Like Mother, Like Daughter (2): Inspiration

 

This week's focus is inspiration. Specifically, I asked my mom and grandma what inspired them to become involved in reproductive rights activism.

Maria: I think the first factor that got me into [reproductive rights activism] was my experiences with birth. I had very different experiences with Peter, my son, and with my daughter, Christine, and it made me question how the medical model treated women around the birth issue. I started to read into it. I had a wonderful doctor who was very supportive of midwifery. He was very supportive of midwives back in the sixties which was revolutionary. After that, I ended up needing to work on a dissertation for my PhD. I had visited the island of Rhodes (Greece) where my father was born and I started to ask the women in the village about their births. I was surprised to learn that many of them gave birth at home. It motivated me to make that my PhD thesis. It opened up the world to how women have been treated.

Christine: You were teaching before you got your PhD, and you were teaching in the reproductive rights area.

Maria: Yes, absolutely. I taught a sexuality class. I learned a lot by reading about sexuality and [from] my students: questions that they asked. And then I ended up teaching a women & health class at Hunter that dealt with reproductive rights to a large extent, politically and medically based in how women are treated. That’s really how I got there.

 

Christine: I grew up in [Maria’s] household, so I was very educated. And our household was a source of education of friends. When I was very little I thought I had all these friends in the neighborhood until I realized they either coming over to meet Peter because they thought he was cute or because they wanted to see Maria’s human sexuality books. That’s how I first got involved. When I graduated college, I got a job at the Alan Guttmacher Institute which has its own history around reproductive rights. I think Guttmacher was involved with Planned Parenthood back in the 20s. There is an institute named after him which was the research wing and then later policy was added to that. I was a research assistant in New York for a couple of years. During that time I was involved in a number of projects and one of them was this very large-scale abortion study. It was a survey-based instrument for data collection and I would have to organize and collate the surveys before we analyzed them. I would see all of these papers coming through, all of these women’s lives on these sheets, and I decided I was feeling very disconnected from the people that we were studying. There was a local-area, service provider to teens that Maria had told me about that was called The Door. It was very innovative for its time, very thematic in holistic approach to health care for teenagers. I asked if they would take me on as a reproductive health counselor, sexual health counselor. I did that after work one-night a week. I liked the idea of being able to connect the people and the experience of counseling with the survey data we were collecting. People that were coming in for contraception, I would do  a little spiel with them on contraceptive use. I also worked on a sexuality education study [at the Guttmacher Institute]. I was an assistant which was great. I did a lot of technical manipulation of data starting from data collection, processing surveys, making sure there legible coding. We would send them out and they would come back to us in an electronic form. I would start to analyze data and we’d look at trends. There were PhDs that worked there that were primarily responsible for the analysis and the writing up [of scholarly articles]. I decided that I wanted to go back to school because I realized that the research assistant jobs were 2-3 year position and then you were expected to go on and do something else. So when I graduated from school, I wanted to get work in the social policy realm working more towards policies that influence the safety net for people: welfare, things like that. I found myself back in the reproductive health area because I had that background. I connected with a professor at UCLA who was heading up the STD program in Los Angeles county and so fell into that world of STDs and HIV.

 

Alex

*Check in next Tuesday for another installment of the interview!*

My mother this past December looking through old posters underneath her mattress in her childhood bedroom in Queens, NY.