Judy really caught it.
The staff is looking at them with hatred in their eyes.
And I'm going, what's up with this place?
(giggles) You know, this is no different
than where I worked for the state where everybody was
at everybody's throat for no good reason.
The staff is lookin' at me like, oh you're with them.
I'm like, oh boy there's somethin'
really big goin' on here, and what happens is
there's some crackdown about signing,
I don't know, hours or something,
yeah okay, they do a management takeover.
The place probably havin' money troubles, who knows.
Judy and Margaret and Byllye are on the hook
as far as they're on the paper as the corporate people.
They do kind of a more heavy-handed management thing,
and the staff revolts and they take,
'cause it's before computers, they take all
the patient identification chart records
so you can't figure out how to find a patient
in all those charts, and the appointment book.
'Cause Judy, Margaret, and Byllye locked
the staff out or something, now I'm just
all hearin' this, you know, in the community.
And then the lawyers get involved,
and I think Brown and Miller are in on that,
and they're on Judy, Margaret, and Byllye's side
'cause they're the professionals.
And we're all grassroots, but I'm sittin' there
and I'm lumped in on the Judy, Margaret, and Byllye side
because I'm hangin' out with them
doin' the Mother's Day March for ERA.
I don't know how a year later, after this divorce,
it sort of all comes to pass that I'm not on the hook.
But somehow I'm not, they accept me.
-: The clinic-Birthing Center divorce is
while you were there. -: No, it's while I'm
in the community, but I don't have links
to either one, I'm only linked with Judy,
Margaret, and Byllye over this march.
-: When is it in relation to when you worked there?
-: I go to work at the clinic about a year later.
-: Okay, okay. -: About a year later.
I think by then, Byllye's getting ready
to take off for Atlanta. -: Okay.
-: And they're all over at the Birthing Center.
I don't really see them anymore.
-: Oh that's where they went,
they went to the Birthing, okay.
They bought the Birthing Center or something like that?
-: Well I think the Birthing Center was created
off of the Gainesville Women's Health Center.
And so that's the settlement of the divorce is,
you guys get the Birthing Center, and the staff
will own the Gainesville Women's Health Center.
-: Which was the abortion clinic.
-: Mm-hmm.
-: I think I got that.
So when you went to work there,
you were not with Judy, Margaret, and Byllye,
you were with the clinic 'cause you were doing
abortion counseling, and they were doing the other stuff.
-: Yeah. -: Even though originally
it was the whole thing, Margaret talked mostly
about how what they were doing, that full spectrum,
was something nobody else in the country was doing.
-: Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, definitely,
we had Carol Downer come, I mean they did.
Shortly after, I think she got arrested,
you know, for the yogurt or something.
Yeah, they were doin' a whole lot
of really cutting-edge medicine
with the Gainesville Women's Health Center,
and with the Birthing Center too.
So it was really sad for me sitting out
in the community to get in there and know
that this big split had happened,
but splits had happened before.
I don't remember during my interviewing now
that I'm looking at how close these events were,
why they weren't sayin' hey, you were just hangin' out
with these Birthing Center people.
I don't know why that didn't come up,
except again, that some of the main energy
at the clinic at that time was people from the farm,
so Lynda Lou and Marilyn, and they knew Marsha,
and really I was more with Marsha
than with Judy, Margaret, and Byllye.
Once we were done with the march,
we sort of went our separate ways.
-: What was the farm connection to Gainesville?
-: Sorry? -: How did the farm get
connected to Gainesville, was that the Birthing Center?
-: Oh no, C-R farm is Lynda Lou Simmons (mumbles) farm.
-: Okay it's not the farm in Tennessee, okay, okay.
-: Yeah, yeah not that farm (giggles)
I know about that farm, but yeah.
-: You're now working as an abortion counselor,
you and two other people, and you narrowly miss
getting wrote off when there is an embezzler.
How did you eventually get fired or whatever it was?
They said you got kicked out (mumbles),
no that was something else.
-: I was actually at the clinic for 11 years.
-: 11 years, okay, as an abortion counselor?
-: Well, yes, and then I eventually was
the Counseling Director, I think we called it.
I worked as a lab tech, I worked in the CSR,
the Central Sterilizing, not a lot, but (giggles)
when there was no one else, I made a stab at it.
-: Was that '79 to '90? -: Yeah, yeah, '90.
Actually I think I left February of '91.
-: Wow. -: Mm-hmm.
Eventually I was Director. -: Wow, God.
Of the whole thing? -: Mm-hmm.
-: Okay, and that thing doesn't close down till '97, right?
-: I think probably more like '94.
I think it's earlier than '97.
Patricia Lassiter and Abby Palmer
were kinda in charge then, the deficit, I think.
Sorry, Abby, (laughing) this is different
from Abby Goldsmith, there's a couple,
well actually was a couple of Abby's
in on the Health Center, but Abby Palmer was
a sweet person, oh, very, very nice person.
Not a really good business person,
ya had to be tough, ya had to be tough
with that place, oh my goodness the things.
There was always a deficit, was always,
I mean $10,000, ha, we ran with a $30,000 deficit.
We just didn't worry about it, but it drove Abby crazy.
She went to balance the budget,
and in balancing the budget, it either
became apparent they couldn't do that
or it did the clinic in, I don't know which.
If you were gonna pay that close of attention
to the money, then you were gonna drive yourself crazy.
So I was there during when the protest...
When I first went to the Gainesville Women's Health Center
it was on 4th Avenue, I think, in Southwest,
across from Alachua General Hospital.
So we were in the medical district,
but that's where we first started having protesters.
When I actually first started at the clinic,
we didn't have any protesters, that comes a little later.
And the church we're dealing with is called Maranatha,
this medical district was right up
on the university campus, I mean like,
down the street from the administration building.
And Maranatha is a campus ministry,
and they had their headquarters or building
or office in that same area, and so it was very easy
for them to organize on a Saturday
and then come down to the clinic to protest.
For some reason, I was always the one
in charge of security, again I think
I'm following in Alyce's steps.
I get charged with very early on, getting out there
and going nose-to-nose with protesters.
-: Add that to the list of things that you were doing.
(Donna cackles)
-: (mumbles) Counseling, lab tech, in charge of security.
When would you say that the protesting began?
You started in '79, there's no protesters,
is it in the '80s, or...
-: Oh, yeah, I'm thinking that when Ronald Reagan came in
that that gave them a real lift.
-: Which was '80. -: Yeah, it could definitely be
in the early '80s. -: Yeah.
You know, it's funny, I wanna pause this.
So talk about the '80s and your experience
with the '80s compared to the '70s.
-: Well the '70s, I'm just so young,
I don't know why I'm so immature then,
but looking back on it, I'm like, oh my God, you know?
I have to constantly remind myself now
that I'm a professor that students forget things,
and they promise they'll do, and you know,
that that was me, (chuckles) you know,
so quit being so hard on them
because I did exactly everything that they're doing.
Again, I'm doing this I-gotta-catch-up-to.
Alyce is gone by then, she'd moved to Tallahassee,
I think, and was really into, she's sort of
the first lobbyist for State NOW as I recall, Alyce McAdam.
Edna Saffy's graduated and gone to Jacksonville,
Jeanette Blevins, who was a secretary staff
at the University of Florida, she is gone to law school,
and gone up and lived in D.C.,
so my role models that I'm always trying
to catch up to have all left town,
but I'm still trying to catch up to them.
So when I get to the Women's Health Center,
of course that takes all kinds of energy,
but then this protester thing comes in
with the abortion politics, and that's,
that to me is just wonderful.
A lot of the energy at the clinic at that time,
during the late '70s when I start and the early '80s,
it's very, we're going to be all about love
and connecting and peaceful, and I can do that
for a certain time period, and then I get feistier.
Being outside with the protesters is a real good use
of my energy, 'cause this is people I can mess with,
this is people I can yell at or call the police on
or be aggressive with, and so I can really
get that energy out there and do something
that the rest of them don't wanna mess with.
And I'm protecting the clinic,
so I'm doing it for a good reason.
I ultimately become very close to the women
in this clinic, there's about 30, 35,
there's a pretty big staff, a lot of 'em work part-time,
and there's a woman up in the front office,
and she is wild and crazy, she is pretty much
just like me, she's just not gonna take orders
from anyone for any good reason.
She comes to work in these really high heels
with the little fuzzy feet on them,
pink feathery things, and she just wears
anything she wants to, which is almost un-feminist
in those days, but she's just gonna be her.
And her name is Gethan, and she's in a fire.
And she's killed, and not even, it takes 18 days.
She's in this terrible fire, and so she's gone overnight.
Abby Goldsmith, now Abby is a very interesting person.
In the '70s, Abby isn't really at the university,
she's not a student, but she's
in the community, and she's an anarchist.
I meet up with Abby during my travels,
and I kind of admire who she is,
she has people living under her dining room table,
she's just totally wild and crazy.
She's very forceful, very down-to-earth kind
of personality, I really like that about her.
She's working at the clinic, and she's very close
to Gethan, and so she and I go out
and proceed to have too many pitchers of beer
at the Windjammer and decide,
we've gotta get politically involved.
That we're gonna take this energy of feeling
like our life could end at any moment and all that,
and we've gotta get politically involved,
and what's going on in, gosh this woulda been
I think '82, is that the ERA is coming due again,
it got that extension which is why
they didn't want us doing anything in '78.
Got an extension, but the extension is only
for four years, and so it's coming all due again.
The ERA missionaries have come to town.
They have been sent by Ellie Smeal
and the ERA groups that have gotten together
as a coalition, of course National NOW is
in the thick of it, there's no NOW chapter functioning.
The Student Chapter has gone totally
into peace and love and I don't know what they're doing
but anytime I inquire about them,
I'm told that the leader of the student group,
who I actually think I knew her name, and I had met her,
she was more interested in navel-gazing
or some derogatory thing like that.
The ERA missionaries are kind of,
and we didn't know they were called missionaries
until much later (guffaws).
The ERA action team are these folks from,
feminists from up north somewhere
who've come down to the South, particularly Florida,
to get the ERA moving, and they're floundering around.
They're lost, they don't know anybody
in the feminist community other than people
who've just come to town, most of the organized
feminists would not deal with them.
Abby and I decide we're gonna bite the bullet,
we're gonna go work on the ERA.
We go over and we start volunteering our services,
now I don't know how much Abby did.
These people, oh my Lord, they'd get on the phone
in front of us, and talk about,
you wouldn't believe how large the insects are
here and the natives don't seem to notice.
I was like (chuckling) this is really
not helping the bonding project, you know.
I don't know they just, (sighs) ay,
there are so many stories like that.
They weren't the easiest folks to get along with,
but I was again seeing this different,
because I was a Northerner, so I wasn't one of them
that didn't get it, that we have to come help.
(laughs) I wasn't seen as a native.
I'm like, I don't know how I always get in this
one foot in both camp, but there I was again.
-: Because you don't have the heavy accent or somethin'?
-: Yeah, maybe, I don't know. (laughs)
So the ERA ends on somethin' like June 6th, 1982.
One thing I will say about the ERA action team
and the missionaries, they worked nonstop.
They might have been as obnoxious as hell,
but they worked nonstop, I mean 50, 60 hour weeks.
Six of 'em, they organized Gainesville
from top to bottom, they knew who was who,
how they were connected to somebody else,
and slowly I was able to get the community in,
as long as I kept 'em (chuckles) far away
from the obnoxious Northern people,
I could get like Corky and that whole group
to come to things or do something.
But when their big project was,
they came in one day and they must have
had orders from Washington, we're going
to turn Senator Kirkpatrick around.
Well, Senator Kirkpatrick was a good ol' boy
who had run on an anti-ERA platform.
His wife was more anti-ERA than he was.
And we were sitting there going,
we're gonna go convince him with green balloons
and a plant, I don't think so.
We'd be further along in this project
if we could figure out who he frequented
for sex and blackmail him, I mean, now we're talking.
But balloons and a plant aren't gonna do it.
'Cause he's got way too much political support
to be anti-ERA, so we were like,
these people have something going,
but they don't have the whole thing.
They were going to, at the end of the ERA campaign,
take all the resources, all the boxes,
'cause again, we didn't have computers yet,
all the boxes of cards that people had signed out,
signing the ERA petition where they indicated
what they were willing to do,
what their address was, all this information,
they were gonna take that all with them.
Unless we started a NOW chapter,
then they could leave it with us.
So Abby Goldsmith and I started the second town NOW chapter
in 1982, and we called it Gainesville Area NOW.
Who knew that a name, I mean Abby,
Abby's even more cut-and-dried than I am,
Abby's like, just slap a name on there,
let's get this done. (chuckles)
We were gonna call it I think Alachua County NOW,
and Felicity Trueblood, who was a professor
at University of Florida, and she
and Phyllis Meek, who was a dean,
were very much in on the ERA campaign.
Felicity objected 'cause she lived in Putnam County.
She said, if you call it Alachua County,
it won't include me, I'm like,
oh you're being so picky, who cares?
(laughs) We just wanted the resource,
we don't care what we're called.
I think that's how we got to Gainesville Area.
That's the reason we started the chapter,
was the negotiated you must start this chapter
or we'll take everything with us.
They did leave everything, we supported
a pro-ERA candidate named Margaret Epps,
who was out of the League of Women Voters.
For senate, she came really close to defeating
George Kirkpatrick, which was astounding
in those days, that we could get that much.
Because it would be like running a democrat
anywhere in Alabama right now,
and running against Shelby, and coming really close.
The thing with Margaret that was very interesting is
Abby and I go up to her campaign headquarters,
and we have volunteers that we have all gathered there.
They're streaming out the doors, crying,
gnashing their teeth, angry like I've never seen.
All these young women, I'm like, oh my God, what's going on?
Your candidate's anti-abortion!
Oh, dear (cackling), and so we have to sit Margaret down
in the Windjammer for like three hours
and go through it, you can personally be against it,
but politically, if you're elected,
you have to support Roe v. Wade, and this is why.
And just go through all the stories with her.
-: (inhales deeply) Wow, think we need to stop.