THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Sue Errington

“When I got involved in the women’s movement, it was a revolution in my life.”

Interviewed by Mary Jean Collins, VFA Historian, October 2021

SE:  I’m Sue Errington. I was born in Warsaw, Indiana, February 15, 1942. I was the first of four kids in the family, and I lived in this little town called Atwood, just a few miles from Warsaw with my parents and my siblings. My grandparents were nearby. In fact, most of my relatives were nearby, except the ones on my dad’s side. They were all from Kentucky. In the summers, we would take trips to see his family, and we’d go back at Thanksgiving. But most of the time I was in Indiana.

After I graduated from high school – there were only 16 in my class – I wanted to go to a place where there were lots of people, a big school. I then went to Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, and studied Spanish, graduated from there and then went to graduate school at the University of Michigan, studying Spanish and Latin American geography. And I got a little extra work in Spanish at the Middlebury language school. This was as a graduate student. They had summer schools for a variety of languages. And while you were there, you signed a pledge to speak nothing but the language you were studying. It was a really good way to get more fluent in Spanish.

MJC:  How did you get interested in Spanish in Warsaw, Indiana?

SE:  Well, actually, the only language my little school taught was English. But my dad took me to the World Poultry Convention in Mexico City when I was a junior and I just fell in love with Mexico and the people there. So, when I was ready to graduate and go to college, I really didn’t have a major in mind and I wanted to learn Spanish. So that’s what I did. I took Spanish, and I learned the language and studied the literature. I also learned French, because I enjoyed their literature a lot, too.

So that’s the education that I got. The next thing was to get a job. And I decided I wanted to teach at the college level. And I got a job teaching Spanish at Bethany College in Bethany, West Virginia. It is near Wheeling. It’s way back in the woods. A lot of the students that come there are from Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New Jersey, and New York. Kids that wanted to get away from big cities and get back into a natural setting. So that’s the kind of students we had.

And I taught there for three years. That’s where I met my husband. He taught physics, and he had graduated from the University of West Virginia, and we dated while we were there. It was a small school. I think there were maybe 1,000 students, and the President of the College had an engagement party for us. He said he knew of quite a few student-faculty marriages, but we were the first faculty-faculty that he knew of.

MJC:  What was your husband’s name?

SE:  Paul Errington.

MJC:  How did the way you were brought up and your early life lead you to feminism?

SE:  There was definitely a division of labor in my home, and I always wanted to do the things that my brother got to do. He got to mow the yard and he got paid for it. I had to iron clothes. I got paid for that, too. But I got tired of ironing clothes. And then when I went to IU for freshman orientation, they had time for parents to come in with the students before we got started. And I remember this Dean talking about living arrangements. And the women had hours, that we had to be back in our dorms.

And the boys didn’t have anything. And he said, “Well, we don’t have to worry about the boys getting in trouble if the girls are inside.” And I was highly offended by that statement. But that’s the way it was back then. When I got my first job, I got the credit card. It was a gas credit card, the first one I’d ever had. But then when I got married, the credit card company said it had to go to my husband’s name and the same thing. I applied for some department store credit cards, and they all had to be Mrs. Paul Errington. And I complained about that. And that’s about the time that I found NOW. We’d lived in Peru, South America, for a year. And then we came to Ball State University here in Muncie, Indiana.

MJC:  We left the story in West Virginia where you met Paul. And then what happened?

SE:  Well, we got married. It’s sort of funny. I took Paul back to meet my parents, and my mom was just shocked. Here was somebody she didn’t know, that I was thinking of getting married to. But after he visited, she said, “Well, he seems just like an Atwood boy.” Maybe it was that small town that he came from and his upbringing that made her comfortable. But anyway, we were both teaching at Bethany, and I really wanted to go to South America. Paul agreed to apply for a Fulbright lectureship to teach in South America.

We figured out where they had lectureships available. And it was in Lima, Peru. I actually filled out the application for it and he got it. So we went to Lima, and we arrived there, and he was assigned to work at two different universities. One was Catholic University in Lima, a private school, and then the engineering school, which was a public university. It turned out the students at the public university were all on strike the entire time we were there. He basically just taught at Catholic University where he taught physics.

MJC:  What year was it?

SE:  We got married in December of ’66. So it was 1968 that we went because we watched the moon landing in Lima, Peru. And I can tell you the Limeños were just as excited as we were. It was like this set the whole world on fire. Here was a wonderful accomplishment that human beings had done. And everybody in Lima shared in it. Now the other thing that had happened just before we arrived, maybe two or three months before we arrived, there was a bloodless coup in Peru.

We were wondering, are we going to be able to go? But as it turns out, it was a bloodless coup. And we got there as if hardly anything had happened other than the sugar plantations, which had been US and German owned, were taken over by the government and the oil. Some of the big things had been nationalized. But just meeting people on the street, there was no hostility. We felt very safe. And we were there for nine months which was the end of the lectureship.

And while we were there, the Chair of the Physics and Astronomy Department at Ball State was in South America. He had been to Argentina for an eclipse and stopped by the Fulbright office because he’d been there before. And he met Paul, and he told him that when he finished in Peru, if he was interested in a job, they had a temporary one-year position open. Well, he didn’t think he would want that. But when we got back to the States, all the money had dried up.

Scientists who had been working for the government no longer had jobs. Also, US steel, which had received some of the moon rocks, their federal money for research on those rocks dried up. And people in those industries were leaving and taking positions in universities. When we got back into the States, it was a really bad time to be looking for a job. But Paul remembered the invitation and he contacted the department chair and he got the job. We came to Ball State. We arrived when the semester began in January, and ten days after we arrived, so did my daughter.

She was born early, about seven or eight weeks early, which was quite a shock. And she stayed in the preemie ward for five weeks until she got up to a weight that she could leave. So that was a surprising beginning to being at Ball State. Our second daughter was born two years later. I had been teaching Spanish part-time at Ball State. Not long after my second daughter was born, Betty Friedan came to Ball State to do a lecture, and I had already found Ms. Magazine.

And like so many other women, what I saw there just clicked with my life. When Betty Friedan came, I went to the auditorium to see her. And as it turns out, I sat in a row right beside a group of NOW members. We got to talking and they invited me to come to a reception afterwards at the home of a faculty member who was a NOW member. That was a reception for Betty. So that was my initiation to NOW.

And it was just like, where have you been? I’ve been waiting for something like this. I got involved in the chapter immediately. And at that time, Indiana had not yet ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, so we were working on that. This was in the winter, and that’s when the Indiana General Assembly is in session. I remember our chapter leader was Betty Newcomb, and she was very involved in the beginning of Veteran Feminists of America. I remember her talking about it.

Betty was saying we should sell our blood to raise money for the ERA. I didn’t know if I wanted to do that, but I was willing to give a donation. There was a bill to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment before our legislature. And we decided to take a bus load of supporters to the Indiana General Assembly, to the State House. And what we got was a yellow school bus. It pulled up in front of the Teachers College at Ball State. And we all got on and rode a little over an hour to get to the State House.

We were so excited. We listened to the speeches. This was a hearing. And then they voted and they voted it down. And we just couldn’t understand. How could they vote down something that was so obviously needed? But they did. And then the next year, we went and they voted it down again. The crowd was even bigger. They had to get a big room in the convention center, which was next door to the State House to hold all the people that had come. Again, they voted it down.

Then we realized – and it really came at a rally. A supportive Senator, by the name of Louis Mahern, spoke at our rally, and he said, sometimes it’s easier to change legislators than it is to change the legislator’s vote. And that’s when we got political. Instead of just being interested in legislation, we helped change the makeup of the Indiana General Assembly. There was the NOW group, and then there was a larger group of various organizations. But I mostly worked with the NOW group that researched and analyzed where are we vulnerable?

Do we have enough votes in one house or the other? It doesn’t matter who the leadership is. By doing that analysis, we realized it really didn’t matter which part controlled the House. The leadership, both Democrat and Republican, were pro-ERA. It was the Senate where we had a problem. And at that time, the Indiana Senate was very closely numbered. There are 50 members, and we only had to flip one or two, maybe three, seats. Whereas in the House, we didn’t have to flip any seats.

We just had to make sure that we kept the right seats and got the right people in so that the majority was still pro-ERA, whichever party was in the majority. We looked at different races for the Senate and decided who lives close enough to go help so-and-so. A group of us from Muncie went over to Marion, which is about 45 minutes from Muncie to help a candidate, and we were trying to defeat the incumbent. And we went, at least once, often more than once, every week.

Unfortunately, our candidate didn’t win, but enough of the others did that it flipped the Senate Democratic. At that point, our job was to hold all those votes. And I remember we decided to do different things. We had seen the Alice Paul movie, How We Got The Vote, and we took that around the state and did a road show to play the movie to interested people. We would have a meeting and get people there. And then we would show that movie and then make a pitch for getting involved in the Equal Rights Amendment.

And so that way we were doing grassroots organizing around that issue. We had letter writing parties, and we decided we needed to have a march. This was in January 1976, and Indiana is very cold in January. This was all during the time of the International Women’s Year, and Indiana was one of the last states to have our state Women’s Year conference because people wanted us to be able to concentrate on the ERA and then go to the International Women’s Year.

We had the rally. We invited NOW members from everywhere, and I can remember that Birch Bayh called me. I was a state coordinator. That’s what we called the state President at the time, State coordinator. He called me. I was standing in my kitchen when I got the call asking me if I was sure we wanted to have this. Was this really a good idea? They were really afraid. What they were hearing in Washington was these radical NOW people could do something that would turn the legislature off and we’d lose our votes.

And he said, “Can’t you do something?” I said, “Well, no, we’re from the bottom up. I don’t tell people what to do. We do it all together, but I can talk with them and see what we want to do.” What we ended up doing was, we contacted Ellie Smeal who was the NOW president at the time. They were putting pressure on her. She was calling us, not to talk us out of it, but to make sure that we weren’t losing our nerve and we knew we had national NOW support for what we were doing.

We decided, okay, instead of having a rally outside, we would have it inside the convention center. It was a Sunday. There was a huge snowstorm. We were glad we were inside. We marched from the State House across the street into the convention center, and that’s where we had it. We filled this big room, even though it was hard for people to get there because of the snow storm. I can remember we were about halfway through when Carol King led a Michigan busload of people in. They had broken down on the outskirts of Indianapolis and somehow they got into the middle of the city and they made it to the rally.

MJC:  If anyone could do it, Carol King could do it.

SE:  That’s right. She made it. There were NOW members from all surrounding states who came. I think there were some maybe from the east coast who came. One of the things that we did was modeled after the suffragists and we had people stand in silent vigil at the State House every day that they were in session. Different groups of people would just be there in white outfits, standing. And then it came time for the vote. The first vote was in the Senate, and one of the senators, Rod Piper, who was from Muncie, and we had lobbied him.

He was very supportive. I should go back and tell you what novice lobbyists we were. We were told the way you need to set a meeting is to have lunch or something with a legislator and talk to them about the ERA and ask for their vote. I had the job of calling Senator Piper. I called him and I asked if he would come to lunch with me and another woman. He readily agreed, and he said, “Well, where shall we go?” I hadn’t thought that far through. I was just thinking about whether he was willing to say yes or no.

I quickly thought, “Well, how about the cafeteria at Ball State?” He said, “Yes, that’s fine.” We took him out to lunch at the Ball State University cafeteria, and he picked up the tab. We learned a little more when we asked the next one to go to lunch with us. That was our first experience in lobbying, was through the ERA.

Anyway, when it came time for the hearing, we all sat in the gallery and watched them vote. It was on a Thursday. Our legislature is in session Monday through Thursday. It was on Thursday afternoon with not much going on. And a couple of our supported legislators who lived in northwest Indiana, up around Gary, had left early. And Phyllis Schlafly’s Indiana person was Senator Joan Gubbins. And she got up and made this motion to recommit the ERA back to committee.

Before they could vote, Senator Piper, my legislator, realized what she was doing, ran up and spoke to the President Pro Tem. He called a recess and sent the state police out to pick up those two senators who had left. The Senate was in recess until they got them back and they could vote no on recommitting. You’ve got to watch out for all the games that are played. Fortunately, he was paying attention.

Nobody else caught it. When it came down to the vote, we prevailed. It was pretty close. One or two votes at the most. Then over in the House that went pretty smoothly and we won. And the Republicans were in the majority over the House, while it was the Democrats in the Senate. It’s sort of interesting and sad, but that biennium was the last time that the Senate has been controlled by Democrats. It’s been a [Republican] majority ever since. So that window quickly closed. And if we hadn’t been able to get it then, we might never have ratified.

MJC:  Is Indiana the last state to ratify?

SE:  We are. Yes.

MJC:  That was a glorious moment.

SE:  It was. And to commemorate it, we decided to do something on proclamation type paper. We had the text of the Equal Rights Amendment, and the signatures of everyone who had signed it. The two women who were our volunteer lobbyists went around and got everybody’s signatures, and it was sort of interesting. There’s one person who voted no, who signed it. He must have wanted prosperity, wanted that to be in his legacy, that people would think that he had voted yes.

We had about ten original copies made. And we used that for a fundraiser. The Smithsonian heard about this and asked if they could have a copy. One of those ten copies went to the Smithsonian. Then we made some other copies and sold them for much less money. The originals were $100 and the copies went for $10.

But time marches on. We still had other work to do. As I say, regarding the International Women’s Year, the way Indiana did it, we had regional meetings. I think delegates were elected in the regional meetings who then went to the state. And by the time it got to the state meeting, Joan Gubbins and her crew had organized mostly through fundamentalist churches to get people to oppose the issues and the resolutions and to stack their people into the Indiana delegation.

MJC:  Indiana ratified the ERA. What happened after that?

SE:  Well, we just kept working wherever we could. I became a National NOW board member, and I ended up in the pilot group of ERA missionaries to Utah. That was very interesting. I forget how many of us were in that initial group. Maybe 10. This was something that the National NOW board had come up with, and I think it was from talking with Sonia Johnson who was from Utah and I believe, was excommunicated from the Church.

She had talked with the NOW leadership about what was happening in Utah and how they were organized against the hierarchy, which was against the ERA. But she didn’t really think that the people were. So that’s why we went. It was a petition campaign modeled after their missionaries. We would go two by two, door to door, talking about the Equal Rights Amendment and asking people to sign our petition. And in Salt Lake City, we got a lot of people signing those petitions, especially if they had either fallen away from the Church or were non-Mormons.

They jumped at signing those petitions because there was some religious discrimination in employment there, even in Salt Lake City. We did go out to Provo, and that was not nearly as welcoming like Salt Lake City was. We went to the ski resort area, and they were all for it.

MJC:  Were you ever afraid?

SE:  For the most part, no. I remember one time I was with a man. It was a couple who had come out and I was paired with the husband, and it was on a Saturday afternoon. We knocked at this door, one of the last ones we were going to call on. And a man opened the door and we could see from his body language and his facial expressions that he didn’t like us being at his door. And then we noticed he had a rifle right next to him. We quickly said goodbye and left.

When we had the ERA countdown campaign, we were trying to get those final states, I went to Oklahoma, and that one went so fast. I think they wanted to go fast because we were building support. I went out to the Western Panhandle, right towards the very end of the campaign. And we made a lot of progress out there after people began to find out about it and get involved. Mostly, my job in Oklahoma was being sort of like “Call Central”, working with the grassroots. Sometimes I would go out to a location and do meetings and talks.

But a lot of times I was on the phone with the organizers from Oklahoma that we had identified and gave them new information, kept them engaged, was what I did. In the end, Ellie came out. I think Jane Wells-Schooley maybe was out there. Molly Yard came out and they were there at the time of the vote, which was not the way we wanted it to go.

MJC:  Then the ERA was pretty much coming to an end, that campaign in Oklahoma.

SE:  Florida, I think North Carolina, Illinois. It stopped with Indiana, unfortunately. Although then, of course, we had the campaign to extend the deadline. Many of us in Muncie went to Washington, DC, for those marches and rallies. But again, we weren’t able to make it happen.

MJC:  Politics of the country was changing.

SE:  Yes, we had a NOW member in Indianapolis. Her name was Sharon Boothby, and she just died. But she always said we needed two more years to get that through. Maybe she would have been right. I’m trying to remember back then if there was a change in the makeup of Congress. That would have proved her right.

MJC:  Then you went on to do other work on behalf of women, so tell us about that.

SE:  Well, one of the issues that I was really involved with is abortion and reproductive rights. Toledo had an abortion clinic that was under siege, and the Toledo City Council was considering an ordinance that would effectively close them down. So I went to Cleveland, along with several other NOW members to help. It was mostly a phone campaign to gather support and ask people to contact their City Council members, the mayor to get a no vote out of them. In that case, we succeeded. And it’s interesting. Back then, one of the symbols was a little coat hanger.

The owner of the clinic had gold hangers to use as a little pendant to put on a chain that she gave each of us who came to help out. I still have it. It was a very nice reminder of that time.

We still worked on different things. Credit was one of them. One of the things I’m really proud of is, while I was on the national board, the New Jersey board members including Rosemary Dempsey, had a campaign to get Princeton to go co-ed. In fact, all of those big, prestigious Ivy League male-only colleges, universities, NOW and others had a campaign to get them to go co-ed. And Princeton did. And a few years later, my younger daughter, Amy, enrolled in Princeton. She wasn’t in the first class of women, but she wasn’t that far behind.

The other thing that happened, my other daughter, Sarah, went to Mount Holyoke, and then she eventually went on to get her PhD from Brown. She thought she wanted to be a history teacher, but she decided that wasn’t for her. She then married a man from England. He was a PhD student at Brown, and she was there. They got married and went to Cleveland because he had an internship at Reserve University.

And while she was there, she got a job on the newspaper and she really liked newspaper work. So then when that internship was over, they moved to Syracuse, New York, and she got a job with that newspaper. And while she was there, her beat was fire and police. She got people to open up. Reporters joke around. And the firefighters say, “Oh, you couldn’t do this job” and she said, “Oh, I bet I could.” And she got on as a volunteer firefighter in a Township Fire Department just right next to Syracuse.

She loved it. And she applied for the Syracuse Fire Department, and they weren’t hiring at the time. But she stayed with it. She was continuing with the Volunteer Department, and she had opportunities to train with the Women’s Firefighting Organization of New York. They would have retreats that you could go on and you could do all the physical exercises that a recruit would have to do to get on to the Fire Department. Plus, they helped her with the written part which is what you have to do first.

She passed that with flying colors. Then she had to do the physical part. She made that. And she got on the Syracuse Fire Department, and she was the third woman on the force. And now she’s worked herself up to a Division Chief. There are twelve of them on the force. She’s one of twelve Division Chiefs. When I look back at what we veteran feminists did, the doors that we opened. It is so wonderful to see my own children going through those doors.

MJC:  How did the movement get you interested in elected life?

SE:  While I was still a NOW member, and I still am a NOW member, but while I was still active while in Muncie, I met the executive director of the local Planned Parenthood. We were standing in line. Her husband was a university professor like mine. And there was a women’s club that had a salad “carry-in” every September. So, we brought our salads. We were standing in line to get our food. I introduced myself, and she said, “Are you the Sue Errington that has written those wonderful letters to the editor about abortion?”

I said, “Well, yes, I am.” And then she told me what she did. She was the Executive Director of Planned Parenthood and invited me to be on the board. I was on the board of Planned Parenthood for several years and went off. And for a short time, maybe three years, I sold radio advertising. I wasn’t a very good radio sales person. She kept wanting me to work for her. One day I called her up and I said, “Do you have a job I might fit into?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. It was grassroots organizing, development, and education. We were a fairly small operation. And so that’s what I did. And this was back in about 1986. While I was working for that, here in Muncie in Delaware County, we were building a new county building and it was a total fiasco. Cost overruns, years beyond the time it was supposed to be built. It was a true scandal. And the election time was coming up, and the County Council members at-large were up. There were three of them, and they saw the handwriting on the wall.

People were fed up with what they were doing. And they all decided not to run. By this time, I’d been around helping other candidates. I knew that an open seat was a really good thing. There were no women on the Council. So I went around to all the women that I knew that I thought would make good County Council members, and every one of them turned me down.

The last one that turned me down, said, “Sue, why don’t you run?” And that was the first time anybody had ever said that to me. It was getting close to the filing deadline, and I wasn’t getting anywhere twisting arms. I thought, well, maybe I should. Maybe instead of pushing people along, I should get out in front and leap. I talked to my husband, I talked to my friends, because I knew I needed more than just me to make it. And they all said, “Yes, Sue, do it.”

I ran for County Council and I won. This was 1992. It was the year of the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings. And there was a mood in the country that men have sort of messed things up. And maybe it’s time for a woman. I heard that on the campaign trail as I was knocking on doors. There was one man I really remember. He said, “Yeah, the men have made a mess of it. You ladies, you can clean it up.” I got elected. And that was known at that time as the year of the woman.

It was a very good year to be running as a woman. There were four-year terms, and I served my four years and then had to decide, do I want to run for County Council again, or would I want to run for something at the state level? And my heart was still in those issues that the state legislature deals with. I enjoyed the Council, but I really wanted to get into something different. I ran for the State House of Representatives against an incumbent who was a fairly moderate Republican and well known and pretty well liked in town, as it turned out.

And he beat me. I still had money in my treasury, and I just left it there, bought a Certificate of Deposit (CD) and kept it there. I was just about ready to cash it in and donate it to some other candidate, when our longtime state Senator decided to retire. I think he’d been in for about 24 years. There’s another open seat. I still had money in that CD. I did the same thing. I talked to my husband. I talked to my kids, I talked to my friends. They all said, “Do it.”

So, I ran. And Senator Vi Simpson from Bloomington was my mentor in the Senate. She headed up the Senate campaign committee. She made sure that I had the money and the other resources to win. So having a mentor is really important. And she really helped me. Then I was in the Senate for four years, and she helped me get on some of the best committees. I loved the committees I was on in the Senate. It was a four-year term, and in 2010, I ran again for reelection and lost.

It was a Republican year, and a lot of Democrats lost that year and I sat out for two years. In 2010 was the census. In 2011 was redistricting. The Republicans were in charge. They were in control in both houses for redistricting. And the boundaries in the Senate district I had represented had changed so much that my home was no longer in that district. And my new Senate district included an incumbent Democrat Senator that I really liked.

And I thought he’s doing a good job. I’m not going to run against him. So, I sat it out. In that same year of redistricting, they moved the House boundary so that my home was now in a district that was all Muncie. The representative who had had that seat ran for Mayor the year before I ran for the House in 2011 and won his mayor’s seat. So he had to give up the House seat. They put in a stand-in person, but he didn’t run. So again, it was an open seat.

It was 2012 and I beat a pretty full field of Democrats in the primary, and it was a Democratic district. That’s how I got in the House. Ever since.

MJC:  That was wonderful. All that organizing from NOW helped a lot.

SE:  Oh, absolutely. Even our elections helped, knowing how elections work. I’ve been on the National Elections Committee two or three times and the voting and the organizing that you do for your team or your candidate. This was really good training for when I started helping other candidates and then myself. Another really helpful thing was just before I ran, I think it was for the House, EMILY’s List put on a seminar. It was a day and a half seminar in Bloomington, and I went to it. I had no plans to run at the time, but it was a wonderful training. That must have been in 2011, so then in 2012 when I did run, I was ready.

MJC:  You are still in the Legislature, correct?

SE:  Yes. There are two-year terms in the House, so I was elected last year, and I’m going to run again next year in a different district because we had redistricted again this year. We just finished it in fact, because the census was late getting the numbers because of Covid. We just finalized the districts on October 1^st. The House went first, and then the next week the Senate voted. Unfortunately, it’s still pretty much the same. The Democrats are a super minority in both houses. And even though there was a big push to get some more competition, they resisted.

MJC:  Does your district still look winnable?

SE:  Yes, it does. In the House, they weren’t quite as greedy as the Senate. They sort of left the Democrats alone that were in their seats. And what happened with my district, which was most of Center Township, which is Muncie, we lost population. So they expanded it to include all of the Center Township and a couple of precincts outside. So, yes, it’s more competitive than it was, but it’s still very winnable by a Democrat.

I’m the person who likes to go door-to-door and really go to lots of things. People see me a lot. I get really good name recognition here, and I think most people like the way I’m representing them, but you never know. I don’t know what kind of opposition I’ll have next year, but I’ll be ready for it.

MJC:  You’ll be ready. It’s a wonderful story from the beginning to where we are right now. Not the end, certainly. But to this point in your life you have certainly made an amazing contribution. Are there things we forgot to talk about, Sue, that you want to add here?

SE:  In my early life, my mom was very traditional, and she could see that I was rebelling against all the traditional things that women did. And she was always saying, “Oh, Sue, you should have been a boy.” I knew I couldn’t be a boy. The women’s movement was a way that I could expand what a girl could be and what she could dream of being and I feel really good about that.

MJC:  That’s absolutely perfect. Yes. That’s the story of a life and the story of a movement.

SE:  It is. So many of us had that.

MJC:  We did. We feel very fortunate, don’t we?

SE:  Yes. And very proud of what we’ve done. Just the other day, I went to the Women’s Rally for Abortion Justice. We had a little send-off rally here in Muncie, which I spoke at and then went to Indianapolis. And we rallied in the rain. It was pouring down rain in Indianapolis, but there were probably 1000 people there. It was so heartening to see all those young women with veterans wanting to continue the fight.

MJC:  They are inspiring in their own way. And we are inspiring to them.

SE:  Yes. I think we inspire each other. Those younger ones keep us involved, keep us going. But we know that they’re out there and they’re doing the things we did when we were in our 20’s and 30’s.