Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings by The Century for Young People: 1961-1999: Changing America Read Free Book Online

was the most fundamental of rights, the right of a woman to control her own body and her own health. By contrast, their conservative and religious opponents saw abortion as an act of human arrogance, an attempt to replace the will of God with the will of the individual.
    For many women, the goals of the women’s movement—equal pay for equal work, affordable child care for working mothers, the ability to control their reproductive lives—were very close to home. Marie Wilson, born in 1940, was typical of the women who began to demand change.
    I was quite certain that after college I’d marry, have children, stay at home, and have this great life that I saw in the Betty Crocker ads. But I was living in a very interesting time, sort of on the cusp between two eras. Half of me wanted to do something different, but half of me felt loyal to this vision of life as a wife and mother. So when my boyfriend proposed to me in 1962, I decided to drop out of college and marry him, but then I immediately changed my mind and canceled the wedding, deciding to go to graduate school instead. Just as suddenly I changed my mind again and had the wedding after all. Within nine months I was pregnant with my first child.
    I felt like things had gone badly for my mother because she had to work outside the home, but it would be different for me, I thought, because I would stay home and be a happy, loving, perfect mother. Of course, things didn’t happen that way. My husband and I moved around a lot and I didn’t have a very good support system, so I was home alone with the baby quite a lot. I started to feel like you would feel on an airplane when they tell you the mask is going to drop and that you should just breathe normally. You can’t breathe normally with a child in an apartment, without a lot of money, without friends and family. Children aren’t meant to be raised in a home with just one adult who never leaves the house. I didn’t like it. And I was also disappointed with myself for not absolutely loving this motherhood experience.
    I got pregnant again—my fourth time in four and a half years. I had been sick a lot during those years—my body was just worn out—and I remember sitting in the bathtub and crying. I asked myself, “What am I gonna do? I really can’t deal with having that many children, and the only alternative is abortion. Can I risk getting an illegal abortion?” There was a good chance then that I could die from it, and I didn’t want to leavemy children motherless. It suddenly hit me that something was wrong with this picture. For the first time, I realized I had been working for African American rights, for peace in Vietnam, but that I still had no choices, nor any peace, in my personal life.
    The push for women’s rights in this country really was a kitchen-table movement, started by women like me who needed changes in their lives. I found a number of women out there who felt the same way I did, and we started working together in our homes. Everything we wanted in life—whether it was to choose how many children to have, to go back to school, to get involved in the workforce—we were determined to go out and create in the world. So we gathered around kitchen tables and pieced together legislation, wrote petitions, and planned events while our children ran around the room. We figured out who to write to in the legislature in order to pass the Mondale child-care bill in the early seventies. I remember working on the Mondale bill, talking to a labor economist in my kitchen; I had a child in one hand, and I was stirring spaghetti sauce with the other.
    Meanwhile, the media was creating a movement that was unrecognizable to me—people who burned bras, who hated menand all of that. I had no idea who these people were, what they did, what they looked like. That branch of the movement was never something I could identify with. My feminism came straight