Geneva Williams: Can you tell me about your background and how you became interested in the field of women’s studies?

Martha Wheelock: I always loved Nancy Drew novels when I was growing up. I would sneak out to read Nancy Drew and I thought she was the best detective ever. My father and mother didn’t know it, but they were both good feminists. My father was a professor of Latin and Greek, and so he knew all about the Amazons. And he would tell me about that kind of mythology. So I grew up in a family, and I have a younger sister who is also badass, so we kind of were inventive ourselves. We had special codes, we were that kind of independent gal. I won the Girl Scout cookie-selling award the first year I was out there doing that.

At one point I grew up on a farm. I had a cow of my own, I milked her. I broke a horse that had been in the rodeos, she wouldn’t let anyone else ride her. I grew up with things that were telling me that I could do what I wanted to do, or I could do what I was in love with, or I was doing things that maybe the boys in the neighborhood…I was the best sportsman too. I could hit a homerun better than any of those dumb boys. And then I chose for my musical instrument the drums. Well, you know, that’s not the violin, a very feminine kind of instrument. So I was sort of not knowing this, but I was breaking a lot of codes early on. And I was born in 1941, so I’m now 84 years old, and in those times it wasn’t really too popular to see women doing those things, or young girls. And my mother said, you gotta wear a dress to school, you know? So there were a lot of things that were giving me reason to rebel and giving me some kind of stature or stand in life. So I guess the background was that it was in my DNA a little bit.

And then my father had a heart attack, a really bad heart attack, when I was about twelve or thirteen, or maybe fourteen. But there was nobody to help my mother take over this little farm that we had, the chicken farm. So I became the man of the house! I was the elder. My mother had turned the house into a bed and breakfast to raise money. This was out in northern New York state, in Cazenovian New York, near Syracuse. We had a hundred acres of farm. That whole background is interesting. And then gradually, from Nancy Drew, I went through some other early education of being a Girl Scout. I loved the Girl Scouts! Were you ever a Girl Scout?

Williams: I was a Girl Scout through eight grade, I loved Girl Scouts!

Wheelock: We could do anything, couldn’t we? I love it! And we got badges, I still have my Girl Scout badge!

Williams: I have my uniform upstairs, I took it to college with me!

Wheelock: So these are things that they didn’t know, Juliette Low, who started it, she didn’t know what trouble she was going to be creating! Because didn’t you always know when you met a gal that was maybe your age or a little younger or a little older, that she had been a Girl Scout? I mean there was something about her! I wanted her for my bestie, you know?

So the background is that we don’t sometimes know what we’re cultivating in ourselves, what we’re absorbing from the environment that we grow up in, but we just know that it’s more comfortable wearing the blue jeans versus the dress, or whatever happens. My father later on taught at an all-boys school once he recovered from his heart attack, called the Darrow School in New York state. So we lived on campus, but the local school wasn’t very good when we moved there, so I got admitted to a very prominent girls school, Miss Hall’s School for Fine Young Ladies. And I would go home at night to the boys school, and go off in the daytime to the girls school, where very bright and very distinguished women of the best, the “blue blood” of the country. The Vanderbilts and the Fairbanks and all those kinds of people, who were really just wonderfully ordinary girls. But I really learned why I wanted to be with the girls versus the boys. And the refinement that happens, the kindness, sensitivity, and intuitions that I loved about being around women that I just found boring in boys, because they didn’t have a thing to offer me.

I’m sure that’s where I sort of started being really attracted to women versus boys. I got married and had boyfriends and all that stuff, but I really never cared to be that. And when I couldn’t have children, I said, why should I stay married, you know? I’m gonna go off in another world. So that’s a very long answer, I guess that’s the background that leads me. I went to a Quaker college, a wonderful college called Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. And of course, the Quakers as you know, Susan B. Anthony was a Quaker, Alice Paul was a Quaker, it’s the most breathable kind of, quote, “religion” or “spiritual” path that one can have, I think, because it just lets you find a spark within, like Anne Hutchinson did. But anyways, I went to this Quaker college and I was just looking at a film on Joan Baez. I brought her to my college in 1961, when she was in her first year of singing songs, so that was another environment that I went to. I went to graduate school at New York University in Greenwich Village, woohoo! Where the hippies were! And I was a hippie, and you know, so, all of that, I think, contributes to my wanting to know more about what women in the past had been through. And was I really weird because I was free spirited? Or was I really weird because I wanted people to be equal? And at one point I was engaged to a wonderful black man. Unfortunately, he was killed before we got married, but I was brought up in the civil rights movement and then the feminist movement, so all of that happened. I stumbled upon it, but intentionally. Was that a long answer?

Williams: That was a wonderful answer. The next question I have for you is how did you get into making films of important feminists such as Inez Milholland?

Wheelock: Well it started before Inez, it started when I was a Ph.D. candidate at New York University, I was in American literature and I had to choose a subject for my dissertation. And I wanted to do somebody, some writer that I had loved and had clicked with me. And I wanted somebody who hadn’t been discovered quite as well as she was. Because I had found a best friend in the writer May Sarton, who was not known very well, but she was very popular because she wrote about how women can live alone, and she wrote with women characters as the head in her novels, she wrote novels, poetry, memoirs. She was one of the very first memoir writers to talk frankly about her life. So I thought, this is grand, I can do this. I went in to say, this is who I want to write my Ph.D. thesis on. She’s still alive, she’s given me permission to interview her. I’ve read all of her letters in the New York public library. She’s an awesome writer, and someone should write about her, as well as the fact that she’s a darn good poet, and she’s very popular in the public library system. And they said, “Oh, no, darling, you must write about someone like Ernest Hemingway!” And I said, “I am not interested in Ernest Hemingway.” So they granted me a little bit of grace there.

And they said that women writing about other women, that we should write appreciatively about them, because they don’t necessarily want to use the same language and sentence structure as male writers. They’re trying to find their own voice, so let’s look at what makes them interestingly appropriate to be female, versus following the old male, you know, Charles Dickens and Hemingway and all those people. And there really was a real struggle for women writers to find the most authentic voice for how they were going to address character, how they were going to address structure. And it may not have been conscious, the way I’m dissecting it, but it certainly was an ache that these great…like Erica Jong wrote a book called Fear of Flying. Someday you should read it. And my God, that was so shocking to people. But it was the freedom that women were trying to find at that point. Her daughter is now an MSNBC commentator, I noticed. I can’t remember her name, but she’s got her mother’s feistiness. And we were all starved at that point, for authentic voices.

So I went out to do the May Sarton thesis, and it kept getting rejected. We have to rewrite it, it’s not strong enough, you’re not critical of her even though you know, blah blah blah. Finally I stood up, about the eighth time that my dissertation was presented and I had done about 500 pages on it. I said, “You can take this thesis and do what you want to with it, I’ll keep a copy, but I’m not finishing it based on what you want.” I just couldn’t do that to her, and I couldn’t do it to my sensibility. So I set out to make a film about her. So I had to learn filmmaking. It wasn’t digital, it was 16mm. I raised money by doing readings of Sarton’s work, I stood on corners with a bell, you know. I went to all the women’s studies meetings and raised enough money to make it on 16mm. I had a dear, dear friend who was in film school at NYU, so she helped me film it and work with it. But just the two of us made it. I was bitten. I was gonna be a filmmaker, as well as literature.The next film I made was on Kate Chopin. Have you ever read her novel The Awakening?

Williams: No, I have not.

Wheelock: Oh, put it down on your list. It’s short. 1899, Louisiana. She wrote a novel about how women needed to find their voice and all that. And your mother could even tell you where you can find my little short introduction to her. But again, she had been banned, because her character was a mother who chose to leave her children because of the treatment that she was being given by her husband. And 1899, you know? So there was still that feminist voice coming out at that point. So that was my second film, after my film on May Sarton. Then I got more into women’s history starting with One Fine Day and onward, and made five films on various aspects of women’s history. You can see them all at wildwestwomen.org. So that’s how I got involved in that. Accidentally, always accidentally. I think one of the morals, as I look back on my life, is that I’ve taken some accidental risks, not knowing what kind of puddle I was going to pop into. But you know, it just was okay. I found out something new or different than I needed to know. So from that filmmaking, I continued to teach. I taught in high school, I taught in college. I smuggled in literature by women. If they had a cannon, I got to teach Beloved by Toni Morrison.

Williams: That’s a good book. That’s a really good book.

Wheelock: I taught Virginia Woolf, and I taught Kate Chopin, as I said, whose novel I just referenced. Carson McCullers, some of those deep Southern writers. And I always put The Great Gatsby in, you know, so that they didn’t think I was a total subversive teacher. Then I started and I founded an alternative high school within the confines of the high school where I was working out in Long Island. And it was a time when kids were really confused. They were either on drugs or something, so I took the kids who had problems, who were so sensitive and so bright, and didn’t know where they were because their family was wanting them to go out and be doctors and lawyers, and they didn’t know what they were going to be. So we started an alternative high school, and that’s when I took them to peace marches, and ERA marches, and any war marches, of course, any war marches. We were 25 miles from New York, so we would all get out of school, it was just great. So students also helped me expand my awareness of the need for equality. I worked on the Bella Abzug committee campaign, I worked on Shirley Chisholm’s campaign, I worked on the New York ERA campaign from the very beginning.

The book, by the way, I forgot to mention, I graduated from college in 1963, and in 1963, Betty Friedan’s book came out called The Feminine Mystique. And I could answer all those questions that she was bringing up about what the women with a college degree do, you know? Do they stay home and make sure the linoleum floor is clean, and have a martini ready for hubby when he comes home? Is that what happens? “The problem that had no name”? So I would say that, you asked me at one point what was a great text, and as I was graduating from college, that book came out, and I would say that that really stimulated a lot of my thinking. It was actually a forbidden book, you know, some places you couldn’t even find it, you couldn’t even buy a copy of it, it was so subversive. And it wasn’t that dangerous. It was dangerous to the patriarchy, but it wasn’t dangerous to women who wanted to have a rightful place in our society.

So that’s how I became a filmmaker. I became a filmmaker because of an author that wasn’t known, that I wasn’t given permission to tell the truth about. So, my portrait of the author May Sarton was first-person. I let her tell her own story. And there’s not a single question in the story, in the film, except the very end question which I asked her, which was, “What do you want to be remembered for as a person and as a writer?” Caught her totally off guard, I was so happy. And you know what she said? She said, “For being fully human, if I am.” And what a thing to want to be, right? “For being fully human.” And that didn’t say for being fully woman, she…

[Dog comes on screen] You wanna talk here? Meet Geneva! This is Gatsby.

Williams: Aw, that’s such a cute dog.

Wheelock: He’s blind, so he doesn’t know what’s going on. So I kind of make sure he knows how to get up here. 

Williams: Can you share about how you became involved with feminist groups like the National Organization for Women?

Wheelock: I probably stumbled into them, too. 1970, eons, decades, before you were born, I marched down 5th Avenue, because the Betty Friedans and the Shirley Chisolms and whatnot…It was 50 years since women had gotten the right to vote, and I was still married, and I knew I didn’t want to be, but I was still married. Marched down 5th Avenue the way the suffragists had. And that was the boon of my existence, and that was actually sponsored by a very early chapter in New York of NOW. And they said, oh you can have a little strip down 5th Avenue. And there were, oh, 50,000, 60,000 women, and nobody expected them all to be there. So it was a great march and it started the way the suffragists started us, to march and to ask for, demand our rights, as we’re gonna do on Saturday, aren’t we, Gatsby? We’re gonna go to the No Kings march. Yeah! So I joined the first NOW group in New York in 1970, partially because I wanted to be in the march. And then I became involved in a lot of the marches that founded…of course around the ERA. I took my camera to Washington D.C. and filmed the first AIDS quilt, the gay and lesbian march in Washington D.C., which was an incredible experience. It covered the entire Washington Mall, the AIDS quilt did. It’s now beyond, they can’t even find a place to put it. People made squares of the people that died of AIDS.

Williams: How did you get involved with the National Women’s History Project?

Wheelock: Oh, that’s a simple answer. They were not in existence when I first started making films. But the film One Fine Day, which was a short anthem that we made for the Geraldine Ferraro Campaign, 1984. It was still in film, there was no such thing as VHS or DVDs. So you had to distribute it on film. I had heard about them, they had just started, in 1980, and in 1984 when Ferraro ran as the first woman on a national ticket, with Walter Mondale, I sent this film up to them to say, “Listen, couldn’t we get this in some of your curriculum classes?” And that’s how I became involved with them. And that was in 1984. So that’s a long time ago!

They helped promote and distribute it, and all the teachers that took the curriculum course with them, I think, bought a film copy. So it really spread really quickly, and it became an anthem for NOW. Geraldine Ferraro used it on her campaign in ‘84 when she was out running for Vice President.

Williams: I know you’re friends with Zoe Nicholson and I interviewed Zoe for this project. Can you share a little about the projects related to women’s history or women’s studies that you’ve worked on with Zoe?

Wheelock: I first worked with Zoe for the Veteran Feminists of America Conference that she wanted to do, and she needed a helper, so I helped organize it with her. I think that was 2013, when I first met her. Thank goodness the two of us could work together and get that done, really awesome. It was here in Los Angeles the first time it had moved west. And then I found that she was a wonderful researcher. The first film she worked on with me was I think Inez Milholland. She gathered all the photographs together for that film. And then I said, well, we really need somebody to be a co-executive director, or just a person to help, who could do all the things like constant contact and all of that. And I’ve been a major supporter of her brilliant work that she’s done. We produced her show called Tea with Alice and Me. Launched that, I filmed that for her. So we have been buddies since we first met.

Wheelock: She does a lot of research for me when I need something for films or my own work, as well.

Williams: She’s really a wealth of knowledge. Are there any feminist scholars or activists that you admire or who would be important to mention in our developing curriculum?

Wheelock: Well, you know I taught high school…this is sort of your other question about why women need women’s studies and women’s history. When they’re seniors in high school, particularly. Juniors, I had some very fine juniors but the seniors, as they got senioritis, these young women, and I had some young men, too, who were great students. The guys in the class would teach the gals in the class self-defense, and what to do when boys badass them or were rude to them, or something. So the boys were really, really important in the classes where they were willing. It was always a very, very low ratio of boys to girls. I started them way back into understanding the difference of what, historically and sociologically, patriarchy was. We read some stuff about who the Amazons were, about some of the goddess images that work through the past of how matriarchy was seen as nothing that ruled, but which influenced and acculturated the societies. And I would bring in my little Venus of Willendorf, you know there’s a great little statue of her. She’s got breasts as big as her body, nurturing the whole world. And I think it’s interesting when we start from there, not that men and women are so different, but that we need to share the traits that we both have.

So I do a really whole scope of that, and in that I included the study of the Amazons, of early, as I said, goddess imagery, God was a woman. Those great women out of, I think they were out of your area in San Francisco, Jean Bolen. The study that happened at one point where they actually can find cave drawings and images, they go way back. The Venus of Willendorf is 3,300 years old, and still the image of women, of who they were. Old, old history. And then of course the whole study of the ERA, of how that developed was a very important thing. And I told you about Betty Friedan. I have them read part of Betty Friedan’s book, the problem that had no name. I had a really good anthology of writings by Native American women and black women, the Combahee River Collective. It is a great statement. Doesn’t matter, men or women, black or white, you know, it’s just a great statement of humanity. And I just found out that that was a river that Harriet Tubman took her troops through.

Williams: Oh, I didn’t know that.

Wheelock: Combahee, that’s a river between Virginia and Maryland or someplace like that, where she smuggled the slaves and troops, the Southern troops, some of her Northern troops through, and spied.

Williams: That makes sense. Because one of my majors is Women and Gender Studies  I’ve read that at least two or three times. 

Wheelock: They didn’t have courses like that when I was going to school. I would’ve loved it. You’ll have to tell me a little about your courses when we’re finished, would you?

Williams: Oh, of course. If you want to hear about it, I would love to share. I love it.

Wheelock: Great.

Williams: The last question I have for you is, do you endorse the creation of an AP U.S. Women’s History Course?

Wheelock: Without a doubt, without a doubt. And I would add to that, women’s history and it could even be called gender studies. I had to change the course name from my women’s studies class. I had a women in literature class, and the second semester it became women’s studies, which included women’s history, a great percentage of it. They wanted to change it to gender studies, and I got a couple more men in it. And one of my favorite students is Jacob Soboroff, I don’t know if you know him, he’s an MSNBC commentator. He goes down and he reports about the separation of children and parents. And boy, you can just see that little feminism in him that he picked up from us gals. I’m very proud of him. Anyway, I think if they can get it even before college, if they can get it in high school, oh, what a difference! You can even do a little modified case of it in eighth grade, when all we women go through that horrible “slut” mentality, and degrading ourselves, and “Oh, Ethel has bigger boobs than me,” you know, “I’m not a woman.” All the things I hated being in seventh and eighth grade, it was just awful.

And I also think that women have to understand that they don’t have to be defined by the men in their world. And even I’d do a couple of weeks on gender, lesbian, and gay rights, and fluid gender. I still don’t understand all the trans stuff yet, but I’m willing to embrace it. And I had students who transitioned, and they taught me an awful lot. So the answer is yes, yes, yes. And if you need anybody to sign anything, my predecessor, we started women’s studies and women’s history early, early on. I think it probably…she started it in the 80s, the 1980s, one of the first classes and courses, but it was at an all-girls school, so it was a little safer. And I picked up from her in 1999, and carried it forward. But I did it all through my alternative school before I did that. It’s just in our blood, baby, you know? We got our DNA, and your mom’s got a good dose of it in her, doesn’t she?

Williams: Oh yeah, she’s the real go-getter.

Wheelock: But you know something? I don’t think we’re really obnoxious about it.

Williams: I don’t think so at all.

Wheelock: I do say things like, I walk into a bank, and there’s no pictures of women, they’re all bank presidents. I say kind of like, “Oh, where are the women?” And when One Fine Day was brought to NBC, we thought we could get it in for Women’s History Month one year, this is 1985 or something. We showed it to all the men, the guys that came from the departments. There was one woman, I think, in the room. And they said, “Oh, this is too political!” And we said, “Why?” “Well, there’s no men in it!” And we were very quick to say, “Well, what about Monday Night Football?” They just needed to think a little more outside the box. So that’s an endorsement of what you and Serene are doing. It’s just wonderful. So tell me about you!

Williams: I’m a junior, but I’m graduating this year, which is very exciting and really great. But I’m studying Political Science and Women and Gender Studies. So I’m dual majoring in those. And it’s awesome. I really like it a lot. But I really thought, because I’m applying to grad school right now, I’ve had to make a lot of quick decisions. Because I only found out I could graduate a month or two ago. A lot of my favorite classes are cross-listed with English and Women and Gender Studies. 

Wheelock: It’s so intersectional, isn’t it?

Williams: Yeah, it’s awesome.

Wheelock: Because, I took a week out to talk about women in business. What about economics? And you know the word “econos” in Greek means “home.” The entire bedrock of philosophy about economics comes from how women ran the home. Because that’s the basic economics. And all of the arts, and all of the music and the arts and all of that, it’s just wonderful. So, do you have any political aspirations?

Williams: I haven’t decided quite on what I’m going to do yet. The vast majority of all the adults I know keep asking me if I’m going to go to law school, but I don’t want to be a lawyer. I really, I’m not sure. I think I could really see myself doing non-profit leadership.

Wheelock: Well it’s good to know. And the kinds of hell that you can raise can be done in a lot of different ways. We just lost the great Jane Goodall, you know, and she was talking about young people’s leadership. It just needs to be from the heart, it needs to be engendering, like environmental issues, and things where we really need to make a pact. People think it only happens from the political point of view, but it happens through the courts, it happens through people finding their voices, people doing the vagina monologues. It comes from a lot of those areas. And I think, between you and me, I think that the National Women’s History Alliance motivated the entire study of women’s history. It was the only game in town when it first started, that’s why we’re in this, and your mom will tell you this, but we’re in this crucial point right now, of how do we make it relevant, how do we find people? Once they get bitten by women’s history, there’s no turning back. You just want to know everything about it. But you have to get them bitten, and obsessed with it. There’ll always be a Women’s History Alliance for you to be a part of. And just follow your passion, you know?

Williams: Yeah. I would love to end up…I’m applying for master’s programs right now, a few of them I’ve applied to a master’s in human resources or management. And I’m excited about that, thinking, hoping I can make a little money. My mom always says learning is a lifelong process. So I’m excited for that, but I know that’s not my end-all degree. I hope I’ll go to school more after that, so we’ll see what happens.

Wheelock: I’m still going to school! Nowadays, with all these great webinars and the great semesters you can do online, it’s just really wonderful, you can get a degree from doing that. I just saw the marvelous portrayal, I think it’s on Disney+ or HBO or something, it’ll probably come out, of the Prime Minister of New Zealand. Her name is Jacinda Ardern. She only served five years. The first woman to ever be the head of New Zealand. What I learned from her, and her book is called A New Way of Leadership, and it’s the first place where I ever saw the potential of women being accredited to being a better Prime Minister. She was involved in four issues during five years. The first one was the Muslim burning of the temple in Christ Church, New Zealand. She went in there with a burka on. She went into the Muslim temple to solve them, not with American dress, but with an identity with them. And we don’t see that in our country. The second thing she did was she handled COVID, and whether immigrants could come in or not. She persuaded them to have a total national shutdown. She had four cases in all of New Zealand of COVID. I mean, there were other things that she did, but her book is called A New Way of Leadership, which emphasizes the mothering. Whether you’re a mother or not, but the nurturing, the creative, the instinctual, the intuitive, the compassionate, that’s her leading word, is compassion, to have compassion. And wow, what a breath of fresh air that was. To see that really heralded. And we know it, it’s just hard. Teachers and nurses and those kinds of people aren’t necessarily given the same economic structure or rewards, for sure. Anyway, that’s the end of my wrap on that. But, in other words, you can be a really good leader without being a senator.

Williams: Yeah, I agree with that. My mom’s a teacher, she’s one of the smartest people I know, and I learn so much more from her. Obviously she’s my mom, but it’s funny how when you’re given access to this type of knowledge from a young age, it transforms your own conception and self-conception of what you can do, and what you can affect, and what you can be. It’s awesome that I really get to help her out with this project, because she’s just such a go-getter.

Wheelock: Oh, bless her, bless her. My claim to fame was 50 years ago a picture of me appeared in Time Magazine. It was when I first left my marriage, and I realized that I was much more attracted and influenced by women. I finally acknowledged that basically, I was a lesbian. And so I went to my very first Christopher Street march, and I carried a sign that said, “Mother Nature is a lesbian.” And the reason was because they found an island off the coast of Catalina Island which was all-female seagulls. And they were having babies! They were having babies! They didn’t need men! It was awesome! So I carried my sign, and you can look it up.

Williams: That’s an awesome photo.

Wheelock: First of all, the most exciting thing about it was that the font, which I wrote in lipstick, that lettering has become a published font. You can look it up, and people made t-shirts out of it, and books out of it, and all sorts of things. And it’s called the “protest” font. It’s an official font!

Williams: I’ve seen that photo before! I’ve seen that photo before! That’s super cool that that’s you.

Wheelock: And the date on the magazine, it was in a magazine I have back here, but it was Matlovich, Mr. Matlovich, Lieutenant Matlovich on the cover. And he was the first person, I guess the first male, I don’t know about women, but the first male to be kicked out of the army for being gay. And it was 1975, that magazine came out. 50 years ago, September 9, 1975. And I looked, and I said, “Oh my God, that was 50 years ago.” And it was so humbling, you know? And it was sort of what I said to you, sometimes you just get things, the universe supports you, and that made it much easier for me at that point to even be aware. My students were aware of it by then, too, for sure. And I didn’t get fired. They warned me about it, because I could’ve gotten fired. But you know, when you’re in a march, it’s fair game. You’re public. You can’t sue anybody for taking a picture.

Williams: Where were you teaching at this time?

Wheelock: Outside of New York City, on Long Island, in a town called Great Neck. Out here in California, they had what was called the Briggs Amendment, where people who were teachers, firefighters, if they were gay, they could be fired. But that was a little bit later, that was in the 80s. And then we had another one, Amendment 8 or something, I think it was, which was run by the Mormons to get rid of the gays in education.

Williams: Was that in California?

Wheelock: Yeah, but it was only in California, so it didn’t affect me.

Williams: Yeah, it was Prop 8. Proposition 8.

Wheelock: Prop 8! Right, yeah!

Williams: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me! This is so cool!

Wheelock: Well, keep me posted! I’m so grateful, I’m so grateful to you, Geneva, for being my sister, for being in the trenches with me. And your mom, of course, too. But just the idea that, wow, there’s going to be someone else that’s not going to let this history die, or let our progress. There has been progress, because we know our history.