By Jim Heffernan
(Cover of Ms. First Issue, July 1972)
I’ve been thinking about why I was a charter subscriber to Ms. Magazine when it came out in July 1972. I can’t remember what exactly prompted me to subscribe. My wife tells me it wasn’t her idea and that she was mystified at the time. Maybe a little bit of mental archaeology will reveal the why.
In July 1972, I was 26 years old and my Air Force enlistment had ended a year before. I was a Democratic party precinct captain in Denver and knocked on doors for Pat Shroeder and George McGovern. Pat Schroeder became the first woman representative for Colorado, McGovern was washed away in the Nixon landslide. Pat Schroeder was an electrifying personality and ended up spending 24 years in the House. She wrote a memoir, 24 Years Working in the House and the Place Is Still a Mess.
I’m sure Pat Schroeder had a definite influence on me, but my mother and my wife made me into a feminist long before I even knew about Pat Schroeder.
I was the 6th child born into a devout Catholic family, but the three children who were born in the 6 years that separated my sister and I died early. Two sisters never made it home from the hospital and a brother died before he was 2. I was born after my father had been drafted to be part of the Army of Japanese Occupation. They had gotten to the point where they were drafting married 25-35 year olds with 2 children. My father was in Japan when I was born and he saw me for the first time when I was 6 months old. I was showered with my mother’s unconditional love and believe I bonded with my mother 4 times, once for me and once for each of the 3 who died.
I first met my wife in a high school Ancient History class when she was 15 and I was 16. She sat behind me and we had an instant attraction. It was the beginning of a 4 year on and off relationship. She broke up with me and I broke up with her, but we never forgot each other. I didn’t have a word for it then, but what made our relationship special was mutuality. She wanted me as much as I wanted her. I didn’t have to play “boyfriend-in-charge” games with her. We were partners who happened to be boy/girl.
Each time we got back together the voltage between us increased. We married in 1966, just before she turned 19 and I turned 20. Three weeks later, the Air Force sent me to England for a 3-year tour. It would be another 4 months before she finished nurses training, and we could raise the money for a flight for her.
England was magical. For 18 months we lived in primitive, isolated houses in rural Suffolk County. No TV and a very limited social life, it became an extended honeymoon where we built upon our sense of mutuality with no interference from family or peers.
Just when pregnancy came up, we got the chance to move into modern apartments leased as base housing. Trading coal and kerosene heating for central gas felt like winning a lottery. We spent our last 18 months in the only racially balanced neighborhood we’ve ever lived in. Any traces we harbored about racial difference were erased.
The apartments gave Sharon a social life. Coffee and Yahtzee with military wives was a good education about what it was to be a strong, independent woman. Isolated tours enforce self-reliance on the women left behind.
With the influence of Pat Scroeder, my mother, and my wife, it was impossible for me to buy into Patriarchy’s view of women as inferiors. The intervening 54 years has only re-enforced my view.
Four years on from 1972, Judy Collins came out with the song, “Bread and Roses” that gave me an anthem and neatly tied up the issue with the wonderful line, “The rising of the women is the rising of the race.”
Happy Mother’s Day to all the many types of moms out there!
As always, discussion welcome at codger817@gmail.com