Six on History: Women's History is Every Month
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"In March 2020, Amanda Lee McCarty was laid off from her job.
For years, she had been working in the fashion industry as a buyer and product developer. But as COVID-19 cases surged and lockdown orders were implemented across the world, retailers were faced with a dramatic plummet in consumer demand for clothing. McCarty, who had been the sole breadwinner in her family for most of her life, was left without a steady income or health insurance.
McCarty wasn’t the only one in the global apparel industry whose future was thrust into uncertainty.
Thousands of miles away, in countries like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Cambodia, apparel factories had just received catastrophic news from retailers in the West. In order to offset the financial losses of the pandemic, executives had made a swift and nearly universal decision: They were going to steal $40 billion from their most vulnerable workers.
“This wasn’t theoretical money,” said Elizabeth L. Cline, who works with the consumer activist nonprofit Remake. “This was garment workers not being paid for work already done, which is slavery.”
“If a brand is refusing to pay up, it’s likely they’re paying slave wages in the first place, not caring about the climate and burning billions of dollars of excess clothing every year.”
For many brands, this theft was not only legal, but outlined in their contracts with factories overseas, which enabled them to cancel orders at any time. Retailers cited a force majeure clause to claim that they didn’t need to take clothing they had ordered before the pandemic — and they also didn’t have to pay for it, even if the product had already been made after hundreds of hours of painstaking labor.
This decision was enforced by nearly all of the world’s most profitable apparel companies, only 20 of whom control 97 percent of the industry’s profits. Among the offenders were Walmart, Sears, Kohl’s, Nike, Forever 21, H&M, Gap, Adidas, The Children’s Place and Ross Stores.
What followed was one of the largest transfers of wealth from the Global South to the West in recent history.
The effect of the cancellations was immediate: factories, who could no longer afford to pay textile mills and workers, were forced to shut their doors. Millions of garment workers, most of them young women, were sent home without severance or pay.
While wealthy fashion brands continued to deliver shareholder payouts, workers already living in poverty were plunged even deeper into debt and starvation.
“Why were companies so comfortable robbing their factories in the middle of the biggest humanitarian crisis of our lifetimes?” Cline said. “It had a lot to do with the fact that the people impacted were in the Global South. They were women of color, who companies were used to being able to subjugate without any consequences — who they thought weren’t going to stand up to them.”
The companies were wrong. In a matter of days, a movement was born, comprised of non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, and thousands of garment workers, grassroots organizers and consumers across the globe. They named their first campaign after their primary demand: PayUp.
By March 2021, PayUp had secured $22 billion from brands who had initially refused to pay, and laid bare the exploitation fundamental to the global supply chain. It was one of the most successful labor rights campaigns in the fashion industry in modern times — and activists say they’re just getting started.
“This is an industry that is part of every person’s life, but nobody really knows what happens behind the scenes,” said McCarty, who became a vocal advocate for the movement after being laid off from her job. “If a brand is refusing to pay up, it’s likely they’re paying slave wages in the first place, and not caring about the climate and burning billions of dollars of excess clothing every year. When you take a step back, the fashion industry is really a case study of everything that is wrong in the world right now.”
Holding brands accountable
From its foundation, PayUp’s strategy has been to discern which brands are moveable and to then target those brands using grassroots pressure.
“We knew if we were going to wait for fashion brands to gain a conscience, nothing was going to change,” said Cline, one of the founders of the movement. “It was public knowledge who canceled, so we had a list of companies and the amount of money they owed, but we needed a bigger picture of what was happening.”
Because of this, the testimony of garment workers themselves has been critical to the success of PayUp. In November 2020, the Worker Rights Consortium released a survey of garment workers who had lost their jobs across Cambodia, Bangladesh, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, Lesotho and Myanmar. Nearly 75 percent of these workers reported going into debt to buy food since the pandemic began. Many described skipping meals in order to feed their families, being unable to afford food with protein, and having to withdraw their children from school due to lack of funds.
Garment workers who remained employed, many of whom were working overtime to produce personal protective equipment for countries in the West, were similarly plunged into destitution. Even as the world’s most profitable fashion brands saw an 11 percent increase in value over the past year, garment workers experienced pay cuts averaging around 21 percent.
“When you’re working in the industry, you know there are people that aren’t being paid, but they’re sort of these ‘others’ that you don’t know,” McCarty said. “It allows you to say, ‘Oh, things are different where they live’ or ‘These people are unskilled.’ All these other functions of racism, classism and colonialism are so baked into every person.”
By the summer of 2020, #PayUp had been shared on social media millions of times. A Change.org petition, which was sent to over 200 fashion executives directly, garnered nearly 300,000 signatures calling on companies to pay for the cancellations. Behind the scenes, NGOs and activist groups like Remake, the Worker Rights Consortium and Clean Clothes Campaign moved in tandem to negotiate with brands.
“We need contractually enforceable commitments from brands, and we need brands and unions sitting across the table in real negotiation.”
Similar actions took place in Pakistan after factories cut holiday bonuses that usually allowed rural workers to return home for Eid. Striking workers gathered in protest outside factories, chanting slogans demanding better wages even as police fired shots into the crowd. In Bangladesh, garment workers who staged protests outside factories were also met with opposition, with many workers reporting that they had been attacked by police with batons, water cannons and tear gas while they were sleeping.
A deepening crisis
Despite the tremendous victories of the PayUp campaign so far, the past few months have revealed worrying trends within the industry, and the crisis surrounding garment workers continues to worsen. The vast majority of the money PayUp secured from brands went to factories, enabling them to pay their debts to textile mills and stay open. While this has potentially prevented even more disastrous factory closures and mass layoffs, most workers still haven’t received their stolen wages — and the crisis surrounding the garment industry continues to deepen.
“Throughout the pandemic, I’ve seen retailers squeezing factories for lower costs and pushing them for faster turnaround,” McCarty said. “Even more product is being imported into our country by plane, instead of by boat, so the carbon footprint is even worse — and people overseas are being paid even less. We have to end the cycle now.”
One year after the founding of PayUp, garment workers who are struggling for survival have yet to see any financial relief from brands. There is also the issue of safety; in Sri Lanka, over 7,000 cases of coronavirus, more than half the nation’s total, were traced back to a factory that manufactures clothing for Victoria’s Secret.
In many apparel-making countries, garment workers who demand safety measures have been met with brutal repression, facing threats, physical attacks, dismissal and imprisonment for speaking up or attempting to organize. One of the most recent examples of this repression took place in March, when nearly 1,000 garment workers who produce clothing for Primark were allegedly locked inside factories for hours to prevent them from joining anti-coup protests in Myanmar.
“Brands’ labor codes and monitoring systems don’t exist to protect workers,” said Scott Nova, the executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium.“ They exist to protect the image and reputation of brands … even as they squeeze suppliers on price, driving down working conditions and wages.”
Perhaps the most compelling illustration of the failures of self-regulation can be seen in garment factories in Bangladesh. For decades, these factories were notorious for being little more than death traps. Despite frequent mass fatality fires and factory collapses, major brands and retailers continued to tout their voluntary codes of conduct as a reliable method of protecting workers. It was only after the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in 2013 — a disaster that killed 1,134 people and injured another 2,500 — that meaningful protections were put into place.
Even as rescue workers were still searching for survivors in the rubble, thousands of garment workers and relatives of the dead rose up, storming the streets of Dhaka to demand safer working conditions.
Within a month, the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety was launched, requiring independent building inspections and reviews of safety standards. The accord functions as an international compact between NGOs, Western manufacturers and Bangladeshi and global unions. Since the program began, two and a half million garment workers have been working under vastly safer conditions — and Nova believes the accord can serve as a roadmap for accomplishing PayUp’s long-term goals.
“We need contractually enforceable commitments from brands, and we need brands and unions sitting across the table in real negotiation,” Nova said. “If we want brands to behave responsibly, we need to get it in writing.”
Last fall, PayUp founder Ayesha Barenblat sat down with the founder of the Awaj Foundation, an NGO that represents 600,000 garment workers in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Together, they launched the website for Pay Up Fashion, where they outlined seven demands for action going forward: worker’s safety, transparency, giving workers a platform, enforceable contracts, an end to starvation wages and the implementation of labor laws.
“Besides a handful of rich factory owners, executives and shareholders, it’s an industry where there aren’t a lot of people benefiting,” Cline said. “I think brands wanted a pat on the back after they paid up, but for us, the campaign revealed everything that’s broken about the fashion industry.”
Resisting a return to business as usual
Around the same time PayUp was founded, McCarty utilized her insider experience to launch Clotheshorse, a podcast exposing dark truths about the world of fast fashion. It was the start of a new chapter — and an inadvertent decision to never return to the industry, no matter the financial consequences.
Before long, McCarty was getting up to a hundred messages a day from fashion lovers and activists. Though the pandemic prevented them from meeting in person, Clotheshorse listeners began coming together online to call out brands, quit fast fashion and support one another’s sustainable businesses.
“A lot of people found their lives completely upside down last year, and we’ve all been getting educated about things that we weren’t before,” McCarty said. “It’s amazing that we were all able to find each other and respond to one another’s ideas — I feel so lucky that at least once a week I start to cry.”
As PayUp enters its second year of campaigning, this kind of community building could prove essential to ensuring the movement doesn’t lose momentum.
“PayUp was able to reveal the inner workings of this power dynamic that was hidden from view for a long time,” Cline said. “That’s made it much easier to propose reforms, but everybody has to be ready to fight for the long haul. The fashion industry we want to see is going to take commitment and perseverance — and a belief that anything is possible.”
Micaela Wells is a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria.
"Once, after second-grade history class, I came home and jokingly asked, “So did women just not exist?”
Ten years later, the question stands. But I’m no longer laughing.
In this advanced text is a 20-page chapter on World War II. As I read about President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Pan-American conferences and the war’s impact on society, I came across a paragraph creatively titled “Women.” Merely a hundred words later, “women” were abandoned.
I was bothered that the writers had deemed 100 words sufficient for teaching students everything important about women during that era. What bothered me even more was my own lack of surprise.
Perhaps some would say of course there are fewer famously influential women than men throughout history, considering the cultural norms that long created gender-based divisions and hierarchies. But that’s a lazy assumption. Curious, I did the least I could do — Googled “important women in American history” — and obtained myriad results. Which raises the question: Why did the writers of my textbook neglect to do the same? Or if they did bother, why was the information excluded?
If education reflects our societal values — and if textbooks provide the foundation of our education — then AP U.S. History is perpetuating for all students the idea that women are comparatively worthless. Worse, it’s sending the message to girls that their stories and accomplishments don’t matter.
After encountering the “Women” paragraph, I decided to conduct an (admittedly unscientific) experiment. I asked two questions of about 30 students from several Northern Virginia schools, half of them girls and half of them boys, ranging in age from 6 to 17 years old: 1) Who are some important people in American history? 2) Who are some important women in American history? (Note: The second question is one I shouldn’t have had to break out. But I suspected it was necessary.)
Respondents to the first question named a total of 35 men — and one woman. The girl who mentioned a woman was my second-grade cousin, who told me about Amelia Earhart because her substitute teacher had read her class a story about the acclaimed aviator earlier that day.
Among the named men, answers varied, from a few presidents to lists of activists, scientists, journalists, authors or other pioneers — roles that women, too, have held, though you might not know it if you attend American schools.
Among those who could name a woman, the list of answers was short: Rosa Parks (nine mentions); Harriet Tubman and Vice President Harris (five each); Clara Barton, Earhart and Susan B. Anthony (two each). Other responses included: “that one person who did the thing for women’s rights,” “the lady who was that president’s wife” and “who was the Underground Railroad girl?”
Nearly half my interviewees couldn’t name one historically influential woman. And these weren’t just little kids; they averaged 11 years old.
Here are 20 women it should be mandatory to learn about — and this list is by no means exhaustive: Jane Addams, Louisa May Alcott, Maya Angelou, Amelia Bloomer, Claudette Colvin, Mary Coffin Ware Dennett, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Emma Goldman, Anne Hutchinson, Helen Keller, Sybil Ludington, Lucretia Mott, Jeannette Rankin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Sacagawea, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells and Edith Bolling Galt Wilson.
My textbook includes fewer than half of these women. Six merit less than a sentence, and only one is mentioned more than once.
Ever heard of John Crittenden? Joseph McCoy? Josiah Strong? The book discusses each more than any of the women on my list.
As we work toward women’s equality, education is holding us back. Here in 2021, young women are told we can make history and achieve anything. But that’s difficult to believe when history curriculums marginalize or ignore women’s accomplishments. When these facts are omitted from compulsory education, it becomes more difficult for students to see how gender-based inequities remain entrenched — which in turn will make it harder for us to escape them.
If your response to “Should history curriculums include women?” is “Well, duh!” — good for you. I hope that my generation can reach the point where “Well, duh!” is ubiquitous, and that one day I can laugh at the memory of my 7-year-old self asking such a ridiculous question."
"Our faces on money, gracing the other side of currency upholding men who enslaved our ancestors, is a painful kind of spending.
America values its dollars and cents and adorns money with cutthroat capitalists who place profit over people and pretend Jesus is their savior while they worship cash. Is this the kind of homage we want?
Will having her on the quarter teach folk about her legacy in a country that is fighting over teaching accurate American history in the classroom? Will they learn about Angelou using her arts as activism and her role in American civil rights, or will her story be cookie-cut and her poetry diced up into comfortable excerpts to be exploited, like they’ve done to Martin Luther King Jr.?
Does the average American know the names and legacies of the many slavers whose faces live on the front of their cash?
Honor us not by putting us on coins and bills when we are the descendants of folk once bought and sold as part of America’s economy, but by actualizing equity.
Decorating your money with Black heroes is not equality. It is not justice. It’s not even a great way to learn about the brilliant poet who raised our souls with her prose. Make her a monument. Place her name on a school that isn’t afraid to teach the truth.
“It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for Blacks, without including whites,” Angelou once said. “Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it.”
But so many white folk in this country think that if all of us have civil rights, they won’t have power, if the whole truth is taught in school, they won’t have favor, that equity will cost them privilege. Those fears are enough to send them to our Capitol, raising Confederate flags and erecting a noose, ready for war in the name of white supremacy under the guise of freedom.
Do not put us on money when there are elected officials who betrayed our nation and incited an insurrection, and other members of that mob are freely running for office. Biden got it wrong. We did not prevail. And the normalization of this violence is not something we the people should endure.
Angelou was a poet. Angelou was an author. Angelou was an activist. She succeeded Bayard Rustin as northern coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She worked alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. She spoke at the Million Man March, reminding us that we are a “going-on people who will rise again.”
Angelou believed in King’s vision for the Poor People’s Campaign before his assassination. Pay homage to a woman who stood behind the fight for economic equality and for all people by creating economic justice.
Five years ago, the US Treasury announced the $20 bill would be redesigned with Tubman’s portrait on the front and Andrew Jackson on the back. It’s yet to happen, but last year Biden claimed to be pushing it forward.
In a country where we are still fighting for forgiveness of student loans and rent relief, where Biden is urging schools to stay open during the pandemic and the CDC is sending sick people back to work sooner than they should, is putting Black folk on money progress?
Tubman risked her life for her freedom and that of others. She actively fought capitalism that enslaved people. And we’re still fighting for equity. Honor her more respectfully than a $20 bill. Lift her legacy. Do not commodify Black women and call it commemoration.
Monday, the same day Angelou’s quarters began shipping and she made history as the first Black woman to grace a 25 cent piece, Rachael Rollins was sworn in as US attorney, becoming the first Black woman to serve in the role for Massachusetts.
Rollins life has been threatened. Every last Republican senator voted against her nomination. She’s been targeted by conservatives across the country and called dangerous by Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, who labeled her as “pro-criminal.” This type of vilification riles up white rage and puts her at risk.
She’s received e-mails saying things like: “SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE IS PLOTTING TO PUT ONE IN YOUR FACE OR HEAD!!!”
They won’t protect a Black woman who is protecting us but they put the people’s poet laureate on a coin and called it an honor.
Maya Angelou knew why the caged bird sang, and a quarter couldn’t buy that freedom prayer."
BY JOAN DIDION
I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships that hampered others. Although the situation must have had even then the approximate tragic stature of Scott Fitzgerald's failure to become president of the Princeton Triangle Club, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nevertheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honour, and the love of a good man (preferably a cross between Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and one of the Murchisons in a proxy fight); lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed wonder of someone who has come across a vampire and found no garlands of garlic at hand.
Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named corespondent. If they choose to forego their work—say it is screenwriting—in favor of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne Frank.
In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.
In one guise or another, Indians always are. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.
That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower.
But those small disciplines are valuable only insofar as they represent larger ones. To say that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton is not to say that Napoleon might have been saved by a crash program in cricket; to give formal dinners in the rain forest would be pointless did not the candlelight flickering on the liana call forth deeper, stronger disciplines, values instilled long before. It is a kind of ritual, helping us to remember who and what we are. In order to remember it, one must have known it.
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course we will play Francesca to Paolo, Brett Ashley to Jake, Helen Keller to anyone's Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no rôle too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play rôles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.
It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one's sanity becomes an object of speculation among one's acquaintances. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home."
"Seventy years ago, when it was officially believed that abortion was a crime rarely resorted to by American women, one out of four were having them, according to Dr. Alfred Kinsey, since love and sex had not been outlawed as well. There were also far more deaths from perforated uteruses and peritonitis and conditions euphemistically called urinary infections than were ever reported in the papers, but each appalling story that came to light weighed upon the minds of young women of my generation.
If you lived in New York City back then and found yourself in a desperate situation, you were extremely fortunate if someone passed along the name of a Dr. Spencer, a licensed MD, who dealt with unwanted pregnancies in Ashland, Pennsylvania. Although Ashland was much farther from Manhattan than you’d ever thought you’d have to go, it was possible to get there on an interstate bus. Toward the end of your journey, the bus would travel through mountainous country scarred by coal mines with woods closing in from both sides of the road before you were dropped off in the middle of a town with dilapidated buildings and empty shop windows, where at first it seemed unlikely that your life would be handed back to you. But once you’d made your way to 531 Centre Street, the precious address you’d written to, you’d walk into an eccentric-looking waiting room filled with curios—masks from the South Seas, fishing and hunting trophies—where you’d be warmly greeted by a nurse who did not seem to regard you as a disgraceful person.
Avoiding the interested stares of the doctor’s regular patients, you’d find a seat and wait for her to take you to the remarkable Robert Douglas Spencer, a Republican, Rotarian, and free-thinker, who believed that “a woman should be the dictator of what went on in her own body.” “I just set out to help,” he told a reporter toward the end of his life, “and never gave it another thought.” Between 1923 and 1969, in addition to carrying on with his family practice in Ashland, where he specialized in treating coalminers and developed a treatment for black-lung disease, Dr. Spencer gave at least 40,000 women—wed and unwed—safe abortions. His heroes, he said, were Clarence Darrow and Thomas Paine.
On that first visit to Dr. Spencer’s clinic, a solution of his own devising would be injected into your cervix; the following morning, before doing the curettage, he’d administer a general anesthetic, a compassionate step that was almost unheard of, since abortionists usually rushed women from the table to the door, as if there’d be a raid any minute. By the time you came to, a few hours later, you’d feel no pain. You’d pay whatever you could afford and spend one more night in Ashland before returning home, with your body intact and your human dignity restored. What women mostly remembered years afterward was Dr. Spencer’s kindness.
Over the years, the town got used to having visitors get off the bus who everyone knew were not tourists—few of those had ever come. Ashland had been depressed years before the Depression. Its main sightseeing attraction was its unusual monument to motherhood—a Whistler’s mother in bronze, installed on a hillside overlooking Route 54, with the inscription, “A Mother Is the Holiest Thing Alive.” In addition, there were a couple of places that served meals, a struggling dress shop, and a hotel and motel that always had room for white guests. The money spent by Dr. Spencer’s visitors kept all those businesses from going under. For his black abortion patients, the doctor eventually bought a building where they could stay for free.
Twice in the Fifties, the doctor was arrested for performing abortions (in one case, a woman with a heart condition had died as a result of the anesthetic); but each time, he was acquitted. Sometimes, he closed his clinic on Centre Street for a while and no one knew where he went. But he always came back. His waiting room and office became more and more crowded with the souvenirs of his travels.
As the word about him spread from one woman to another, Dr. Spencer became known up and down the Eastern seaboard as “The Saint” and “the college girl’s friend.” Women from as far away as Hollywood turned up at his clinic, even a few with foreign accents. But in order to find Dr. Spencer, since there was no way to look him up, you had to be lucky enough to be on the right grapevine.
“How did you get yourself pregnant?” the male doctor asked the sixteen-year-old girl taken to him by her mother, who later told me the story. “In the usual manner,” the teenager replied with aplomb. It was 1983, but the doctor’s gratuitous question was a throwback to the Fifties, when it was generally felt that a woman who went out and got herself pregnant by a susceptible male deserved what was coming to her. A friend of mine who took the trip to Ashland alone in 1957, when she was twenty-two, has never forgotten the frightening moment when a car slowed down to a stop as she waited for the bus back to New York. There were a number of men in it. “You must’ve been a b-a-a-d girl!” they jeered before driving off.
I was born eighty-four years ago, just in time to grow up in the postwar period when women lost a good deal of the ground they’d gained during World War II while the men were away fighting. Once women found themselves back in the home, attitudes about keeping them there became so pervasive that there was no way for an adolescent girl to avoid internalizing them—though, once you started questioning the status quo, you were likely to continue. Although a mother might be the holiest thing you could possibly become, what if you wanted to be a novelist or a brain surgeon or an anthropologist? What if you wanted to live in your own apartment and meet all sorts of people and even see what having sex was like before you got married and had your two-point-something children? What if you wanted to run away to Paris and burn your very own candle at both ends? I was a member of the so-called Silent Generation, but beneath our silence there was turbulence.
I was raised by my mother in a state of almost Victorian ignorance about my body. Even at a women’s college like Barnard, which I attended as a day student, practical information about sexual matters was sketchy. In Modern Living, a required course I took as a freshman in 1951, we were taught the names and functions of the male and female sexual organs, as if the body were a machine without sentience, under the full control of its owner. Homosexuality, like Eros, apparently did not exist, since Dean Millicent McIntosh, who had been an officer in the WAVES during the war (there was a signup booth for naval service in a central location on campus), did not mention it. In one of her lectures, there were allusions to Family Planning, which sounded sensible to me, like budgeting, but I certainly wasn’t planning a family at sixteen.
In my junior year, when a classmate whispered she’d acquired a diaphragm, I had to pretend I knew what that was. A few of us trooped up to her room in the dorm, where she locked the door and passed around a jar in which a rubber cap that looked too large in diameter for its purpose lay dusted with cornstarch. In order to get it, she told us, she’d had to purchase a wedding ring at Woolworth’s before going to the Margaret Sanger Clinic. There, she’d filled out a questionnaire about her sexual habits, those of her “husband,” and the frequency of their intercourse, nearly every word of it made up.
I was impressed by her nerve, but all that lying you had to do was off-putting. I had been resting my faith in the condom. My scientifically minded Columbia boyfriend had recently demonstrated its capacity to withstand pressure by blowing a couple of them up into larger and larger balloons the night we both lost our virginity. I didn’t go to Woolworth’s to buy a wedding ring for my Sanger appointment until I was twenty, after I’d had my abortion.
My next boyfriend was a dangerous choice for a girl of nineteen, not that anyone could have talked me out of the feelings that overwhelmed me. He was a thirty-year-old instructor at Barnard in the midst of a divorce, who regarded himself as a liberator of young women. In order to be with him, I’d defied my horrified parents and moved out from under their roof right after graduation—not to his place, but into a tiny maid’s room of my own. I did not expect to be there very long, only until we were married.
Over the next year, he introduced me to jazz, Stravinsky, experimental film, Auden, Kafka, Wilhelm Reich, and some founding members of the Beat Generation, as well as his need for a vast amount of space in which his ceaseless search for himself could continue. Finally, he told me I was too young for him. He had just taken up with a new student of his. She was even younger than I was.
In the wake of all this, I managed to drag myself to my job at a literary agency, where I had to act as if my life wasn’t over in order to keep earning my fifty dollars a week. But the nights I spent by myself in my room were very bad and so were the empty weekends. On one of them, I went to a party and ran into Bill, an alcoholic recent graduate of Columbia who seemed more of a wreck than I was. We ended up on a bed in a back room. At a critical moment, Bill told me he didn’t have a condom, and feeling that everything was meaningless anyway, I let him go on. I wonder how many pregnancies have resulted from the self-destructive inertia that can come over young women who feel adrift.
A few weeks later, after counting backwards, I realized what I’d stupidly done to myself in that moment when I should have gotten off the bed. I felt so humiliated by my carelessness that it was almost a point of honor not to blame Bill, despite his contribution to my predicament.
I spent a few days in paralyzing denial; then I woke up and started frantically making phone calls. “So do you know of anyone who does abortions?” I’d ask friends, lowering my voice. It felt a little like sending out a chain letter that was going to travel outward, hit or miss. Everyone promised to ask around, but all I really learned from that flurry of calls was that pregnant movie stars went to Puerto Rico. They checked into some posh clinic there and flew back with suntans.
After a couple of weeks went by with no further results, I reluctantly consulted the graduate student in psychology from whom I was renting my maid’s room. Dorothea, who liked to take charge of things a little too much, urged me to go immediately into therapy, so that, after a few sessions, I could ask a shrink to write a letter stating that I was a mentally ill person, in grave danger of killing myself if I was forced to have a baby. This was the only thing, she swore, that would qualify me to get a legal therapeutic abortion. (I later learned I would have needed three such letters, a process that would probably have taken months; a friend who went this route ended up having a Caesarian in a California hospital, on the condition that she also have a hysterectomy.) Dorothea even had a shrink lined up for me: her rejected boyfriend, who had just opened a practice and might be inclined to do a friend of hers a favor. Before I could say yes, she reached for the phone.
For about a month, I went to him. Twice a week, I lay on his couch, waiting for the moment when he’d put down his pipe and just offer me the letter I needed, since he knew about my predicament. I was, of course, justifiably depressed, but the whole business of having to pretend that this was a symptom of insanity prevented me from producing the tears that might have helped my case. Finally, I gave up and asked if he’d authorize a therapeutic abortion. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said. I stood up from the couch and told him I would never come back—or pay him for our last session.
As time kept trickling away, I actually did begin to think about slitting my wrists or swallowing a bottleful of aspirin. Not that I was likely to do either, but I needed to know there was some way out, in case I never found a way to get an abortion. It didn’t make much sense, when I thought about it, that a mentally ill pregnant woman could get approval for the abortion that would save her from killing herself, but that someone in her right mind could not. It made as little sense as denying diaphragms to the very women who were in the worst position to have babies.
As for the one I was carrying, I didn’t think of it as a baby. I couldn’t afford to. I seemed to have mislaid all my feelings, apart from the terror I woke up with each morning. Yet, when I’d been with my boyfriend, I’d often daydreamed about the child we’d have. Despite my thoughts about suicide, however, I had stopped feeling that life was meaningless, since I seemed to be going to great trouble to live.
One night, the phone rang. The call was from a friend I’d known since high school. “Get a pencil,” she said. She’d run into someone who’d given her the phone number of a guy named Andy who worked in advertising. As a sideline, he enjoyed escorting women who’d gotten themselves knocked up to a doctor of his acquaintance in Canarsie. Enjoyed? But the important thing was that the doctor sounded okay.
*
I hadn’t known there were abortion middlemen, but at the time there were quite a few who’d sized up the impossible situation entrepreneurially and seen a niche they could fill. Some delivered women to their abortions blindfolded so that they would never know where they had been taken or be able to recognize the person who had treated them.
In the Sixties, even Dr. Spencer, in an effort to help more women, became entangled with a middleman named Harry Mace. This unwise arrangement forced him to raise his fee to two hundred dollars; up till then, he had never charged more than a hundred and sometimes as little as five. Flooded with the patients Mace was sending him, the elderly doctor often did three or four abortions a day—too many for his failing health and too many for the authorities to ignore. In 1969, he found himself under indictment again. He died while awaiting trial, at the age of seventy-nine.
My middleman was a much smaller operator than Harry Mace. Apart from the dollars he picked up from his sideline, he apparently derived some fringe benefits from meeting attractive young women who obviously had been sexually active.
I met with Andy on a Friday evening in P.J. Clarke’s, a bar on Third Avenue popular with admen. Wearing the striped seersucker summer suit he’d described on the phone, he showed up so late that I felt limp with relief by the time he arrived. He had one of those very close crewcuts that made him look a little like a peeled onion, I thought, as I looked up into his tanned face.
I remember obediently sipping the Martinis Andy insisted on ordering for me as he plied me with personal questions, none of them having to do with the reason I was there. As his talk grew more openly flirtatious, I had the feeling of being trapped in an unfortunate blind date I would have to play along with until he turned me over to the doctor in Canarsie. When he told me I was an “interesting combination of innocence and sophistication,” I feared that what might come next was an invitation to his house on Fire Island, to which he’d alluded several times.
“You know,” he remarked, “I’m unusually sensitive to women.” I answered politely that I could see that.
“So, don’t you like to get out of the city on weekends?”
I told him I spent weekends with my boyfriend.
“I’m surprised you didn’t bring him with you,” he replied.
When I finally brought up the abortion and asked him about the arrangements, he refused to tell me the name of the doctor, the secret that was the source of his power. “He’s a doctor who does tonsillectomies. What more do you need to know?” I came away without full confidence in the deal I’d just made, but by now I was at least eight weeks pregnant and the doctor in Canarsie seemed my only hope.
A few evenings later, I went out to Canarsie with Andy to set up an appointment and settle on the price. I remember my first sight of the doctor’s neighborhood, the rows of sawed-off-looking houses that seemed in need of an extra floor, the flights of too many steps leading to front doors high above the cemented-over yards below. It was a neighborhood where if you lost yourself, I thought, no one would ever find you.
At a house with no sign outside to indicate the presence of a physician, we were let in by a paunchy older man in a sweaty rumpled shirt, who did not look like any doctor I’d ever seen. Although he must have been expecting us, he seemed displeased by our arrival and made a point of telling Andy we’d interrupted his dinner.
There was a brusque interview in a small waiting room filled with brown furniture. Above the shabby couch where the doctor was seated was a row of diplomas behind dusty glass. I very much wanted to examine them closely but was not able to. Addressing me sternly as “Young Lady,” the doctor made sure I understood that tonsillectomies were his specialty rather than what he called “the other,” as if he did “the other” very rarely and only as a favor.
His fee would be $500, more money than I could earn in two months in my job at the Curtis Brown Literary Agency. Fortunately, since I had no savings, a friend had promised to borrow whatever I needed from the famous writer she was having an affair with, assuring him it was for a good cause. When I went to meet Andy at a newsstand in Union Square the following Friday, I had a manila envelope in my handbag stuffed with fifty ten-dollar bills.
That morning, I’d left a message at the literary agency that I’d come down with the grippe but was sure I’d be back at work on Monday. My greatest fear was that my mother would call me at work and not find me, then wonder why I wasn’t answering the phone at home. To minimize the chances of this, I’d told the doctor that my appointment had to be on a Friday. For that he’d be charging me fifty dollars extra. Fridays, Andy explained to me afterward, were the most popular days for abortions for girls like me with jobs.
*
When the day came, Andy showed up late once again, and didn’t apologize. He was in a cheerful mood—you might have thought our trip to Canarsie was going to be a pleasant excursion. I watched him stock up on the candy bars and magazines that would see him through the hours ahead. “This is how I catch up on my reading,” he said with a grin, holding up a copy of Esquire.
Once we were on the L train, although he was sitting so close to me, his thigh couldn’t help rubbing against mine, he engrossed himself in an article and left me to my silence. As the train kept stopping at stations with unfamiliar names, I’d watch the doors slide open and think how easy it would be to get off. And then I’d sit there, watching the doors slide shut again. Deeper into Brooklyn, when the train ran on an elevated track, I stared out the window into kitchens where housewives with normal lives were going about their chores.
All during that long ride, the baby seemed more real to me than it had ever been. I kept thinking about it, waiting to be born, in the red dark inside me, with its life like a sealed letter that would never be opened. But at Rockaway Boulevard, the last stop on the line, I put away those thoughts and followed Andy out of the station.
This time, the doctor immediately hurried me down some back stairs. We descended to what looked like a converted garage, where he unlocked a small room in which every surface had been covered with white towels that I could picture soaked with my blood. They seemed a sign of the doctor’s own fear of the likelihood that something could go wrong.
“I want you to remove your undergarment, young lady,” I heard him order. He watched as I complied and grew extremely agitated when he saw that I was also about to remove my shoes, “No! Those stay on!” Stretched out on his towel-covered table, I wondered, as he grasped my ankles, whether I’d actually be expected to run for it if we were raided in the middle of the abortion. After jamming my feet, beige pumps and all, into stirrups, the doctor walked out of the room. He returned wearing a white gown, rolled back my skirt, and proceeded to examine me. Then he gave me a local anesthetic, an excruciatingly painful procedure, and said it was time for me to pay him.
Perhaps it had become a ritual of his to ask his defenseless, half-naked patients for payment at this point. Perhaps this was his way of decontaminating the transaction, absolving himself of the decision to proceed.
I was trying not to breathe or do anything that might raise the level of the anger I felt directed toward me. I doubted he still had patients who came to him for tonsillectomies, or any other legal treatments, but I told him to open my handbag and just take the envelope he’d find there.
Instead, he brought the bag over and placed it squarely on the bare skin of my belly. I watched him open the envelope I gave him and count up the bills. Then he went to wash his hands and put on a mask.
The anesthetic he’d given me didn’t eliminate all the pain of what followed. All through the abortion, since I couldn’t keep my body from resisting what was being done to me, the doctor grew more and more enraged by the way my legs were shaking. Ordering me to control my “lower limbs,” he’d threaten to put down his instrument and go no further. “Young lady! If you want me to stop, I’ll stop right now!” I’d be forced to tearfully gasp, “Keep going.” He worked on me for a long time. At some point, I realized he was being very careful.
When I started feeling much less pain, I unclenched my eyes and saw the doctor carrying a basin away from the table. Shortly afterward, his hands closed around my ankles freeing my feet from the stirrups.
“You can stand up now, young lady, and put on your undergarment.”
My feet were still in the summer pumps I’d put on that morning as if I were going to the office. I didn’t think I could possibly stand, but found, after I slid off the table, that my legs would hold me up and that I could even take a step or two. I was weak, bleeding, but I’d stopped shaking.
The brick wall that had been blocking my view for months had crumbled. I could see my life once again, stretching out in front of me as the abortion, the terror, all of it started its slow slide into the past.
The doctor wasn’t quite done. “The baby was a boy,” he informed me, as he handed me some pills. A fact too raw for me to swallow and absorb. It was years before a friend pointed out that at eight weeks, he couldn’t possibly have known.
“Don’t ever let me see you here again, young lady,” were his parting words as he escorted me to the stairs.
“I have to sit down a minute,” I told Andy, who was standing near the front door, intent on leaving. I walked by him into the waiting room, close enough to the row of diplomas to read the Gothic letters of the name that had been withheld from me.
Berlucci.
A few months later, I passed on that name to someone else who needed it, along with the phone number I’d gotten from Information. At Barnard, she and I had been in some of the same classes but I didn’t know her well. I told her what to expect, that she would probably be fine after her ordeal, but that the doctor was crazy and despised his patients and maybe no longer had a license.
She said she would go to him anyway. Then she got teary and embarrassed and told me she’d have to go to him alone because there was absolutely no one she could ask to take her.
I hadn’t said anything to her about Andy because the name and number I’d given her were all she really needed. I was grateful she didn’t think to ask me for anything more. The last thing I wanted was another trip to Canarsie, but I felt bad to be thinking only of myself.
“You’ll feel as good as new,” Andy had said to me in the cab that was taking us back to Manhattan, “once you forget this whole thing.” Later in that long ride, Andy had repeated this advice—this time sounding nervous, after I’d refused to go with him to Fire Island to begin my recuperation and shaken off the arm he put around me.
“Remember, sweetheart, none of this ever happened.”
