Serene Williams: Can you tell us about your involvement with the movement for the Equal Rights Amendment? I am especially curious about your work in the 1980s when you undertook direct action tactics. I read about many of these events when I worked at the Schlesinger Library. I know you have mentioned social interaction among activists in Virginia was really important to organizing. Can you tell us about why that was so important?

Georgia Fuller: Socializing at each other’s homes was very important, especially after we chained ourselves to the White House fence and the police ignored us. There’s an interesting  quote from Mahatma Gandhi–first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. So you expect to get ignored in the beginning and then by the time they say mean things about you and fight you it’s like “yes, I’m making progress!” So they ignored us when we were chained to the White House fence.

After they ignored us, we chained ourselves in the main driveway of the White House. Then they ignored us some more. So we walked into Pennsylvania Avenue and then we got arrested. You sometimes have to work hard to get arrested and other times you don’t. The minute we got out of jail, we all went to Mary Ann [Beall’s] house. Charlotte Bunch was there, so was Sonia Johnson. Maureen Fiedler was there, have you talked with Maureen?

Williams: No, I have not talked with her. I would love to talk with her. I know she was part of the Fast for Justice with Zoe Nicholson and Sonia Johnson.

Fuller: Yes, Mary Ann was there too.

Williams: How did you get involved in militancy? Was it through the National Organization for Women?

Fuller: I have always been a little on the aggressive side, just never particularly found a place for it. So I found a place for it within the women’s movement. I have a background in cultural anthropology, that’s my minor. My major was in the social use of language. So I have a sense of a macro perspective. A lot of little things need to work together to have success and you don’t put your eggs in one basket if you’re trying to accomplish something. So militancy has always been attractive to me because of my personality.

But it has to be in cooperation with all the other elements of working for social change, it doesn’t stand by itself.

Williams: That’s so interesting. I first learned about your work at the Schlesinger Library in relation to the National Organization for Women Task Force on Religion. How did you get involved in that task force?

Fuller: When I got out of college, I worked at the National Agricultural Library. At that time, acceptable women’s professions were librarian, nurse and teacher. That was about it in terms of professional jobs. What happened was that they started automating the library and bringing men and boys in over the top for traditional women’s occupations. I could see that very clearly so I didn’t get a master’s in library science. There were a few other women my age then, in our twenties, and a lot of the women were much older. They had been librarians for thirty years.

So we talked and we had all read Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, which was the basic one back then. I looked around for something to do. I’m a doer, an over–doer sometimes. I got involved with Federally Employed Women, this would have been in the late sixties.

Once I was no longer employed by the federal government, I got involved with the Virginia Women’s Political Caucus and with Flora Crater. Flora Crater was really the mother of everything feminist in Virginia; she was very soft spoken. She started the first Virginia NOW chapter and was the co-founder of the Virginia Women’s Political Caucus. She had a group called Crater’s Raiders.

She was working to get the ERA out of Congress. What I have been told is that when the final vote came, her estimate was closer than anyone else’s. It’s important to never underestimate the people that are on the ground. The professional title isn’t always the best thing. Flora was amazing! I became in a sense her protege. I was interested in NOW because it had a wider scope of activity and a wider look at what was going on. That fits into my sense of having a macro perspective and not just focusing on one thing in particular.

Just before the birth of my first child, Flora decided she was going to run for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia as an independent. One of her mottos was “every time a woman runs it’s a victory.” And that’s what it was like for us. Just the fact that a woman was putting herself out there to run was a win. I was her speechwriter. The campaign cost about $15,000 and I think we got about 10% of the vote. She toured the state and talked about women’s issues.

I was pregnant with my first child. Who do you go to for help, you go to older women. I went to older women and said, “I’ve got to get back for this last year of my doctorate degree, how do I manage this?” And they said, you pick a date on the calendar and focus on it. So I thought women’s equality day, August 26th, would be a really good day to have a girl. Then I’d be all set to go back to Georgetown for my last year of doctorate work.

I had the date on the [campaign office] calendar and it said, “Georgia has baby for Flora to kiss.” I went into labor on the 24th. So by the time it turned the 25th, the nurse was looking and listening to the heartbeat and she said very officially, “It’s a boy.” And I said, “of course it’s a boy. A girl would have waited one more day until the 26th.” So that’s when my son was born, on the 25th.

I think the important thing to remember is when we’re doing this work we can’t take it too seriously or we just burn ourselves out. When an activist burns out, they usually don’t go solo, they take other folks with them. So having companionship, taking a step back, all of that’s important because you have to take a long view.

I’m going to get back to what you asked me. One of the things I do, because of my exposure to experience in language and cultural change with my doctorate, is I look for what’s happening and what needs to happen. I look for the cracks. Cracks are important.

What I realized was that there was really nothing going on in terms of religion in the feminist movement. Back in 1976, part of the reason why there was not much going on is that a majority of the women that first became activists were the ones that had been most scarred by patriarchy, many of them were Jewish or Catholic. If you look at it, for thousands of years, the Roman Catholic Church was the single most stable power in Western civilization. This ideology has become embedded in our secular life. So we have to take that seriously. We simply can’t ignore it.

The second thing is that no social movement in the United States has ever really existed without a substantial religious component. So I started to go for the crack. I had an evangelical background. I could speak evangelical. I could read the texts being put out by Rosemary Radford Ruether. I could speak academic. I picked up a little Espiscopalian and a little Catholic along the way because I’m pretty good with languages. I notice when words change.

Interestingly, in the early 1980s, if you talked to a religious person, you could tell their politics by whether they used the word justice or righteousness. And in both Hebrew and Greek they are the exact same word. If it was justice, they would be a liberal Christian. If it was righteousness, they were going to be on the conservative side. I can pick those things up relatively easily.

We had a little Northern Virginia NOW committee and at the same time I was going to a seminar for my last year and we had a presentation by the associate director of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) which was formerly the mother superior’s council, and I had a good feeling about her. I work a lot on how I feel.

I talked with her and I don’t know if I invited myself or simply wrangled an invitation to go visit the LCWR. It was so amazing and I thought we’ve got to start forming alliances. So I began working with religious institutions, also with feminists and later people that were lesbian and gay. I worked with anybody that wanted to change.

Another thing I did was to model for feminist women a healthy feminist spirituality and how we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath. People talk about religion being misused but power is always misused. Whether it’s money or water or land or technology, we don’t throw away money just because someone is misusing it. So I thought we shouldn’t throw away the power of religion just because it is being used in an abusive manner. Those are two of the three things I dedicated myself to doing as head of the committee on women and religion. The third was the most fun. It was annoying all the patriarchs and that was really a lot of fun.

I had a friend from college talk with the Episcopal Bishop of Washington and he was getting ready for his last exams and his ordination. Much to his surprise, the bishop was stomping around saying unpleasant things about me by name. My friend Jim said, “I thought I shouldn’t tell him that we went to college together.” So that’s fun. You know if you ever want to have a really good time, go poke a patriarch.

Williams: That’s so interesting. My WAPUSH partner, Kristen Kelly, came from a religious studies background and was head of the religious studies department at our school. She did a master’s at Berkeley’s Theological Union and we have this course proposal together. She will love to read this interview. I’m a lifelong Catholic and so is Kristen and when we go into feminist spaces or when we go to academic conferences we see very little discussion about religion. So things haven’t changed much.

One project I have been working on is to improve the lack of coverage of feminist Catholics on Wikipedia. I wrote a page for the group Catholics Act for ERA but it got taken down because it did not meet a notability standard. So I am trying to get as much documentation as possible. Do you know anything about that group?

Fuller: Yes. The way it got started was that I had a lot of relationships with lots of folks including liberal Catholics. That’s the most fun group I ever worked with because they have a long view. They know they are not going to change their church overnight and so they are able to take a breath and have fun along the way. One of the things I did was I gathered 5-7 Catholic religious leaders and brought them into the Washington area and into the national NOW Action Center to be briefed by Ellie Smeal who was then the president on where we were with the ERA. The next month I brought them back and as we were walking out the door, Maureen Feidler said, “why are we waiting for NOW to get us organized? We should organize ourselves.” And she did. Maureen is both a genius and a bulldozer when it comes to organizing. You want to be beside or behind her, never in front of her when she’s organizing something.

After a year or so, Maureen said, “what’s this thing about Catholics Act for ERA? We’ve been acting for years. We’ve proven ourselves.” So they became Catholics for the ERA. There’s this woman in the Maine area, Dolly Pomerleau.

Williams: Yes, I’ve read about her.

Fuller: Maureen had a laywoman co-chair, I don’t remember her name. Maureen and I worked on a book together. I was her editor.

Williams: What was the name of the book you worked on?

Fuller: It was called, Are Catholics Ready?

Williams: I read a digital version of that book.

Fuller: Well I was the editor. And I turned it back to Maureen and she would look at all the red and she would say, “you murderized it.” She joked around like that.

Williams: It has a lot of quantitative data, right?

Fuller: Yes, a lot of data. When you get to Appendix G, which was about abortion, Maureen started forgetting that she was an academic. Appendix G got all the notoriety.

Williams: Did you ever work with Sr. Donna Quinn in Chicago?

Fuller: Yes. That was the first presentation I ever gave after I had my PhD. Being Catholic and certification conscious, that was the first time I was ever introduced as Dr. Georgia Fuller. I laughed because when I went through Georgetown, I determined that I was going to have two pairs of blue jeans that I would wear every day until I graduated. Well I had a little trouble with my thesis and it went on for about six months longer than it should have and by then the jeans were in really poor shape. When I graduated, my in-laws invited me and my husband, and Rob, who was about three, out to the house and burned the blue jeans in the outside fireplace and toasted with champagne to Dr. Fuller.

Then I was in the car and we’re all driving back and and I was a little spaced out with everything that was going through my head. I was thinking about everybody I had to fight with and everything else so I was sort of out of it. And I didn’t hear a little voice in the back seat saying, “uh, mommy, mommy.” And finally he said, “Dr. Fuller.” Whoa! That woke me up from whatever I was engaged in. And then he says to himself, “she’s really my mommy but we call her Dr. Fuller because she burned her blue jeans.”

Williams: That’s an incredible story!

Fuller: I had to tell that story after talking about Donna Quinn and Marge Tuite. She and Marge were powerhouses.

WIlliams: I know all about Marge Tuite. I wrote a biography about her for the National Women’s History Museum and I read her papers at Notre Dame. She was amazing.

Fuller: Her religious order didn’t know what to do with her. She died untimely and was cremated and the order didn’t want to let go of her ashes.

Williams: I’ve read about her funeral and how there was quite a controversy about it.

Fuller: Some of her ashes were taken to Nicaragua where she worked. It’s like, you know Marge didn’t become a saint until after she died suddenly.

Back to the ERA. By 1980 it was clear that we had the short end of the stick. One of the important things to remember is that women had virtually no power in our society. If we had ever realized that, we might have never had the audacity to start in the first place. We had no political power, we had no social power. We couldn’t get the headlines of anything, we couldn’t get media coverage. The only power we had was our personal convictions and the trust we had in one another, the sisterhood.

I think Sonia Johnson phrased it best that what the movement needed was yeast because yeast is a very small, inconsequential ingredient but it is what takes the flour over the top of the pan and that civil disobedience would be the yeast. We entered into our work with that idea. We did not enter into it feeling we were in any way superior and I understand for the time that was quite phenomenal that we didn’t think of ourselves as better.

I think there’s a greater recognition today that you need multiple strategies and tactics to make any change. But certainly at the time it was the top macho people that were out getting arrested and we weren’t that. A lot of the people that came to it originally were religious women because you have that spiritual power that enables you to feel connected to Susan B. Anthony.

I’d like to tell you a story about that. In 1976, we had a 12 hour a day vigil with flags and everything out in front of the White House from July 5th until Women’s Equality Day on August 26th. We didn’t start on July 4th because the hippies were there with marijuana jumping over the White House fence. We figured we’d wait.

What I did was contact different churches or religious organizations like Church Women United and I asked them to come with us on a Sunday and pray for the Equal Rights Amendment. Most people thought I was really crazy for asking church people to do something feminist.

Of course they’re going to come, right? When you ask them to pray for you? I mean that’s a no brainer. So we had people there praying every Sunday. We had Catholics, Quakers, Church Women United, Episcopalians, I think we had seven weeks lined up. Toward the end of August, I got a call from Allison Cheek. Allison was one of the Philadelphia 11 that was ordained prior to it being considered legal in the Episcopal Church. She said to me, “The great niece of Susan B. Anthony is in town. We have a room at the capitol. She celebrates her birthday on Women’s Equality Day. Do you know anybody who would like to come?”

Well, did I know anybody who would like to come! The whole vigil moved over there with the flags and everything! Susan comes up to me and she’s so excited. She said, “Well how many hours did you vigil?” I was so embarrassed, I looked at my shoes and said, “Not very many. I was really busy arranging these religious prayer meetings every Sunday.” And she says, “Praise the Lord! I have been waiting for the day that the women’s movement would come back to religion. Religion was so important to Aunt Susan and all of those early women.” Isn’t that a good story?

Williams: That’s a great story! I know a little bit about her because I have seen how she was mentioned on the flyers Catholic Act for ERA sent out and they advertised her as part of their movement.

Fuller: Yes, she became a Catholic charismatic.

A lot of the women who came together to form the first group of people doing civil disobedience were religious women because civil disobedience had been a part of religious life, especially with the civil rights movement.

Dolly Pomerleau was there . I helped plan our first event but I wasn’t able to be there. Betty Bone Schiess was there, she was one of the Philadelphia 11. She was a good friend of Karen DeCrow who was the president of the National Organization for Women. She was my predecessor as head of the task force on women and religion. Sonia Johnson was there too. Betty and I had a discussion a couple of nights before the action because she was a little worried about being chained to the Republican National Committee headquarters, it was August 26, 1980, with her, as she put it, post-menopausal bladder. So that’s something we women had to take into account [chuckles].

They got Bill Callahan who was with the Quixote Center.

Williams: Oh interesting, I’ve read about his involvement with Priests for Equality.

Fuller: He drove them to the national headquarters in a truck to chain shut the doors. That’s what they were going to do. They had a few people with signs and they all jumped out of Bill’s truck and charged up the steps to chain shut the doors. They chained themselves everywhere they could and nobody knew what to do with them.

My friend Mary Hartzler was a Republican businesswoman from Chicago who was very good at investing. When the Republican Party took the ERA out of their platform for the first time since it was put in, she felt very betrayed. Being a good businesswoman, she gave herself the job of taking care of our money to bail us out of jail and things like that. She was at the planning meetings for this as a purse holder and her husband Jim has a doctorate degree in physics. He did real serious research on chains and locks, the kind you need to keep somebody from stealing your yacht. They were so heavy. Have you ever seen the chains?

Williams: I actually held chains at the Schlesinger Library but they were the chains that Mary Lee Sargent’s group used at the Illinois State House in 1982 when they chained themselves in protest when the ERA was being voted on.

Fuller: The locks were a number 15 Master lock weighing 1 pound. The chain links were about 2″ long, 1 1/2″ wide and about 11/4″ around. They weighed 8 pounds. They were serious, serious chains. The night before the action, they said somebody dropped out. Mary was asked to take her place, “what do you think?” And she said yes. Her mother thought Democrats were a dirty word and it was so unladylike but she said, “I’m going to do it.”

So she and another woman were the first ones up and they grabbed the chains around the outside handles and it was a brass door with huge panes of glass. Cheryl Dalton and Mary were pushing from the bottom to keep it shut. Before they could lock the chains, this security guy comes running down the hall and smashes against the door at the top to push it open. They did manage to chain the handles together so the doors couldn’t be opened. Here you have a very big door with a lot of glass and it’s heavy. You have somebody pushing at the top and you have people pushing at the bottom and the whole frame bent and the entire pane fell out all over the place.

Afterwards, Mary said to me, “Georgia, I’m beginning to think there is a God.” Shards of glass falling all around me, and the only thing that happened is I got a small slit in the cuff of my jeans. But this door completely broke but it was chained shut. The police were called and they jumped out of their car and they were going to settle this whole thing. They had a set of chain cutters and I was told by the people, this is the problem you have with oral history, especially fifty years later. When I did the work for my book which was ten years after the fact, the people further away from the policeman said he held up his chain cutters and he looked at the chains and said, “no way.” Now, the people standing closer to the policeman swear on the Bible that what he said was “No, Shit!” he could cut those chains.

Republicans started having to crawl out through the glass doors or out through the window if they wanted to get out or to go back in. So the women there started singing, “go in and out the windows, go in and out the windows, go in and out the windows till you pass the ERA.” They left them there the entire day. (I was singing it.)

Betty had no problem, she unchained herself, found the bathroom, came back, rechained herself. They left them there until 5pm and they couldn’t get out. Actually, we never found anyone who could cut those chains but that’s a whole other story.

It was sort of natural to come into how the women that were very active in religion came into civil disobedience. What was especially interesting is the ones from a tradition of mysticism, the Russian Orthodox, the Catholics, the Quakers, and the Mormons were the ones that came up with the screwiest ideas. The people that kept us solvent and sane were the Presbyterians, the Methodists and the Unitarians.

When we started pulling the group together, it was probably around June 1981, and we were seriously embarking on civil disobedience. We were part of the Congressional Union at that time. That was some of the women out of New York that were active in women’s studies programs in college. Mary Ann Beall would know more about that. We started, as Sonia Johnson put it, “chaining ourselves to things and stuff”.

Sonia had a wonderful way with words. We burned watchfires for freedom and burned effigies. The thing that separated us was when we did something that the suffragists had never done, which was climbing the White House fence. I was told the people from New York had a lot of trouble with that. So we left and changed our name officially so they wouldn’t be brought in with anything having to do with the fence and a petition to Ronald Reagan.

Williams: What do you change your name to? Did you become A Group of Women?

Fuller: Yes. Sonia said, “let’s keep it easy.” Every place she went to talk about her book, people would ask her about that group of women. So that’s what we used. We researched the White House fence at the time. It was actually not as tall as it appeared because it was a low sort of fence of rock. So it had about two feet of stone and an iron fence was on the top of it. What happened is that the people in the Wednesday Vigil, we called it the Plain Vanilla Vigil because they never did anything wrong and were always well behaved, they would measure everything with their body parts. So we knew how far apart the posts were and their thickness. They went up to a flat metal bar.  We knew the thickness of that bar and they went up through it and that’s where the spikes were. So we made a rope ladder out of closet poles and rope to the specifications of the White House fence. We even had them so they could anchor them over the fence. It’s hard to describe but there would be a bar and another bar and then between it would be something holding it apart. That was the exact distance it needed to actually sit over the fence and be anchored by the bar that went through. I might have a diagram somewhere. The original one I went over is supposed to be in the Smithsonian being hidden under current circumstances. I have a copy that I had made before I gave it up.

What happened was we were really, really scared and having nightmares. It was a really scary thing to do. We couldn’t blame the people from New York for not wanting to do it. We were so scared we realized that we had talked on telephones that we knew were tapped. So what were we going to do about that? Well, we went back on all those lines and said, “oh, darn. That was such a good idea but we just can’t pull it off. We’re going to have to go back to the same old thing with the chains.”

What happened next was the Secret Service went out and bought six chain cutters with red plastic handles and were up that night practicing cutting the chains they thought ours looked like to see if they would work. So when we went over the fence, all of the Secret Service was by the bushes by the gate. Sonia, who went over closest to the gate, got arrested first. I went over. I don’t even remember going over. I had a friend from Brooklyn who had a big coat on and the ladder was curled up under the coat. And you see, she gave birth to that ladder, right on the White House sidewalk and she put it over the fence and she said, “no, it’s not straight yet.” But nothing was going to stop me. I went over and you know there was no dog on my arm. There was no policeman in my face because they were all behind the bushes with the six new chain cutters with red plastic handles. I didn’t know what to do.

You rehearse your civil disobedience, all sorts of things. It never occurred to me there would be a straight path to the White House. I figured there’d be a dog on my arm and a gun in my face. What should I do? Then I realized that there was this planting of bushes between me and the White House. I had never looked 10 feet beyond that fence because I was sure I wouldn’t get there and I thought, “Oh, what do I do? Do I go around the bushes or do I go through it?” If you go through it, they’ll add a charge of destruction of government property. So I went around it and I was one of the last people arrested. The other thing that’s interesting is when we were roleplaying our civil disobedience, we would take a turn of playing the police officers. It’s important to have an understanding of what I would call an intimate interaction when somebody arrests you.

I realized later this guy comes streaking down and puts an armbar behind my back. I think I’m not going to sit down and have to be carried off because it will break my arm. So I said, “hello officer, my name is Georgia, what’s your name? I’m here to use my First Amendment rights to deliver this letter to the president of the United States.” Well, he wasn’t buying anything. When we got to all those bushes, he couldn’t figure out how to get me around them. He’s pushing me one way, pushing me another way. Finally we got around the bushes and what I remembered later were two things. Susan B. Anthony’s birthday was over President’s Day weekend and it was a Monday. Reagan had always spent the entire weekend at Camp David. But while we were doing our presentation, speeches and songs, we saw his helicopter land. So we knew he was in the White House which we hadn’t expected to happen.

I realized that the guy who arrested me had been standing on the porch at the White House and he had to make a decision. Do I leave the outpost with the president in the White House and run down and arrest this woman or not? He was terrified. I think at that moment he was more scared than I was. It’s important that we understand how the police feel if we have absolute dedication to nonviolent civil disobedience.

So they arrested us all and put us in some kind of an underground thing where nobody would see us. We were sitting around talking; it was kind of like two teams after a pickup football game except there was no beer and we were in handcuffs. That’s when we found out about the six pairs of chain cutters with red plastic handles. As we’re talking to them, they said, “you really fooled us. We went out and bought six new chain cutters with red plastic handles and practiced cutting chains that we thought were like the ones you had last night.” That’s how we found out about it.

In this particular case, and I think part of it is that we’re women, they were less scared of us from the get go. These working guys had working wives and they knew what the ERA meant to the economy of their family. So there were very few problems that we had with all the men in being processed through one way or another. They held us there for a long time because they didn’t want us to get any more publicity.

After dark they took us to a police station to be photographed and fingerprinted. This young police officer, as I recall he was Brazilian and Puerto Rican, pulled open the doors and said, “Ladies, first of all, you must speak to your lawyers about filing a petition for inexpeditious justice. It should not have taken you this long to get here. Secondly, what the hell were you thinking?! You know we shoot people for that.” He was a really nice guy and my blood sugar was starting to plummet. He went out to get me a sandwich and brought me some peanut butter crackers from the machine.

Jennifer Walalce was 18. She said, “officer, hypothetically, if there were someone here underage how would you advise them?” The officer went, “Well, I would advise her not to leave the rest of the group because she would not want to be processed through the juvenile system all by herself.” “Well the next day what if when it comes to standing trial that person has a different birthday? “ He said, ” Well, just say that the policeman who took the information wrote it down wrong. But you need some kind of proof of who she really is, like a driver’s license or a relative or something.”

Jennifer said, “or like a mother?” Suddenly, Jennifer’s mother pops up and says, “hello” and he says, “mother and daughter getting arrested.” Shirley said, “Well you know, this is a Monday. We are a Mormon family. And Monday is a home night for Mormons. And the family that strays together stays together.”

Williams: Wow, these are incredible stories!

Fuller: The reason I am able to tell you all these stories is that it sort of devolved on me to be the administrator of the group. I conducted the meetings, set the agenda, wrote things down on the newspaper, carried the newspaper home. So I had all the files with me and I sat down to write a book and I started interviewing people. I had a lot of phone interviews with Shirley and Jenifer and Jean Crawford. I should tell you that story.

We had pushed ourselves so hard that virtually all of us got sick after the ERA. It just caught up with us. I was quite sick and not able to do a lot. There’s one thing I want to tell you about going over the White House fence. I was up on the platform because I was one of the speakers and I saw the helicopter land and our lobbyists down in Richmond had already told us that the ERA would not be ratified that year. So we knew we were going down. But we went over the fence anyway because it was so important to me that the women who came after me knew that we had done every possible thing we could.

Women had no power. And that left us with the power of civil disobedience which when really well done is theater and getting ourselves arrested. We’ve tried everything. So we were going to put our bodies on the line and I really went over the White House fence with that in mind. Maybe we lost, but we didn’t go down without a fight.

Williams: Well the ERA passed in Virginia several years ago. That was a huge success when it passed.

Fuller: That was my life’s work. I was sitting there on the first day of the General Assembly session season and they’re bringing it through the House of Delegates which was chaired by a woman for the first time in 419 years or something like that. She was also the first Jew to be speaker of the House of Delegates in Virginia. That was amazing.

Every single woman who spoke in favor of the ERA talked about the women who came before and thank you for women’s studies because we had to dig up our ancestors almost literally. But because of women’s studies, they knew that they were standing on our shoulders and they gave us the credit. It brought tears to my eyes, which is still just amazing. Then it went through the Senate. The wording was a little different so it had to go through both chambers together and then come out on the 27th of January which I think is the date it passed.

Williams: Thank you so much for sharing these stories with us!