Dixie Ann Snow Huefner, interviewed for the Aileen H. Clyde 20th Century Women's Legacy Archive, 2014

The Aileen H. Clyde 20th Century Women's Legacy Archive oral history project was created to record the personal histories of 20th century women; to record memories and emotions related to historical events and social change processes; and to explore women's participation in and response to social and cultural changes. The project is conducted by Resources for the Study of Social Engagement, a non-profit organization, and is supported in part by the Clyde Family Foundation and by the Aileen H. Clyde 20th Century Women's Legacy Archive at the University of Utah.

Dixie Ann Snow Huefner Interviewed by Marie Cornwall for the Aileen H. Clyde 20th-Century Women's Legacy Archive Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library University of Utah February 3, 2014 Dixie Ann Snow Huefner Interviewed by Marie Cornwall for the Aileen H. Clyde 20th-Century Women's Legacy Archive Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library University of Utah Born: December 7, 1936, Washington, D.C. Parents: William James Snow, Jr., and Dixie K. Mangum Snow Husband: Robert Paul Huefner Children: Steven Frederick Huefner Eric William Huefner The Aileen Clyde Life History Project is conducted by Resources for the Study of Social Engagement, a non-profit organization, and is supported in part by the Clyde Family Foundation. Marie Cornwall conducted this interview. Transcription was by Elizabeth Condie Brough and editing by Dawn Hall Anderson. Footnotes were added by Dawn Anderson and Marie Cornwall and approved by the interviewee. Marie Cornwall prepared the final manuscript. The focus of the interview project was three-fold: 1) to record the personal histories of 20th century women, 2) to record memories and emotions related to historical events and social change processes, and 3) to explore women’s participation in and response to social and cultural change. February 3, 2014 Marie Cornwall: So to start out, Dixie, I’d like you to tell me your full name and your birth date, and then I want you to describe for me your family circumstance for the first ten years of your life. Please describe who you were in that period, where you were, and who your parents are. Okay? Go! (laughs) Dixie Huefner: I’m Dixie Ann Snow Huefner, and I was born on December 7, 1936, in Washington, D.C., Columbia Hospital for Women, which no longer exists. My dad and mother had gone back there during the Depression years. They were from Provo, Utah. We lived first in the District of Columbia, and then in Westmoreland Hills, Maryland, from the time I was two or three until I was five. My dad, William J. Snow, Jr., worked for the Farm Credit Administration, and the government moved the Farm Credit Administration to Kansas City during World War II. So my family moved there when I was five. We lived in a suburb of Kansas City, Kansas, two blocks from the Missouri state line. I was there until I was eight, and then the war was wrapping up. My dad took a job with the Banker’s Trust Company in New York City, and we moved to New Jersey. I lived there until I went off to college. So my early years, my first decade—what I remember from my first decade—was in Maryland, Kansas City, and New Jersey. I was the first of my mother’s children. My brother Bill was born in Maryland, and my brother Jerry was born in Kansas City. Ours was, as far as I knew, a pretty typical middle-class, happy, well-adjusted family. I liked my brothers, I liked my friends, and I liked my school. Kansas City was interesting for me because, although my parents were LDS from Utah, we lived there during the war with fuel rationing, and the LDS ward was a long way away—too far to drive in a car on Sunday with rationing. So I went to a little Bible school once a week after school, and sometimes dropped in on the Methodist Church, I think. I didn’t ever spend any time, really, in the LDS Church at all, not that I remember, until moving to New Jersey. MC: Was the [LDS] Church closer in New Jersey, or was fuel no longer rationed? DH: No longer rationed. The church wasn’t close, but the war was over. We met in an old, converted Dutch Reform church in East Orange, and we had to take the train. It was quite a big deal to get to church: we had to take the commuter train that went into New York. Then eventually the [LDS] Church got enough money to build the Short Hills Ward. That was a tenminute car drive—so, no, the ward houses were not close, ever. 1 1 Compared to the experience of most Utah Mormons who live within walking distance of their meetinghouse, even ten minutes seems a long distance to church. 2 MC: And you felt growing up that there was nothing special or different about your life or your family’s lives? DH: No. I loved my dad—he was darling with children—and my mother was busy in the home. She and he had great friends from the Farm Credit, and I knew my parents were just great people, and they were kind to the other neighborhood kids when they’d come to visit. I can remember each house; I can remember how I played in the houses. I can remember the backyards; I can remember the play equipment. I can remember the walks with my dad. I can remember learning to ride a bike. I think it was very typical, a happy time. The adjustment to New Jersey was a little harder. I was in the third grade. They didn’t know me at the school, so they didn’t know whether I was going to be able to advance with my grade. They didn’t know how I’d compare, so they put me in a second/third grade combination because I didn’t arrive in New Jersey until April, close to the end of the year. But they let me go on with the third grade, so whatever I’d been doing in Kansas City was clearly good enough. I was up with what they were doing. Oh, I do remember one funny thing. I wasn’t sure I liked my name: Dixie. (That was my mother’s name. I don’t know whether I didn’t want to have her name . . . I don’t know what it was—I can’t remember.) And so when we moved to New Jersey, the teacher asked me what I wanted to be called, and I said I’d like to be called Ann, my middle name. So, for the first few days she would be asking, “Ann” this and “Ann” that—and I wasn’t responding. I didn’t know who she was talking to! I got so embarrassed that I had to tell her I thought I’d rather be called Dixie. (laughs) So, that was my transition to New Jersey third grade. MC: Oh, that’s funny! What about grandparents? I guess you were traveling a lot. Where were your grandparents at the time? DH: They were in Provo. 2 We started going to Provo for summers when we could, and actually, I didn’t tell you this, but when my dad took the job in New York, he didn’t have a house for us to live in. I think he took the job in January or February of ‘45, so that year my mother took the children to Provo, and we spent several months living with my grandparents. I lived mostly with my mother’s family in Provo, but my other grandmother wanted me for part of the time, so I spent some time over there, too. Those are probably my earliest real memories of my grandparents, but then, after that, my parents would try to take us west to spend time in Provo every year or so. 2 William James Snow and Hattie Thornton Snow; W. Lester Mangum and Jennie Knight Mangum 3 MC: All right, so you’re in New Jersey until you go off to college. Tell me about expectations for college and how you ended up wherever you went to college. DH: You know, I was my parents’ daughter at that point. It was so clear that their roots were in Utah, even though my dad had chosen to leave when he wanted to go to law school at George Washington University, and even though my mother got restless in Provo and decided to join her sister in Washington, D.C. (There were so many opportunities for Utahns to work in Washington during the Depression.) My dad never wanted to return to Utah to live, ever. But they’d both gone to BYU, and they both had parents who were well known in Provo: my dad’s father taught history at BYU, and my mom’s parents were Knights and Mangums, after which the Knight-Mangum Hall was named on campus. 3 So they talked about BYU a lot, and they always encouraged me to consider going there. I don’t remember being pressured or pushed, but they didn’t know anything about any other school, virtually. They were Utahns. My dad traveled in the South with the bank, and he had some friends who really liked Rice University in Texas and Sweetbriar, which was a women’s college, in Virginia. He mentioned those two to me and said that if I didn’t want to go to BYU, his banking friends thought those were really good schools. Well, I didn’t know anything about those schools. I had no desire to go off by myself to Rice or to Sweetbriar. I applied to Duke because there were quite a few kids in my class who went to Duke every year. Quite a little group of New Jerseyans went off to Duke, and it had a good reputation, and it was co-ed, so I applied. Well, I got accepted to BYU and Duke, and I thought, Well, I should go explore my roots. So I went to BYU, based on a very limited exposure to anything else. MC: But it sounds like there was never any question whether or not you would go to college. It was just where. DH: It was just where. I took the SATs—I was on the college track. I was a very good student. I was also one of only two Mormon families in Columbia High School in Maplewood-South Orange, New Jersey, and I was very well known as “a Mormon.” So, people were quite accepting of the fact that I was going to go to BYU. I never got questioned or hassled about it by the guidance counselor, never got discouraged, never got told to go somewhere else. MC: So, when you think of your high school friends, did they all go to college, too? DH: Yes. 3 The Hall was named after Dixie’s grandmother, Jennie Knight Mangum, and her grandmother’s sister-in-law, Jennie Brimhall Knight. 4 MC: You were in a setting with your peers, where you lived, and with other Mormons where the expectation was that you were going to go to school? DH: It was college prep: I had three years of Latin, two years of French, four years of English. This was a very, very fine high school, and the overwhelming percentage of students went on to college. MC: So you went to BYU. What did you do when you finished BYU? DH: Well, I didn’t like BYU! (laughs) There’s a story there. MC: And the rest of the story is …? DH: And the rest of the story is that I really felt like a fish out of water. And I hadn’t realized it before, but I felt like I was a cultural Easterner. Also, I felt like BYU was a lot easier than my high school, plus I felt like the general atmosphere was confining. They didn’t have an Honor’s Program then. MC: And it was a much smaller school than it is now, right? DH: It was about 6,000 students. Ernie Wilkinson was the president, and he struck me as being very authoritarian. Also, I lived in Knight-Mangum Hall, and the dorm mother had her own rules—I don’t know whether they came from “on high” or they were just hers—that you couldn’t play any cards in the dorm, for instance. I found a number of things just kind of stifling, so although I made some nice friends and I liked a lot of the people and actually liked a number of my teachers, I did not like the atmosphere. I actually liked people, but I didn’t like the overwhelming sense that everybody was Mormon and thought they were better than everybody else who weren’t. I’d had such good friends in high school, and I thought they were better Christians than the kids I was meeting on the BYU campus. It seemed to me that this BYU world was too narrow and that these kids didn’t know that their world was too narrow—they didn’t know what else was out there. And I didn’t want to stay. MC: So what did you do? DH: So, I went back to Wellesley College, and I graduated from Wellesley. I had actually seen the Wellesley campus because my next-door neighbor two doors up, who was a very close friend, had a dad who thought that I should see a couple of Ivy [League] schools with his daughter. He took us around the Boston area when his daughter was a junior and I was a senior. So I had seen the Wellesley campus, and by spring at BYU, his daughter, Sarah, had 5 been accepted at Wellesley and was planning to go. I knew what a good reputation it had, so I applied there and to Duke again, and I got accepted at Duke before I got accepted at Wellesley. Actually what was quite pivotal was the opinion I got from Earl Snell, a campus leader at BYU who was from Connecticut and who had gone to MIT until he went on his mission. Then he had transferred to BYU. He found out that I wanted to transfer out and that I had a choice between Duke and Wellesley, and he said, “Take Wellesley, my girl!” (laughs) Okay, he didn’t say “my girl,” but he did say that in his mind, there was no question. “If you go to Duke,” he said, “you’ll find it’s too much like BYU. It’s co-ed; it has fraternities and sororities; it’s interested in sports. It’s just so different from Wellesley.” He said, “If you want a really, really fine education, and you want intellectual stimulation, and you want to meet really interesting young women from all over country, go to Wellesley.” Well, the fact that he was my peer, and he’d been at MIT, and he was from Connecticut... MC: So he was a student, but also a student leader? DH: Yes, he was a student leader, and he was a senior at that point, when I was a freshman. Because I had to let Duke know and Wellesley hadn’t officially accepted me yet, my mother called the Admissions Director at Wellesley and said, “My daughter needs to know whether she’s going to get in because she has to answer Duke by April 15th” (or whatever it was), and the Admissions Director said, “Well, you tell your daughter that although she has not heard from us yet, she will, and is being accepted to Wellesley. But why, in God’s name, did she ever go to BYU?!” (laughs) MC: Oh, gee. (laughs) DH: Because from Wellesley’s point of view, why would this eastern girl, coming out of this fine New Jersey high school with this great record, go traipsing off to Utah to go to college? MC: Yes, I bet. So you just did one year at BYU? DH: Yes. MC: And then you went and finished up at Wellesley—went back to your eastern roots. DH: I went back to my eastern roots. Wellesley was transformative for me. I absolutely adored it. It was a wonderful experience for me. MC: Transformative in what way? 6 DH: It opened my eyes to the world that I’d not been exposed to—by my parents or by BYU. I loved virtually every course I took, I was fascinated with the girls on my floor in the dorm that I was posted to, and we’d spend hours after dinner talking religion, politics, philosophy. They were interested in my religion; I was interested in theirs. There were Unitarians, and Jewish girls, and Episcopalians, and Presbyterians—and everybody was exploring. I found it so exciting. I thought the peer group was just so stimulating, and the whole ambience of Boston I thought was also extremely stimulating. I went to the LDS Church in Cambridge. I went to the ward, and I loved that compared to BYU. The kids were all bright, and it was a big trek. To get there we drove with a gentleman and his wife who lived in Wellesley. (He was the Sunday school chorister. He kept honey bees on his property.) [Victoria] Jane Cranney Ream 4 from the Boston area was a year younger—she was a freshman and I was a sophomore—and the chorister and his wife would drive us in, and we’d spend the whole day. We’d go to Sunday school, and then a whole troop of kids, male and female, would go off to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts after church, then come back for sacrament meeting in the evening, and then go home after that. So Sunday was interesting. George Albert Smith [Jr.] 5 taught the Sunday school class. He was open to questions. You could explore issues: things weren’t just closed in There wasn’t an absolute answer to everything; it didn’t have to be that you didn’t need to think. So, I loved the ward in Cambridge, and I loved Wellesley. MC: Sounds like a great place. DH: It was great. I discovered The New York Times at Wellesley; we had to read it. I discovered that the faculty wanted you to question, they wanted you to explore your values, they wanted you to figure out who you were, and I just felt like I had been pretty sheltered prior to that time. MC: So you graduated from Wellesley when? DH: 1958. 4 Victoria Jane Ream married and moved to Salt Lake in her mid-30s. Before her marriage, she was a technical medical writer and researcher. Much later she authored Art in Bloom (1997), which depicts and discusses the "marriage" of art with floral interpretation. The phrase Art in Bloom is often used as the title of various art museum exhibits, usually held in spring, combining visual art with corresponding flower arrangements. 5 George Albert Smith, Jr., professor at Harvard Business School from 1934 to his death in 1969, was the son of George Albert Smith, LDS Church president. 7 MC: The civil rights movement is heating up, a little bit. DH: Just barely. The only thing I was aware of at Wellesley was the Hungarian uprising. There was a Hungarian uprising against the Soviet Union [1956], and the Soviets put it down. I wasn’t very political at that point, but some of the young women at Wellesley were raising money to send off to the Hungarians. There were little happenings on campus that I was just kind of watching, keeping my eyes open, because I hadn’t been an activist of any sort. MC: So when do you meet Bob? DH: I graduated in ’58 and went to New York City and worked for the Ford Foundation for a year. I met Bob when I went up to Boston for one of those regional [LDS] youth conferences. It was for eighteen to twenty-five year olds, I think, from Maine to Washington, D.C. I met Bob that weekend, and we corresponded over the summer. New York was a lonely place for me, and I hadn’t met any young men I was interested in. I’d done a little bit of dating, but being in New York seemed kind of isolating, overall, and I thought, Well, I think I’d rather go back to school in Cambridge. So I left the Ford Foundation and went up to Cambridge for summer school at Harvard (I took a class in Chaucer and a class in English literature) and then got a job at the Joint Center for Urban Studies of MIT and Harvard. Bob and I started dating when he came back to Boston that fall—and our relationship took off. He was in the final year of his master’s program in city and urban planning at MIT in 1960 when we were dating. We got married in the summer of 1960 and moved to Utah. It was his home: love me, love my state! (laughs) MC: How long did you stay in Utah? Have you been here ever since? DH: No, not quite—but pretty much. You know, he loved the geography of Utah. He liked the scale of Utah. He came back, joined the Salt Lake County Planning Department, made a lot of contacts, and was really one of the most educated, experienced planners because it was just taking off as a field. And Governor Clyde—George Dewey Clyde—asked Bob to please become the very first State Planning Coordinator for the state of Utah. (The governor decided to establish a planner in the office of the governor.) Bob took that position reluctantly because he was only twenty-seven. In fact, he turned it down—twice, I think. And the governor finally said, “Here’s who I’m going to appoint if you don’t take this job.” Bob took the job! (laughs) MC: That’s one way to get some movement! DH: But after a few years, when he was also responsible for federal-state coordination (governmental coordination) under Governor Calvin Rampton, he was troubled by some of 8 the lack of cooperation and some of the issues he didn’t understand, and by federalism in general, so he applied for a White House fellowship and got it. So we left Utah and went back to Washington for a fabulous fellowship year for him—and for me: it was wonderful what they did for spouses! Then he decided to go back for a doctorate in finance at Harvard Business School. So, all told, we ended up spending about five years in the East. Then we came back here. So I was here from 1960 to 1967, and then we came back at the very end of 1971, and we’ve been here ever since. MC: So, tell me about the emergence of your interest in community and government, and feminism and … I mean, when did it all start? DH: It evolved slowly, I think. I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I graduated from college, and most of the young women were still looking to be married and just do community service. Only a third of the graduates went on to graduate school. My parents encouraged me to go to Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School and learn shorthand. It was about the strongest thing I ever did when I said to my parents, “I do not want to do that! No!” MC: But that’s just what educated women did then. DH: That was, and I just knew I did not want to be a secretary. I did not want to do that. So it was about the first suggestion from my parents I can recall rejecting. And so instead I got this job at the Ford Foundation 6—and it was basically secretarial work. (laughs) But it exposed me to international affairs: I read all the mail that came into the central secretariat [a special kind of secretarial pool located in the Office of the Secretary]. We screened all the mail that came in to everybody and routed it, not just to the person to whom it was addressed but to whom else we thought would be interested in it. And things were in turmoil in Beirut; things were happening in Indonesia. I just thought these letters were fascinating that were coming in from Ford people who’d been assigned abroad, and I thought that the international aspect was really interesting. Then when I worked at the Joint Center for Urban Studies [at MIT and Harvard], I worked with Ed Banfield, who was a political scientist. Again I did secretarial but also administrative, editing, and other kinds of work there. He was doing political reports on cities all over the United States. Some he did himself; some he asked his doctoral students to do. 6 The Ford Foundation is a globally oriented private foundation, headquartered in New York, with the mission of advancing human welfare. Its goals are to strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement. 9 When I was getting married and planning to come to Salt Lake, I think I took the initiative, as I recall, and said, “Do you want one on Salt Lake City? Could I try my hand at it?” And he said, “Sure, I’d love one on Salt Lake City. If it’s good, I’ll pay you. If it’s not, I’ll tell you!” (laughs) It was very conditional. So I got out here and interviewed the mayor, and the commissioners, and a lot of other people, and wrote this report on Salt Lake City politics. He was pleased with it and paid me for it, and it became part of the series of volumes he did with his doc students on city politics across the country. So that was putting my toe in the water in kind of a new way. I’d majored in political science at Wellesley, but that was a step into a professional role. Then coming off of that I got asked to be the ghost analyst for the Salt Lake City-County Civic Auditorium Committee that was studying whether or not to build a public auditorium. I wrote that report. I interviewed people, I studied the data, I went up to Portland and looked at their civic auditorium, and I ended up being the ghost author of something called “The Missing Link,” which resulted in the [LDS] Church backing the development of a new civic auditorium [the Salt Palace] and a new symphony hall, later named Abravanel Hall. 7 And I got active in the League of Women Voters. I stayed active in the League of Women Voters when I went to Washington—well, not in Washington because I was too busy, but when we went back to Boston while Bob got his finance degree. So to answer your question about my involvement in the community, it was slow. You know, one thing just led to another. The civil rights movement was taking off in the late ‘60s when we were in Washington. Vietnam was boiling over, and there were a lot of protests on campus. So I was just gradually becoming aware of what was going on in the world around me that I really hadn’t been aware of as a kid. MC: You mentioned how you couldn’t get a credit card in your own name after your marriage. Tell me more about that. DH: Yes, that annoyed the heck out of me. So I guess that was a little trigger too! I mean, these were things that I never thought about and I just… MC: And you’d been an independent woman living in Washington, and New York, and Boston. 7 In late 1961 an 11-member Joint City-County Civic Auditorium Committee was commissioned to determine the need for a large public auditorium in Salt Lake City. After meeting for a year and a half, the committee, headed by Howell Q. Cannon, issued an 83-page report titled "The Missing Link,” which called for a multipurpose complex in the community. According to the Deseret News (4 March 1994), “Cannon was meticulous to a fault in compiling the data, and every word that went into the report was thoroughly scrutinized. … Cannon made a case for its position in a very detailed and convincing manner.” 10 DH: Yes, I was living on my own. And now I was married, and I wanted a credit card from JC Penney. But I couldn’t get it in my name because I was married, and only my husband was considered responsible for paying my debts! That was just a small thing, but it really annoyed me. It was just very annoying to me. I thought, What is this? I know how to pay my own bills, and I’ve even got a little bit of my own income. So what’s with this? It was just a little series of triggers as you figure out who you are in the world, what’s going on around you, and what seems fair and what doesn’t seem fair. MC: So, the Equal Rights Amendment 8 is passed by Congress in ’72. DH: And I’m back out here, and Christine Durham, who had moved out here, really wanted to do something about this because the [LDS] Church was not in agreement. So she and I together teamed up to form Mormons for the ERA, along with Becky Cornwall, and we put out this nice little tri-fold that she, as I recall, wrote (since she had this wonderful legal background) about why it should be fine for women to be the beneficiaries of an equal rights amendment. The [LDS] Church was opposed to it, but it wasn’t a revelation: it wasn’t a pronouncement from on high. It seemed to be a political position, and we both thought that we were fine taking another position and gathered as many signatures as we could in a brief period of time. We had sixty or eighty signatures, as I recall. We wanted to put out this position for consideration, and the newspaper picked it up. It was just a small little effort. MC: That made a big splash! DH: Yes, it did because it was unusual to take a different position from the [LDS] Church. MC: Didn’t it get a lot of media attention? DH: It did get quite a bit of media coverage. Christine was the more prominent one, even though I think she was just practicing law at the time. 9 I don’t think she’d been appointed to the bench at that time. And there were other names, prominent names, on the list. Esther 8 One of the most contentious social issues of 1970s was the role of women in society. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) had been passed by Congress in 1972 and was requiring ratification by the states. 9 Justice Christine Durham has been on the Utah Supreme Court since 1982 and served as Chief Justice and Chair of the Utah Judicial Council from 2002--12. She previously served on the state trial court after a number of years in private practice. 11 Peterson 10 was on the list, and Algie Ballif 11, and Rodello Hunter 12, who was a well-known author, and Kathy Flake 13. Anyway, it was a good list of women who’d signed on. This was for me another toe in the water, so to speak, of deciding where to be independent and what to be independent about. MC: Do you want to comment on the IWY Conference 14 which was in 1977 in June? Did you go to that? DH: I went; I was there. I was invited by my Relief Society president to go because she told me that she had been asked to invite people from the ward to go to IWY. 15 Now, she knew 10 Esther Eggertsen Peterson (1906-97) became the first lobbyist for the National Labor Relations Board in Washington, D.C. in 1914. She was Assistant Secretary of Labor and Director of the United States Women’s Bureau under President John F. Kennedy. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson named Peterson to the newly created post of Special Assistant for Consumer Affairs. She would later serve as President Jimmy Carter’s Director of the Office of Consumer Affairs. 11 Algie Eggertsen Ballif (1896 –84) was an educational leader and politician in Utah. She served for 23 years on both the University of Utah Board of Regents and the Provo City Council. She served from 1959 to 1961 as a member of the Utah House of Representatives and later served as head of the Utah Department of Social Services. 12 Rodello Hunter (1920-2005) was the author of A House of Many Rooms, A Daughter of Zion, and Wyoming Wife, all published by Alfred A. Knopf. Two were translated into several other languages by Reader's Digest Book Club. Her books are National Library Selections. 13 Kathleen Flake later became a professor of American Religious History at the Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion at Vanderbilt University. She has a bachelor's degree from Brigham Young University and a J.D. from the University of Utah. She served an LDS mission in Japan. She was previously an attorney based in Washington, D.C. and author of The Politics of Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle(2004). 14 The United Nations declared 1977 as International Women's Year (IWY). President Carter appointed a commission to plan a National Women's Conference in Houston, Texas, November 18 to 21, 1977, and to propose a National Plan of Action, which included controversial issues like abortion, sexual preference, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and day care. Leading up to Houston, each state held its own conference to discuss platform issues and elect delegates. Utah's IWY conference was held in June 1977. It erupted in controversy when (only one week before the event) the Mormon Church urged its women to attend in large numbers, presumably to resist passage of any resolutions reflecting liberal social ideas. 12 me, and she knew I was a liberal. I had taught cultural refinement in Relief Society—and had just loved it. And she knew that I had now defined myself as a feminist, so she knew she was inviting feminists from the ward to go to the IWY Conference. So I went in blind; I expected a far different experience than what transpired. I ended up being asked to be a moderator at one of the sessions that was on something about the family and family planning. As I recall, it was whether you should get married young or postpone your marriage until you’d gotten your degree. When I got down there, it was so disillusioning because it had been absolutely packed, stacked with these Mormon women who were told to vote “no” on every one of those resolutions, the propositions we were to vote on. I was just kind of in shock. I remember being so nervous when I was moderating this session because so many young women in there were attacking anything anybody said among the presenters about the value of becoming educated as a woman and knowing who you were first and getting a college degree before you got married. I was watching my clock the whole time; I wasn’t supposed to be the timekeeper, but I was just really nervous about the whole thing. I thought Esther Landa 16 was wonderful in conducting and keeping order at the plenary sessions, but I just felt like everything the organizers were doing was being attacked without any really thoughtful conversation going on. And then it was very disillusioning to see the largely LDS crowd vote all those resolutions down that I thought were so sensible and to see them stack the deck as to who Utah would be sending off to Texas for the National Women’s Year [IWY]. It was truly an extremely disillusioning event for me in terms of the way I saw the leadership of the LDS Church. I wrote about it for Dialogue. 17 The article was not on my perceptions as a person; it was quite journalistic in terms of going through every one of the 15 A letter signed by the General Relief Society Presidency was sent to LDS Church regional representatives. It invoked President Benson's office as sanction for its request that at least ten LDS women per ward be asked to attend the IWY conference. The letter made no mention of ERA or feminists, radical or otherwise, and gave no instructions on voting. However, after the conference, Relief Society 1st Counselor Janeth Cannon acknowledged that the attendance goal of ten women was mistakenly interpreted by many as a "call to arms." 16 Esther Landa presided over the Utah 1977 International Women’s Year Conference held at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City. Esther was an activist and was especially involved in issues related to women and children—public education, social services, family health, children’s welfare, and human equality. She served on the Salt Lake Board of Education, was president of the League of Women Voters of Utah (1958) and president of the National Council of Jewish Women (1975). She helped plan the 1971 White House Conference on Children and was a Utah delegate at the Conference on Families in 1979. 17 Dixie Snow Huefner, “Church and Politics at the Utah IWY Conference,” Dialogue 11:1 (1978): 58-76. 13 votes and the committees and describing what happened from a reasonably objective point of view—well, not completely, probably. (laughs) MC: We’ll put a footnote in, so we can find that. You say disillusioned with the leadership, but were you disillusioned with Mormon women as well? DH: Well, I was also disillusioned with Mormon women but not with my own ward and not with my Relief Society president. MC: So it was these women “out there” somewhere? DH: Yes, it’s these other women. I thought, Where are you coming from? What do you know about anything?! You’ve just been given instructions: you haven’t studied this yourself; you don’t know what you’re doing; you’ve just been given instructions about how to vote. Some of them had their husbands there, and they were telling them how to vote, and you could just feel this. And I just thought, This isn’t the way this is supposed to be! You should be making an independent vote after listening to all these sessions, all these discussions, all this opportunity to interact. You shouldn’t come in just so stacked against everything you hear. I don’t think I voted “yes” on every one of those resolutions, but I certainly didn’t vote “no” on all of them! And I just felt like we weren’t doing a good job as a church in developing people’s true, independent spiritual conversion—that we were a cultural and sociological church in many ways and that the politics out here were different from anything I’d ever experienced growing up outside of Utah as a member of the [LDS] Church. The people here didn’t know how to separate the culture from the religion, and IWY was just an example of it that hit me hard. MC: So did it take a while to recover from that? Or was it just kind of “Gee, this is bad”? DH: No, it took a while. But even before IWY (and maybe this goes back to the ‘60s and back to college), I’d also been extremely disappointed in the [LDS] Church’s position in respect to the blacks and not giving the blacks the Priesthood. I had been a very religious adolescent, and I had studied. I felt like I was a better Christian than Mormon. I had spent a lot of time thinking about Christianity, maybe partly because of the exposure to other churches and the time I’d spent in the Presbyterian Church in Maplewood. And I could not accept the fact that blacks could not hold the Priesthood. I had friends who didn’t like it, but they felt bound by the position that had been taken by the First Presidency to accept that it must be “revealed truth.” They didn’t like it, but they accepted it; for me, I never could accept it. It was always completely clear to me—always— 14 that it was wrong. It violated everything I knew about the New Testament and everything I knew about Jesus and everything I’d studied on my own about Christianity. I simply thought it was just plain wrong. I could not defer to the First Presidency or credit the [LDS] Church stand on that. So I was already at odds with the [LDS] Church on a very important matter to me, and then along comes another example of the same thing: Okay, you don’t really understand blacks, you don’t really understand non-discrimination, and now it seems to me you don’t understand women either. So it was sort of a double-whammy in a way. I just thought, I don’t think this is “revealed truth” either. I think this is an example of a cultural-political position that is based on not-deep-enough understanding. That’s how I took it. MC: And then, about a year after IWY, in June 1978, there’s a Priesthood revelation extending the priesthood to all worthy men in the [LDS] Church. 18 What did that mean to you? DH: Well, of course I thought it was wonderful—and I also thought it was about time! We knew people who had been writing to the [LDS] Church, and we knew that many of them had been saying, “We have no idea whom to baptize down here in Brazil. You’ve got to do something about this. Everybody is 1/16th or 1/8th or 1/32nd black. I mean this doesn’t make any sense at all.” We also knew that President Kimball had been praying about it for a long time. We had heard that—that this was something he had really wanted and had been working on. So, of course, I thought he was wonderful, but I still thought it was late coming and that I didn’t know how much pressure was coming from what sources when it happened. Arch Madsen, who was a dear friend of Bob’s, was head of Bonneville Corporation—the radio, TV, all of that—so he was informed beforehand. Arch knew how Bob felt about it, which was the same as I felt about it. Bob always remembers that he walked into the Alta Club for lunch and Arch, who was quite lame and limp, walked all the way from the back of the dining room up to the front to tell Bob. And it was very exciting to Bob, and it was really touching to him that Arch knew how much it would mean to Bob. MC: So he hadn’t heard yet? So this was on the day…? 18 On June 9, 1978, what is now known as the Priesthood Revelation was announced in the media. “He has heard our prayers, and by revelation has confirmed that the long-promised day has come when every faithful, worthy man in the Church may receive the holy priesthood, with power to exercise its divine authority, and enjoy with his loved ones every blessing that flows there from, including the blessings of the temple.” The revelation has implications for women of African descent as well. They also receive the blessings of the temple. 15 MC: Arch knew because they were releasing it in about two hours or so. It was just about the time they were announcing it. So, yes, it was a big deal, but I thought it should have come before. It shouldn’t have had to wait for President Kimball. MC: So it was important, but you always felt it should have come much earlier. Tell me about your involvement with Exponent II. 19 You would have been out here in Salt Lake when it started. DH: Well, when Bob was getting his doctorate in finance, Laurel Ulrich 20 and Claudia Bushman 21 were beginning to push Exponent II, and I was back there. So that was very exciting because when I had been there earlier, I had participated in writing the second edition of A Beginner’s Boston 22 with Laurel. I had written the chapter on culture. So I knew some of these same people, and I adored Laurel. I was so in awe of Laurel! I was also extremely fond of, and in awe of, Claudia. So here were these two women with a whole group of others who had discovered the original Exponents in the Widener Library. I had written an article for the pink Dialogue 23 and then watched Exponent take off. But I wasn’t part of the Exponent 19 After the consolidation of the Relief Society Magazine into the Ensign in 1970, several Cambridge, Massachusetts, area women, including Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Claudia Bushman, started an independent publication, Exponent II, in 1974. Exponent II was inspired by and named after the 19th-century Relief Society magazine Woman’s Exponent and focuses on the concerns and experiences of Mormon women from a feminist perspective, as did its predecessor. The masthead of the early Utah Woman’s Exponent proclaimed itself dedicated to “The Rights of the Women of Zion and the Rights of Women of All Nations!” Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, professor at Harvard University and winner of the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes for her innovative study A Midwife’s Tale, specializes in the history of early America and of women. 20 Claudia L. Bushman became a professor of American Studies at Columbia University specializing in LDS Church history. 21 22 Written in the early 1970s, A Beginner’s Boston was a successful guidebook that included entertaining oddities, such as where to find the bricks laid by the drunken bricklayer, or the street on Beacon Hill where you can almost touch both sides simply by stretching your arms, as well as art galleries, museums, historic landmarks, and such. Dixie Snow Huefner, “A Survey of Women General Board Members,” Dialogue 6:2 (1971): 61-70. Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought is a quarterly journal that addresses theological, philosophical, historical, and sociological studies of Mormon life. First published in 1966, the editorial board and advisors have included several notables of Mormonism, including Eugene England, G. Wesley Johnson, Lowell L. Bennion, Leonard J. Arrington, Richard Bushman, Chase Peterson, Stan Cazier, and Dallin H. Oaks. In the early 1970s, 23 16 editorial crowd. I was back in Salt Lake City. The “pink” Dialogue came first, and then the women kept going with Exponent II, which struck me as a very happy, good thing. The women back there in Cambridge were a terrific bunch, and they were very keen on being Mormon feminists and discovering the early roles the Mormon women had played in the [LDS] Church and how much near-Priesthood authority they had actually exercised. MC: Tell me how important that network of women was for you during really all of the ‘70s—from the ERA to the IWY to the Priesthood revelation. How did you interact with these women? DH: Networking with Mormon feminists was important to me. Can I even remember when the Retrenchment Society was formed in SLC? This group of women 24 in Salt Lake (whom you know well) I guess was formed in the early ‘70s after I got back here, after Bob got his doctorate. It was very important to me because we felt like we were a bit alone in our own wards, and together we felt empowered, that we weren’t alone, because here were all these active Mormons who were quite educated, quite independent-minded, and liberal in [LDS] Church terms—definitely hard-thinking and carving out their own reasons for activity and their own basis for their spirituality. I thought the group was extremely important, both for what we brought to each other and also for the issues we were studying. Someone would present each time we met, with resource materials; she would have researched the topic. There was a lot of really interesting Mormon and non-Mormon research data being shared about the role of women, and it was very Claudia Bushman, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and other women living in Boston guest-edited the Summer 1971 “pink” issue of Dialogue (so-called for the color of its cover) that focused on the experiences of women within the Mormon Church. It included articles on nineteenthcentury Mormon feminists, scriptural and historical origins of the dominant LDS model of womanhood, the difficulty of balancing academic work with family, and the challenge of being single within a church that exalted families. 24 Retrenchment was the name adopted from early Mormon roots by a group of LDS women, (many of them Cambridge/Boston area transplants to Salt Lake) who met to discuss women’s roles and their experiences adjusting to Utah religious culture. “The original Retrenchment Society was a group of leading Mormon women who met semimonthly between 1870 and 1914. They ‘retrenched’ from ignorance, studying physiology, politics, theology, and women’s sphere of responsibilities. …The same need for sharing feelings and exploring attitudes with sympathetic people led to the organization of the Salt Lake City General Retrenchment Society in the spring of 1974. … The Retrenchment Society of the 1970s decided to extend their private discussion and growing awareness of woman’s roles in society through a lecture series funded by the Utah Endowment for the Humanities.” Leonard Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience, 2nd ed. (1992), 326. 17 meaningful to me. (Of course, it’s still going on but in a very different form.) We did this lecture series called “Utah Women: Roots and Realities” that was important, and I took a big logistical role in organizing it: bringing women together and arranging for these lectures across the state to explore different topics about Mormon and non-Mormon women and what the future should hold for them in Utah. MC: We need to get those papers and get that history recorded. DH: I’ve got most of them. I have everybody’s except Leonard Arrington’s in written transcripts. MC: Well, you know where that has to go, right? (laughs) DH: Yes…in the Aileen Clyde Archives! MC: So, you had how many children? DH: Two boys. MC: Your raised two boys. But then you went off in another direction, in terms of education? You got your law degree? DH: I did. After we came back to Utah in the ‘70s, I went back part-time to the U and got a master of science degree in special education. (In Boston, I had gotten really interested in dyslexia and learning disabilities.) It took about five years to get that master’s degree because the boys were still in elementary school and junior high so I was going to school part-time. And then I got this clinical appointment at the U because it was quite a new program. The whole field was just taking off, so it wasn’t like they had this huge body of people to choose from! (laughs) I had done well in their program, and they asked me to come on as a clinical instructor. So it was a beginning of a career for me that I had never, ever considered as a college student or a young mother. I really enjoyed it, and a federal law got passed, which is now called the “Individuals with Disabilities Education Act” [IDEA], that established rights for children with disabilities in the public schools and the rights of their parents. We had to start teaching those rights to our teachers who were training in special ed. Nobody was very prepared to do it; I had the political science background, League of Women Voters background, and I’d gotten interested in state politics over the years, so I opted to teach the course. And I fell in love with the material—fell in love with reading these court decisions! I thought, Well, I’ll go to law school 18 because if my department doesn’t want me in a tenure track spot, I will have a law degree. I can go off and practice law. But if an opening should come up in my department, I might have a chance with a law degree. It was the equivalent of a doctorate; I might be able to compete for a tenure track spot. Since I didn’t want to stay in the clinical track, I thought it was a good career option. So I started law school in 1982, about five years after I got my master’s degree. I did that part-time because I still had my clinical appointment and was still teaching. So I went to law school for four years instead of three. I loved law school. I absolutely loved the discipline and the material, plus, after graduating, I had a chance to clerk for a federal appeals judge for four years here in Salt Lake, Judge Stephen Anderson, who was on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. I shared a half-time clerkship with another woman. Together we were longer-term clerks for him. I stayed there for four years until a tenure track spot opened up in the department. I competed for it, and I received it. They had very kindly tailored it for someone just like me! (laughs) They were looking for someone to fill a position in special ed law and policy, which I fit very nicely. So I got my tenure track spot, left the judge’s chambers, and my career took off fulltime. MC: So you became full-time faculty in what year? DH: In 1990, and you know I never anticipated having a career when I was a young woman. To do that was a very important step for me. MC: That’s great. One of the things you list in the ‘80s that I want to talk about now is not only the publication of the book about Emma Smith by Linda Newell and Val Avery [Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith] but the LDS leadership’s reaction to it. Those were difficult times, with the excommunications.25 DH: Those were very difficult times. My friend Lavina Fielding Anderson was one, and it was so clear to me that she had a testimony of the Gospel. She was a committed Mormon but was so upset by what she saw as administrative abuses in the Church in terms of denying people freedom of speech and being deceptive about it. She’d done so much research, logged so much data, and it seemed so compelling. I thought it was very wrong for her to be 25 Six members were excommunicated or disfellowshipped in September 1993, allegedly for publishing scholarly work not aligned with Mormon doctrine or for criticizing Church leadership. The label "September Six" was coined by The Salt Lake Tribune. The six were Avraham Gileadi, Lavina Fielding Anderson, D. Michael Quinn, Maxine Hanks, Paul Toscano, and Lynne Kanavel Whitesides (disfellowshipped). Lavina Fielding Anderson edited Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective (1992) and Lucy's Book, the definitive edition of the Lucy Mack narrative and has served as editor for the Journal of Mormon History 1991-2009. 19 excommunicated. I thought it was very wrong. And other things were happening at the same time. Sonia Johnson 26 got excommunicated, but she was really out there challenging the [LDS] Church in a very public way and was a very different kind of personality from, say, Lavina. It was a tough time; I thought bad things were happening for people who were asserting themselves in what they felt was demanded by their own sense of integrity. I wasn’t as sympathetic to Sonia, but I was to many of the others. 27 MC: Why do you list the Emma book here in terms of importance? Does it represent something? DH: Well, it represented something to me. It represented, number one, that very good scholarship could come from a couple of women who felt a need to go digging in historical material that hadn’t been published before. Linda was not an academic historian, but she brought such care, such conscientious scholarship to it, trying to cast light on material that was difficult for the [LDS] Church to handle. It’s been interesting to watch the [LDS] Church evolve over these decades to be somewhat more open, finally, about its own history and being less afraid of publishing the complexity of it—the good along with the bad—and to recognize how harmful it is for people who really are searchers after truth in a deep way, how harmful it is to deny them access to the truth—to real history, to what actually was going on. I had just been disillusioned in many ways by the political, well, what I saw as the political leadership of the [LDS] Church at that time. So many decisions I thought were made that maybe they thought were right for the bulk of the [LDS] Church—who was I to judge? But they weren’t right for me! (laughs) And they weren’t right for most of the people I knew who were really interested in intellectual honesty about things. And Emma was representative of an attempt at intellectual honesty about our history. MC: You mentioned that it was also important that it was written by women. Mormon women are starting to publish in the ‘80s. Were you involved with Claudia Bushman and the history of Mormon women that she did? DH: No, I wasn’t involved in it. Claudia and I lived across the street from each other in Arlington, Massachusetts, when Bob was getting his doctorate. She was a historian, and Laurel had become one, and I just admired both of their work greatly. They were active in the 26 Sonia Johnson co-founded Mormons for ERA. In 1979, she delivered a scathing speech entitled "Patriarchal Panic: Sexual Politics in the Mormon Church" at a meeting of the American Psychological Association (APA) in New York City. She was excommunicated later that year. 27 Dixie wrote a review of Johnson’s book, From Housewife to Heretic, which appeared in The Sunstone Review, 1:3, November/December 1981. 20 LDS Church. They were committed on their terms and were very outspoken in different ways about what they thought ought to be happening for women. I was involved on a more personal level with them. MC: LDS women really begin to publish during the ‘70s. Emma Lou Thayne begins publishing, Carol Lynn Pearson is publishing, there’s historical work being done; it’s the emergence of women’s voices in writing. DH: And Jill Mulvay Derr under Leonard Arrington. 28 He was encouraging some good history—and not being too encouraged from on top. In fact, he was being discouraged. There were a lot things starting to happen. Maureen Beecher was working on Eliza [R. Snow]. MC: Yes, it was an exciting time in terms of that. So let’s go to the 90’s. You were the cochair of Karen Shepherd’s campaign. 29 I had not known that. Tell me about that. DH: That was exciting. I was the “Issues Coordinator,” and then officially Scott Matheson Jr. and I were the co-chairs of her campaign. But the work I was actually doing was coordinating about ten different task forces that Karen wanted set up on different issues to really educate her about what was going to be important nationally. We set up these little teams and turned them loose—and they were good. We asked them to define the key questions that Karen should really be up on and to write executive summaries for her: to write somewhat longer papers and then shorter three-pagers that she could really study and decide what questions she had, whether she agreed or disagreed, what else she wanted them to find out for her. We pulled together this impressive book for her that she took with her to the Deseret News and Salt Lake Tribune. They were very impressed that this was a woman candidate who had really studied the issues—who was not coming in cold—and had taken these positions. And it was exciting! We met around the dining room table. Karen would come in and meet with each task force before they started working. She would lay out for them what her values were so they understood the big principles that mattered to her and the value orientation so that they would have a sense of who she was when they started digging in on these specific policy issues. Then they’d go to work on the policy issues, then come back and show her what 28 Leonard J. Arrington (1917-1999) was the first professional historian to serve as church historian of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1972 to 1982). He and the historians he encouraged and worked with produced path-breaking works of Mormon scholarship during his life time. 29 Karen Shepherd first ran for elective office in the fall of 1990, when she won a seat in the Utah state senate, where she served two years. When U.S. Representative Wayne Owens, a Democrat, announced he would not seek re–election to his Salt Lake City district, Shepherd won the party nomination to succeed the four–term incumbent. 21 they had done, and find out if she was comfortable with it or what questions she had. It was great. MC: And it was effective—because she gets elected, right? DH: Yes, she won. Bob was doing some work for her, too, on tax policy. He told her not to promise that she wouldn’t raise taxes, that it was always dangerous to promise something when you didn’t truly know what you were going to get into when you got back to Congress. But her handlers …There were two kinds of handlers: one was PR and one was polling. It wasn’t the polling; it was the other one, the PR. He got her to promise that she would not support a tax increase. Then she got back to Washington, and she was one of the deciding votes. Clinton needed a tax increase, and it was a terrible time for him. There was another woman in Pennsylvania who was seen as the last vote he needed. But Karen was also a very deciding vote, and they used that against her out here. She lost her next election. “You promised you wouldn’t support a tax increase and you did.” She only served one term, and she was such a good, thoughtful, intelligent woman. It was really hard to see her lose to Enid Green. (laughs) That’s a whole other story. MC: And then Laurel, your good friend, wins the Pulitzer Prize. DH: I was so excited for her to win that. I thought it was a wonderful book: the detective work of taking what had been seen as a kind of boring or standard day-by-day journal of this [18th-century New England] midwife and tying it to everything happening in Maine, and the court records and the press reports, and from those sources being able to create such a complete picture! I thought it was just a fabulous example of women’s history. MC: Comment, if you will, about the excitement in this liberal Mormon women’s group that you had been associated with. I mean, was there a lot of excitement among the women of Mormonism about Laurel winning the Pulitzer? 30 DH: I honestly don’t remember. So many Mormon women didn’t even know who she was. In Retrenchment I’m sure we were all excited, but I don’t quite remember. But I do remember how Laurel was an unknown out here, how most people didn’t know who she was, and how 30 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich received the Pulitzer Prize in History for A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785-1912. The book was also honored with the Bancroft Prize and the John S. Dunning Prize, among others. Ulrich received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992. In 2016 she was named the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University. Laurel originated the phrase “Well-behaved women seldom make history” and authored a book by that title in 2007. 22 the [LDS] Church mistreated her when she pops onto the scene as a prize-winning Mormon woman historian. She gets invited to BYU to speak…and then uninvited? MC: Well, she wasn’t uninvited; she never got invited. She wasn’t approved by the administration to speak. So the [BYU women’s conference] planning committee wanted to invite her but couldn’t. The administration said “no” to that proposal. DH: She gave a commencement address at the U. She’s very soft-spoken, and it was quite personal as I recall: a very low-key discourse on the evolution of her feminism, going back to her undergraduate days at the U. I was sitting up high in the audience, and there were a lot of people up there, including men, who sat on their hands and did not applaud when it was over. I remember being quite stunned that they were taking offense at this very soft-spoken woman describing the importance of the role of women in the life of the community. I thought, There’s still a lot of anti-feminism in this culture, a lot of fear or worry or something. MC: Okay, I want you to comment as we finish up here about grandparenting because you list this as one of the important things in the 1990s. And I think it’s a nice way to weave all this policy stuff together, maybe. What did that mean for you? DH: Well, I’m still exploring what it means. We have seven granddaughters. We had two sons, and our oldest son has three girls and our younger son has four girls. We never had the privilege of raising daughters, so it’s been fascinating to see how individualized these girls are, how very different they are from one another, and how terribly different they are from our boys—and, from our point of view, how much more challenging they are to raise than our boys were. MC: Oh really? DH: They’re darling, and they’re very interesting. Now I have to give you a little background here. I’ve just sort of taken things in life for granted; I mean things have just happened, a lot of opportunities, and I’ve just gone with the flow. I felt like I lucked into them in a way, and I hadn’t thought too hard about “what I wanted to be when I grew up.” I was just going to grow up, get married, and live happily ever after. I wasn’t a very deep thinker about who I was or what I wanted to be. So both Bob and I have been trying to figure out how can you be a good influence on your grandchildren. Do you just go with the flow? I was just being a grandmother for a while: I mean I just love seeing them, and it’s fun getting to know them. Over time I’ve started thinking that maybe I’m missing opportunities, maybe I should think harder on this. Maybe I should think about what I might do to be helpful, or what I might share that would be meaningful, rather than just saying, “It’s great to see you. I love you. You’re darling!” (laughs) I’m trying to figure out what it means to be a grandparent. I’m still 23 sort of struggling with it because you don’t want to force anything. You just want to be who you are. But maybe I should think a little harder about how to relate to each one of them separately because each one is very different. MC: So tell me, then, as you look at your granddaughters and their future, has life gotten better for women, or is it just different? Is their generation facing similar or different problems? DH: I think that they have more options, and I think they are aware they have more options. I think that feminism and Title IX, whether they even realize it or not, have made a difference in the lives of today’s generation. They just have more opportunities. Our oldest granddaughter has a very emancipated mother, and our granddaughter is very much her own person. She’s doing a project on feminism right now for her history topic in her high school, and she’s asserted herself in a couple of extremely helpful, interesting, wonderful ways that I never would have dared do when I was her age. So I see her as very much evolving into her own person. The other ones are younger, not as defined yet, but gosh, they’re exploring sports, trying out all these sports! And they have disciplined piano instruction; they’re way ahead of where I was as a piano student at their ages. And they’re all keen on education. Their parents are keen on that and making sure they have options. Both sons have already started driving these girls around to a ton of different schools to think about lots of different possibilities for college. MC: How old are they? DH: The one family has girls who are seventeen, fifteen, and eleven. And the other family has younger children. They have twins—they’re twelve—and they have an eight-year-old sister and five-year-old sister. The twelve-year-old twins have already been seeing colleges. Their parents have already been showing them places. When they take a trip to San Francisco or to Oregon or to Boston, they show them all the colleges. So they are already exposing them in ways that I wasn’t. On the downside, I also think they have a tougher time because there are drug issues, and sex issues are so much more out in the open, and so much behavior and language are acceptable that weren’t when I was growing up. They get good and bad exposure to the world in a way that’s much more fraught with temptation than I ever experienced. I’m not sure where technology is headed, either, especially in terms of how you spend your time, whether you spend it on trivial games and texting. I’m not sure what it means for the future of men and women, where we’re headed right now. But they’re more sophisticated, and their schooling is impressive, and they have lots of opportunity. 24 MC: Do you have any other thing you might want to talk about before we end? DH: The world has changed enormously in my lifetime. Don’t you feel that, too? I suppose that’s true of everybody’s lifetime, at least since the Industrial Revolution. Change is happening so fast in every generation that it’s really hard to know where it’s going, and I sometimes feel like I live my life a little backwards, that I understand things after the fact, that I put them together a little late! (laughs) I wish I were a little more prescient, or a little bit more far-sighted, or a little bit more creative in the way I think about things. But at the same time, I feel like I’ve learned enormously as a woman, as a wife, as a mother over the course of my lifetime. It’s an interesting life. 25