(Editors Note: Working from an interview originally
conducted by Becky Kluchin of Carnegie-Mellon University, UIC student
Gina Caneva edited Heather's interview into a memoir. In it Heather
Booth talks about her lifelong commitment to social justice.)
The beginning of the women's movement was a time a
joy and excitement, of building a better world and finding ourselves.
I was raised in a loving family that believed in equality
and taking action for what is right. I grew up in Brooklyn, but went
to a suburban high school where I felt that I didn't really fit in.
I was head of a lot of the social organization like chorus, history
club and yearbook. There was a sorority in the school, and I quit it
when I realized that they didn't accept anybody who wasn't conventionally
pretty. I'd been on cheerleading, and I quit that because they weren't
letting blacks onto the team. I was ready for the sixties, and the
sixties weren't here.
Then I hit college, and the world burst open in the
most wonderful possible way. I went to the University of Chicago in
1963, in part, because it had no sororities. And sports didn't dominate
the scene. Within weeks, I became very active in the civil rights movement.
There was a school boycott that would've been for integrating both
integrated and neighborhood at quality schools. Blacks and whites lived
near enough to each other; it was a time when you could have integrated
schools. But instead, they created these wagons--like trailers--on
the overcrowded black schools. And the wagons were named after the
superintendent of schools, Benjamin Willis. The black kids couldn't
walk across the street and go to the white school. I ended up coordinating
the South Side Freedom Schools. That propelled me into the center of
the civil rights movement in the city.
I became active in what was the citywide group called
the Coordinating Council of Community Organization--CCCO. From that,
I also decided to set up a campus chapter of SNCC: Student Non-Violent
Coordinating Committee. And at the time, I was volunteering at a mental
institution, working particularly with a set of women on a locked ward.
I ended up being involved in a tutoring project that SNCC was also
involved with. It was for tutoring young African American kids nearby
the university. I was also active in the documentary film society and
the folklore society.
For raising all of the concerns that I was raising at that
point, there actually was a lot of reinforcement from the university. Professors
initially thought that this was exciting--there was a positive response initially.
It was clear that the university itself had this double role--one being this
extremely exciting place that taught me to think critically, brought people
together and allowed certain kinds of freedom. In high school, I was just miserable
because I couldn't figure out a way to express the concerns I had. At the same
time, there were other forms of traditional social control, and the school
explicitly function as what was called "in loco parentis" or in place of parents.
In those years, there were dormitory hours when women had to check in and when
men had to check in. I remember that a friend of mine was nearly suicidal.
I spent time with him to talk his way through a broken romance he had with
someone else, and when I came back after check-in, I was searched for contraceptives.
I was outraged--but this was a very innocent time.
Later, there was a sleep-out to protest the hours. In 1965,
a friend of mine was raped at knifepoint in her bed in an off-campus room.
When she went to student health for a gynecological exam, she was given a lecture
on her promiscuity. She was also told that student health didn't cover gynecological
exams. So we sat with her and they called it a sit-in.
In 1964 at the end of first semester, I was recruited to
go to Mississippi for the civil rights movement. I'd been very active in SNCC
already, and I was also active in the emerging anti-war movement on campus
and student government. And I became a leader of the Progressive Student Political
Committee called SPAC. In the civil rights movement, women played these extraordinary
leadership roles. A lot of things were happening at once.
When I got back to campus I traveled, talking about the civil
rights movement, SNCC and I did fundraising and promotion for it. We did local
organizing, and there were rent strikes in the black community It's not like
there was just one strand. All of these strandS together meant being in the
Movement. Women, civil rights, anti-war, students rights--it was all part of
the Movement.
In 1965, my sophomore year, an ex-boyfriend told me that
his sister, who had also been in Mississippi, was pregnant and needed an abortion.
I don't know if I'd ever really thought about it before. On being told there
was someone with a problem, my reaction was to try to do something to resolve
it. I called doctors in the Medical Committee for Human Rights, the physician
support team for the civil rights movement. I found a doctor who was on 63rd
Street--in the heart of the Woodland black ghetto. That was successful. All
I did was just make contact with someone. It turns out that the doctor, TRM
Howard was a great hero of the Civil Rights Movement and left Mississippi only
when he was on a Klan hit list.
Then, a few months later, someone else had heard about it
and asked for some more help. I made another contact. And someone else called,
and someone else called, and someone else called. I told people when they called
they should ask for Jane.
For a while, there was just one doctor. Then he died.
And I had to find another doctor. It was just talking to one person and then
another. First I needed to understand the procedure. What amount of pain is
there? What health risks are there? Is there emotional problems? Do they counsel?
What's the cost? The cost was $500. Would they bring down the cost if we gave
for every three people who came through? Would they give us one for free? Would
they be there in an emergency?
I'd have conversations with the perspective doctors. If I
ever heard any criticism, I'd tell them that someone said there was a problem
and ask them what they were going to do about it. We just had back-and-forth
conversations. He arranged for his assistant to meet me, both to check me out
and for me to check them out.
I was petrified about everything. I think there's a tendency
for when people talk about these conversations to think they are brave. In
hindsight, you gain confidence as you do it. I was always scared. It's also
easier to talk about it than it was to do, and I think we forget about how
scary it was. I also was very insecure. I've been insecure my whole life. I
don't know that it's so much that people who do this are more secure or confident.
But I think there are just ways that you decide to take action in spite of
lack of confidence. I met with his assistant in a downtown Walgreens and was
pretty satisfied. We reached some terms with payments and at least felt we
could trust each other. We had much more regular communication then, and a
lot more people came through Jane. It was a few a month. There were a lot of
students, many from the Midwest. There also were some housewives. At least
a couple women, one of the housewives and a younger woman were related to the
Chicago police. It made me believe that the police department knew about it,
and for all I knew, was even referring people. It made me pretty scared.
But I kept on counseling women, preparing them for the abortion
and doing the follow-up with them and the doctor. I'd meet with them in person,
and we'd talk, then follow-up by phone, and I'd follow up with the doctor only
by phone. Also, there were some public demonstrations about abortion. There
were some organized speak outs, ads in newspapers and some meetings with the
Clergy Consultation Service. But mostly, it wasn't a focus of the women's movement.
A lot of other stuff was going on. There was still anti-war and the world was
changing. Then in 1966, at a draft sit-in at the University, I met the person
who became my husband. He had been the national secretary of SDS (Students
for a Democratic Society), and their national office was in Chicago. We have
been life partners in the movement.
We decided we'd get married when I graduated in 1967. Then
we had a child right away in 1968. With all of that happening--and I was trying
to get a doctorate, working full-time, had a Movement life full-time and I
was expecting a child. There just a lot going on, and the number of people
coming through Jane were increasing.
I decided we had to get more people involved, and I wanted
to move on. Jane wasn't something that was really discussed a lot. I almost
never talked about this with anyone. It was illegal; I didn't want to go to
jail. I was willing to risk it if that's what it took, just like in the civil
rights movement. But I didn't want to flaunt it. There had been exposes that
the Chicago Red Squad was spying on people. The Red Squad in Chicago was different
from CIA exposes but occurred at the same time. I remember when members of
Jane were arrested (in 1973)--it was horrible. We needed to come to their defense.
We had to do anything that we could do. We had to support them personally.
We had to clarify that it was a political issue. We had to see if the abortion
service could continue. It was a rush of many things at once. I remember going
to meetings, trying to figure out what to do about it.
But I'd go to meetings and try to recruit people to be part
of Jane. At the end of every meeting I went to, I'd ask if anyone wanted to
talk. A few people were recruited--Jody, Ruth, Eleanor and a few others. Then
we had conversations, and I led people in a training session before I gave
the doctor's name. I used role play to make sure that they knew how to counsel.
Then we went through all the questions and made sure that people would be attentive
and responsible. I turned Jane over to the collective in 1968', and Jody rose
to the leadership.
By then, I had one child, and we had another child right
away. It was wonderful having these two great babies. It was also a bit overwhelming.
I was in school. I was in the Movement. I was working. We had no money. I had
been organizing, and I was fired in two different places for Union organizing.
With money I Won from a back pay suit for organizing, I started the Midwest
Academy, which is the activist training center. I helped organize some speak
outs on abortion and was an active supporter, but it wasn't the main area that
I focused on.
My start in the women's movement began after a national SDS
meeting in Champaign-Urbana in 1965. I went to the meeting because they were
going to discuss the woman question. One of my teachers, Dick FlackS, an SDS
member who had been at Port Huron, told me about it. And I knew about SDS because
it was allied with our political party on campus.
At first, men and women contributed to the discussion. It
was very large, but it was clear that men were denying the women's experiences.
The women would say, "We're made to feel that we're not equal partners, or
we?re not given a chance to be leaders.? And someone would say, "Oh no, of
course you're given a chance." It was ridiculous. But initially, I said, "Let's
keep talking together. We can work this out." Just as I didn't want the civil
rights movement to divide black/white, I didn't want this movement to divide
men/women. We needed to deal with our common problem.
But then a guy named Jimmy Garrett, an SNCC and African American
organizer and a boyfriend of one of the people I lived with in Mississippi,
said, "Look, you women are never gonna get this together unless you just go
off and talk by yourselves. You just have to do this." And he walked out. Later
that evening, I realized he was exactly right. A number of us went off and
talked alone. We committed that we would go and pursue these kinds of discussions
I went back to Chicago, and I set about and formed a group
on campus for a year called WRAP--Women's Radical Action Program. One of the
women in it was the assistant head of student affairs and government activities.
Then we formed another group for a year called the Center City group that included
not only people on campus but also people with campus connections who were
organizing in the city. The campus group began as discussion. We did this study
of significant response, looking at how often men or women teachers responded
to students depending on whether they were men or women. The comment back was
either that's stupid or that's wonderful, let's discuss it. It was like four
to one more significant responses to men than to women students. The woman
student would say her comment and then it was just passed over as if it never
happened.
Then we tried to go to classes and discuss it as part of
the subject. It needed to be discussed in sociology, but this was before there
was a language--before women's liberation. I remind people it's when "chauvinism" meant
intense national feeling. We put radical into our title because in the Movement,
you were radicals because you tried to get at the root of the problem. But
we didn't have a language. We were just figuring it out. I started WRAP because
at an SDS meeting, I was talking and one of the guys yelled at me to shut up.
And I was a really, really nice kid. And I stopped talking. I went around and
tapped the shoulder of every woman in the group and we went upstairs and made
a separate group. We basically pulled out half the numbers.
Then, in the Center City group, we started forming more consciousness-raising
groups. I must have formed about ten myself, and the others did too. We started
talking about a demonstration at Playboy, and helped to create a WITCH group--Women's
International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell--where we just basically did guerilla
theater. There were four of us in the Center City Group were really good friends.
Amy Kesselman, Vivian Rothstein, Naomi Weisstein and myself. We recently got
together and wrote a chapter in The Feminist Memoir Project. But even in that
we all had different recollections, and it was quite a stitch trying to even
figure out how to write jointly.
Then the Thanksgiving conference came around in 1969. Our
second son was born in October, so he was about five weeks old. And I took
him with me. The women's movement really couldn't absorb children at that point,
so I wasn't part of all the meetings. Partly everyone was a kid themselves,
and many of them had trouble in how they had been raised. We weren't familiar
with how to take care of kids as a group. Rather than have childcare, it was, "We
really don't want your crying kid over here". Rather than, "Can I help you
out?" it was "Can you go into another room when you're nursing?". I had gone
to my women's group, with Jo Freeman, Amy Kesselman and others and asked them
if we should have kids. My husband was going to be drafted, and there was going
to be a punitive draft because he was an anti-war leader. One way to get out
of the draft was to have a kid. We were only married three months before we
had to face this decision--it's a pretty big decision. I went to the group.
They said, "Yes, you should really do this." And then when I had the baby,
most of them just couldn't deal.
This is a sad part of the movement, because having these
children was so important and wonderful, but, as I said, in the movement, we
were really children ourselves at this point. Our children are our future.
My kids are a center of my life and concern.
Still, a lot of very exciting things happened at the conference.
People left from it and formed the coordinating committee that I worked on
which helped set up the Chicago Women's Liberation Union (CWLU). Through the
Women's Union, I was in the Liberation School, and I set up the Action Committee
for Decent Childcare. There were two kinds of groups in the CWLU. One was a
workgroup and one was an affinity (usually geographic) group. I had also set
up this city-wide organization called Action Committee for Decent Childcare
in 1970.
There was a move to create nationally-funded childcare, and
Walter Mondale promoted it. A number of states were trying to set up these
childcare coordinating committees, which became semi-political operations.
This was to get parents voices in the movement as well as to revive the childcare
licensing laws.
We had tried to set up a day care center called Sojourner
Truth in Hyde Park. But there was no city funding for childcare. The childcare
licensing procedure was rigged in support of contractors, and twenty or thirty
years before, this horrible fire burned down a church that had a childcare
center. Because of the fire, the laws were changed to make it so you had to
pay tens of thousands of dollars to create a childcare center--more than was
probably needed. It just made the contractors rich. It was almost like there
was a rule against being in a church basement. If you had kids who were under
two, you had to have an on-site generator, and exit signs marked with a lighting
system that would survive a blackout. But you could get glow-in-the-dark exit
signs that were a dollar.
So, we formed the city-wide organization, created a multi-racial
group and were part of an effort that finally won a million dollar city investment
into childcare. It became one of the issues in the governor's race. We won
new licensing procedure. There had been thirty-two stops, and they made one-stop
licensing. We created a board made up half of clients and half of childcare
providers that reviewed licensing and childcare problems. We won a lot of victories
and also built a wonderful multi-racial direct action organization.
Again, it was all just part of the Movement work--all parts
of the same thing. In my senior year in college, there was a move by the civil
rights movement. Dr. King came to Chicago and said, "The way to secure civil
rights is through union strikes." Remember that he was killed during a strike
of sanitation workers. He believed that union strikes were front and center.)
From that, there was then a move to unionize Chicago hospitals. While I was
going to school, I was a full-time nurse's aide trying to build a union. I
didn't just view that as healthcare work or civil rights work or women's work.
It was just part of the Movement-civil rights, health care and women's movement
all together.
Some final thoughts: I also think that recognizing the inside of the
women's movement--the personal is political--is so powerful and important.
In so many ways, I think it's just been stood on its head in this era. Before,
ideas that we felt were personal we realized were political and needed political
action to solve. Now it's been reversed. Things that we know are political,
we treat as if they are only personal. You care about the environment; you
get a green shopping bag. You're for the women's movement; read non-sexists
books to your kids. All of which are good things. But it's missing this context
that allows us then to actually change the society.
The Movement may have been a different experience
for different people and at different points. But it wasn't so much
that people took risks; it's that people decided to take action even
in the face of risks. I think there are some people who think they
are not good enough. They don't know enough. They won't do it right.
They won't be effective. But there's still this leap of faith that
says in the face of injustice, you need to act for justice and figure
out the best way. Even having all these concerns, we need to realize
that we actually do know enough--we can make this change happen- if
we organize. We need to reinstill in people this sense that regular
people acting together can make history. I think the loss of that belief
is the worst thing about this current period of time.
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