Novelist Mary Gordon remembers an unforgettable gathering in 1971.
It is the fall of 1971. I have just walked into a room in a church basement, where there is a meeting of NARAL, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, the organization created two years earlier by Betty Friedan. Although abortion had been legal in New York since 1970, it was still illegal in most states.
The meeting is called to order by a short, dark, wiry, fast-talking woman. Quickly, we get down to tactics, which involve organizing travel to Albany and to Washington. Despite the legalization of abortion in New York, antiabortionists are tirelessly picketing the state legislature with gruesome pictures of mangled fetuses. We sign up both for counter-protests and to speak to our local legislators in person. Pennsylvania, a close neighbor state, will be another target of our lobbying.
The next woman to speak is older and the most elegant in the room. She wears a tweed suit; her silver hair is in a French twist, her accent refined, although not off-putting. It reminds me of someone, and then I realize who: Julia Child. “It was 1937. I was 21 and working on a newspaper in Washington. I was having a relationship with a rather aristocratic Englishman, separated from his family overseas. It was a pleasant relationship, but nothing serious.
“I’m from California,” says a woman who seems to be somewhere in her 30s. She is wearing what I think might be a Laura Ashley dress: small pastel flowers on a pink background. “I married young. My husband was a high school teacher, money was tight, and we had three kids. I was only 30, and we’d agreed that when the youngest went to school, I could go back to college. Then I got pregnant.
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