Geneva Williams: Hi, my name is Geneva Williams, and I am studying political science and gender studies at the University of Michigan. I am recording Zoe Nicholson, a longtime feminist and ERA activist on August 8, 2024. I have grown up with my mom, a longtime feminist and I’ve gotten to experience so many different meetings and activism and ways to interact with the government. I have been so inspired by your activism for the ERA and this summer I have really started to familiarize myself more with what happened with the ERA, I was familiar with it but have started to learn more about it, why it didn’t pass, it didn’t get ratified in the Constitution, what could possibly be done to get it ratified. Please, introduce yourself.

Zoe Nicholson: My name is Zoe Nicholson, and my life I have pretty much given to equality. The first experience I had, was at the produce market and I said to my right wing mother, you can’t buy grapes. I was eight. Well, Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers are striking and so you can’t buy grapes. I told her I got it from girl scouts. That was 3rd grade. I’ve done some really high risk things with activism. This century, the Secret Service knew my name. I was at a Palin event one time and this guy walks by me and you can definitely tell who they are and what they’re doing, and said, “Hello Miss Nicholson, how are you today?” and I said “Oh, I’m fine thank you.” I have been protesting in high risk activism since I publicly heckled George Wallace about his overt racism. And I was on the streets of Chicago since 1968 protesting the Vietnam War and Curtis LeMay and the people who were bombing the hell out of Vietnam.What’s particularly interesting regarding 1968, Mayor Daley, it was the first time the police had riot gear. The police officers are not shielded. The historical markers of my life, and how I ended up being at a certain place, the Chicago 8, the Black Panthers, it just sort of all happened.  It’s kinda interesting because in two weeks the Democratic party will be in Chicago again. And that was only just the start of what has been a really interesting life that I’ve been fortunate to live. 

People think I did something in 1982 and then just went to, I don’t know, the malt shop or something and that’s just crazy in 1982 when I offered to die for the Equal Rights Amendment. People say to me all the time, well how do you feel that it failed, you know? And I just break out laughing and tell them it didn’t fail, it made me, me. Do you know what I’ve done with my life since that movement? Do you know the righteousness that I live with now knowing that no one can ever as long as I live, and I’ll be 76 in a couple of weeks, no one can question the depth of my zeal. No one can think I’m just a party person showing up a good time at the corner. I stood with the hotel workers here a number of years ago and the city council had voted no on protecting the workers for wage theft and sexual assault and protecting workers’ hours. So the council voted no twice. The group I was working with took it to the people and we gathered 7,000/8,000 signatures, put it on the ballot and the people took care of it and voted yes. One of the things I am most proud of in my life is that I’m one of the signatories on that law, it’s named Claudia’s law after Claudia Sanchez who had fallen during working her second shift in the kitchen washing dishes and the city refused to pay her hospital bills. So I’m really privileged to have known the Sanchez family and stood with them in the picket line for two years on Ocean Boulevard. So that is one of the things I’ve done recently. I’m always kicking butt and getting in trouble, but I don’t know it’s just how my life turned out. 

Williams: Well, that’s wonderful. I wanted to first ask you about Alice Paul. Do you consider that part of your life’s work to continue the work of Alice Paul or is it something different?

Nicholson: It’s nothing different. It’s nothing different. I refer to the life of Alice Paul constantly hourly, daily, there’s a woman in Florida who is alive today. Very well known, she’s a lot older than I am. She knew Alice when she was on the Board of Directors for a while at the Sewall-Belmont [Museum] and she saw that I had posted on Facebook that Alice Paul was my mentor. Oh, [dog walks behind Zoe] and there’s my dog, my dog’s name is Dorothy Day named after the great Catholic Dorothy Day who housed the poor and I call her Dottie for short. My cat, who may make an appearance, is Doris Stevens whom you may know worked with Alice Paul. 

So Sonia wrote me, Sonia Fuentes is her name, and she wrote to me and said you may not call Alice Paul your mentor because she’s dead and you didn’t know her. And I gotta tell you something when somebody tells me I can’t do something that I want to do, uh, nothing will stop me and so I set off on this journey to find every single interesting story that nobody knew. 

After Alice died July 9, 1977, there were many people who knew her, and I knew many of the people who knew her when I started studying her life. I did something that just broke it open. I called my living mentor, Jacqui Cebellos in Arizona, and I said will you tell me every single person you know that knew Alice. Because I have all their phone numbers, I will call them all. There’s a really interesting photo taken by Ivy Bottini of the Statue of Liberty and below is a 100-foot banner, maybe more, saying, “Women of the World Unite” and Jacqui is one of the people that smuggled that banner onto the Statue of Liberty so I seem to collect people like that. 

But what’s really fascinating is, I called probably eight women who knew her, and they told me things nobody else had any idea. I asked them specifically I want to know who she was, what she was like, did she laugh? What did she think was funny? Was she sickly? Was she frail? Was she small even though she played all kinds of sports?

I started immersive reading probably when I was 18. Immersive reading occurs in the case of choosing an author and reading every single thing they wrote in the order they wrote it which I did with Herman Hess. And what happens is you get a feel for their evolution as a writer, their evolution of experience and I did the same thing with Elie Wiesel. You know if you read everything that Elie wrote you will understand his Judaism, you understand his evolution, you understand something about World War II that you would not learn if you just read Night and Fog.

Obviously, I’m pretty serious about books. In 1976 I built and opened a bookstore. So, I started reading newspapers and at this moment I have close to 1,700 newspaper clippings of Alice Paul and they are all in order and searchable and as I do my research now I’m working on my fifth, and I hope, final book because it’s exhausting. So anyway, as I tried to do research, I was denied access everywhere I wanted to go. My degrees are in religion, my bachelor’s degree is in Roman Catholic theology and my graduate degree is in world religions and ethics and I am currently not a student or a teacher even though I’ve been both, but I would want something and I would get just so far with the journals and everything online. I would be denied access and then I did something really interesting. I applied for a grant, a $3,000 grant for two-week access to the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. Geez Louise, I got a letter back, a form letter stating very clearly that I was not a student or a teacher and that I didn’t qualify. It was a form letter, I still have it of course, and on the bottom was something extraordinary so I’m not gonna forget to put a pin in that.

Back to my research, I collect essays, I collect newspaper articles, I collect memorabilia, I have buttons. I have a fundraising letter that Alice wrote when she wanted to close out the debt that they had from getting the vote in 1920. I have the letter framed on my wall because nobody was a fundraiser as good as Alice Paul. Nobody could say no to her.

So, I read this biography and it turns out this essay is one of my top five favorite essays on Alice Paul because what she does, the author, and I’ll tell you in a second what the author does, is she goes and besmirches Alice. It’s called “The Biography I Could Not Write.” It’s about everything she doesn’t like about Alice and it’s everything I love about Alice. What a cutthroat she was, she was not a simple lovely girl from New Jersey, she was a bitch, a no-nonsense person, she could deliver a teacher’s eyeball like nobody you know. And I adore every bit of that. So I’m reading this and I’m just beside myself, she has actually written the journal of all the things I like most about her. At the very last page, the author says how there are people who are alive today who are walking in her footsteps. And she lists the fasters, of which I am one, and I can’t even tell you what that meant to me. I wrote to her and said thank you–you did write about her faults whether you like it or not; and I am that person you spoke of on that last page, and she wrote me back. And of course, her name is the great Susan Ware who was the librarian at the Schlesinger Library at the time and thus my relationship, my friendship, with her began.

As I tried to get into the Library of Congress, I tried to get into the Belmont. I tried to get access to API [Alice Paul Institute] every place I wanted to go, every document I wanted, everything I needed about her I had to know. I played this game with these people, the gatekeepers, and I would say I’m going to tell you a story about Alice Paul you’ve never heard before and you have and you have no idea of and I will prove to you that I know more about her than anybody alive. And it got me in astonishing places, I mean I have private access to a librarian at the Library of Congress. I have private access to a Ph.D. student from San Diego who will get me any article I want. I mean it’s like a game now, how fast she can get this journal article to me. How fast can she get me on Alexander Street with something I want. And she waits and then we laugh, you know I am one of these secret people. And then of course I meet the fabulous Paige Harrington. I met her because the Sewall-Belmont was being threatened with lack of funds. And I know the whole backstory and that I’ll get to, but I want to go back to the letter that I got from the Schlesinger denying my application for a grant with a little note by none other than Susan Ware herself who is such a wonderful author. I have all her books of course and she says Zoe, I’m sorry that you don’t qualify for this grant but I want you to know that you should collect the money to get there because she’s at the library and will see to it that I have full access to anything I want. But we cannot give you a grant according to the rules. So, I have all these wonderful backdoor fascinating things. 

I will tell you how I got the Library of Congress, almost nobody understands what she did from August 21, 1920, until July 9, 1977. I mean it’s like there are 12 books on Alice Paul every one, but one throws her off the bus on August 18, 1920. It’s like she vaporizes, and they have no idea what she did. She helped write Title IX, she helped Eleanor Roosevelt write the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, she worked at the League of Nations in Geneva, she got a house on Echo Lake in Vermont, driving distance. (She drove a Chevy by the way, not a Ford; people think she drove a Ford, Henry Ford was associated with the Nazi’s, she drove a Chevy). Anyway, she rented a two-story house in Vermont on Echo Lake so she could drive to the temporary headquarters of the United Nations. Now what happened was the United Nations had broken ground on Manhattan where you could see it today, it is there today, but that took years to build and so in the interim, the United Nations rented the Sperry Gyroscope Corporations on Lake Success. So, she lived in this nearby two story house that almost nobody knows.  

The Treasurer of the World Woman’s Party, which was Alice’s party, lived in Pasadena, California and she had gone to the Vermont house to visit Alice, but they were actually doing bookkeeping. The treasurer went out there, I’m guessing by train, I don’t know for sure, and she was up on the second floor and the secretary fell down the stairs and died in Alice’s front room. Now not only did the chief librarian at LOC [Library of Congress] not know that but she didn’t know the pictures of the Vermont house were in her collection because I found them in the catalog, and she personally went off-site to where that box was and put on her gloves and got out those photos and sent them to me. 

Williams: That’s amazing! 

Nicholson: I feel I can tell anybody, even your mom, a story about Alice that they can’t imagine and one of my most wicked favorite ones, it’s just horrifying, but it’s such a window into who I am. As you probably know Inez Milholland went on that final tour across America to work for the vote. This wonderful, fabulous woman and her sister and she went by train, I can picture the map, and she stops in Los Angeles and at the podium right here on Wilshire Boulevard, Inez faints, or so it is said, and she suffers from anemia. She goes into Good Samaritan Hospital and she’s there actually for over a month. She faints on November 25th,1916, and she is there for a month, and she passed away before Thanksgiving. This was a time before blood typing, and they did a blood transfusion because she was anemic. We have no idea what kind of blood she had or was given. So her pernicious anemia is how she died.

Vida, her sister, calls Alice and says, you know Inez has passed. And Alice says, now I’m gonna laugh and it’ll last forever because it’s on your recorded tape, but I’m kind of happy to share it. I mean seriously people; this woman is just beyond belief. She says to Vida whose sister has just died; she says to know we have all these speaking engagements coming up in Arizona. She needs to go to Phoenix, she needs to go to Tucson, if you just could maybe prop her up by the window in a train you know where and you could be next to her waving to everybody. I mean what kind of wicked horrible person says that? The kind of person that sets my life on fire. So you know, she is my everything.

The more I read about her I just can’t believe the things I find out about her and what Maude Younger says about her, what Elsie Hill says about her, and you may not know that and I, right now, we are knee-deep in a process that is so romantic to me. A woman whose name is Amelia Fry, who was a student at Berkeley, wanted to interview Alice so she went to the Belmont at 144 Constitution Avenue when it had a front door and a side door, that now is the front door. Please remember to ask me all about what happened to the Sewall because I was part of that story. Amelia gets a hold of Alice and says, “I would like to interview you now,” it is five years before she died which means she is 87 years old. Amelia asks her a second time and Alice says “No, I won’t do that.” So, Amelia does the most brilliant thing, she goes to the side stairs, sat down and just sat there and Alice came to the door, she lived there sometimes, and other times there were two senior homes that she lived in. Alice says, “what are you doing here?” And she says “well, I’ve decided I’m going on a hunger strike until you say yes.” And Alice says, and I should be calling her Miss Paul, so Miss Paul says, “Get in here, come in here.” So begins these eight hours of live tape that you can listen to on the API website. 

Years ago, I became friends with a man at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley and I told him the exact same thing I told you. I said, “I’ll tell you a story about Alice you’ve never heard before if you give me access to those tapes” and he did actually make copies for me, and I have them here on CDs. I was listening to Alice in my car for hours and hours. I’ve listened to them 4,5,6 times and they’re 8 hours of Alice talking in the front room where the fireplace was. And Alice is doing exactly what you and I are doing now. I mean, you just gotta laugh because she’s so crotchety, I mean she’s 87, and she says “I’m sorry, but I have to stop now because the plumber is coming, the plumber should be here by now I  don’t know where the plumber is but oh wait I think that’s the plumber I’ll be back and she disappears or she’ll say we need to stop for tea. And Amelia says, “what would you like me to call you?” because Alice had four law degrees and a Ph.D. for God’s sake. And she says, “Well, I think you should call me Miss Paul” so for the duration of their relationship she called her Miss Paul.

I think some of the most moving pieces I have read about Miss Paul are by Amelia. I got this book, this book is my Bible, I live on this book [holding up Alice Paul: Claiming Power by J. D. Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry], I have never found a mistake in this book which I cannot say about the rest of them. Amelia’s work was all heart. Amelia loved her and was worried about her when the weather was cold in the Ridgefield Cottage, she was concerned about her in Echo Lake in Vermont, I mean she loved this woman. You will find there are places where you just can’t even believe how people talk about her, about her violet eyes, how could they say no to her? 

Because I read the good, the bad, the ugly, I read newspapers that hated her and then when I just get fed up I go read the Detroit News or I read the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Inquirer actually was reporting on, you know, Quaker life and her family’s life and it’s beautiful work.

Ok, I am curious to know before I launch into any decade you want. I keep writing notes about things I don’t want to forget. One of the things I like about this is we are not bogged down by chronology. You think about the high points and the low points and the journey to go to the high of the low and the height of the low. And the journey to go to the high of the low. You don’t actually think chronologically. I think that’s one of the reasons why academic books don’t have enough heart for me. Because they are perfection in their chronology. That’s why the book I am currently working on is 40 teas with Alice. They are sort of not really in chronology, a little bit, but not like it’s a deal. It’s a scrapbook of my life with Alice. It’s a shame because I was old enough to know her. I am curious to know what you have told me so far.

Geneva Williams: It’s kinda surreal because my mom has been so interested in learning about Alice Pauls’ work. My mom and I and my sister took a trip to D.C. and rented a car and went to Alice Paul’s house, Paulsdale. My mom spent time working in the archives and she was so happy there. It is so interesting because I am able to remember a lot more now that I am older, and my mom was deeply researching Alice Paul. I’m also passionate about oral interviews. It’s something I really enjoy being a part of and viewing and watching. It’s super fun for me. One of my pastimes is hearing passionate people talk about their life’s work and what they are passionate about. Is there anything you want to bring up that you wrote down so far that you want to speak to?

Zoe Nicholson: [holding up a picture of Alice Paul sitting down with an ERA blanket on her lap] Ok, lots of things. This is a picture that I look at, that I stare at, it’s my favorite picture. It is January 11, 1977. Do you know the story of this picture? 

Geneva Williams; No, I don’t.

Zoe Nicholson: Ok. Alice Paul died penniless because her nephew Donald took all her money. Sold the car, sold the house. The only possibility she had was a subsidized retirement home, it was really grim and horrible. I guess I’m going to go through the whole story. So, this queen of activism…the mother of everything I believe in, was in a substandard senior home. There was a full page spread in the New York Times, headline “Mother of the ERA Found Penniless in Substandard Senior Housing.” I live in a beautiful senior housing. I live in subsidized housing; activists make no money. We’re not supposed to! So back to the headline, I knew about the headline, I was performing a 90-minute journey to my love for Alice It is not a reenactment, I would never want to see a reenactment of Alice that would make me crazy. And I write something about Alice Paul on Goodreads. Don’t remember what it was…I was going on about how much I loved a book about Alice. This person writes a comment on my comment, and she says, “I think you want to talk to my parents.” And she introduces me through the internet to Alice Muller. Do you know who Alice Muller is? 

Williams: No, I tried to do some research on her before the interview, but I couldn’t find anything.

Nicholson: I have it all! Her granddaughter is probably your age and she told her dad, who contacted me. Here’s what happened. It’s just so magical. Especially, I should just have a mirror here…this is my life. So, the Muller’s get a hold of me and send me this amazing set of papers. When Nazism was on the rise Alice hosted the Mullers at her home in Geneva. I thought she had hidden them, but the Mullers corrected me and said no they were guests in her home. They were seeking passage to the U.S. Alice arranged passage for them to America to buy a chicken farm. What they sent me included this letter that Alice Paul wrote to Mrs. Muller.  Alice wrote, “I hope you are enjoying life on the farm; I understand you have 24 new chicks.” It’s a letter from Alice Paul about how the chicks are on the Muller chicken farm.

This is why I’m creating my scrapbook. These are the things I want to give to perpetuity. Maybe you give to somebody, maybe you, who’s going to crack their heart open and just fall madly in love with this untold story of who this woman was. So, the Mullers read this headline, “Mother of Equal Rights Amendment Found Penniless” and they get in the car at the chicken farm and they pick her up and they take her to live in a Quaker retirement home on the very land of William Penn who is a relative of Alice’s. And it’s a Quaker home, the Greenleaf Senior Home.

This photo is something that happened on her 92^nd birthday.  Strange fact that Alice would throw big events every year on January 10th. The first suffragists walked out on January 10th. She had these colossal events that she insists on doing January 10th and it’s not because it’s the inauguration at the time presidents were inaugurated in March so she, I feel that she did it to take the key light off of her always on her birthday. She did not want the key light on her birthday. 1918, she wanted to go get arrested on her birthday.  That is what she did.

On January 10, 1977, she hears from the nurses that the First Lady’s going to call her tomorrow to wish her a happy birthday. Mrs. Ford had an ERA office in the White House until it got too hot for her husband and she had to move it out. When they tell Alice that Mrs. Ford is going to call, she insists that they take her to the phone in the hallway to make sure that she can reach it from her wheelchair.  Is the cord going to be long enough.  So, they wheel her to the phone and by golly it is. 

Knowing when the call is going to happen, the nurses fix her hair.  (I actually have a picture of the nurses fixing her hair.) Alice gets her lipstick on, and this is a picture [holding up a picture of Miss Paul in a wheelchair] of Alice Paul talking to Betty Ford. Betty Ford is calling Alice to say happy birthday Alice! Now, Alice is 92, and she says, “well thank you very much Mrs. Ford but that really isn’t my interest. I want to talk to you about your husband and the Equal Rights Amendment now. Is there any possibility that you can talk to your husband and get the Equal Rights Amendment passed right now while he’s in the White House?” And Betty says to her, “you know Alice, nothing would make me happier, but the fact of the matter is he’s only in office for another 10 days so I really think that there’s not too much he can do right now” and she says, “well you know you can try.” So that was the end of Gerry Ford’s stint in the White House.

That is why the picture is blurry and it’s so beloved. I actually have a color polaroid of this but this one as you can see is in black and white. One of my dreams is, I actually know how to quilt, one of my dreams is, to make myself a quilt like that.

Imagine that the Mullers, who came from Eastern Europe during the rise of Nazism, got her to Greenleaf Retirement Home. A person whose name is Alta Gerry, was going through that neighborhood and had heard that Alice was there. Alta Gerry is the founder of Shameless Hussy Press which was a wonderful lesbian press in the 70s and she heard Alice was there and wanted to go see her. So, Alta stopped by, took photographs and said, well how do you keep yourself busy? This is a great article I have by Alta. I can send it to you if you remember to write me. I will send it to you, I have the whole article and Alice says “well you know I write letters every day I write letters every day, to the House of Representatives, to my senators, I write every day and for some reason they’re not writing me back. I write them about the Equal Rights Amendment, and you have to know about the deadline. Alta stopped at the nurse’s station and says, “You know Miss Paul knows all these people in Congress. She’s writing them and nobody has written her back.” And the administrator says, “Oh, Alice writes letters every day like five or more, but we don’t actually mail them. We just thought she was making stuff up and writing because she was lonely.” So, Alta hired a secretary for the last year of Alice’s life, who went there every workday. And Alice dictated the letters, and the secretary wrote them down and mailed them herself. And Alice started getting letters from members of Congress. And that’s all because of a visitor that had to dispel the notion that she was just a doddering old fool writing ghost letters to nobody. For God’s sake. 

So you know, that is my life, someone named Serene writing to me and saying I would like to 

upscale your Wikipedia page, would that be ok? These things happen, people show up and they make something happen. Yeah, and they have no idea that you’re longing for it, and you don’t know how to get it. And I’m just an old lady sitting in a senior housing place with a dog named Dottie and a cat named Doris. And then the world reaches through and it’s really phenomenal. And here I am talking to somebody named Geneva Alice. Wait, what?!

You know, your mom offered to fly me [to Paulsdale] to come and perform “Tea with Alice and Me.” I’m very well. I’m a Clydesdale and I wish I could, but I have a rescue dog that I can’t leave. I have a life at this moment that I can’t leave but I hope about possibly in the future because I’ve never been to Paulsdale. I’ve never been to her home. I have never seen where those sheep grazed. I’ve never seen where she did push-ups on the front lawn. I know that the roll top desk is there which was just to be Anthony’s death before hers that Alva Belmont paid for, and I know that Paulsdale is now museum fied.

Which leads me to want to tell you about my miraculous love affair with the Belmont and how it all happened there, and what happened to me there, but I am going to back up just a little bit because I think it’s important here. There is a spiritual practice in Roman Catholicism which has to do with in-depth reading. It’s actually a form of meditation, I can’t think of the name right now, it’s a Latin two-word term and it means immersion into literature. 

I decided, I think when I was 20, that I would read every single thing that was published in English that was written by, for or about Mahatma Gandhi and it took me probably four and a half/five years, mostly because there wasn’t that much at the time, there’s much much more now, but it was when he was barely dead. He died eight months before I was born to the day, January 28, 1948. There wasn’t that much and many of the things in India that were very personal and many of them were deeply pejorative. I mean Gandhi was not a popular person with much of India. I read it all because that’s where all the juicy stuff is. You gotta read it all or why bother we’re talking about you know in sickness and in health till death do us part, I want to know everything. I wanted to know that he slept between two naked girls, I wanted to know everything about him and in that course, one of the interesting questions to ask yourself is “where did that person learn that? How did they know that? How did he go back to India and get the women, the older women to sit with a sign now?” You have to understand this is 1947/1946, this is when the quit India campaign to get Britain to just walk as Gandhi said, walk out of India, and how are you gonna get these old women who have never spoken out to be a part of this movement, this magical movement, and hold up a sign sitting outside a store saying FREE India. Where do you learn that? 

Well, he learned it from Emmeline Pankhurst of course. He was studying in Great Britain at the very time that Alice was there and if you read a fabulous book called Gandhi in London, he was in Albert Hall the night that Emmeline decided she had gotten fed up trying to get the vote. And it was going too damn slow, and she was going to cross that bridge into violence. It was July 16th and this barrister named Mohandas Gandhi was studying the law. One of the ways he found the suffragettes was, he obviously didn’t eat beef, he was Hindu, and so he joined the vegetarian society. In the vegetarian society was Annie Besant and a bunch of spiritual seekers and very very wealthy mystics. And that was how he fell upon the Pankhursts. And he was interested in watching how they were affecting the British government without committing violence. And he wrote about it extensively in his newsletter called The Phoenix. 

So on that night in July when Mrs. Pankhurst said we’re just gonna start setting buildings on fire, we don’t care anymore who’s in there, we’re just gonna do it we’re gonna get this done we’ve broken all the windows at Harrods. They didn’t break every window, sparing Selfridges, because Harry Selfridge let them meet in his tearoom at palm court. It is still there if you go to London, go to palm court, and see the place where Mrs. Pankhurst held her meetings. They had done all they possibly could. I know a lot about the British movement and the night that she said, we’re going to cross that, we’re gonna jump the shark here and we’re gonna move on to violence. 

Two people got up and never went back. Those two people are Alice Paul and Mohandas Gandhi. The same meeting that they walked out of and that was where I thought who is this person I need to know this person I need to know who this is I need to know everything about her was my slip and fall into what turned out to be 50 years of you know chasing Alice Stokes Paul and it’s been just unbelievable. 

In December 1981, Sonia Johnson was on the cover of Ms. Magazine. She had written a book called From Housewife to Heretic and she was on a book tour with that book and she was going to come through my bookstore, she was on the cover of Ms., she had been famously excommunicated from the Mormon church because of her loyalty to the Equal Rights Amendment. Now, when you get excommunicated from the Mormon Church it’s a lot different than getting excommunicated from the Catholics or Lutherans or anybody else because for the Mormons it’s in perpetuity. You won’t meet any of the future wives, you won’t meet your children and then hereafter you will not be reunited with your biological family you will be cut off and shunned in this life. So, she was coming to the Magic Speller, my bookstore, and on a book tour. My girlfriend, we couldn’t marry then, queers couldn’t marry then, and we went to LAX to pick her up. There was instant inexplicable recognition so I said to Sonia, she was only there for like three days as she had to move on to another book signing thing, I said whatever you want to do, whatever it is, I don’t care what it is, you call me you tell me what we’re going to do with the deadline next summer, June 30th 1982 and the answer is yes. You just call me you, tell me what to do, where to be, the answer is yes, I don’t care what it is and she said okay she called me in April of 1982 and she said, “Zoe it’s going to be a fast.” I said great and I hung up the phone.

Williams: I wanted to ask you about your book. I read it and the thing I found really interesting was how you talked about your fast as a spiritual experience and how it was just as much a spiritual protest as it was political. I was wondering if you can expand on the importance of spiritual protest as a social justice, activism and what that kind of means for you.

Nicholson: If people say hunger strike, my head explodes, I’ve never done a hunger strike. Wow, I’m really delighted that you understand. I was probably the most pious child on the face of the earth, I was obsessed particularly with female saints and with Mother Mary, a Lady of Guadalupe, Lady of Lourdes, Lady of Fatima, Our Lady in Bosnia, that was my life. And I really believed as a girl as I’m playing with my Madame Alexander dolls and using poker chips as Eucharists. With my dolls I would put on mass in the basement where all my dolls were, fabulous basement. We would play holy communion and I would say mass and it would be in Latin. And I really believed that by the time I was old enough I would be able to receive Holy Orders. 

When John the 23rd became Pope, I actually believed that he was going to go through the Vatican II documents, expand the church to allow women to take Holy Orders and I have as of this moment received five of the seven sacraments.

So when it became apparent in 1969 that John the 23rd passed over and Paul took over and he said let us get back to the business of the church which meant to me was that the possibility of matriarchal gathering and women actually be able to practice transubstantiation, which was why I breathed, I had to leave and I left at 22. 

I left there’s a lot to that story, a lot more to that story but I became a Buddhist, a Tibetan Buddhist, and I have taken solemn vows I’ve taken vows of celibacy and given my life to Tibetan Buddhism, but my practice is called Engaged Buddhism which means for the most part my robes are in the closet. I don’t wear them anymore. The fact that I have one this color right now (wearing maroon) I thought was coincidental maybe not. An Engaged Buddhist believes that it’s all in what you do. As Emmeline Pankhurst said it’s deeds not words. And that’s a lot of what Gandhi was about and it’s a lot of what Alice was about. So, what happened is when I was on that yellow corded phone, by the way you can’t make this up, and I said of course it’s a fast it’ll be there. 

So, there I go. I was the co-chair of the local NOW chapter and the chair of the local NOW chapter, her name is Dina, and she’s very much alive. She lives in Arizona. We flew there and we got to Kumler United Methodist Church, which is, you know a Christian Church, big. We were going to sleep in the Sunday school rooms and we prayed every night. That very first night, we went around the room, there were seven of us, and talked about why we were there. Each one of us was on a spiritual quest. Each one of us, be it Buddhism, be Christianity, or even you know studying the Divine Mother. Sonia didn’t even know she was queer yet.  Sr. Maureen Fiedler, Roman Catholic, who was for many years President of Catholics Act for the ERA, which is still in existence, and of course now there’s Catholics for Choice, I know the president of that group too. Marianne Bell, Quaker. Shirley Wallace, Mormon, was friends with Sonia and then there was another Mary (Barnes) who was Mormon. There were two Quakers there, MaryAnne Beall being one of them. Mary Wood was there for a while and then circumstances befell her that she couldn’t continue. 

But the very act of fasting, which you know we could spend an hour on, is an act of prayer. The provenance through the Old Testament, the providence of Moses wandering in the desert, the provenance of abstaining from turning your body into a food processor. If you don’t eat for 15 days the hunger will pass, the pain will pass, the headaches will pass, and you will find an ecstasy that exists at 15 or more days of not being a food processor and it is in fact taking food in whatever it is good, bad, and indifferent. I’m not judging the food itself at all, I’m just saying that there is a certain calm, a peace that is inexplicable. I didn’t really have words for it until I met one of the most holy evolved people in my life when Dick Gregory came to fast with us. 

I was fortunate that my chair was the last. If you were facing us. My chair was the last on the left so what they did is they put a chair next to me and I had the fantastic honor of having, his friends called him Greg, Greg was sitting next to me. Now Greg had just flown in from Ireland where Bobby Sands and the Irish protesters were fasting in prison and what Greg did was, if he knew of a fast going on anywhere on earth, he would fly to them. When he got to Springfield he brought a doctor with him, a woman and he said stop drinking the goddamn Perrier, it’s got sodium in it, it’s going to kill you. Stop drinking whatever the hell you’re drinking, and I will buy you spring water for the duration. And he left the doctor with us for the duration. And Greg stayed with us for I think five solid days and I got to sit next to him and because of what an aspirant I was and am. You know it’s probably all we talked about was how to use fasting as a spiritual journey, people you know, people think that they can do it you know I’ll just fast on Saturdays. You know there’s this new fad called intermittent fasting. Oh, please people, please don’t say that around me. 

Fasting is a journey beyond acid, it’s beyond mescaline, it’s beyond. There’s only one reason Jesus went out into the desert and fasted for 40 days because when everything is quiet and you actually listen, the divine can break through the mishigas of our lives. It’s funny, one of my tattoos here says 10-4. 10-4 is a trucker’s term, that means over and out, and that is my mantra, in meditation, to say, okay God I’m listening and that is the one way to stop the internal dialogue is fasting there are many ways but fasting is one of them and it is one that’s gotten a lot of press in scripture of course, don’t misunderstand, it’s not really 40 days 40 is a metaphor it means long time the whole Bible old and new and far more interesting than it is literal but yes all of us were on spiritual journeys. And if you read the press releases as they go on every day, we were very clear that all of us were part of our daily conversation. It’s who we were as a group we were seeking to merge with divine light. You’re a very interesting person that gets me to talk about all this. You’re not going to leave me for the rest of my life, I don’t know how long you’re going to live, good luck with that, but you’re going to stay part of my life now forever.

To merge with the divine light is just what everybody’s trying to do. You know, the block I live on is probably the most dangerous block in all of Long Beach and I’m not making that up. We are lined with people who have no address which makes me just so sad, and they are lost. The whole reason is being lost in fentanyl, being lost in alcoholism, being lost in just trying to escape pain. If all you do is seek to escape, you’ve missed the whole the other side you escape the hardness, the literal, the insistence, the demand, the regimen, the harshness, the danger, the cutting, the bleeding, you escape all that but then the point is to go and embrace. The point is to actually be in touch with the spirit that cannot be pierced, that does not bleed and the spirit to be heard and the spirit to be alive. 

And you know Greg taught us all about what was going to happen, we were going to go blind which I started going blind you read that, you know that. We were starting to have the general symptoms of the first 10 days of not eating, it’s very grim, but on the other side that’s where he would go. I will tell you without too much. I’m not gonna press hard and make five copies. I have had the opportunity to speak to people who are spiritually fasting, if I can get to them, one of the first things I say is, get to day 11 because day 11 everything gets quiet and uh you know don’t fuck it up. Because there’s something really extraordinary that’s happening and when we use it as a political lever, oh all hell breaks loose, because everybody thinks that you’re going to drop dead, that you’re insane, that you’re bringing shame on the issue, that you’re going to kill yourself and it’s going to fall on us, and my God, what’s wrong with these people? They’re insane. 

This one guy, I’ll never forget, he was in the House of Representatives in Springfield, Illinois and he demanded an emergency meeting, I don’t know, like day 12 or something. So, we’re all in this emergency meeting at the Ramada Inn and he’s at the end of the table, of course he’s standing, because we’re all women and we’re just gonna sit here and let you blather on and so he starts blathering on that he’s a Catholic and he knows what fasting can do. He is positive a hunger strike is evil and you’re wrong, and you must stop immediately because my immortal soul. This guy’s talking about his immortal soul, telling me “I must not let you die.” And I’m thinking, yeah again that’s exactly what you’re supposed to do, you’re supposed to go in there and vote for the ERA, that’s exactly why we’re doing this, yes go in there vote for the ERA so your immortal soul doesn’t have to bear the sin of us dying. I think that’s a really good idea. I did not say any of that out loud, but when you’re fasting other people can’t bear it, they can’t bear the shame, the embarrassment. 

Women came up and said one of two things to us. They’d say, “I can’t eat because of you, I’m freaked out, I feel guilty. I look at a plate of food, I can’t eat it, I don’t know what to do. And then there were these other women who came up with “I can’t stop eating, my God, you make me hungry, please eat something, you’re making me hungry. I’m eating enough for two or three people now and you know it’s mayhem.” Because these bodies want the noise, these bodies are afraid of silence. These bodies are bumper cars, we’re like bumper cars and when you sit in silence, when you master sitting in silence it’s a whole different world. It’s you know there’s something else going on, and you know the poor and addicted and the people who are just in a world of pain all the time, they’re just trying to get out of that world. I’ve been in Al-Anon for 52 years now. I said Al-Anon, not AA, there is a world of difference.

So it’s a spiritual journey and the great Mahatma knew that. When I began my spiritual external spiritual dive into eastern religions obviously you can tell I don’t do anything halfway. My girlfriend used to call me Zoe “No Half Measures” Nicholson. I had done my research and Richard Attenborough had made sure that the movie Gandhi was factual. There’s actually a book with the pictures of the reality and the pictures of the movie and he tried to make them exactly right and every word that he has Gandhi saying is exact and quoted so I thought it would be interesting, I wanted to see what would happen if I watched the movie Gandhi 108 times consecutively. 

Now I chose 108 because it’s a holy number, it’s the number of beads a mala strand, it’s the number of beads on a rosary–108’s a spiritual number. So I watched the movie Gandhi a hundred and eight nights consecutively. It’s interesting, Gandhi’s longest fast was 21 days and he still had lemon in it. However, the whole country went bananas. As [Jawaharlal] Nehru said, “I fast nobody cares, you fast and the whole country stops.” And that is the whole purpose of a political fast, it has to be done in public. One of the people I advised when they fasted is Dan Choi, Lieutenant Dan Choi, who was removed from the United States army with a dishonorable discharge that was corrected eventually after a group of activists had harassed Obama into repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” by publicly yelling at him. You can look it up in the paper, you’ll find my name. I actually think it might be on my wiki page. 

Williams: It is on the wiki page.

Nicholson: I was Dan’s consultant while he was fasting and people went crazy. The two men who were paying for his hotel room at like day five, said to him, “If you don’t stop, you know we’re not gonna pay for the hotel anymore.” That’s exactly what you want, that is the outcome you want. You want everyone around you and everyone around Gandhi and everyone, in the movie where you know the Pakistani guy comes up and throws the nan, the bread on his chest and says, “eat, you must eat. I don’t want your death on my soul.” 

That is exactly right because a fasting person is vibrating at a different frequency. Their whole, well mystics will call it an aura, Catholics would call it a soul I mean we all have names for it but the vibratory field you can get an airplane and know you’re sitting next to an asshole before they open their mouth you can feel it or you’re sitting next to somebody very kind and you can feel you can rest, you’re okay but it’s not this is not like mystery shit. If you really want to know who you are and what your vibration is actually like and what your heart is, you know fasting is a surefire way to get there. So that was why it was a spiritual journey.

Williams: if you don’t mind me asking, I know you got a lot of opposition about from the general public, and people came up to you and said, 

Nicholson: “Phyllis oh Phyllis” 

Williams: So I was curious to hear was there internal opposition you all faced from other feminists who were also working for the ERA or did you not face a whole lot of opposition? 

Nicholson: We fasted for 37 days. I’m gonna talk about the people, who had the guy who had seven knives with our names carved in them, we can talk about a guy putting a cigar

out on my right arm. We dressed in white, people stepping on her shoes, eating food in front of us, dropping pizzas on us until we actually had a guard standing around us. But you asked the interesting question, I like your question better. I would say oh yes. 

Eleanor Smeal was less than happy. NOW was besides themselves, they thought we were going to bring bad press down, they didn’t know the level of spirituality each one of us was into. That was really not a public thing; we didn’t use it as a calling card. Sr. Maureen had a Catholic background, Sonia had just been excommunicated in the church and so she was published on the subject but as far as all seven of us coming from that background and that was our unifying threading factor between us that was not public.

However, we were all feminists, and we all were there for the ERA. We were all there for one simple reason to rip gender out of the Constitution. White men wrote it 1787. It was for white men that’s what it was for, it protected their cattle, their chickens and the people that bore their children, they owned it all, they built a fence, it’s still the case. And we were there to say all the powers, all the gifts, all the rights, all the privileges, we’re gonna rip gender out of this. NOW thought we’d gone too far. And the mayor of Chicago at the time was a woman, Mayor Jane Byrne, she was an interesting woman. She lived in Cabrini housing which was housing for the poor while she was mayor she literally moved in with the poor into her apartment in Cabrini Green, the projects in Chicago. I admired her greatly. I can’t tell you exactly what day it was because I don’t have the whole book in my head but there came a time, I would say 28, 29, 30 days in and NOW pulled their people. They pulled everybody and left us there with only the antis. It was terrifying. I have a lot of opinions about it.

They went up to Chicago and they marched down Michigan Avenue with mayor Jane Byrne and Susan Catania who was the representative of the ERA in the Illinois legislature in Springfield. I mean they had a parade and a march on Michigan Avenue.

Let’s go back to June of 82. And NOW was in that march, which left us seven weak going blind, sick in wheelchairs. Truly, two of us were in wheelchairs with Phyllis and there was Phyllis herself, the founding president of the Eagles of America. Ladies in red blazers did not want the ERA because living for the patriarchy was a lot easier job. I mean the pay was good and the house was nice, and they could all have lunch and do whatever they wanted to do and go shopping wherever they shopped at worse and get their stuff for their kids and kids to be in school all day and they could see one another and enjoy their neighborhoods. I mean the patriarchy, the whole thing’s a scam! 

If we need any reference, please, look at Usha Vance. I mean, who is this woman who goes to Yale, gets a degree, practices law, gives it all up to have kids and lives with the man who says that women are worthless if they don’t have children? What world do we live in and do not tell me we don’t need the Equal Rights Amendment! Any way yeah, I kind of took a ride on the reading railroad there didn’t I. Anyway, it just drives me crazy that what we really want to do is stop the goddamn controversy in the Olympics about who’s a woman and who’s not.

I just want to crawl through the TV and strangle something anyway, but you can understand

why the world is terrified if we take gender out of the Constitution because they’ll have to pay us! So Smeal and NOW left all the women’s organizations bailed out, we were the only ones there and there we were with you know 200 of Eagle Forum and Phyllis [Schlafly] and there were roses on the voters’ desks to designate that they were with the Eagle Forum. And there we were just sitting ducks waiting for somebody to kill us and then they held the vote on day 36 so there was no reason to fast anymore.

Williams: When I was reading your book one thing, I thought was really interesting was the role of organized religion that supported the seven of you during the fast. One thing for me that I personally pride myself on is, I really appreciate diversity of thought and so I thought it was really miraculous that seven women who came from numerous different religious backgrounds were able to come together and work towards one social justice-oriented goal. Another thing I thought was super interesting was that you did have some support from organized religion, for instance you were able to stay in a church and I was wondering if you expected to have any support from organized religion during your fast and were there any perceived benefits from having connections to organized religion?

Nicholson: By that time I was what I was 28 I had left. I was a Buddhist. I had left. Sonia had left. Shirley Wallace had left, Marianne is still a Quaker today, I know her today, Sr. Maureen is still a Roman Catholic nun. No, I didn’t see any support by organized religion at all except for a very leftist group of people called Catholics Act for ERA. And what had happened which was, you know it’d be clear if it was a movie, but it was really murky that Illinois voted on day 36 and they voted no and that was the end of it because Florida was going to vote in a matter of hours and there was no more chance that the ERA was going to pass before the deadline.

So I really want to talk about the deadline. Anyway, organized religion was very upset with us because we were going to threaten the patriarchy and I mean there’s nothing more organized about religion than the patriarchy. I certainly support with all my heart the orthodox women who practice. There’s a group of women right here in the next city over that say the mass in Latin, who believe that they are self-ordained, and they’re women working for ordination. And I think there are some churches, the Universalist Church is open to it certainly, I have actually spoken in temples being invited by female rabbis. 

When I went to USC and got my graduate degree in religion, I shared my classes with rabbinical students so there was a lot of overlap there, but as far as you know what’s going on in the Vatican or the Archbishop of Canterbury these traditions are so fucked up that I can’t even keep a civil tongue about it. I was gifted with chasing the Magdalene, one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever been able to do. I don’t know how much you know about Mary Magdalene.  Her biography changes with the teachings of the Vatican. There are centuries when people believed she was Enlightened. Most of them were martyred as heretics.   

After the crucifixion of Joshua ben David, the male apostles were fearing for their own lives and hid in the Cenacle. The female apostles were attending the body of their beloved.  Eventually the men moved to protect the women and put them on an oarless boat.  Setting it on the Mediterranean, they landed in Southern France, at the shoreline city, Saintes Maries-de-la-Mer. Magdalene, Sarah and Mary ben David were on the boat.  Some people, and I am one of them, who believe that Mary Magdalene and Joshua ben David were married, and Sarah was their daughter.   

I was able to chase the Magdalene. It is a tour book, starting from where she landed.  There is a Church in the city with several relics and statue of Sarah.  She lived in Southern France for 30 years.  You know it’s the magical beautiful mystical truth behind the Da Vinci Code. The rose line that runs through all of France and map to Paris, to the Magdalene cathedral. She is still prominent in the art, hope you see her above the altar at the Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre.  

When you see 5 women in a boat, one with long red hair, you will know who they are.  

There are secret sects around the world who believe Mary Magdalene reached enlightenment living in a cave. I climbed up to that cave myself on my hands and knees.  It took me hours and hours and hours and there’s an easy road and a hard road.  Of course, you know which one I took. And I went up there, yeah, I’m a devotee of Mary Magdalene who is the Mrs. and for centuries people understood that and then of course the papacy needed to burn that down.

Going back to I think that you’re gonna have a front row seat right now this fall watching the patriarchy lose their shit that women are going to step into leadership finally in the United States. If you follow what’s going on every month the UN then publishes a ranking list of countries, and their standing in women in leadership. I look every month. Right now, the United States, ranks number 75 there are 195 countries on the face of the earth. That kind of comes and goes, it’s usually 192-94 and it hasn’t recently gone lower than that. And when I started looking at that we ranked 123. Now we rank 75. That means there are 74 countries that have more women in leadership than we do. I’ve never had an American president for god’s sake. I mean India had one decades ago in the last century.

But we’re gonna watch patriarchal advocates, and that includes women, I mean that’s what Marjorie Taylor Greene is trying to sustain–man she wants that yes! The boys talk to her boy you’re lucky I mean there are that’s what Phyllis [Schlafly] was all about, that’s what the suburbs are all about that is you know what the saint and society is all about in the Roman Catholic Church there is this events in de Paul society where the men collect for the poor and then there is the Saint Ann Society where the women collect for the poor. They are separate, they are disparate but they both are in process of carrying on the patriarchy. As you know that there will be poor, always pathetically struggling, look at the good things you’ve got. And Jesus responds look why you still see me because I will be gone. And at the moment of his death, the purity of his teaching started to degrade until you know the first century when they decided they’d be much more fun to have a corporation and they figured out how to make money. And that’s where they’re at. 

They’re the richest holder of the greatest artworks in the world there’s a great book actually it’s not a bad movie either called Shoes of the Fisherman where this very humble monk becomes Pope through odd circumstances, and he decides that he’s going to sell off all the art and give the proceeds to the poor. I mean I could weep over the thought, weep over the thought. 

So going back a little bit let’s just remember the New York Times story, “Mother of the Equal Rights Amendment found Penniless in Substandard Senior Housing.” I mean there it is.  It’s just shameful how obvious it Is.  When are we going to stop? How can we hold in our hearts that the widows are left with the children and managing the legacy for decades, and not honored. Medgar Evers dead in his driveway or Malcolm X murdered in front of his children. And Coretta Scott King alone in a cancer clinic in Tijuana, how can this be.  Where is Coretta King Blvd?  Who is Betty Shabazz?  The invisibility is suffocating.   

I was at an ice cream social two nights ago.  It was national going-out night or something.  A man I barely know, asked me, aren’t you excited there might be a woman president?” And I said well I really am, yeah I’m really excited. And he said, “Do you know how far we’ve come?” And I said, “Well actually, we’ve completely gone backwards, women are making less right now than we did 40 years ago,” And he was so pissed off he just couldn’t even believe it. He didn’t know what to do with me at that point. He just walked away, Like I spoiled his ice cream. 

Native women, Latin women, Black women, white women are making less today by percentage than they were making 40 years ago, and you want me to jump up and down that we have 25 % of the Senate?  That’s not going to happen. And they expect me to be happy that we might have one more female senator next year. No. No.

I would hope you can imagine, January 10, 1917, (to distract from her birthday, which was the next day) Miss Paul sent the Silent Sentinels to stand at the White House gates and she got a letter from Carrie Catt telling her to stop. Please stop. Carrie Catt, the leader of the largest feminist organization in the world at the time, wanted her to stop.  The National Woman’s Party, Alice’s group had 10,000 members.  The National Woman Suffrage Association, NAWSA with 1000,000 members, were told to suspend suffrage work.  Carrie Catt told them to stop as Mr. Wilson had gone to war. She asked women to support the troops, make bandages, be nice.

Even Tacie Paul wrote her daughter, Alice. I bet it’s somewhere in the archives at Paulsdale, Tacie Paul wrote a letter to Alice saying–you know Alice, this isn’t kind.  You should not be protesting now men are at war. Men are trying to keep us free. Mr. Wilson is now at war. You must stop this instantly and of course, Alice doubled down. One day she said, it’s a good day to be arrested and she she walked out of the HQ, Cameron House on Lafayette Square, goes across the street and gets arrested.  Miss Paul knew that if she is arrested it will get more press than anybody else. So you asked me ten hours ago, five minutes ago, one of the first things you asked me was does Alice inform your daily life today?  Yes, she’s right here, pictures are all over my wall. I talk to her all the time. She is my guiding light. She’s braver than I will ever be. 

She left the pro-violence meeting in July, made arrangements to return to the US in December, and the ship landed in January.  By that time, her mother was not happy.  There’s an article in the [New York] Times, Tacie is asked about the return of Alice.  It had been well publicized that Alice had been arrested, jailed and force-fed.  In fact, she returned with her voice, her throat damaged, maybe, that explains why she was so hesitant to speak publicly. I can easily imagine Tacie thought Alice got involved with some radical people. Her mother must have felt that many times, Alice was leading her on for months, writing home for money for a new dress, a winter coat, a trip to a dentist, as it was all tied to extending her time in Europe. Maybe it was in support of the Suffragettes.  The Times quoted Tacie Paul, “Oh we will be so glad to have our Alice back but to tell you I don’t know what happened to our Alice.” 

My deepest connection to Alice is the ERA.  I was 34 at the time of my fast.  I wanted to know how, why, when Alice came to the need for an Equal Rights Amendment.  She was 21.  ( WHY isn’t this in all the books about her?)  

How did she come upon the Equal Rights Amendment? It is really spectacular. I mean if you read her early stories, she was an athlete, she loved her sorority, she had girlfriends, you know she was just sort of an all-around girl.  She intended to be a biology/botany teacher. She was studying to be a high school science teacher. A new young political science professor, Robert Brooke, said to her, “I think you’re more than that. I think you have something else in your destiny and I’d like to make arrangements for you to spend a year in the school of philanthropy.” 

That was originally the title for social work; it was founded at Columbia University, and he got her a fellowship to work at 91 Rivington Street in lower Manhattan. Now you may not think going from Paulsdale to Swarthmore to Manhattan is a huge leap, but it was.  (oh God, I want to tell you everything about the Belmont). It was sort of middle class, but it wasn’t really. Her father was a banker, her mother would have finished college, but married women weren’t allowed to go to school so as soon as she married William, she had to leave Swarthmore and manage the farm. But her mother was a businesswoman, Alice’s father died young and that left Tacie with the children to raise. 

Alice Paul got this fellowship to go to Manhattan and work with immigrants, such similarities to our lives today you know to work with people from Eastern Europe, Italy, and Ireland. I always remember that because it’s two I’s. Italy and Ireland–people were actually immigrating at the time; they’re going through Ellis Island, and they land at 91 Rivington. This is the whole settlement house movement that started in Chicago and it’s these wonderful feminist women who established these settlement houses. She writes a lot about her room how much she loves the light.  She is discovering Manhattan, Times Square, the museums and the subway and it’s really exciting! 

The building is next door to a temple.  The streets are filled with people vendors and a dozen languages.  She learning to sew doing millinery work. She is confronted for the first time with the poor and she has an experience that people have written about many times. Gerda Lerner, the founder of women’s history studies, in the last book that she wrote, the introduction has a bit of a biography where Gerda Lerner writes about the first time in her privileged life, she meets the poor and it changes her. 

And Oscar Romero, the great Archbishop in El Salvador, who was a quiet bibliophile, who never took his nose out of a book, is chosen by the conservative prelates to be Archbishop.  They think that he will not embrace Liberation Theology and will side with the rich leaders, both political and clergy.  He begins meeting the poor, He is asked to bury the murdered rebels.   He is asked to baptize babies in segregated services. Romero meets the poor peasants and the priests who serve them. He is converted by meeting the poor.  He puts down the books and is called to service.  –there will be poor always pathetically suffering looking at the good things you’ve got. You know this call to feed the poor, to give drink to the thirsty, housing to the homeless and visit the imprisoned. I mean Matthew 24–that’s all there is, the rest of it is just malarkey. 

So, Alice gets there, and she is overwhelmed with the tragedy of teaching these immigrants English, sewing, culture, foods in America but the very idea of their life progressing to ever be landowners, to ever build a fence, to ever have a wife who could stay home, to have a job that would buy a home like Paulsdale. She realizes, I mean, she’s studying in Philadelphia! This is a very educated, interesting woman who knows all too well the history of the men who left England to get away from the king who ended up building little kingdoms she sees all of that and she realizes she has this epiphany in 1906 living on Rivington Street that in order for these immigrants to ever have the possibility of a real life in America we will have to take gender out of the Constitution. 

We will have to guarantee every American full constitutional rights. And on the road, I mean it’s really, it’s a magical road that you know she gets on. She goes on this bike trip as girls did at the time–Lucy Burns and Elsie Hill–they go to Europe, and they would buy a bike. And they ride around Europe, and she ends up in England and she meets the Pankhursts and and she meets Christabel and she sees these women who are out on the street with public voices.  The Pankhursts give Alice this pile of magazines to go sell on the corner and she’s terrified. She writes about hesitating to mail her membership fee to join the Suffragettes.  

However, Alice knows that in order for every American to have a chance to build a life, 

they must be included in the Constitution.  Before that can happen, women need the vote. She joins the British movement and learns the tools of change.  As she famously says it’s just another tile in the mosaic to equality.  

One truly unbelievable coincidence is that Alice Paul went to England because she was given the chance to work at a Quaker Settlement House and, much later, Gandhi actually was in that very same Settlement House. There’s a plaque on the wall at that settlement house in London that Gandhi had spent time there.

Miss Paul demonstrates so powerfully because she lives everything she believes. On the night of August 18, 1920, on the signing of the 19^th Amendment, she goes into the house at 14 Jackson Place on Lafayette Square, packs and leaves that very night because she doesn’t want to incur any more financial burden on the National Woman’s Party. She and Maude Younger leave the HQ and rent a room at a Quaker rooming house. There she lives there as cheaply as possible while she earns three law degrees. To begin the research on the need for the ERA, she creates a study group of 13 women attorneys. The chair was Bernita Shelton Matthews, and you wonder why I know all this and I gotta tell you it’s because you asked.

Because I don’t walk around with all this shit like right here but it’s because you ask. I’m kind of always really excited when it comes up, so I want to tell you why there were 13 attorneys who had nothing better to do. Because at the time women could go to law school but they couldn’t take the bar. They couldn’t practice law. There were four or five law schools in Washington, D.C. at the time Alice went to three of them but these were all women who were itching to practice.

Williams: What do you do if you have a lot for women who had a law degree and couldn’t take the bar? 

Nicholson: You gave legal advice, teach, okay or look for a husband, marry a lawyer make children but they were itching to get equality yeah so what she did is she took her thesis that she wrote actually her original paper, her college paper, and then her thesis was all about the rights the women of Pennsylvania had and it was this detailed data-driven study–fabulous,  so these 13 women went to the 36 states and found out what laws were needed for women in those 36 states and that was the data that drove the writing of the Equal Rights Amendment.

So she waits, oh my God, it’s just so it’s too much, it’s all too much. On July 21st, 1923, the 75th anniversary of Seneca Falls. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton suggests, hey how about women vote? 75 years later Alice announces and gives to the world, in 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment at that very church I mean it just it just it just makes you crazy, doesn’t it? 

She and Anita Politzer drove to Susan B. Anthony’s grave and Alice gets down on her knees. There’s a really famous picture of this, dedicating the Equal Rights Amendment to Susan B. Anthony. The majesty of this person and I think it’s the very idea that you could go to first grade through 12th you could go through and get a college degree and not know every inch of this woman’s life, it’s just it’s unthinkable! It’s just unthinkable how could this be? 

So yeah, she informs, she is why I breathe you know? I’m looking at this one book here. It’s so about feminism in the Americas and it’s about the Pan American conferences and where Alice doesn’t want to travel. She’s sort of a stick in the mud about that. She doesn’t enjoy traveling so she sends Doris Stevens everywhere, which is why my cat’s name is Doris Stevens. 

But you know this amazing woman has affected our lives and everybody. One of the eight women I call after Alice died, was Bunny Sandler, who was attributed with Title IX. And Alice actually helped to write it and almost nobody knows that, but Bunny was on the phone with me and told me the most moving story I know about Alice Paul. Now you know that Alva Belmont, a rascal of a woman, a bitch on wheels, she’s utterly fantastic and the nastiest woman ever! She married two famously wealthy men, fabulously wealthy people, and then, oh oops they’re gone, and she kept all her money, and she spent it all in the women’s movement she spent every penny she had on the women’s movement–amazing. 

So the Sewell-Belmont is this house right across from the Supreme Court. They used to have the Old Brick, they used to have a building that they actually sold to the government, who tore it down to build the Supreme Court. I don’t know if you know that. Congress is right down the road. Alice is living there, Alva bought it for her and she’s there off and on. She has the house in Vermont or she goes to Geneva, she goes around but headquarters is the Sewell-Belmont. So the United States Congress holds hearings on the Equal Rights Amendment, and I think it was 1971. The reason they have it, it’s because a bunch of women are up in the gallery harassing them and heckling them and insisting that they have hearings on the Equal Rights Amendment. If you ever want to have a hoot, I mean reading the transcript of it is just fantastic! Three actresses dress up as the abolitionist sisters, Angelina and Sarah Grimke and Emma Goldman.  These three actresses dress up and walk in as them to give testimony and I mean all hell breaks loose and it’s utterly fantastic. They were from Boston they were part of the abolition movement Grimke thank you sisters, yeah, thank you, so these actresses dress up as the Grimke sisters and another one is Emma Goldman who’s in prison at the time for whatever the hell. 

So they actually give testimony on the Equal Rights Amendment and Bunny Sandler is there and Eleanor Smeal is there and Shirley Chisholm is there. The House votes to pass it on March 22nd. And they all come running across the street. You can probably picture it they’re running from Congress to Sewell-Belmont, and they ring the front door, they go up the side steps to do what you can’t do anymore. (steps are now closed) They say, “Alice, you won’t believe it now!” This is Bunny telling me the story on the phone and they knock on the door, they’re all excited, they’re young, they’re college students, the young women they gave testimony. The House has voted to send the ERA out to the states and Alice looks at him and says, “was there a deadline?” 

Bunny says yes and Alice looks at them and Alice says. “It will never pass,” because she played chess. And I mean that metaphorically. She understood that all they had to do, was so perfect, all they had to do was not publish the 38th state, that’s all they needed to do! You know what’s going on right this minute. We have not published the 38th state, righteousness, we published 36 that was Nevada 2017. We published 37 that were Illinois 2018.

I was in the balcony in Virginia, January 2020 when they ratified and because Donald Trump told Bill Barr to tell David Ferraro the archivist do not publish the 38th state, and on March 22nd, you know March 22, 1971 Alice Paul looked at them and said it will never pass because she knew all they had to do was stop the 38th state from being published that’s where we are today.

And that’s why if you go to my Facebook page you go into my insta account if you look at my twitter all you see is Joe Biden, page 42 the Democratic platform, Kamala Harris. They have broken their promise to publish the 38th state and yesterday in case you think I just make this shit up, yesterday the American Bar Association declared the Equal Rights Amendment law because 38 states ratified it and the fact that Bill Barr will not publish the 38th is a moot point. 

The Founding Fathers, all they required was that two years after a supermajority passes it goes into effect which means January 20, 2022, the Equal Rights Amendment actually went into effect and the American Bar Association just sent out a letter asking every state in the country to recognize that the equal rights of women is law right this minute. And this morning I’m not obsessed. Kirsten Gillibrand put out a press release this morning calling on the country to recognize that the Equal Rights Amendment is law there’s nothing more that needs to be done.

Williams: I have two more questions I wanted to ask, and I didn’t end up asking one of them.

I think now there’s a lot of confusion about what the Equal Rights Amendment is and why it’s necessary. Can you tell us or tell me why it’s like why you feel that we are still in need of an Equal Rights Amendment today?

Nicholson: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or bridged by the United

States or by any state on account of sex.” Now if you and I wrote it today we’d probably cross out sex and put in gender because we’re women of our day. The number one reason why the Equal Rights Amendment has not passed, which I think is the shorthand of what the problem is, is that women are the cheapest labor force on the face of the earth. That’s it.  At the end day, that’s it.  Do you know that the insurance industry makes more on women’s insurance? Georgetown student, Sandra Fluke was called to testify in the United States Congress, on why the government should pay for her pills while they do pay for Viagra.

Do you remember Kamala Harris saying to [Supreme Court Justice Brett] Kavanaugh, do you know one law in the country that is about controlling men’s bodies? I don’t think you want the government in your bed, in your bedroom or in your gynecology office. That is why we need the Equal Rights Amendment. 

Because Lily Ledbetter, her case got thrown out of court when it became clear that after working her entire life, and she retired from Goodyear, that the three men who did the identical job as she did, got paid twice as much. It’s all about wages, access and we don’t want one gender owning the other gender. And as John Adams is out of town writing rights for white men, Abigail Adams taking care of the kids, milking the cows, pulling up the crops, selling the harvest, she was running the farm inside the fence. And when John was up in Philadelphia doing whatever the sam hell he was doing, eating food cooked by two black chefs, the only black people that were there.  Somebody tell Lin Manuel there were two black people there.  They were Washington and Jefferson’s chefs. They were the only black people there so John was there, and they were all inventing the rules they made sure that women had zero rights not half rights not a few rights. Zero rights, by making sure that the Constitution only applied to white men.

So the amendment, and the reason why everybody is so scared about it, the reason why Phyllis Schlafly wetting her pants about it the reason why people are terrified of it passing, is because in the workplace an employer will not be able to pay a man and woman for the same work they will have to actually say what it is now some people say but didn’t Obama sign the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act?

Oh please, children, somebody wake up! Wake those children up. Now I have something to tell you, that Act meant nothing without the Fair Paycheck Act because the Fair Paycheck Act, which was running parallel with it but didn’t pass, said that employers must make it a matter of public record what they’re paying people. So yeah, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act that you can picture Obama signing it at his very first signing–it was the first thing he signed, and all the women around him in their red jackets and Lilly Ledbetter standing over to that side and Obama signing it. They did not sign the Act that required employers to make public what they were paying people. So, although they were required to pay them the same they can keep it a secret and HR will fire you if you tell if a man or a woman says out loud what they are making it is cause for dismissal. 

People are going to rip their hair out between now and voting day and it’s going to be because they know darn well a woman running the country is going to change everything. Studies have been made; we have looked at those countries. The top countries: Rwanda, Finland, Sweden, what happens when women run them. I will tell you what happens. All the money comes out of the military, all the money comes out of death, all the money comes out of corporations, and it is spent on health, education and welfare. 

That’s why, and I gotta tell you, all those rich people up in Silicon Valley or Mr. Musk don’t want that to happen. It’s funny so, no, there’s only one reason you never have to worry about it again because women are the cheapest labor force in the world.

Today actually is Mom’s Equal Pay Day, and that means it’s the day of the year where if a woman worked all of 2023 and this far into 2024 moms would be making what a white man earned in that one year and that’s today, August 8th. 

Williams: Wow, that’s a very powerful statement I didn’t even know that was a day! That’s so interesting.

Nicholson: Well there’s Latina day, there’s Black women’s pay equal pay day, there’s white women’s equal pay day. White women’s equal pay day is in March but the worst off would be Native women we’re not even there yet. 

So I’ll just blow your mind a little bit. If you take two Latinas and they’re lesbians and they have a home and they pay rent. We’re going to households doing a statistical study of rents in our city, but we don’t disaggregate the data to figure out what happens. What percentage of their money pays the rent? That’s the question, it isn’t how much is the rent in this building. So, you take two gay men who make one hundred percent each. Two white gay men have two hundred percent to pay their rents, yay. Two Latina lesbians have one hundred and eight percent. I mean it’s how we are held down. It’s a tool that’s used against us, we are kept poor. 

I live in a building that’s at least 85% women and it’s not because we outlive men because the poor elders are by a long shot women because we could well, Lilly Ledbetter, she happens to be, you probably know, a personal friend of mine because of our appearance in the movie Still Working Nine to Five, we became pretty good friends. She won her case for 18 million dollars in the lower courts and then Goodyear took it to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court ruled against her and [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg asked to see her after the court ruled and said take it to Congress. That’s when they came up with the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Fair Paycheck Act and they only passed half. It’s no wonder the whole world’s confused about it. What do you mean it didn’t pass? Because they don’t look far enough, it’s complicated. Alice knew instantly that because they tacked on that deadline, that stupid deadline of seven years, do you know we have at the moment 27 Amendments to the United States Constitution and only the ones regarding women have deadlines! All those other ones don’t have deadlines. They made that up because they knew they could just sit back and wait for state number 38 to come along and just stop 38 from being published. Oh who cares, that’s what they thought.

Williams: I have one final question for you, if that’s all right you are final no you better take that back which I have been doing a lot of research about activists in the 20th century and it got me thinking, are there any activists today that you find inspiring and that are doing great work? Are there any young people you find particularly inspiring?

Nicholson: Greta Thunberg of course, who is a name we know. When I was 18 nobody knew my name and yet I was out there yelling my brains out at George Wallace. I think somebody I really want you to know about is actually my age but the reason I love him so much. Oh and his name’s gonna come to me–George Lakey, he interviewed Alice Paul. And I have the interview, and he’s a man who’s been protesting and making good trouble his whole life. I know that of the Young Feminists Party of course. And I’m moved that they changed their name. Did you know their name used to be?

Williams: Generation Ratify

Nicholson: Thank you, yes now it is YFP and Alice loved that because Alice started with NWP and went to WWP that they’re actually starting a party and anybody who has the nerve to not take members over 30 years, I’m a big fan of that, yeah. I think that Rosie Couture is utterly fantastic and I think those people are doing a great job! I have four mentees, one of them her name is Ashlie Brady and we are currently putting on a woman’s fair on Women’s Equality Day, August 26th and of course it’s women’s equality-light. Banks are open and mail is delivered. Nobody really wanted to take it that seriously.

Anyway she and I are putting on a women’s fair it’s our second one we will have 30 booths

of organizations that are in service solely to women. I think that a lot of the work now has to happen through climate change, through guns, through the peace movement they’re involved in pro-Palestine, there are people doing all that work. 

And after 50 years of working on it, Long Beach finally has a women’s commission. The first time we sat down was in June, we sat down in July, our third meeting will be in August and I will tell you that I’m not the oldest one on it. There’s a woman a few months older than I am. But on the women’s commission which has 11 members, we have a 14 year old. Her name is Helena and she is this year’s Poet Laureate for the city of Long Beach. She travels all over the country and talks about bullying because she herself was so terribly bullied in school for having a thinking disorder, she thinks very slowly, she speaks very slowly and she’s a champion of people who have disabilities and she’s amazing.

I believe that there was a time when a woman I used to know made a bumper sticker called “war is not healthy for children and other living things.” It was a wonderful bumper sticker during the time of Vietnam. There was this belief that we were all going to go to Woodstock, we were all going to walk on Abbey Road, we were all going to put daisies in guns but that’s because we didn’t understand the history of what happens when you get older.

What is just so interesting to me is your rear-view mirror keeps on getting wider because I’ll have people today in their 30s and 20s ask, is this the worst time in the world, this must be the worst time and I’d say well actually it isn’t. 1982, AIDS wiped out practically every friend I had. 1968– almost every young man I went to high school with, went to Vietnam. So there was a time in my mind and I imagined so many people’s minds if they’re not utterly realistic like David Hogg, that the world is going to change because it’s not.  It’s cyclical but if you want to know I think the interesting question is how does change occur. And how can I be a part of that.  Remember George Lakey, L-a-k-e-y, he writes for a magazine called Waging Nonviolence and I have permission print his piece entirely. I’m sure you don’t find that hard to believe but he interviewed Alice Paul. I imagine he’s my age now, he’s a very famous activist. He’s been in several movies. He’s just utterly fantastic that he wanted to go meet Miss Paul and he went to the Belmont house and sat with her, and he wanted to know from her the kinds of things I wanted to know from her.

In my 70s, boys and girls, oh it’s funny you should ask. I learned that change occurs as far as your fingers can reach. Your reach is equal to your height. Did you know that? It’s pretty cool, this is six feet.

I have the full power to say hello to all the homeless people, who are sleeping out front, to be kind to the people I meet in the elevator, to help a woman who doesn’t have a cell phone whose landline broke last Saturday She came and knocked on my door and said, “I don’t know what to do, my landline broke, my phone broke. I don’t know what to do. I can’t call anybody.” The real change occurs in the diameter of your reach and I’m not saying do nothing, I’m saying do everything. I’m saying do everything.

 I just think that there are people who are in their homes who are losing sleep over something going on 12,000 miles away. I appreciate you. I agree female genital mutilation is a problem and I think that sati is a problem in India. That’s where widows throw themselves on their husband’s pyre. I think women have problems the world over.  But as an engaged person, going back all the way to the idea of religion being engaged, it is my obligation that no one that’s in my reach is hungry. That’s what I’ve learned at 70. I wanted to stop the war, I wanted to do prison reform, I really wanted to walk across Pettus bridge. I really wanted to do more good trouble and meet John Lewis but all I can do right now is tell that jackass yesterday at the ice cream social, no we have not progressed. And he thinks I am a big bitch now, a real downer.

Be unafraid within your reach, stand up in a city council and say “Where is CEDAW? What are we doing about violence against women?” We need to ask, why has the Long Beach police department dismantled the rape unit, which they did, probably was a fiscal concern I’m sure it was a fiscal concern let’s study that. So, I may not know all their names. I remember what you asked but I think it’s because a big name hasn’t been available to them yet and don’t ever forget Greta’s parents. Both Greta’s parents were activists. The reason she was sitting there with that sign about climate when she was in eighth grade or high school whatever, it was her parents brought her up that way. I mean you are exposed to the people in your family first and foremost. You went towards your mother, and I went away from my mother. She was a Goldwater volunteer and had no hesitation demonstrating her racial bias.

But I really do believe that the question to ask is how does change occur in society and what can I do to contribute to that?

Williams: Do you have any advice for young people who want to get involved with social justice activism but it seems the problem seems so big and don’t know where to get or how to get involved?

Nicholson: Well, I do know the answer to that! When I’m in a college classroom and it’s really hard. I have spoken in this international, transnational feminism class, God it is so frustrating. And there are these people sitting in this class who are upset about female genital mutilation in Egypt. And they’re all upset about this going on, and that going on, and then they’re, you know, well what are you doing about it ladies and gents? And they don’t know what to do because the whole freaking world’s going to hell in a handbasket. What should I do? I’m going to tell you. Whatever God puts in front of you is what God wants you to do. That is the answer. For some reason, for some stupid-ass reason, I am here talking to you for three hours, the happiest three hours ever in the middle of a chaotic day with people doing stupid things out there. Because I believe that the light for my torch is going to live on and I gave you my best. And that is my obligation. 

When this lady knocked on my door and said, “my landline’s broken” and it’s like, Jesus why don’t you have a cell phone? It’s like wait, let’s figure this out. We’ll figure this out because that is what God put in front of me at that moment. If God puts in front of somebody the peace corps or a settlement house or helping somebody get home or taking cookies to somebody who’s living outside in their truck because they don’t have anything. That’s what you do

My answer is personal and if people aren’t believers, my answer probably doesn’t work. In my life, whenever God is in charge of that you don’t have to worry about that. Need is going to come and knock on your door and say could you do this and by golly you can. I’m looking at you know the year of the woman back there [referring to the poster behind Geneva Williams] and Hillary Clinton. I’m hearing Hillary say women’s rights are human rights and imagine that was life-changing. Women’s rights are human rights and you and I today in 2024 were going, duh, but when she went to Beijing no one had ever said that before and when Alice Paul went to Havana, she sent Doris of course. In 1928 in Havana was the first Pan American Conference. The women exchanged the idea that they would all go home to the Americas from Latin, southern, central, northern, Canada, all the Americas and start commissions. 1928, that’s what they did. Some of them were successful and some of them weren’t. It took me a while but as of June of 2024 Long Beach has a women’s commission because I would not fucking shut up. And that’s the truth.

When I die, I will leave the City of Long Beach with two things, Claudia’s Law protecting the housekeepers from illegal labor practices from sexual assault while cleaning hotel rooms and that they can have a panic button and it has to be answered. I will leave that, and I will leave the women’s commission which will go on in perpetuity, whose youngest member is 14.

If you look at the Amelia Fry interview, it’s online and searchable and utterly fantastic. Alice says she would take 5 inexperienced, know-nothing youth to go stand as sentinels than one educated older woman, any day of the week. Because the youth were excited. I’ve never met her; I wish I had.

Williams: Thank you so much for your time this was amazing, thank you so much.