Hilary Ross Salk's oral history is a story of feminism and community. She begins her 1988 interview discussing her search for community at Pembroke, and speaks about her experience as a "City Girl," Pembroke rules, and studying women in Shakespeare. For Hilary, the birth of her first child galvanized her to feminism and specifically women's health issues. For her, childbirth should be entirely in the hands of the woman who gives birth and her loved one. According to Hilary, the medical profession wasn't devised from a woman's perspective at all, and because of this, hospitals expect women to accept their procedures and be a good patient rather than allowing them to experience childbirth in the way they want to. In track 2, she discusses founding the Women's Health Collective to organize women around the fury that women felt in the early years of the women's movement and to give women control over when and how they gave birth to their children. In tracks 3 and 4, she reflects on the goals of the Women's Health Collective and their activism process, as well as the way the organization has changed and evolved. In track 5, she considers her Jewish identity, activist work and her involvement with Women for a Non-Nuclear Future, the Feminist Theatre, and the Friday Group. In track 6, Hilary discusses her run for governor and the Tough Love organization. She ends her interview by reflecting on her activism, explaining that she wants to live in a place she is proud of.
Notes:
Class year: 1963
Biographical note: Hilary Berger Ross was born in Providence in 1942. She attended Pembroke after a year at Emory University, graduating from Brown in 1963 with a degree in English literature. Directly afterwards she began to earn an MAT at Brown, studying the father-daughter relationship in the tragedies of Shakespeare. Hilary moved on to later pursue an MSW from Rhode Island College. During her last year of her Master's program at Brown, she married Steven Salk, and upon her graduation began working as a teacher in Boston. In 1966, her first daughter was born, spurring her to become involved in childbirth education, and she began teaching classes to give women autonomy in their childbirth and childrearing decisions. In 1973, Hilary moved back to Providence, where she founded the RI Women's Health Collective as a feminist organization dealing with women's health issues. She also ran for governor of Rhode Island within the Citizen's Party, went into real estate to help single women get established economically, and was part of the Women for a Non-Nuclear Future and the Tough Love organizations. In 2016 Hilary published a novel, Eavesdropping in Oberammergau, based on her experience as the only child of a Jewish American military family living in post-World War II Germany for a few years during her childhood. Hilary currently lives in Rhode Island and has two adult children and five grandchildren.
This collection contains oral history interviews with alumnae of Brown University, which admitted its first women students in 1891. The Women's College at Brown was renamed Pembroke College in 1928, and in 1971, Pembroke College merged with the Men's College …
