My husband Jim and I had just graduated from art school in 1971 when we moved to Rockport, his hometown. I worked at a store on Bear Skin Neck managed by a woman a few years older than I. One chilly fall weekend huddled around the space heater, she told me about a friend who had gotten pregnant, went to get an abortion, and died. There was talk in the air about making abortion legal, and she was for it.
I was a timid, withdrawn 21-year-old, trying to process getting through the day as a grownup, yet to develop opinions about life and death issues. My first dorm roommate got pregnant and disappeared - rumor had it - to a home for unwed mothers. She did not return to school. That didn’t seem right. But dying was clearly worse. I felt lucky that I had dodged both fates.
My mother-in-law was very self-confident, active in the Rockport Republican Town Committee and scared me to death. She told me about a meeting that a group of women were holding at her church – they called themselves the Cape Ann Feminists. Jim, clearly concerned about my reticence to go out the door without him, encouraged me to go. I felt very brave as I walked into the church hall filled with women of all ages. About 10 women who looked to range in age from mid-30’s to early 50’s spoke about their experience in a ‘consciousness-raising group’ they had formed. They met every week for a season to discuss topics on a list produced by the NY Radical Feminists. I was very surprised to hear the word ‘radical’ come out of these straight looking older women’s lips. They invited us to sign up to join newly formed consciousness raising groups. I signed up.
The women in my group where young to middle aged, married and single, with children and without. We talked about subjects that I had been taught were taboo. I was not the only person who shared personal stories of rape, family violence, or abortion for the very first time. We all felt ashamed that these things had happened to us. I was shocked that people I knew had suffered as I had. When the season was over, I joined the next round of consciousness raising groups and helped with adult-ed classes at the high school.
The women who started the Cape Ann Feminists became my role models, trusted big sisters, beloved friends. Many of them have since died. I miss them. I started to ask those still living how they got started. For some of them, it began with the difficulty of receiving medically safe abortions. For instance, one Mom raising a house full of children had decided with her husband that their family was complete and used birth control. When they got pregnant anyway, her doctor told her that she needed a psychiatric exam, along with her doctor’s and her husband’s permission for him to end the pregnancy. By the time all the paperwork was ready, it was too late to have the procedure done. Two of the women who heard her story discovered from another doctor that he could help women through the process, so they started helping desperate women to connect with him. Many of us were able to lobby for legal safe abortions - even my mother-in-law. Less than two years after I became involved, the courts decided that everyone in our country had the right to make medical choices about their own bodies.
My mentors did not stop their work then. Many of them earned graduate degrees. One became a sex therapist after realizing that many of us had absolutely no knowledge of how our own reproductive system worked. Others became leaders in our community in the fields of law, psychology, and religion. I was part of a group of women who met at one of their adult education classes on “women in art history” who started a lively cooperative feminist art gallery at Center and Main in Gloucester. Our leadership across the fields of human endeavor has led us to live rich public and private lives. But now it may be time to go back to our roots. I was taught how to collectively transform myself and my society by the generous, caring older women of Cape Ann. To them I am forever grateful. Now that those of us who remember those days some 50 years ago have stepped down from public service, may we find ways to support our daughters’ and granddaughters’ generations as they discover their own power.