My Life on the Road (15 page)

He is telling me his story to say thank you. Because the women’s movement was born of women talking to each other, childhood sexual abuse was revealed to be a fact, not a Freudian fantasy—and children began to be believed.

We finish our coffee. He is a rare person—a man who knows what it is to be a woman—and also someone who has ended abuse in one generation. I thank him for surviving—and teaching. There are many kinds of lessons on a campus.

·
It’s 1995, and I am at the Dominican College, near San Francisco. Because an outdoor amphitheater on its campus holds a thousand people, it is about to be the site of a fund-raiser for Planned Parenthood. No one has uttered a peep of protest. Planned Parenthood clinics have provided health care for so many for so long that it has become one of the most trusted organizations in America. Even some anti-abortion protesters seem to have figured out that demonstrating against clinics only turns public opinion against them, especially since just 3 percent of Planned Parenthood services are related to abortion.

But this is the calm before the storm. Archbishop John Quinn of San Francisco writes a letter to the college’s president condemning me as a “leading advocate for virtually unrestricted abortion in the United States.” Though the college gets not a penny from the Catholic Church, it was founded by Dominican nuns long ago. They are no longer around to speak for themselves, but the archbishop says their legacy is being betrayed.

Everything just keeps going, both the accusations and the event. Some contributors do indeed withhold their funds from this college, which is hurtful. But when the trustees hold firm to their support for free speech on campus, new contributions make up for the loss of the old. If anything, the archbishop has only brought more media coverage of an era of declining church membership, aging priests, shutdowns of a dozen historic churches, the revelations of sexual abuse by priests, and many other troubles that caused him to be summoned to the Vatican for a tactical consultation.

On the day itself, I’m impressed to see a small protest plane circling over the amphitheater, pulling an anti-abortion banner. Someone yells out, “Look, the right-to-lifers have an air force!” There is laughter. The event goes right on. Even though I know this lonely little plane is a commercial one that can be hired for birthdays, weddings, and advertising, the symbolism of its constant circling makes me sad.

Talking later to Dolores Huerta, my friend of thirty years—a lifetime organizer of farm workers and efforts to elect progressive women—I tell her that I can’t shake the sadness of this symbolic distance between an airplane representing the church and the real lives of women on the ground.

She reminds me of the organizer’s mantra:
Roots can exist without flowers, but no flower can exist without roots.
Religion may be a flower, but people are its roots.

Three months later, Archbishop John Quinn retires at the age of sixty-six, nine years ahead of schedule. San Francisco newspapers report that he was too distant from the people.

·
In rural Oklahoma, where oil wells grow in fields next to cattle and winter wheat, I’m talking with a university auditorium full of students in a postlecture discussion. Most people are trying to figure out how to make their daily lives more fair—whether it’s who gets tenure or who gets the kids ready for school—but I notice that an all-white group of twenty or so people in Jesus T-shirts are not taking part.

Finally, a young T-shirted man stands up to protest my support for legal abortion, which is odd because we haven’t been talking about abortion at all. He says abortion isn’t even in the Constitution, so how can it be protected by it? A female college student who looks about twelve rises to say that women aren’t included in the Constitution either, but now that we’re citizens, we have reproductive freedom as part of a constitutional right to privacy. If the Founding Fathers had included Founding Mothers, that freedom would have been in the Bill of Rights to begin with.

The crowd applauds. I can see we’ve reached the magical point when people start to answer each other’s questions. I can just listen and learn. An older man who seems to be the leader of the Jesus T-shirt group says that the Bible forbids abortion in its commandment “Thou shall not kill.” But being in the Bible Belt, people really know their Bible, and an older woman cites Exodus 21:22–23, a passage that says a man who causes a pregnant woman to miscarry must pay a fine but is not charged with murder, not unless the woman herself dies. Thus the Bible is making clear that a dependent life is not the same as an independent life.

This quiets the T-shirt wearers, but probably not for long; I can see them conferring. Meanwhile another student rises to object to parental and judicial consent laws that treat a young woman as if she were the property of her parents or the state. “If you’re old enough to get pregnant,” she says, “you’re old enough to get unpregnant.” A man chimes in, pointing out that if a woman serving in the military is raped by another soldier or even by the enemy, she can’t get an abortion in an army hospital or anywhere with government funds. She’s not even guaranteed a leave to find one on her own. There is a rumble of disapproval and learning.

A nurse arises to explain the metal bracelet she is wearing. It looks like the prisoner of war bracelets that bear the birth date of a loved one, but she explains that hers bears the birth and death dates of Rosie Jimenez, the first woman—but not the last—to die from an illegal abortion because the Hyde Amendment forbids not only the use of military tax dollars but health care or any tax dollars for abortion. Rosie was on welfare, only a few months away from graduating with teaching credentials so she could support herself and her five-year-old daughter. But she got pregnant, crossed the Mexican border to get an illegal abortion, the only kind she could afford, returned to Texas, and spent seven painful and fevered days in a hospital being treated for septic shock—at hundreds of times the taxpayers’ expense of an abortion. She died, leaving behind her daughter and a $700 scholarship check that was proof of Rosie’s promising future. This happened only two months after the Hyde Amendment went into effect. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of women have lost their health or lives since.

With an eye on the T-shirt group, I explain that reproductive freedom means what it says and also protects the right to have a child. A woman can’t be forced into an abortion, just as she can’t be forced out of childbirth by sterilization or anything else: the women’s movement is as devoted to the latter as the former—including the economic ability to support a child. It just seems lopsided because the opponents of safe and legal abortion have focused there.

I hope the quiet T-shirt group might be realizing that this protects their choice, too—that government with the power to forbid birth control or abortion could also enforce one or the other—but no such luck. Suddenly they stand up in unison, chant “Abortion! Murder! Abortion! Murder!” and walk out en masse.

In the silence that follows, I can feel people trying to figure out what went wrong. I too wonder what I could have said or done. I express my regret at their walkout, which seems to break the spell.

A young white man in jeans—slender, shy, perhaps in his late twenties—raises his hand and begins a story that seems unrelated. He has invented a new kind of bit for oil rigs. He just sold the patent and received an unexpected amount of money. He would like to donate $90,000, about half of his windfall, to the cause of reproductive freedom as a basic human right—like freedom of speech.

There is silence, then laughter, and then cheers. Never in my four decades of traveling and fund-raising will anything like this happen again. If people pledge money, it’s usually after an appeal and in requested sums. Also they tend to give according to what others are giving. To me and to everyone in that room, this young man has shown how to give without being asked and according to ability—more than ability, since he is sharing a rare windfall. He has given us all the gift of spontaneity—and hope.

We stay in touch. He comes to New York and stops to say hello. When I’m on another trip, a young woman introduces herself to me as his sister. When he and I cross paths in Denver, we have breakfast. Every few years, the road seems to bring us together. That day in Oklahoma became a landmark in all our lives.

·
At a law school in Canada, we are deep in a discussion of the law as a universal instrument that feminists should not expect to be flexible. I am arguing that this is what judges are for—otherwise, justice could be meted out by a computer. The mostly male law students are arguing that any exception is dangerous and creates a “slippery slope.” Make one exception, and the number will grow until the law will be overturned de facto.

I am not a lawyer. I am stuck. Those young men may or may not represent the commonsense majority in the audience, but they have triumphed.

Then a tall young woman in jeans rises from the back of the room. “Well,” she says calmly, “I have a boa constrictor.” This quiets the audience right down.

“Once a month,” she continues, “I go to a dissection lab on campus to get frozen mice to feed my boa constrictor. But this month, there was a new professor in charge, and he said to me: ‘I can’t give you frozen mice. If I give you frozen mice, everyone will want frozen mice.’ ”

There is such an explosion of laughter that even the argumentative young men can’t resist. She has made her point: not everyone wants the same thing. A just law can be flexible. To be just, a law
has
to be flexible. She has saved the day.

·
At a community college in California, an auditorium full of returning women students is into a long and serious discussion about how difficult it is to get their male partners to share equally in the housework and child care. It’s not just because the men are resistant; it’s because the women themselves feel guilty, or don’t want to seem like nags, or don’t know how to divide work and child care because they’ve never seen it at home.

One woman rises to speak: “Close your eyes and pretend you are living with a woman—how would you divide the housework?”

There is a long pause. “Now, don’t lower your standards.” There are cheers of approval.

·
On another campus, some women tell me about men who leave their underwear on the floor and don’t feel compelled to pick it up—or even notice. By now, the shouts and laughter have become quite rowdy, and I’ve begun to worry about a silent young Japanese woman near the front. Perhaps we are offending her.

As if summoned by my thought, she stands and turns to face all five hundred or so women. “When my husband leaves his underwear on the floor,” she says quietly, “I find it quite useful to
nail
it to the floor.”

Amid laughter and cheers, this shy young woman seems surprised to find herself laughing, too. She tells the group this is the first time she has ever said anything in public.

·
In a discussion of the advantages of having younger men as husbands and lovers—because they’re more likely to treat women as equals—one woman rises to say, “Of course they understand better. We were their mothers!” Once again I worry about a much older and ladylike woman in a front row who looks disapproving. When I ask if we are offending her, she rises, turns to the audience, and says, “When you are having an affair with a younger man”—I notice she doesn’t say
if,
but
when
—“try never to get on top. You look like a bulldog.” This remark coming from an unlikely woman—but one who had clearly been there—brought down the house.