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Kiera Feldman: Um...let's see, so can you hear me alright?

Jessica Murray: I can.

KF: That's great. Um, so can we begin?

JM: We can.

KF: Excellent. It's 4:37, alright. Can you just begin by stating your full name, today's date, and where you are?

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JM: Today's date being the third. This is Jessica Murray and I'm speaking from San Francisco on June 3^rd, 2006.

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KF: Could you maybe give me some background about where you grew up and when you were born and what your family was like?

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JM: I grew up in the Midwest. I was living in a small college town in the cornfields called DeKalb, Illinois, where my father was professor of American literature. And I did a little bit of theater then, it seems to me. Back in the days when that was really quite unusual. There really wasn't much to do in the summertime. And so I did a little bit of theater and I didn't do it again until maybe my last year at Brown when I was in a play in the regular theater department.

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KF: And what year were you born in?

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JM: I was born in 1951. I went to um school a little bit in England when my father was on a Fulbright. And then I went for another year abroad in Hong Kong. Another English school.

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KF: And what grades were those for?

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JM: This was when I was...11 and 12 I was in England. And when I was 15, 16 we were in Hong Kong. When it was still an English colony.

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KF: Did you have siblings?

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JM: I have a sister. She is a psychoanalyst and lives in Cambridge. That's my only sibling.

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KF: Did your mother work?

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JM: My mother was a fine artist who then became a psychiatric social worker. She's retired now and lives in Cambridge.

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KF: And when you got to Brown, what kinds of activities were you involved in?

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JM: Well, everything was so exciting. That one would just look through the course announcement and go nuts. I had taken a lot of languages in high school and so I continued with linguistics and French and Spanish and Russian. And I also started getting involved in music, mostly as a listener.

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JM: I was interested in the women's liberation that was just starting to crest. Activities were just breaking through consciousness in '69. In the fall of '69. And the anti-war activity was heating up at that time. There were student strikes. And I started to get interested in Students for a Democratic Society. And go to meetings, anti-war meetings. And try to understand a little bit about how protests were organized. This was entirely new to me.

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KF: And um how would you characterize Brown's political scene in 1969?

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JM: Well as I say everything was just getting going. We would meet in what was called the Blue Room. Wonder if it's still there.

KF: It is.

JM: Is it?! Whether it's still blue or not, I don't know. That was fun. We would meet and we would talk and then we would meet and talk some more. This is what I remember. And then there were--increasingly, as the war heated up...there were certain geopolitical realities started grabbing the consciousness of the whole country, not just college students. But we would track them. If there was the carpet bombing in Cambodia you know, it would ripple through the youth movement like wildefire. And we would all sort of get galvanized and call a meeting. There was a lot of writing going on.

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KF: What kind of writing?

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JM: Well I was writing a lot of poetry and essays trying to to sort out my feelings about everything. I was trying to find different venues to express the horror that we were all feeling. And also the sense of excitement because it really did seem to some of us at certain points that there could be a revolution in this country. It seems very poignant and silly and sweet and uber idealistic now when I frame it that way. But you know we had John Lennon on the radio with a song called Revolution. And who knew how much of it was a metaphor, and how much of it really could happen?

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JM: These were the years when the Bider-Meinhoff gang were grabbing the headlines. You know, the socialist groups-two radicals in Germany and France. France had just had their 1968. And anything could have happened, it seemed to us. We were so young and untried, and mind-blown. And then of course there were the drugs. That you could see that who knew what could happen. And we were just aware-I was anyway-that there was something going on. I wanted a front row seat. This was before Watergate. This was a couple of years before that whole thing broke.

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KF: What do you think you accomplished in the anti-war movement?

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JM: Well that's a very good question. It's a sobering question. I don't know um if I could answer it in terms of the big cultural context. But I can say that a lot of us got experience in organizing, and maybe hopefully we learned how to think politically. We learned perhaps how to put on a teach-in and how to speak in front of a crowd. That kind of thing. These things have served me later. Also there was a lot of just learning how to get along. There was a lot of you know the social and the cooperative and the group dynamics experience.

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KF: Were there non-Brown students involved?

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JM: Not very many. This was mostly Brown, maybe a few RISD. And some from other Rhode Island universities and colleges. I remember in the theater group we were in there were a couple of high school girls from Mary C. Wheeler.

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KF: Alright well we'll definitely go back to that. And um...what do you think was the relationship between the anti-war movement and the women's movement?

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JM: Well I think that-you know there was a clich� that was growing up that many women writers have chronicled since then which I think from my own experience proved true. Which is that we noticed-the women-that we were getting relegated to positions of less power because we were women. I mean it was really inescapable that once we got involved in these dynamic, exciting, passionate exercises in group work that we would get relegated to doing the shitwork-stuffing the envelopes. This was very humbling. From a spiritual point of view, certainly it had its place [laughs]. And it served me since to think of it that way.

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JM: But at the time it was this glaring incongruity. And so when women's liberation started to call itself that. When a group of women-I guess New York, Washington DC, and it certainly Boston-started to form these feminist collectives, and started bringing this point home. Saying you know, 'Socialist women, radical women, anti-war women, have you noticed this phenomenon? Have your brothers been looking over your heads playing ego games with you?' Then of course it was immediately obvious. And so a lot of us-our energies poured into the other direction. Or we straddled both lines.

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KF: Did you straddle both lines?

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JM: Yeah I would say so. Although for me personally it was mostly feminism that took most of my energy and became most of the focus.

KF: When did that happen for you do you think?

JM: I think...1970. It didn't take long. You know I caught wind of what a few of these women's groups in Boston were doing. My sister, who was 5 years older and she was at Harvard, she fed me a little bit of information. And then I sort of took with it and ran with it.

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KF: And what were the first feminist activities you were involved in?

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JM: Well you know we looked at Brown itself. We looked at the structure of the university and we had, you know, a few sympathetic women on the faculty and in the grad student community who were on the same page. We were all getting the bug around the same time. So you know it was ripe for meetings where we we deconstructed what was going on when there was you know only one women dean. And then what were the percentages of women in the different departments who have tenure. And we sort of put a lot of our energy into that and it took on an academic focus for a while, which was appropriate because that's where we were.

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JM: And at the same time a lot of these women started to-the faculty women and the grad student women-started to talk among themselves and started to put forward proposals for women's studies classes all over the place. They just sprang up like mushrooms after a rain. And this little group of women that I was in, underclass women, we just started to multiply and we started to take all those classes. And so there was this academic wing, really, of the consciousness-raising. And then a lot of us also did what we called C-R-consciousness raising groups. And we would go into the lounge of our little dorm or we would go to each other's off campus apartments. And we would riff about sexism.

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KF: And how did you come to start C-R groups?

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JM: [laughs] I don't remember. But I'm thinking back and sort of realizing how inevitable everything was. You know, it's almost like it couldn't not have happened that way. It was wonderful. And you know then too like I was saying about the political organizing, we got all this inadvertent experience in you know learning how to deal, learning how to cooperate, learning how to relate, learning how to hold the space. Sort of unofficial psychological experience.

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KF: Why do you think C-R groups were 'inevitable'?

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JM: Because women love to talk. And we had so much experience in us from the past. We had so much intimate, emotional baggage from our families and from our boyfriends and from our high school distresses and pains and you know unhealed wounds. And it was burbling over. And here we had people who were able like us to search for a context to put all that in. Not just to pathologize it, like maybe those of us who had gone to shrinks, or who had you know, had had therapy in a rather more patriarchal model, would have been cowed I think. Unless they would have talked in a C-R group or something like it. They would have been cowed. It would have been encouraged to think of these dilemmas in nonpolitical terms. So this was really very refreshing to see it in this other context.

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KF: What were your experiences with sexism like?

JM: Um before women's liberation? After women's liberation? During it?

KF: Let's say before.

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JM: Well you know I remember being called aggressive when I tried to kiss a boy on a date. I remember this in my last year of high school and thinking that was really odd. It really perplexed me. I thought maybe that was a little bit weird when I tried to put it together in my mind that he probably wouldn't have been called aggressive or too aggressive when he tried to kiss me. So that was a little singular bit of data that i-the kind of thing that we talked about in C-R groups and suddenly it all made sense. We started to talk about the double standard. It might be difficult for you to imagine that this kind of thing was not talked about. I mean there's cultures today, obviously extent in the world, plenty of places in the world where it's not talked about in a political way but a matter of life and death for women in the third world and Pakistan I mean it goes on and on.

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JM: But for these middle class white women that we were, highly educated women that we were, it's really noteworthy that such an idea that that was part of a double standard had not been introduced to us before then.

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KF: And in your mind when do you see, or what do you see as the start of women's liberation?

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JM: Well like I say the symptoms of it happened in these young women's collectives. Is-are you meaning something else by the start of it?

KF: Um like when you think of when women's liberation started, what do you think of? Like do you think C-R groups were the start of it? Or--

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JM: Well I think that women's experience in the anti-war movement. I mean historically this is something that a lot of us have looked at when we try to chronicle an immense cultural phenomenon like this. Many people have pointed to its beginnings um in you know in the anti-Vietnam war protests where women did get this experience and then had this wake-up call that sexism was still going on in the ranks of the protestors. And it really makes me think-you know this is not an original idea, I think I was looking at this with Mari Jo Buhle years ago-that the same sort of thing happened in you know the 19^th century in this country when women were starting to get involved in the moral reform movement and women's suffrange and anti-slavery causes. And realized that they were-their hands were tied and they were seen as second-class citizens in those movements too. So that, I mistatated a minute ago-what I meant was that women's suffrange movements came out of that. Feminism came out of those other causes, where they had been fighting alongside their brothers idealistically and then realized that they needed their own fight.

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KF: Definitely. So let's see just to clarify a few minutes back, could you state who Mari Jo Buhle was?

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JM: Mari Jo Buhle was a-I don't remember what her rank was but she was some kind of instructor in the history department. And she taught a women's history class. She was one of the first to teach one of these women's studies classes. Way before there was a department, way before we had hope of forming a department. Although it seems to me that we knew about such things that had been formed. Maybe New York, maybe Sarah Lawrence, you know maybe some of the women's colleges that were still women's colleges.

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JM: When I was at Brown, when I was admitted to Brown it was Pembroke and when I left Brown in 1973 it had turned into Brown. It was merged. And so that was the time when women's colleges were merged en masse. And that would be another interesting branch of this inquiry to look at. Because there was a lot of talk during those years about um will this hurt women or harm women? We're searching for her identity, we're searching for equal rights, what are the implications of merging with Brown? And here we were in the middle of curriculum reform and exciting radical ideas of dissolving this old quaint fashioned little women's college which smacked for many people of an earlier time. And yet there we were looking at women's studies departments. So there were a lot of ironies that none of us were very clear on at the time. I don't know that they've been worked out yet.

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JM: Anyway there was also Nancy Williamson, I'm just mentioning the name because it just occurred to my foggy brain. Nancy Williamson in sociology taught another class. And there were women in the...in the language studies who classes I taught. And there were art history classes that looked at the role of women. English department was starting to look at women in literature and so on.

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KF: What were some of the names of some of the people-the grad students and faculty members, deans?

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JM: Well there was Judith Weiss in Hispanic studies. Um Elane somebody-I'm very sorry, I'm very poor with names. I do remember that they existed though . Um Barabara somebody in the English department was one who was very vocal and articulate. And she not only offered classes to us women to see how feminism might have a voice in literature and the humanities, but she was also part of the feminist lecture series it seemed to me. Women of Brown United, which was this um women's group of students, got some money from Jacquelyn Metfeld (sp) who was a dean at the time and the highest ranking woman at Brown during those years, that had been in some kind of a fund. Probably left over from some pre-feminist women's consciousness, you know, where they had stashed some money aside probably with a very different sensibility.

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JM: Which we young women came-self-identified feminists-and grabbed it and put on uh maybe a semester's worth, maybe a year's worth of courses that where the undergraduates taught as teaching assistants with the graduate student women on different subjects-

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KF: [interrupting] Was-was-[laughs] sorry. Was Women of Brown United um like strictly academic

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JM: No, but I'm going to embarrass myself. I don't remember what else we did. But I think it's safe to say that our focus was very close to home. What's going on in terms of...this college, you know. And women securing women's identity here and securing women's rights here. We did address such issues as the way women learn. We put on film series. You know some films were coming out that were consciousness raising attempts on the part of the women who had the equipment and the resources to put together a film. They were very grainy. They were very primitive by today's standards but I remember renting out the an auditorium and trying to get people to come.

KF: Do you remember any specific films?

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JM: Oh my goodness. I don't. I just remember the types of ideas that they were about. I remember Martina Horner. I think she was from New York, gee maybe a psychologist or a sociologist, who wrote a book called Bright Women Fail. And so you know as academic women we were interested in this idea of how the school system prepares women to not expect excellence and how to turn all of their attention to um relationships, if not marriage then looking good. And um you know, not that-as we found later-that there isn't an art to relating. Now that-as we found out later-there isn't a whole thing that could be called emotional intelligence, which women are ingenious at, as the genders go. You know, we learned later to look at the fullness of this and to sort of reclaim the the sensitivities that actually were bred into women, for good or for ill.

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JM: But at the time we were sort of in shock. We were just waking up to the fact that things weren't equal and these were our initial reactions.

KF: Did you think of women's qualities as um being like uh you know something that you're born with or something that you're schooled with?

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JM: Well you know the issue is still out, right? The jury's still out on that. But at the time-this is what I think you're asking-and I think that this is perhaps the most interesting point, but at the time at least I felt that it was very important to stress the nurture angle because the other had been given so much press. And so you know a lot of the studies that were coming out-the women's liberation studies-were talking about you know this enormous capacity for learning that the human brain has. And how it had been underestimated tremendously, how much the conditioning, how much a part it played in women always choosing to be nurses and secretaries and so on. These were radical ideas at the time-it sounds like such a clich� now.

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JM: So yeah we were very um much wanting to get the point across. And I did so in essays and speeches and talks and so on and the types of articles that we would sort of Xerox and pass around that asked people to consider the extent to which um women's roles had been socialized. And to just dare to ask the questions of what it would be like if we hadn't all been given pink blankets and Barbie dolls.

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KF: Great. Let's see, so maybe we should move on a little bit to talking about RIFT. What was the relationship between Women of Brown United and RIFT?

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JM: I think the only relationship that I can remember is that several of us were in both. But really um...yeah, I mean I was probably active in both of them maybe more than the others. Most of the people it seemed to me had more of a role in the theater department than I did.

KF: And how did uh RIFT come together?

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JM: A women named Katie Phelps who was a year ahead of me had-let's see, she was more involved in theater. And she had the idea to form a women's theater group. It would have men, so really it was feminist theater, which is a distinction which we took pains to make. We would calling everything feminist, not women's. And there were several men in the theater group and they were feminist men.

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JM: So we started to convene and um the man I was living with at the time was in-I believe his major was English-he was certainly a poet then, he was a writer, prolific writer-and we tapped his shoulder to come and take the ideas that we would brainstorm and write them into the form of a script. And that worked very well. Mark Halliday. We would come and we would meet and she was well-versed enough in theater techniques, theater games and exercises to get the creative juices going. She meaning Kate, she was our initial director. She was trained enough in those types of things to direct us through different exercises to get improvisation happening. Which becames, you know it kind of snowballed and was this fabulous um-talk about consciousness raising-it was just this wonderful process by which all these ideas came forth from all of us at once in ensemble. And then old Mark would go back to his little typewriter-tappety tap tap-can you imagine an old fashioned manual typewriter?

KF: [laughs]

JM: and construct a script for us. And we did several plays that way. Once we had a script we would actually treat it like a scripted play. We would memorize our lines and we would have ordinary rehearsals and we would go on tour.

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KF: And um so what productions were you involved with?

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JM: Oh god I should have looked through my memorabilia before answering your question because I'm probably not going to get it right. But there was it seems to me the initial play was called Taking It Off and it was about a fat farm. It was about a camp-summer camp where young women would go to shed weight. And different ones of our characters-all of which had been worked up through these improvisational exercises-would um you know they came out of our improves, these different characters who each had a different reason for wanting to lose weight. And of course it was a metaphor for women's emphasis on the appearance and for feeling suppressed, repressed, put down, belittled, because each of the women characters for different reasons had uh terrible self image. But of course the shared reason, which is the point of a play, was that women were squashed into this role and if they weren't physically beautiful and thin, they really weren't encouraged to think of themselves of anything.

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JM: So it was very polemical and it was I think really well done. Bunch of pretty much untrained young thespians that we were we put on an entertaining show.

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KF: And what can you tell me about the discussions that followed the performances?

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JM: Oh you've heard about those discussions. That's wonderful. We did. We advertised in the playbill that we were going to encourage people to stay and have little C-R groups afterwards. Um we sat around kind of exhilarated post-performance, you know. And I remember some well-intentioned men putting their feet in their mouth [laughing]. I remember feeling very arrogant and superior [laughing] when I would answer them. I also remember feeling torn in my role as I guess facilitator-discussion facilitator. Being very candid now, you know. This was not part of the party line at the time. But I'm thinking back honestly and remembering what was going through me playing this odd role. Um here I was, you know what was I? Eighteen, nineteen, twenty? And I was a mentor somehow. And a very vulnerable and prickly, highly charged subject. Sexuality always came up. The men were threatened would have been the men who would even come to the performances were not-were at least open enough to have come, so clearly they weren't the most threatened men in society-but here they were and all of their ambivalences were out there.

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JM: I do remember one specific exchange with an older east Indian woman. See everybody had been reading about feminism and was all hopped up about women's liberation, pro or con. Everybody was all ready for a forum to talk. And then they came to this play and the discussions afterwards gave them a chance to say things they had been thinking and feeling. And this woman clearly had a position that she wanted to contribute to us young whipper snappers. And it was that no women could be raped, she said. All you have to do is squeeze your vaginal muscles together. This is just a little random memory that strikes me. It was stuff like that you could see how every night was interesting.

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KF: What did you mean by the men putting their feet in their mouths?

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JM: I can't remember. I just remember-since you ask-the only thing I remember is a visual memory of a man-a young man's face. Who-there was defensiveness and there was an effort to learn, you know an effort to be humble, and there was anger and confusion. I saw that look-kind of a highbred look-in my brother's, my male classmates at Brown-I saw that look a lot during those years.

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KF: And why do you think you saw that look?

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JM: Well you know, women's liberation was starting to have a kind of legitimacy on the level of um-at least on campuses, certainly not in the wider society, we know that. But in these impressionable, idealistic groups of people-men and women that were going to college during those years-the men who were open enough to consider themselves progressive-knew that this was not something to dismiss. They knew surely that there was some way that they would be uh linked with what we would know call the Right. We did not call it that then. The Nixon camp, I guess we would have called it. And they certainly didn't want to be linked with the wrong side.

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JM: So anyone who had I suppose any ambitions to progressivism would have to check out this phenomenon-men and women alike-and see what it was about. So there was a lot of conflict there. Here was a political movement that reached into the bedroom. It was actually daring to talk about sex.

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KF: And how did it reach into the bedroom?

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JM: Because women's liberation was challenging the politics of sexuality. It wasn't just talking about foreign wars and corruption in congress. It wasn't talking about a distant geopolitical situation that could remain in the realm of theory. It was talking about what went on between you and your girlfriend. It was talking about the politics of childbearing, it was talking about daycare, it was putting it all together. And it was-I don't think even now in 2006 people have really um credited the side of feminism which is the most truly revolutionary of all, which is about women reclaiming their own sexuality. I think that has yet to be discovered, en masse.

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KF: Definitely. Um...and so with uh RIFT what did you hope to accomplish?

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JM: Well personally I hoped to get out of the [laughing] top floor of the List Art building where I was sort of playing out-up till that time I had been playing out the really the stereotype of the isolated artist in the garret. I was a painting major first. And it was too isolated. I hoped to-I mean I was doing paintings of you know that were on the feminist theme. And I had a show of them down in I think it was URI. So I was able a little bit to put my passions into paint. But I hoped to bring it to the streets.

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JM: I mean the literalism of street theater-we went to Lincoln Center in New York, RIFT did, at one point. And I was prouder than anything else we had done to be part of a festival that billed itself as street theater festival. So for me personally that notion of having that direct and immediate a venue to interface with people was a big part of why I crossed over into theater from strict visual arts.

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JM: At the moment I work in a political organization that puts on street demonstrations, so you see it's clearly something in me.

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KF: Did you see art-did you see theater as a way of popularizing feminism?

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JM: Mmhmm, I did. I saw it as being really very much more likely to have an emotionally galvanizing effect. Again the directness of it, and the you know the all-body, there's your body in it, there's your emotions in it, there's your intellect in it. Um...I still think of theater that way. Again the idea of street theater. Because this was never meant to be a kind of ivory little institution where only a certain niche of the culture would pay the ticket and come to an auditorium. We wanted to get out there, as much as the phrase means, we wanted to get out there.

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KF: And what kinds of people do you think you reached?

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JM: Well you know it was in retrospect um gonna be inevitably limited to the campus crowds that we were a part of at the time. So aside from the rare gig like the Lincoln Center thing-which really was in the middle of New York City in the summer and was going to get a lot of widespread attention-aside from that we just went to little campuses like our own. These were the people who were inviting us and it's unrealistic when I look back to imagine that we would have reached many more than that. But you know I don't know what happened with RIFT after I left and it seems to me that they might have gone further afield with the message.

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KF: And um so did you have like a target audience?

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JM: I don't think I had a target audience. I don't know what Katie's idea was, you know she was the founding mother. And sometimes I wonder what her target audience was, if you want to put it that way. I think that um we did an incredible job for what we had. We were well known in our little, timely context. That epoch needed RIFT. That epoch created RIFT. You know, we were just an expression really bubbling up on this crest-this wave-that was happening in the culture at the time. And it's almost like the moment that was the very early 70s gave birth to feminist theater. And there we were, ready to take up the torch.

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KF: You've touched upon this but what were some of the main cultural and political events of the moment that shaped RIFT?

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JM: The Vietnam War and the radicalization that was its result among a whole generation of people. The literature that came out of it. You know everything from Rolling Stone magazine to Norman Mailer Armies of the Night. You know Gonzo journalism. Um the flowering of strictly women's collectives, you know little women's houses and communes and groups that would put out their own little poetry journals. And women coming together like that. And drugs and rock and roll, which were these liberating um liberating uh influences which along with the pill-the birth control pill-which was uh just staggering in its impact in every, every element of culture that you could name, it affected it. All of this stuff was just a swirl at the time and they each influenced the other.

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KF: Amd um a little bit more on that line of thought, what kinds um of things were you reading that influenced you?

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JM: What kinds of things was I reading. I was reading as sort of my bible for feminism Kate Millet Sexual Politics. Germaine Greer The Female Eunuch. I was reading Lesbian Nation by Jill Johnston who at the time was a wonderful columnist at the Village Voice in New York. I was reading um Ruth Herschberger. What's the name of that book-Adam's Rib. And um there was a book by Mary Daly, a religionist, a religious studies scholar, who was beginning to write about the things which later since then I have researched more thoroughly about the pre-patriarchal religions. So going way back looking at sex roles from a very macro perspective as much as I could get my hands on.

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KF: And were these political or artistic influences?

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JM: Well that's a good question isn't it, because what we were starting to see about women's liberation is that it didn't follow those classic lines of demarcation. Like we were saying a minute ago, if you're talking about sexual politics-I mean look at the very title of that. Um you're saying that the intimate relationship hierarchies that are involved in you know a boyfriend-girlfriend dyad, that they too are based on power. Um you're taking these notions of political dynamics and you're applying to the most personal conceivable realm of life. So we were taking on a lot.

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KF: And um let's see next question um...was RIFT connected to any other theater or political groups around Providence?

[00:43:54]

JM: You know we had links it seems to me with the theater in URI-University of Rhode Island. And it was from them that a women named Judy whose last name I forget, forgive me Judy, and a young man who was an undergraduate, I think his last name was Bill, joined us um after Cate Phelps split off. I'm not sure if she split off because she got her Arnold Scholarship and went to England or whether it was other reasons. You know, um political groups are always having these comings and goings. But URI it seems to me we had links with in that way.

[00:44:37]

JM: And then there was a black group-a dance troupe-I want to say Rhymes and Reasons but I'm not sure that was accurate. The name of the group was something like that. And they had also their own space.

KF: [interrupting] Was it Rites and Reasons?

JM: Rites and Reasons, thank you. Yes, R I T E S. Yes that would make sense.

[00:44:59]

JM: And so you know we had a little bit of a collaboration in the sense that we shared space and talked to each other and realized that we were both groups that had a kind of political charge to them, who had the same marginal history, and you know it would be nice if we could make that point. But I don't know if we were politically mature enough to do much more than theorize about it.

[00:45:26]

KF: So did you um so there wasn't any more kind of cross-pollination between the groups than that?

JM: I don't think more than that, no.

KF: Was RIFT an all white theater?

JM: It was.

KF: It was...and why do you think that was?

[00:45:40]

JM: Well you know for the reason like I said that we were so new. I don't think that the movement, if we can even call it that--at the time we certainly did but you know you look back and you look at these things differently-I don't know that we had gotten to the point in terms of group maturity to work out a sophisticated overview. Um you know have a real political understanding about how subcultures need each other. I think that we were very young-I know I was. And the whole radicalization process was like dropping acid for me. I wouldn't call my dialectic particularly mature at the time.

[00:46:26]

KF: Um...and why-so from your viewpoint now why do you think subcultures need each other?

[00:46:33]

JM: Well I think that it would help if marginalized groups would understand the dynamics of power from you know a real sound, theoretical viewpoint. To understand that there is such a thing as class. You know, like we were saying before, even in the man-woman dyad there is a class dynamic going on. And that there is such a thing as an oppressed class versus a ruling class. You can look at it economically, you can look at it politically, you can look at it in terms of first world, third world globally. And that there are certain constants in that framework that we could have learned from had we been hip to it at the time. It's not that none of us were. There were a couple learned socialists in the group who I remember-Ann Falsto, she's still around, I think she's in New York. Ann Sterling-Falsto, she had a hyphenated last name-she was very knowledgeable and tried to help us expand our understanding a little bit by looking at other cultural models. Does this answer the question?

[00:47:50]
KF: Yeah, yeah definitely. So another question-what were the class backgrounds of RIFT's members?

JM: Mostly I think upper and middle class women.

KF: And so you were all university students? You mentioned there were two high school students.

JM: There were two high school students [laughing] who were at least as upper middle class as the average RIFT member. Um they went to Mary C. Wheeler [high school]. Nancy Buell-a wonderful actress, and Mary K........something.

KF: And how did they get involved in the theater?

[00:48:29]

JM: That's a good question. I don't know. It may be, although this is just a guess, that Cate Phelps who was a little more involved I think in the outer community than strictly campus activities, partly because she was more local-I think she grew up in Massachussetts. Um than a lot of us who were you know all over the place. I was from Chicago, I didn't know anything about New England. But she through one of her sort of satellite activities. Maybe she had taught in the local school system-now I'm just making stuff up, I don't know. But I think it was through Cate that they were brought in.

[00:49:08]

KF: Hm...and how would you describe the sexual orientations of RIFT's members?

[00:49:13]

JM: We were still at the level with women's liberation where gay liberation was almost unheard of. I think we had heard of the Stonewall riots that had happened really only a year and some earlier. But um I know I for one was egregiously na�ve about homosexuality, was really very theoretical and abstract for me. I didn't know any gay people. And I think it was typical of campuses at that time-that even though there was this mounting radicalism, an iconoclasm-so that again there was the sense in the air that all of these sacred cows were going to fall sooner or later.

[00:49:59]

JM: At the time when RIFT started it hadn't gotten to the point where the consciousness about homosexuality was as open as the consciousness about sexism...against women. And so when I think back, I am imagining one particular individual-a man-who was probably gay. But it just strikes me as so incongruous and...funny really, that for all our vaunted, much-touted sexual liberation [laughing] that we weren't even at the point within the theater group for him to come out. I mean who knows his reasons, right. Um this is an area of life which is extremely personal as well as political and cultural, so I would never presume to say that he should have.

[00:50:50]

JM: But I do think it's telling that the most...um...what should we say, outspoken or closet-bashing experience I can remember was when Cate, who herself identified as bi-bisexual-she was on a panel. Um not associated with RIFT but some other sort of consciousness-raising um I don't know festival that was going on at college at Brown at the time. And I found that very shocking and wonderful.

[00:51:28]

KF: Hm interesting. And um...Let's see where to go from here. Now you've been-this has been kind of in the background all along-but how uh, but just to say it explicitly, what did it mean to you to be a feminist?

[00:51:47]

JM: Well I think it was very important for young women to identify how the sex role constraints had limited us. And as a culture we had gotten to the point where we were beginning to understand race, you know, we were reading Black Like Me and you know civil rights books in high school and stuff. And you know that was getting to be 1969, 1970, but there had been no background in how our gender had played a role in making us who we are. And to understand society that way, and the greater patriarchal world that way, and you know human history for the past 5000 years anyway that way. Was I think the most radical step of all for a woman who was interested in self-awareness. And then a bunch of women you know really took it and flew with it. Some of us um...it changed our life. I mean it was nothing less than life altering to make that connection-connect those dots.

[00:52:57]

KF: And how do you think your definition of feminist compared to that of the men in the group?

[00:53:04]

JM: That's a good question. I really want to listen to this interview if you get any of the men to try to answer that. Um we certainly were aware of how we had been victimized on the level of the obvious economic levels and passed over for tenure and 69 cents to the dollar-you know, that was the button that we wore. I think it's now not much more-women make what 79 cents for every dollar that men earn? And all of this stuff-what was there one woman in the senate at that point? All of these statistics which were just this staggeringly depressing inequality. Um and here we were at this fancy Ivy League school getting ready to join the ruling class-some of us. That was actually never my aspiration, but it was kind of the unstated idea of what Brown was for. [laughing]

[00:54:03]

JM: But the woman who were coming in-in larger and larger numbers by the way-were, what were they being set up for? So the picture of where they were going to go with their full human identities were um you know they needed feminism to fill in the blank.

[00:54:27]

KF: How do you think your definition of feminism changed over time?

[00:54:33]

JM: Well for one thing the phrase 'Women's Liberation,' which was mocked far and wide by abbreviating it to Women's Lib, which used to make us furious. Justifiably so, it was meant to be a taunt [laughing]. Um you know you don't hear the phrase Women's Liberation anymore, and I think this is interesting. I think it's...noteworthy because the earlier suffrage movement, for example, in England, in the USA, and the ones that are still struggling to happen in other parts of the world--which American feminists tend to forget about. You know we would not call them Women's Liberation. We would call them feminism. And the word even has a kind of historical resonance that links the little blip on the screen of the culture wars that I-that was going on when I was in my 20s. It links that little blip with a noble history.

[00:55:39]

KF: Um and on a related note, how do you think RIFT changed over between when you left and when you started there?

[00:55:49]

JM: Well you know we were so young-we were just growing like weeds. I think we were going philosophically and physically, sexually and intellectually. And you know we were at the level where we were just students and then we weren't students anymore. We started to be adults and reach the age of majority and start looking at having jobs and careers. And we had to decide-each of us in our own way-how this wonderful campus experience was going to translate or not into our adult life choices. And so we started to look at it differently, and we were all each of us full of drama and conflict as one is at that age.

[00:56:37]
JM: And um you know I think that you know the personalities changed. You could look at it on that level, and I think you could look at it in terms of the chronological phase level. Does this answer the question? This is about as good as I can do.

[00:56:55]

KF: Yeah I think so. Well what were some of the major courses you had to make throughout the course of your involvement?

[00:57:03]

JM: Well for one thing those of us who were graduating had to decide whether to stay in Providence or to go to grad school or to go to another city or to get a full time job and then wonder how RIFT would fit into that. These are greatly traumatic decisions you know when you're poised on the verge of adulthood and you have to decide, am I going to be an academic? Am I going to try to get into the art department at Yale, you know this is the kind of thoughts-or am I going to stay and work at a political bookstore in Providence for a while until I decide what I want to do. Am I going to hitch a ride to San Francisco? Some of these I actually did, all of them I was juggling at the time.

KF: Which ones did you choose

[00:57:52]

JM: I went to Europe and when I got back on a fluke I accepted an invitation to go in a drive-away car-I don't know if they have these anymore. Where you sort of official hitchhiking. You drive a car from one city to another for somebody who needs the vehicle across the country. And I accepted an invitation to do that. We went to New Orleans where I made some reasonably half-hearted attempts to enquire about the theater department at Tulane. And then I decided against it and I took the ride further to San Francisco where I again looked into theater as the first thing that I did. I found a little improvisational theater group to work with for a while and then I stayed.

KF: And is there anything that you would have done differently during your time at RIFT or at Brown?

[00:58:53]

JM: No, I loved every minute of it. And I was so happy that I could say I was part of the times. It seems to me a terrible thing that if you don't have a relationship with the epoch that you're in when you're in school. And as chaotic as it was and really ruptured in many ways in terms of classic academic ambitions. The times I was living in at Brown were incredibly rich.

[00:59:27]

KF: And to clarify just once more, what years were you at Brown and what years were you in RIFT, if you can remember?

[00:59:36]

JM: I entered at Brown in 1969 and I graduated in 73. And I think I joined RIFT-you would know maybe better than me when it started-but I joined it when it started. Which might have been my senior year-junior or senior year. Stayed in it at least one or two years afterwards.

KF: So you stayed in Providence a year after you graduated?

1:00:01

JM: I stayed in Providence maybe more than a year, maybe a little more than a year afterwards. And some of that time I was traveling through Europe.

KF: Great. Is there-let's see-so what were, you've touched on this before but what were some of the big challenges that you faced in RIFT?

[01:00:25]

JM: Well I...I think that I got very frustrated because the enormity of what I wanted to say was trivialized a lot-and this is always the case, isn't it, with new movements. But it was particularly the case with the women's movement. Because women have been trivialized. And it was terribly threatening if you look at the group psychology of the men who were mocking us. I think that the function of how terribly threatening sexual politics really are showed up in the kind of-the need to put us down and trivialize us. This used to get me very riled. I had a lot of strong feelings about it that I needed to pump out in talks with my friends, in these groups we were talking about, and also in poetry. And try to be honest with myself about how much of it was personal and how much of it was political. How much of my discomfort with the naysayers was feminist you know collective verities, and how much of it was from you know wounds from childhood that I needed to take responsibility for psychologically.

KF: And what do you think were your biggest successes?

[01:02:00]

JM: I think responding to the moment um the way all of us did when we threw ourselves into this idea, which was kind of unprecedented at the time. And you know put so much into it. You know how much heart and soul and time and effort it takes to launch a theater group and to keep at it with all these personality issues and clashes perhaps with the rest of our schedules and priorities. So for people so young I think we deserve a lot of credit for the sheer commitment of that group and rioting-almost like responding to the moment of our times. I'm very proud that we did that.

KF: And is there anything else that we haven't talked about that you think should be on the record?

JM: I don't think so.

KF: Great. Let me...well I think I've pretty much covered what I wanted to cover.

JM: Ok

KF: Well thank you very much.

JM: Thank you so much for doing this oral history, Kiera.

KF: Ok--