Nelsen, Vivian
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- | Well, Vivian, thank you very much | 0:01 |
for your willingness to be interviewed, | 0:02 | |
and if I could just get some background information. | 0:04 | |
If you could say your full name. | 0:07 | |
- | Okay, Vivian Jenkins Nelsen, | 0:08 |
and Nelsen is spelled N-E-L-S-E-N. | 0:10 | |
- | Oh, thank you. That's very helpful. (laughs) | 0:13 |
And are you lay or clergy? | 0:16 | |
- | I'm lay. In the Lutheran Church, I'm a lay preacher. | 0:18 |
- | Oh, okay. Great! | 0:25 |
And so, that's your denominational affiliation, then. | 0:28 | |
- | That was, when I was part of the community | 0:30 |
up until recently, actually, | 0:33 | |
and I'm now Presbyterian. | 0:35 | |
- | Good, thank you so much. | 0:37 |
And Vivian, when and where were you born? | 0:39 | |
I was born in Selma, Alabama in 1945. | 0:43 | |
- | Mmm. | 0:47 |
- | Yeah. | |
- | Very interesting. And where did you go | 0:49 |
to grad school or divinity school? | 0:51 | |
- | I went to graduate school, and I took course work at | 0:53 |
Luther and also in my college, | 0:59 | |
which was a Lutheran college. | 1:03 | |
- | Which college did you go to? | 1:05 |
- | Dana. D-A-N-A. | 1:06 |
- | Oh, where's... | |
- | And that's Latin for Denmark. | 1:08 |
And that was in Blair, Nebraska. | 1:10 | |
- | Okay. | 1:13 |
- | And, so anyway, I built a religion minor. | 1:14 |
I was thinking of the time of | 1:18 | |
first going into our diaconate, | 1:21 | |
which my dad was very interested in as a pastor. | 1:23 | |
And instead, I did medical drawings and such | 1:27 | |
for their New Guinea work. | 1:31 | |
- | Interesting! | 1:34 |
So what did you do your graduate work in? | 1:36 | |
- | I did my graduate work in Educational Psychology at The U, | 1:38 |
and also at Harvard University. | 1:43 | |
- | Wow, interesting! | 1:47 |
So, what kind of work or ministry where you doing | 1:49 | |
at the time of Re-Imagining? | 1:51 | |
- | At the time of Re-Imagining in 1993, | 1:52 |
I had left work as | 1:58 | |
an executive for the American Lutheran Church, | 2:03 | |
and I was back at The U. | 2:08 | |
- | Mmm. And what were you doing at The U? | 2:11 |
- | At The U, I headed up the human relations department | 2:12 |
for undergrads, | 2:16 | |
and then I went Hamline, and then I went back to U. | 2:17 | |
- | Okay. | 2:23 |
- | Doing the same thing. | |
- | Doing the same thing, yeah. | 2:25 |
And what kind of work or ministry did you do | 2:26 | |
after Re-Imagining? | 2:28 | |
- | Well, after Re-Imagining, | 2:30 |
I got more interested in public policy, | 2:31 | |
and that was really the gift of the civil rights movement | 2:36 | |
that my dad was involved in. | 2:40 | |
So, and that's the tedious grinding work | 2:42 | |
that has to be done. | 2:47 | |
And so, my doctor was initially on ethics | 2:49 | |
and moral development, using the Kohlberg scale | 2:56 | |
of race and gender issues in the Church. | 3:01 | |
And so, as it turned out, | 3:08 | |
I got ill during graduate school. | 3:12 | |
I had to have major surgery, so I never did finish it, | 3:15 | |
but it was a very... | 3:17 | |
It was a very interesting living, | 3:22 | |
an interesting direction, which is | 3:24 | |
studying how people learn moral and ethical behavior. | 3:28 | |
How they unlearn it and how they relearn it. | 3:35 | |
- | Wow. | 3:38 |
- | So, everything that I was dealing with the | 3:39 |
whole palette of diversity issues | 3:43 | |
on the desk that I had been on, | 3:47 | |
and then that went on into my graduate work | 3:50 | |
and then, that went on into my work work. | 3:52 | |
So, being at the Humphrey was challenging | 3:55 | |
because that shut down the whole fate side of the work. | 4:03 | |
- | You were at the Humphrey Institute. | 4:08 |
- | Yeah. | 4:09 |
- | Yeah, yeah. | |
Very fascinating, wow! | 4:11 | |
So, how and when did you first become aware | 4:13 | |
of feminist theology? | 4:17 | |
- | Oh gosh, that was | 4:19 |
I would say early, no, | 4:23 | |
it had to be mid-70s. | 4:27 | |
And that movement was bubbling up nationally | 4:30 | |
and also inside of our denomination. | 4:34 | |
- | Yes, yeah. | 4:36 |
So, do you remember how you got exposed to it in particular? | 4:37 | |
- | In particular, yes. | 4:40 |
In a nutshell, there was a woman writer, | 4:41 | |
and I'm blanking out her name now, | 4:48 | |
who wrote a seminal book, who's Lutheran, | 4:50 | |
who wrote a seminal book on theology, | 4:52 | |
and I was on the desk that | 4:56 | |
dealt with women's role in the Church. | 5:02 | |
And so, the first woman was ordained | 5:07 | |
shortly before I got to that desk. | 5:12 | |
- | Wow. | 5:14 |
- | Yeah. | |
And, so then, there was all of the work to do | 5:15 | |
with helping churches now make this change | 5:21 | |
and so forth and so on. | 5:25 | |
And, actually, there's a book about it, | 5:26 | |
which is called In Our Mother's Arms. | 5:29 | |
- | Oh! | 5:31 |
- | A wonderful steal from that great old hymn. | 5:33 |
- | Yes, yes! | 5:38 |
So that this point, it was before the ELCA. | 5:39 | |
So which branch was this you were working for. | 5:43 | |
- | This was ALC. | 5:44 |
- | ALC, okay. | 5:45 |
- | American Lutheran Church. | 5:46 |
- | Right, right. | 5:47 |
- | And this was basically a Nordic branch, Norwegians, | 5:48 |
and the Germans were in Iowa. | 5:52 | |
And their seminary was there. | 5:55 | |
And Luther was really the seminary | 5:57 | |
where everybody went if they could | 6:01 | |
because it was the biggest. | 6:05 | |
- | Right, right, yeah. | 6:07 |
I know we need to move to Re-Imagining, | 6:08 | |
but I just wanted to hear a little bit more | 6:10 | |
about your work with the women's division of the ALC. | 6:11 | |
Tell me what that was like because that's important. | 6:15 | |
- | Yeah, it was very challenging. | 6:17 |
That seems to be my work for today, | 6:19 | |
but the Women's Auxiliary is something different. | 6:21 | |
So, the Women's Auxiliary, which was | 6:28 | |
the, in other... | 6:37 | |
We would call it in the Missouri Synod the Ladies' Aid. | 6:41 | |
- | Okay, I got it, yup. | 6:45 |
- | And so, they were not particularly interested | 6:46 |
or connected with this part of the work, | 6:51 | |
although there was a really good person | 6:54 | |
who was in charge. | 6:57 | |
So, my role was really more, you know, | 6:59 | |
meeting with bishops, holding conferences, | 7:05 | |
that sort of thing, bringing in speakers, you know, | 7:08 | |
doing workshops, etc. | 7:12 | |
Trying to get people more accepting of this | 7:13 | |
role for woman. | 7:17 | |
And, of course, the Lutheran women in Europe, | 7:19 | |
particularly in Denmark, I knew most about, | 7:23 | |
and eventually were ahead of us. | 7:26 | |
- | Mmm, Mm-hmm. Yeah, interesting. | 7:28 |
That's facsinating. | 7:32 | |
Well, talk about the Re-Imagining community. | 7:33 | |
So, could you talk about your relationship | 7:35 | |
to the Re-Imagining community? | 7:38 | |
- | You know, it was good. | 7:40 |
I had been through kind of the turmoil | 7:43 | |
that this work experienced earlier, | 7:49 | |
so it wasn't new to me. | 7:56 | |
And the fact that I worked within | 7:59 | |
the church hierarchy gave me a certain amount of cover | 8:07 | |
that other people didn't enjoy. | 8:12 | |
And so, I was in a recognized power position, | 8:15 | |
so, I was sent to | 8:22 | |
the United Nations Decade for Women meetings | 8:30 | |
and wrote essays on such for those conferences I was in. | 8:35 | |
When it was in Copenhagen, | 8:42 | |
the bishop gave me the keys to the newest church | 8:45 | |
so we could have meetings there. | 8:48 | |
- | Wow, how cool! | 8:49 |
- | So, it was really great, and a great experience. | 8:51 |
And one of the women I met there, | 8:55 | |
she and I are still dear friends. | 8:58 | |
In fact, she spent two weeks with me recently. | 9:00 | |
- | How nice. | 9:03 |
- | And she's a Lutheran pastor, | 9:04 |
and also an attorney, interestingly. | 9:06 | |
- | Wow! | 9:10 |
- | Both her sisters are attorneys. | 9:11 |
But the long and short of that is that | 9:13 | |
the Church gave me access | 9:16 | |
to other women in other countries, | 9:19 | |
so I was able to have a vision that was | 9:21 | |
in fact real in other places. | 9:25 | |
It wasn't just, well, this is what we think it could be. | 9:27 | |
- | Right! | 9:30 |
- | It already was. | 9:31 |
- | Yes! | |
- | And one of my favorite theologians that I had | 9:33 |
great good luck to study with... | 9:37 | |
(ringtone) | 9:42 | |
Oh, excuse me, I need to take this. Hello! | 9:43 |
- | And actually, it didn't have a name | 0:00 |
but my mother was really key in my understanding | 0:04 | |
of women and equality, because she was, | 0:09 | |
she was a soldier, let me tell you. | 0:12 | |
- | Was she? | 0:15 |
- | Oh, yeah. | |
- | Tell me in what way? | 0:16 |
What was she like? | 0:17 | |
- | In every way. | 0:18 |
I'm telling you, she ... | 0:18 | |
I was gonna turn this off here so we don't hear that. | 0:20 | |
Mom came from a generation of women who were alive | 0:26 | |
and cognizant. | 0:31 | |
She was born in 1913. | 0:32 | |
- | Wow. | |
- | She died at 103. | 0:35 |
- | Oh, wow. | 0:36 |
- | And she was sharp up until almost the very end. | 0:38 |
- | That's wonderful. | 0:41 |
- | So anyway, the long and short of that is she | 0:43 |
and Dad were missionaries. | 0:49 | |
And they were in, they were teaching, preaching, | 0:51 | |
and she was also, she was a teacher-nurse. | 0:55 | |
So she had come up. | 0:58 | |
Her family had money, | 1:02 | |
and they sent her to a private high school and college, | 1:06 | |
and so they were, | 1:10 | |
how to put this? | 1:16 | |
She would have been just a kid during the, | 1:20 | |
a little, small kid really, during the feminist era, | 1:25 | |
but in the rural boondocks, | 1:28 | |
I mean, everybody had to work like nobody's business. | 1:33 | |
Nobody got cut any slack, | 1:37 | |
and she said she still remembered children dragging bags | 1:39 | |
of cotton behind them. | 1:42 | |
- | Wow, is this in Alabama? | 1:44 |
- | Alabama. | 1:45 |
- | Yeah, wow. | |
- | And she was from South Carolina. | 1:46 |
- | Okay. | 1:48 |
- | And so my dad's people are from Alabama so ... | 1:49 |
But anyway so, long and short, | 1:54 | |
they were just out in the boonies with each other | 1:57 | |
and so there really wasn't any ... | 1:59 | |
I mean, her ideas were shaped by what she could do | 2:03 | |
and she could do a lot of things. | 2:06 | |
And she also had been a kid who they, | 2:09 | |
she was raised by older sisters, | 2:16 | |
who didn't have kids. | 2:18 | |
I mean, she was raised in New York City | 2:21 | |
so she was used to speaking out. | 2:25 | |
Of course, Harlem at that time was going | 2:28 | |
through the renaissance, | 2:30 | |
- | Oh, yes. | |
- | So that was a place where she flowered really. | 2:32 |
- | Wow, how wonderful! | 2:38 |
- | And so then when she met my dad, | 2:40 |
and they decided to go back as missionaries, | 2:43 | |
you know, that time, that era, for black women | 2:47 | |
was really interesting because they were being educated too, | 2:53 | |
you see, along with black men and so forth. | 2:57 | |
So anyway, she also was a runner, | 3:01 | |
and she made the Olympics tryouts. | 3:05 | |
- | Wow! | 3:10 |
- | Apparently her mother wouldn't let her go, | 3:11 |
because Hitler. | 3:12 | |
- | Oh, yes! | |
Wow! | 3:15 | |
Oh Vivian, that is amazing! | 3:17 | |
Were your parents missionaries, you mentioned Guinea, | 3:20 | |
is that where it was? | 3:22 | |
- | No, no, actually the New Guinea connection is | 3:23 |
that when I was considering the deaconate. | 3:25 | |
- | Okay. | 3:29 |
- | Our sisterhood. | 3:30 |
I decided not to go but to help them, | 3:31 | |
and they needed a handbook that would translate | 3:34 | |
from English to Pidgin, | 3:40 | |
and would be pictures of things that they could, | 3:44 | |
that they worked with, that they needed. | 3:47 | |
I can remember clear as anything, | 3:50 | |
drawing a picture of a kidney-shaped bowl, | 3:51 | |
and that kind of stuff. | 3:54 | |
- | Oh, wow. | 3:56 |
- | Yeah, and forceps and things like that they needed | 3:57 |
to explain. | 3:59 | |
But anyway, so that was my (laughing) | 4:01 | |
that was my pre-Peace Corps. | 4:05 | |
And then we had something called | 4:08 | |
the Prince of Peace Corps, | 4:10 | |
and it was, of course, spun of off the real one, | 4:13 | |
the Peace Corps, but I applied for the Peace Corps | 4:17 | |
and I was accepted to Afghanistan. | 4:20 | |
- | Really? | 4:22 |
- | Mm-hmm. | |
In those days the Secret Service cleared you, | 4:27 | |
and it was an all-day test at the post office. | 4:30 | |
And so anyway, Eugene Burdick who wrote The Ugly American | 4:34 | |
had come to our campus, | 4:37 | |
and just practically the whole campus was like ... | 4:39 | |
We had more Peace Corps volunteers from that little college | 4:42 | |
than any other school in Nebraska. | 4:45 | |
- | Seriously. | 4:47 |
- | And so I was on my way to Afghanistan, | 4:49 |
and one of my dearest friends was in Turkey, | 4:52 | |
and he came back and said, "Oh no, no. | 4:54 | |
"You can't do that." | 4:56 | |
(laughing) | 4:57 | |
"And as outspoken as you are, no." | 4:59 | |
(laughing) | 5:00 | |
But, as it turned out I didn't have to make the decision | 5:01 | |
because the Afghan government said they didn't want us. | 5:04 | |
- | Is that right? | 5:07 |
- | Yeah, they shut that down. | 5:08 |
- | Wow, Vivian that's fascinating. | 5:11 |
Do you know, where you left off was you were talking | 5:12 | |
about studying with one of your favorite theologians. | 5:14 | |
Who was that? | 5:18 | |
- | One of my favorites was, | 5:19 |
her name was Mrs. Hauge, H-A-U-G-E. | 5:21 | |
Her husband was dead by the time I knew her, | 5:26 | |
but the Hauge Honors were a section of the Danish church. | 5:30 | |
- | Oh! | 5:34 |
- | Yeah, and so our thing is that she wanted to be a pastor | 5:35 |
in the church and the last I heard, | 5:41 | |
she had gone back to Denmark. | 5:43 | |
She wasn't ever, I don't know what her family history was. | 5:45 | |
I know she was Danish but she went back to Denmark | 5:48 | |
and married a Danish dairy farmer, | 5:52 | |
and was ordained in the Danish church. | 5:58 | |
- | Oh, wonderful! | 6:03 |
- | Yeah. | |
- | That's great! | 6:05 |
- | Yeah. | |
- | So, pass over the water here. | 6:08 |
We're getting some water here. | 6:10 | |
- | Yeah, don't wanna pour this over your machinery. | 6:12 |
- | Yeah, good point. | 6:14 |
- | Okay, I'll let you get it. | 6:15 |
- | Good. | |
How did you get initially involved in Re-imagining? | 6:17 | |
You mentioned, well what was the connection? | 6:20 | |
The Ecumenical Deaconate? | 6:22 | |
- | Yeah, the connection was that I had been at that desk | 6:23 |
and we were located here in town. | 6:26 | |
The Lutheran National, the Lutheran Church. | 6:29 | |
- | Oh, okay. | 6:31 |
- | And we did a lot of conferencing and so forth and so on, | 6:32 |
plus I'd gone to the Decade, | 6:34 | |
two of the three Decade meetings, | 6:37 | |
the beginning and the middle. | 6:40 | |
And I wasn't able to get to the one in Africa, | 6:42 | |
my brother died the week before I was supposed to go. | 6:46 | |
So I couldn't go, but anyway. | 6:50 | |
So basically, and also in that interim, | 6:53 | |
I became ... | 7:00 | |
What can I say? | 7:06 | |
I became chair of the Women's Equity Action League, | 7:10 | |
which Arvonne Fraser was the national president, | 7:17 | |
and had been state chair and that was the women's | 7:20 | |
legal side of the movement. | 7:26 | |
- | Really? | 7:28 |
- | Yeah. | |
And so that's when I got to know people like Jenny, | 7:29 | |
who was head of NOW and so forth. | 7:32 | |
And those were the two big feminist organizations, | 7:34 | |
so I tried, and did bring in more black women | 7:40 | |
to the movement because, at that point, | 7:45 | |
we had really been told in no uncertain terms | 7:47 | |
that the feminist movement was a white women's movement | 7:55 | |
and it was anti-black male and yadda, yadda, yah. | 7:58 | |
- | So who was telling you that? | 8:01 |
- | Oh well, let me see here. | 8:03 |
Just about every black male. | 8:06 | |
(laughing) | 8:07 | |
So and, I tell you, | 8:08 | |
it was like I was being pilloried in the black newspaper | 8:13 | |
because I was destroying the black family | 8:20 | |
because I stood on the steps of Morrill Hall | 8:22 | |
with Jack Baker and Dr., | 8:25 | |
oh gosh, what is his name? | 8:31 | |
He's long dead now, but ... | 8:33 | |
Oh, gosh if I could say the name now you would know it, | 8:39 | |
but anyway, he was a very, very well-known professor | 8:41 | |
of sociology at the U. | 8:47 | |
But anyway, long and short, the headline indicated | 8:51 | |
that I was destroying the black family. | 8:56 | |
(laughing) | 8:59 | |
I'm standing with a gay male. | 9:00 | |
- | Really? | |
- | Oh yeah. | 9:03 |
- | Wow. | |
- | So yeah. | 9:04 |
- | How were the white feminists? | 9:05 |
Were they, what was their attitude? | 9:07 | |
- | Well their attitude was they were pretty much happy | 9:10 |
as long as I didn't talk about race. | 9:13 | |
- | Oh, mm-hmm. | 9:15 |
- | But that wasn't gonna happen so. | 9:17 |
(laughing) | 9:18 | |
- | Good! | 9:19 |
- | So, people who I knew then, | 9:21 |
who got it, like Jenny, we're still friends | 9:27 | |
after all these years. | 9:31 | |
- | Jenny, who was head of NOW? | 9:32 |
- | Yeah. | |
- | Yeah, yes. | 9:34 |
- | And we were actually, we were meeting with Walter Mondale | 9:36 |
to talk about ... | 9:39 | |
One of them I convinced to come into our meetings | 9:41 | |
so she could see that we were | 9:45 | |
really bringing class-action suits. | 9:48 | |
That's how we were really doing our work. | 9:52 | |
That also covered other protected classes. | 9:53 | |
So, for example, one of the cases | 10:02 | |
that we brought very successfully about was, | 10:05 | |
at least in the metro area, was public schools. | 10:07 | |
A certain amount of money that was being spent | 10:12 | |
on girls' sports as opposed to boys' sports. | 10:15 | |
- | Oh, yes, yes! | 10:19 |
- | And also another one we brought was about, | 10:21 |
which covered all girls. | 10:27 | |
- | Mmm, yes. | 10:29 |
- | Yeah. | |
And so, then we brought another one | 10:31 | |
that really affected black males as well, | 10:34 | |
and we were intentional about that, | 10:39 | |
was about the number of people who were coaches | 10:40 | |
and who were assistant principals, | 10:47 | |
because mostly that track into coaching came | 10:50 | |
through the assistant principal. | 10:53 | |
- | Is that right? | 10:55 |
- | Yeah. | |
So, learning to do analysis was, and working from that side, | 10:56 | |
made me more interested, of course, in public policy | 11:02 | |
because we were doing things like | 11:05 | |
going through every statute in Minnesota, | 11:08 | |
to look at one of them. | 11:11 | |
Every one of them to see how they were disproportionately | 11:13 | |
either loaded against women or holding, et cetera. | 11:20 | |
I mean, we did things like ... | 11:25 | |
We did a study with a bunch of college students | 11:28 | |
for WCCO-TV's, their licensure. | 11:33 | |
- | Mmm! | 11:39 |
- | So we looked at every program, we looked at every ad, | 11:40 |
oh, it was just amazing. | 11:43 | |
- | Wow, that's massive, wow. | 11:45 |
- | So research is kinda my middle name here and I love it. | 11:46 |
It tells the story of a lot of policy work. | 11:51 | |
A lot of it isn't based on any research, | 12:01 | |
or bad science, or a combination of all of the above. | 12:04 | |
- | Right. | 12:08 |
- | But so, that was very satisfying. | 12:09 |
- | Important work. | 12:12 |
So were you involved in the actual planning | 12:14 | |
of the '93 conference? | 12:16 | |
- | No, no, I was a participant | 12:19 |
and had a bunch of people there. | 12:21 | |
- | Mmm, I would love to hear what you remember | 12:24 |
about the '93 conference. | 12:28 | |
I know it's been a while but what was your impression? | 12:29 | |
- | Well, my impression was that I had read the work | 12:32 |
of almost all the speakers. | 12:34 | |
- | Yes! | 12:36 |
(laughing) | 12:37 | |
- | So, it was just grand to hear them, see them, | 12:38 |
you know, talk to them. | 12:43 | |
I mean, it was just, | 12:47 | |
it was like all my feminist bucket list stuff. | 12:49 | |
(laughing) | 12:54 | |
Had come true, you know. | 12:55 | |
- | Right, yes! | 12:57 |
- | And to actually respond to one of the speakers, | 12:58 |
and I'm trying to think of what her name was. | 13:02 | |
I'm so bad on names today. | 13:03 | |
But anyway, and ... | 13:06 | |
And my student who, Rene Whiterabbit, | 13:10 | |
- | Yes! | 13:15 |
- | Was also on that panel. | 13:16 |
- | Right, yes! | |
- | And it was the speaker, her and me. | 13:19 |
- | Oh, oh. | 13:21 |
- | Yeah, so we were looking at color | 13:23 |
and what people call intersections now. | 13:24 | |
- | Right! | 13:28 |
- | And really trying to see how we could | 13:31 |
work inside of | 13:37 | |
ethnic groups that | 13:41 | |
really felt quite threatened by the movement and so forth. | 13:45 | |
And then now they had to meet at a church. | 13:48 | |
(laughing) | 13:51 | |
- | Wait, what do you mean they had to meet at a church? | 13:52 |
- | You know, it was one thing to be out in the streets | 13:53 |
and about, and at your work. | 13:55 | |
The law has changed around women and what you can do | 13:58 | |
and so forth. | 14:01 | |
- | Right. | 14:02 |
- | But it's quite another thing to meet it at church. | 14:03 |
Church is the most segregated power. | 14:05 | |
- | Exactly. | 14:07 |
- | And it's not just for race either. | 14:08 |
I mean, I'm in 150-year-old congregation | 14:11 | |
and I remember clearly, | 14:14 | |
clearly when the first woman clergy came | 14:17 | |
to that congregation. | 14:20 | |
- | Is that right? | 14:22 |
- | She's a dear friend. | 14:24 |
I was just seeing her yesterday. | 14:25 | |
She was in rehab from a fall, but anyway, yeah, oh yeah. | 14:26 | |
And all of the angst | 14:31 | |
and preaching and da-de-da-de-da, | 14:35 | |
and all that and people dropping off | 14:38 | |
and the things they said to her were just outrageous. | 14:39 | |
- | Oh, oh. | 14:44 |
- | Yeah, so, but she was a, as I said, | 14:45 |
she was a good soldier, | 14:48 | |
(laughing) | 14:49 | |
- | Yes! | |
- | She pushed all the way through it and the fact | 14:51 |
that the church says that you have to do something | 14:55 | |
doesn't mean congregations are going to do it. | 14:57 | |
- | Exactly. | 15:00 |
- | So you know, being on that end of it, | 15:01 |
it was interesting too. | 15:05 | |
I had forgotten this but my friend Una from Denmark was here | 15:07 | |
and she was saying, "You preached a very good sermon | 15:11 | |
"when you came to Denmark." | 15:15 | |
And I had forgotten all about it. | 15:17 | |
She had invited me, | 15:19 | |
you know when you're on these U.N. conferences, | 15:21 | |
they're a month long. | 15:23 | |
- | Really? | 15:25 |
- | Mm-hmm. | |
And so you have to have either, | 15:26 | |
you have to have your own resources | 15:28 | |
or you have to be sent by somebody, | 15:31 | |
because who ... | 15:36 | |
You know what I'm saying. | 15:37 | |
You go and spend a month. | 15:39 | |
- | That's incredible. | 15:40 |
- | And so anyway, as it turned out, | 15:41 |
she said, "Do you remember about what I told you | 15:45 | |
"about the prayers?" | 15:49 | |
I said, yeah that part I remember. | 15:50 | |
Denmark has a minimum, at that time, | 15:53 | |
they had 14 different political parties. | 15:56 | |
And they all got equal time. | 15:59 | |
- | Wow. | 16:01 |
- | Yeah. | |
And there was one, I think there may have been two, | 16:02 | |
one or two debates on TV, that was it. | 16:06 | |
That was it. | 16:10 | |
I mean, people weren't taking signs. | 16:11 | |
You didn't see all this stuff on the ... | 16:13 | |
There were no ads and things like that. | 16:16 | |
It was just, that was it. | 16:19 | |
If you couldn't tell your story then, the end. | 16:21 | |
You were done for. | 16:23 | |
So anyway, this one pastor who was, | 16:25 | |
she was a Communist and one Sunday she, | 16:30 | |
in a country where pastors are civil servants, | 16:36 | |
just like the postmen, and organists too, as well. | 16:42 | |
And all their major universities have theological stuff | 16:48 | |
in them and so forth. | 16:52 | |
And so for someone to say that they were not gonna follow | 16:56 | |
the order of service, | 17:02 | |
becomes a matter of law here. | 17:04 | |
- | Oh! | 17:06 |
- | Okay, so there is no separation of church | 17:07 |
and state in all. | 17:10 | |
- | Right. | 17:12 |
- | So I was like really? | 17:13 |
And this Communist pastor had decided she wasn't going | 17:14 | |
to pray for the Queen and her ladies-in-waiting | 17:17 | |
and the knights. | 17:20 | |
(laughing) | 17:22 | |
And they were threatening to put her in jail! | 17:24 | |
(laughing) | 17:26 | |
- | Wow! | 17:27 |
- | And so, well that whole memory of all of that | 17:30 |
and she said, I remember she said, | 17:34 | |
"I told you." | 17:35 | |
She said, "Please, please, please you have to pray | 17:37 | |
"for the Queen." | 17:38 | |
(laughing) | 17:40 | |
I don't have any problem praying for your Queen. | 17:42 | |
(laughing) | 17:44 | |
- | Oh, that's wild, it is. | 17:46 |
- | But yeah, so by that point, | 17:48 |
I was very active in the Women's Equity Action League, | 17:54 | |
and active with higher ed folks, | 17:58 | |
and you know, | 18:03 | |
earlier the three of us had, | 18:08 | |
we were at Augsberg and I was just a young pup | 18:13 | |
starting my, | 18:16 | |
(chuckling) | 18:17 | |
Starting my teaching career | 18:18 | |
and three of us ended up being discriminated against | 18:23 | |
and we were in different departments, | 18:26 | |
and so we didn't know | 18:28 | |
that we were being discriminated against | 18:30 | |
until one of my students, who was a young black man, | 18:32 | |
did a cover story with our three pictures, saying, | 18:36 | |
and the headline said something like | 18:40 | |
lions three, Christians nothing. | 18:45 | |
- | Oh really? | 18:48 |
(laughing) | 18:49 | |
So how were you being discriminated against? | 18:51 | |
What was revealed? | 18:52 | |
- | Oh what was revealed in my case, let's see, | 18:53 |
what was revealed was that they were giving, quote, men, | 18:56 | |
who were quote, heads of households, more money than women. | 19:01 | |
- | Oh! | 19:05 |
- | And so my colleague, who he and I started the same day, | 19:06 |
same department, neither of us had kids, | 19:09 | |
we were both married, | 19:13 | |
and I was working much harder than him. | 19:16 | |
He was not teaching and I was teaching | 19:19 | |
and working as a staff member and head of a program. | 19:22 | |
- | Wow. | 19:26 |
- | And he was just doing his counseling work | 19:27 |
and going to have coffee. | 19:30 | |
And so one day, | 19:33 | |
I answered the phone and someone said | 19:37 | |
on the other end, they were doing a credit check for, | 19:39 | |
I knew he was buying a car, for I'll say Tom, whatever. | 19:43 | |
That is not his name but anyway, | 19:49 | |
and could I verify that he was making X amount of dollars. | 19:52 | |
Well it was $5,000 more than I was making. | 19:55 | |
- | Wow! | 19:58 |
- | And my husband was going to graduate school, | 19:59 |
and like, I said, I said to the person, | 20:03 | |
I hope to God not and hung up the phone. | 20:06 | |
(laughing) | 20:08 | |
I was kind of a hothead. | 20:13 | |
- | Yes! | 20:14 |
(laughing) | 20:15 | |
Well, that's terrible. | 20:16 | |
- | Mm-hmm, yeah. | |
So then when I brought that to my director of our department | 20:22 | |
he said, "Oh well, he's a head of a household." | 20:27 | |
I said so am I. | 20:29 | |
What are you talking about? | 20:31 | |
Oh no, that was head of household. | 20:32 | |
And then I discovered that, at the time, | 20:34 | |
that teachers who marry each other? | 20:36 | |
- | Mm-hmm. | 20:41 |
- | Her, in Minneapolis, her salary dropped. | 20:42 |
- | Oh my goodness! | 20:46 |
- | Okay. | 20:48 |
I was like no, huh-uh, this can't happen. | 20:49 | |
I ended up testifying up at the legislature about it. | 20:51 | |
I just couldn't let ... | 20:54 | |
I'm kinda like a dog with a bone. | 20:55 | |
(laughing) | 20:56 | |
- | Oh good for you! | 21:01 |
- | They did change that. | 21:03 |
- | They did change, yeah, yeah. | 21:04 |
- | But you know, one of the things, | 21:06 |
one of the lessons I learned early in seeing my parents, | 21:07 | |
my mother particularly, | 21:12 | |
is that you have to show up. | 21:14 | |
- | Mm-hmm, yes. | 21:17 |
- | You have to show up | 21:18 |
and if they're gonna do something tricky, | 21:19 | |
they were always doing tricky stuff in the south, | 21:21 | |
trying to keep people out of stuff. | 21:24 | |
- | Right. | 21:25 |
- | So if they said the committee meeting was going | 21:26 |
to be at 11:30 at night, you show up at 11:30 at night. | 21:29 | |
And things did happen that way. | 21:32 | |
- | Yes. | 21:34 |
- | I went to a meeting at midnight, | 21:34 |
and so we'd have to have relays like somebody would be | 21:37 | |
up there and say, "Okay now, there it's coming up | 21:39 | |
"in about two hours." | 21:43 | |
And you'd get out of your jammies and get in the car and go. | 21:45 | |
- | Wow! | 21:48 |
- | So we were on the front lines of all that stuff | 21:49 |
and so if anything, I have to say that the whole ... | 21:52 | |
Well there was this tension between feminism and womanism. | 22:00 | |
- | Right. | 22:04 |
- | At the time of the conference. | 22:04 |
- | Yes, say something about that, yes. | 22:06 |
- | Okay, so black feminists were pushed, | 22:08 |
or black women who had any sensibilities around this issue | 22:12 | |
were pushed very hard into a different place | 22:15 | |
so that they were not ... | 22:18 | |
You know, your blackness was at stake | 22:20 | |
if you were with the white women's movement. | 22:22 | |
Anyway, so the womanist movement gave black theologians, | 22:28 | |
female theologians, a place to stand, place to be. | 22:34 | |
- | Right, right. | 22:37 |
- | And so people were very, very, | 22:39 |
what's the word? | 22:45 | |
The word feminist was like a bad word. | 22:47 | |
And in a funny way, it still is with young women, today. | 22:51 | |
- | Yes. | 22:54 |
- | And I wanna say, and they think they just fell | 22:55 |
into this stuff, but it's like no, huh-uh. | 22:57 | |
And one of the things that ... | 23:01 | |
You know, it was a hard left, if you will, | 23:07 | |
and that's both theological and political. | 23:12 | |
It was a hard left to accept that God, | 23:17 | |
and the Godhead, for those of us who are Trinitarians, | 23:20 | |
that one piece of God could be like half the creation. | 23:25 | |
- | Mm-hmm, right, right. | 23:31 |
- | In spite of the fact that the proverbs | 23:33 |
and the wisdom literature had always been translated | 23:37 | |
and heard and seen with effeminate ... | 23:40 | |
With a whole, if you didn't clear it out, | 23:48 | |
which some German theologians were very good at doing. | 23:52 | |
Which is why the King James is used so ... | 23:57 | |
I mean, you know, if you didn't translate it out, | 24:01 | |
it's there. | 24:05 | |
- | Yeah, yeah, yeah. | 24:06 |
- | I mean, the Godhead has she in it. | 24:07 |
- | Right. | 24:09 |
So Vivian, how did you negotiate that, | 24:11 | |
the feminist/womanist? | 24:14 | |
You're kinda in the middle there, what did you do? | 24:16 | |
How'd you handle it? | 24:17 | |
- | Well you know, basically I didn't see any | 24:18 |
real difference between the two. | 24:23 | |
To me, it was just a matter of semantics. | 24:27 | |
And the womanist tradition, I think, | 24:31 | |
like I said, it gave people a place to stand. | 24:37 | |
I didn't need a place to stand. | 24:39 | |
I was already standing there, | 24:40 | |
with my denomination and so forth, you see. | 24:43 | |
- | Right. | 24:45 |
- | So by the time that conference had happened, | 24:48 |
we had had women in clergy for 20 years. | 24:50 | |
- | Yes, yes, you've been involved in supporting that. | 24:53 |
So at the conference, you talked about the speakers | 24:56 | |
and responding. | 24:59 | |
Are there any other particular moments from that conference? | 25:01 | |
- | I do remember just looking out | 25:04 |
and it was a pretty vast crowd. | 25:10 | |
And just looking out and thinking | 25:13 | |
oh my God there are all these people, | 25:15 | |
who think the same way. | 25:18 | |
I mean, because you know, | 25:19 | |
so much of what my experience had been was | 25:23 | |
creating it myself, | 25:26 | |
or helping other people, helping other people to do work. | 25:30 | |
And it was an uphill battle, | 25:35 | |
because we were in the most conservative part of the church. | 25:37 | |
- | Mm-hmm. | 25:44 |
- | And so when we would go to national meetings and stuff, | 25:46 |
which I continued to do after I left and went back to the U, | 25:51 | |
was really, was really tough. | 25:57 | |
I mean, it's taken a tone now for people to say | 26:01 | |
oh let's call that woman, oh and by the way, | 26:07 | |
we have to find a job for her husband. | 26:09 | |
(laughing) | 26:11 | |
Yeah, and so here we are. | 26:14 | |
And I looked out on that crowd | 26:18 | |
and I was like oh my God, this is amazing. | 26:19 | |
- | Yes. | 26:24 |
- | You know, and it was such a vindication, really, | 26:25 |
and that there were people of color in this thing. | 26:28 | |
And I remember meeting some Asian women, | 26:31 | |
and I was like oh my dear, how lovely is that? | 26:35 | |
- | Yes! | 26:38 |
- | And so Native women and kids have been, | 26:40 |
let's see Marlene Helgemo was my go-to parent, | 26:47 | |
to go with me, to have meetings with the kids | 26:55 | |
and so forth and so on. | 26:59 | |
So, she was my right hand and then when she decided | 27:01 | |
to go into ministry I was just thrilled. | 27:06 | |
- | Oh! | 27:09 |
- | Just thrilled. | |
- | Wonderful. | 27:11 |
- | And then she's still working now with that same group | 27:12 |
of kids that I started all these eons ago. | 27:15 | |
- | I love it! | 27:19 |
That is wonderful. | 27:20 | |
So did you get involved in the Cordaid Council | 27:21 | |
shortly after the '93 conference? | 27:24 | |
- | I think that was it. | 27:26 |
I think that was it. | 27:27 | |
- | Yeah. | 27:28 |
- | You know, that part of the memory is so ... | 27:29 |
And I remember Manly. | 27:32 | |
- | Yes! | 27:34 |
- | Who forgets Manly? | 27:35 |
- | I know, wonderful guy. | 27:36 |
- | Who was our chair? | 27:38 |
- | For the '93, it was Mary Kay Sauter | 27:41 |
and Kathi Austin Mahle. | 27:44 | |
- | Yes, yes. | |
(talking over each other) | 27:46 | |
- | So do you recall the backlash? | 27:49 |
Did it affect you at all? | 27:51 | |
- | Oh yeah, I remember the backlash. | 27:52 |
- | Yeah, yeah. | 27:53 |
- | But you know, it was like at that point, | 27:54 |
like I say, our denomination was grounded | 27:58 | |
and so, you know all this goddess talk and all that crap. | 28:02 | |
It was just ... | 28:07 | |
You know, I'd been up against some of the best | 28:10 | |
of them really. | 28:11 | |
(laughing) | 28:12 | |
Things like meeting in the same hotel in St. Cloud, | 28:16 | |
as we were getting ready to go down, | 28:21 | |
that was one of the, um, in 1976, | 28:23 | |
when we had the women's conference in Houston. | 28:28 | |
- | Mmm. | 28:30 |
- | And that was, that ... | 28:32 |
Oh, man, Phyllis Schlafly brought her conference | 28:34 | |
to the same hotel. | 28:38 | |
- | Really? | 28:40 |
- | Yes, really. | 28:41 |
Her strongest group was farm women in Stearns county. | 28:42 | |
- | Oh, wow! | 28:46 |
- | Oh, yeah. | 28:47 |
And her Eagle Forum? | 28:48 | |
- | Yes. | |
- | Oh man! | 28:50 |
And she had, | 28:51 | |
there was a book out that an anti-feminist, | 28:54 | |
a woman, had put out and it was ... | 29:00 | |
Oh, it was awful but it was a best-seller | 29:05 | |
and I remember that Phyllis had her women | 29:07 | |
saving their egg money to fight this battle against us, | 29:12 | |
and oh, man. | 29:17 | |
And then once we got to Houston-- | 29:19 | |
- | Just to clarify, us would be the Lutheran Church | 29:23 |
and ordained-- | 29:25 | |
- | No, actually us would be the Women's Equity Action League. | 29:25 |
- | Oh, okay, okay, got it, got it. | 29:31 |
- | The Action League, NOW, you know all of the feminists, | 29:33 |
we were getting our delegates down that we'd chosen. | 29:36 | |
- | Yes. | 29:40 |
- | And by the time we got down there, two things happened, | 29:41 |
and galvanized me, I guess, | 29:45 | |
to do my work in a different way. | 29:48 | |
And that was that I had come out of the south | 29:51 | |
where mentoring kids and so forth and so on | 29:55 | |
was just a part of our nature. | 30:00 | |
I mean, you didn't even talk about it. | 30:01 | |
You had a youth for a ... | 30:05 | |
You know, kids knew that they had to keep secrets, | 30:06 | |
I mean, you know it was all part of the fabric of our lives | 30:09 | |
but when I got here, kids were so segregated from adults, | 30:12 | |
and the ministries. | 30:17 | |
Never shall the twain never meet. | 30:19 | |
Or rarely, but so when I went down to Houston | 30:22 | |
and we had to walk the gamut | 30:27 | |
of all these horrible, white males calling us faggots | 30:29 | |
and this, lesbos, and yadda yadda yah, | 30:34 | |
and spitting at you and so forth. | 30:38 | |
That took me back to my civil rights roots. | 30:41 | |
- | Yes! | 30:45 |
- | Okay, so I'd done this walk before. | 30:47 |
- | Yes. | 30:48 |
- | Okay, for many other people it was terrifying. | 30:49 |
- | Right! | 30:52 |
- | And which is one reason why having black women | 30:53 |
particularly in the movement was so helpful, | 30:57 | |
because we'd been there. | 31:01 | |
- | Yes, yes. | 31:03 |
- | And so-- | |
- | And this was Houston, the Lutheran Church-- | 31:06 |
- | No, this was the national conference | 31:08 |
to send women to our national conference | 31:14 | |
of women's groups and everything, | 31:19 | |
which then chose delegates to go | 31:21 | |
to the first women's conference of the Decade. | 31:24 | |
- | Oh, okay. | 31:30 |
- | Of the U.N. Decade. | 31:31 |
- | U.N. Decade, ok. | 31:31 |
- | And of course, Arvonne had been very, very instrumental | 31:32 |
in getting that Decade. | 31:38 | |
- | Who had, I'm sorry? | 31:41 |
- | Arvonne Fraser. | 31:42 |
- | Arvonne Fraser, okay, got it. | 31:43 |
- | Yeah, so anyway, that was the step thing | 31:44 |
so all the states were choosing their people to go | 31:47 | |
on to this. | 31:51 | |
- | Yeah. | 31:52 |
- | So that was before we had a conference, okay? | 31:53 |
The religious conference, | 31:59 | |
so unlike the civil rights movement | 32:01 | |
where the church people were leading. | 32:03 | |
- | Yes. | 32:05 |
- | In this case, the church people were following. | 32:08 |
- | Right. | 32:10 |
- | And really dragging their heels I might say. | 32:11 |
So anyway, I just wanted to quickly say that. | 32:15 | |
So fast forward to the conference, | 32:18 | |
there were people that I had known | 32:21 | |
in this other place you see? | 32:25 | |
- | Yes! | 32:28 |
- | Who were now in this religious space with me. | 32:29 |
- | Yes. | 32:32 |
- | And really there were a lot of women who were very, | 32:33 |
who had been very beat up by the church | 32:39 | |
and the patriarchal nature of the churches. | 32:41 | |
And so many of them had dropped off. | 32:45 | |
I mean, they were no longer in churches. | 32:47 | |
So this wasn't a place that you went to. | 32:51 | |
- | Yes! | 32:55 |
- | In terms of the women's movement. | 32:56 |
This was a place that was pretty fraught with, | 32:58 | |
with peril. | 33:03 | |
- | Yes. | |
- | So the women's movement got kind of a bad rap | 33:05 |
about being a, | 33:10 | |
what am I trying to say? | 33:13 | |
About being anti-church or so forth and so on. | 33:15 | |
- | Which must have made Re-imagining very striking. | 33:20 |
- | Oh man, very striking. | 33:23 |
And that group of people were still fighting, | 33:27 | |
you know, they hadn't gone any place. | 33:29 | |
- | Yes, yes, yeah. | 33:32 |
- | They were still fighting. | 33:33 |
- | So, given your background, | 33:34 |
were you surprised at the reaction to Re-imagining? | 33:37 | |
To the 1993 conference? | 33:40 | |
- | I was, in a sense, because I thought we'd passed all that. | 33:42 |
- | Yeah. | 33:46 |
- | And I was surprised by that. | 33:49 |
- | Mm-hmm. | |
And how do you account for it, | 33:55 | |
as you think about it now, Vivian? | 33:56 | |
- | Oh, that's an interesting question. | 33:58 |
I'm gonna give you a Bob Turre, Robert Turre answer. | 34:05 | |
- | Okay. | 34:08 |
(laughing) | 34:09 | |
- | Which is that, as long as groups that are dispossessed | 34:10 |
or oppressed don't coalesce, | 34:15 | |
in any way that the other, the majority sees as threatening | 34:19 | |
okay, they'll make deals with you. | 34:25 | |
- | Right, yes. | 34:26 |
- | They'll do transactions. | 34:28 |
But the minute you start to coalesce in numbers | 34:29 | |
that are uncomfortable? | 34:32 | |
- | Yes! | 34:34 |
- | Then you threaten their | 34:35 |
(chuckling) | 34:40 | |
How did he say that? | 34:44 | |
Well, let me just skip up. | 34:46 | |
We would say you threaten their privilege? | 34:48 | |
- | Yeah. | 34:49 |
- | Okay, and this is a power move, | 34:50 |
so whether or not you can deliver on it is irrelevant. | 34:53 | |
- | Yeah. | 34:57 |
- | But it's just seen as a threat | 34:57 |
and then people start organizing, | 34:59 | |
people start really trying to take it apart and so forth. | 35:01 | |
And you know, this was the point at which | 35:07 | |
just about, and I hate to say it, | 35:13 | |
just about every major movement | 35:15 | |
of our time has been attacked. | 35:19 | |
- | Mm-hmm. | |
- | You know, I read this morning this news about CIA | 35:24 |
turning Nelson Mandela in. | 35:31 | |
I was so, | 35:34 | |
I thought I had seen and heard it all. | 35:36 | |
- | Right, yes. | 35:39 |
- | With all that's been through the movement with Dr. King | 35:40 |
and Hoover doing all his mad shenanigans. | 35:42 | |
But I was just, I have to say I was floored this morning. | 35:47 | |
- | Yes! | 35:49 |
- | So that kind of, whenever you are threatening, | 35:51 |
as Turre would say, or you're perceived | 35:56 | |
to be threatening institutions that the majority holds dear, | 36:00 | |
or needs, then you're expendable. | 36:05 | |
- | Yeah, yeah. | 36:07 |
- | And you have to be stopped. | 36:08 |
- | Right. | 36:10 |
And from what you said earlier, | 36:10 | |
it sounded like that the backlash wasn't as powerful | 36:11 | |
in the Lutheran Church. | 36:15 | |
- | It may have been but I, at that point, was not working | 36:16 |
in the Lutheran Church, I was back at the U. | 36:21 | |
- | Sure. | 36:23 |
- | So, but as far as you know, the mentoring stuff, nah. | 36:24 |
- | Yes, yeah, yeah. | 36:28 |
So do you remember anything | 36:31 | |
about forming the Re-imagining community? | 36:33 | |
Were you involved in that? | 36:35 | |
- | Well, yes, I think that, as I recall, | 36:36 |
people really began to see that this was, | 36:42 | |
in and of itself, a movement. | 36:49 | |
- | Yes! | 36:51 |
- | That it wasn't just kind of okay, | 36:53 |
let's have all the religious come together | 36:55 | |
and see where we are, | 36:58 | |
and I can tell that we're further ahead than you. | 36:59 | |
(laughing) | 37:03 | |
But it really, I think, was | 37:07 | |
for most people, the first time | 37:13 | |
that they really saw that working, | 37:16 | |
in this issue. | 37:22 | |
- | This issue being women's? | 37:26 |
- | Women and their roles in the Church. | 37:27 |
- | Yes. | 37:33 |
- | And so I think for, | 37:35 |
that as we began to see that people needed to be supported. | 37:39 | |
- | Yes! | 37:42 |
- | People were losing jobs! | 37:43 |
I was like what? | 37:44 | |
- | Yeah. | 37:45 |
- | Really? | 37:46 |
- | I know. | |
- | Yeah, and the three of us at our college, back in '70, | 37:48 |
where was that? | 37:53 | |
It was in the late '70s. | 37:55 | |
We had won our case. | 37:57 | |
- | The Augsberg case. | 37:58 |
- | The Augsberg case. | 37:59 |
- | Did you? | 38:00 |
Wow, that's great. | 38:01 | |
- | We were on our way to winning it, | 38:02 |
and then the (laughing) civil rights department guy | 38:03 | |
flew in here from Chicago and spent a week here on campus. | 38:08 | |
And they thought that they were free | 38:14 | |
from any kind of restraint | 38:17 | |
because we were a religious institution. | 38:18 | |
Well when he pointed, as he looked at all contracts | 38:21 | |
and this and that and all the things, we had no idea. | 38:23 | |
Then he pointed out to us, says if you had taken one dime | 38:26 | |
from the federal government you were covered. | 38:29 | |
- | Oh really? | 38:32 |
- | Yeah. | |
And we had just built a second dorm using federal money | 38:34 | |
and not to mention all this other stuff, | 38:37 | |
so we were covered. | 38:40 | |
And as it turned out, | 38:42 | |
they started a committee on Sibley, | 38:47 | |
Dr. Sibley was who I was trying to remember. | 38:53 | |
- | Oh, okay. | 38:55 |
- | Mulford Q. Sibley who was, | 38:56 |
Mulford Sibley was probably | 39:00 | |
one of the most famous professors at the U. | 39:03 | |
He did research work, | 39:06 | |
God in the '40s, on race. | 39:10 | |
What was the famous race study? | 39:14 | |
I can't remember it. | 39:17 | |
Gosh, one of the former presidents of Harvard had been | 39:21 | |
part of that, and one of my professors had too. | 39:24 | |
Golly, I can't think of the study, but it's very famous. | 39:31 | |
Anyway, so Mulford was really somebody | 39:36 | |
and I feel like, even yet, | 39:41 | |
privileged that I got to know him, | 39:47 | |
and that we were together standing on the steps together | 39:50 | |
- | That is wonderful. | 39:55 |
- | For gay rights. | |
- | Yes, yes! | 39:56 |
- | Oh, you know and this was the thing. | 39:57 |
So I would volunteer for things nobody else wanted to do. | 39:59 | |
So the first state study on discrimination | 40:04 | |
against gay people had come | 40:09 | |
to the Department of Human Rights. | 40:11 | |
The then Commissioner really didn't want anything | 40:14 | |
to do with it, so he passed it over | 40:18 | |
to the women's advisory. | 40:21 | |
- | Oh, really? | 40:24 |
- | Really. | |
And so the question was thrown out to us, | 40:26 | |
well, I'm sure nobody in here wants to do that, | 40:30 | |
but anybody interested? | 40:32 | |
And of course, | 40:34 | |
(talking and laughing drowns out speech) | 40:35 | |
So we hired a wonderful researcher | 40:38 | |
who also was gay and did a wonderful report. | 40:42 | |
- | That is great. | 40:47 |
Oh, that is great. | 40:49 | |
- | Now, as it turns out, it was all about men. | 40:50 |
- | Oh. | 40:54 |
- | Okay? | |
- | Mm-hmm. | 40:55 |
- | Yeah. | |
It was like really? | 40:57 | |
Are you going to go to barber shops? | 41:00 | |
Well there wasn't any place for gay women. | 41:02 | |
There were no clubs, there were no anything like that | 41:04 | |
at that point. | 41:06 | |
So that movement came along | 41:08 | |
behind this movement but anyway. | 41:12 | |
- | Boy, you were involved in so many important movements. | 41:16 |
And talk about intersectionality. | 41:19 | |
You really lived it. | 41:20 | |
- | I lived it, so back to this thing though. | 41:22 |
Knowing that people needed support | 41:25 | |
and that the larger religious faith community, | 41:29 | |
the national faith community had to see | 41:34 | |
that this wasn't a what? | 41:36 | |
A shot in the, what do they call it? | 41:40 | |
- | A flash in the pan. | 41:42 |
- | Flash in the pan. | 41:43 |
- | Yes! | 41:44 |
- | Yes, and that, I learned long ago, | 41:45 |
has nothing to do with skillets. | 41:47 | |
- | Oh! | 41:49 |
- | Flash in the pan, you know a putter pan? | 41:50 |
- | Oh is that it? | 41:53 |
Oh, that's great, that is great. | 41:54 | |
How did feminist theology affect the structure | 41:57 | |
and functioning of the Re-imagining community, | 41:59 | |
would you say? | 42:01 | |
- | I'd say that it was the lifeblood of it truly. | 42:03 |
- | And how'd it manifest itself? | 42:07 |
- | Well in that I think people were stronger, | 42:09 |
I think people had a place where they could speak | 42:14 | |
without fear and really help one another. | 42:18 | |
I really think it created that space | 42:26 | |
for us to be able to move up. | 42:29 | |
- | And what kind of challenges would you say | 42:32 |
the community faced during its 10 years? | 42:33 | |
- | Oh, there were many. | 42:36 |
- | Yeah. | |
- | There were many. | 42:38 |
One was losing your job, obviously. | 42:39 | |
- | Great, yes. | 42:43 |
- | And another was not being taken seriously | 42:45 |
or how to say it? | 42:50 | |
Being sidelined as one of those bra-burning feminists. | 42:55 | |
And so people either expected you to burn your bra, | 43:01 | |
(laughing) | 43:06 | |
Or they, | 43:10 | |
it was almost like, | 43:14 | |
what was it almost like it was? | 43:18 | |
People who were being, | 43:22 | |
I called it tortured, on their jobs and such. | 43:26 | |
They didn't have any support. | 43:30 | |
They didn't have any place to go with it. | 43:31 | |
- | Right. | 43:33 |
- | And especially religious folks. | 43:34 |
- | Yeah, yeah. | 43:36 |
So, the churches weren't taking them seriously? | 43:38 | |
Is that who you mean? | 43:41 | |
- | Some weren't. | 43:42 |
- | Yeah, yeah. | 43:42 |
- | Some were just kinda like let's just pretend | 43:43 |
they are not here. | 43:48 | |
If we just ignore them long enough, they will go away. | 43:51 | |
(laughing) | 43:53 | |
Can I get some more water from you? | 43:56 | |
- | Oh, okay, sure, sure. | 43:57 |
(laughter) | 0:00 | |
- | So, Vivian what aspects of Re-imagining | 0:03 |
were most significant to you and why? | 0:05 | |
- | Well, um, I think the support, | 0:08 |
the ability to work on things together. | 0:16 | |
That was, to me, see, I'm not long on | 0:21 | |
a lot of yick yack for talk. | 0:26 | |
(Laughter) | 0:28 | |
- | I want to get things done, so. | 0:29 |
- | Right. | 0:30 |
- | I'm a pragmatist, so if the talk leads to something, | 0:31 |
I'm okay with it. | 0:33 | |
- | Right. | 0:34 |
- | But, you know, it was like, for a lot of people, | 0:35 |
they just weren't ready for people | 0:42 | |
to be as cruel to them as they were. | 0:44 | |
- | Yes. | 0:46 |
- | You know? | 0:47 |
- | Yeah. | 0:48 |
- | And in our case at the college, | 0:49 |
people stopped talking to us. | 0:51 | |
- | Ohh. | 0:52 |
- | And I was in a department where that did not happen, | 0:53 |
but, one of the other women was in a department | 0:56 | |
where she was chairing the department, | 1:00 | |
- | Oh my goodness. | 1:02 |
- | And everyone stopped talking to her. | 1:03 |
- | Oh, that would be awful. | 1:04 |
- | Yeah, so she had to step down and you know, | 1:05 |
give the chair over to somebody else. | 1:08 | |
- | Ugh, awful. | 1:10 |
Did your involvement in Re-imagining | 1:13 | |
change your perspective at all on feminist theology, | 1:15 | |
and/ or on the church? | 1:17 | |
- | Oh yeah, absolutely. | 1:19 |
Because at this point, certain things had settled in | 1:21 | |
into my bones at that point. | 1:27 | |
If you will. | 1:29 | |
And my mother had started calling herself a feminist. | 1:31 | |
- | Had she? Aw I love it. That is great. Aw. | 1:35 |
- | Yeah, and so she was involved in some church work. | 1:40 |
But, you know, in the Black Lutheran church, | 1:46 | |
women ran the church. | 1:48 | |
- | Is that right? | 1:50 |
- | Yeah. That's who was in the pew. | 1:51 |
Just like it is with the white women | 1:53 | |
but pastor didn't do anything | 1:56 | |
without coming past the ladies | 1:59 | |
(laughter) | 2:01 | |
in the church. | 2:02 | |
I mean, because they raised the money for this, | 2:03 | |
they raised the money for that. | 2:04 | |
You know, blah blah blah, | 2:06 | |
they taught, they did all the work. | 2:07 | |
- | Yes. | 2:09 |
- | And, not all the work, of course men were | 2:10 |
were part of this, but, | 2:14 | |
the majority of the people were women. | 2:15 | |
And so the black church, women speak out. | 2:16 | |
- | Uh-huh | 2:22 |
- | So, there was no such thing as somebody saying, | 2:23 |
"Sister, whatever, you can't talk here." | 2:29 | |
and you know when white people would come | 2:34 | |
from other churches | 2:37 | |
and we'd have a congregational meeting afterwards, | 2:38 | |
and I guess my Dad was ahead of his time too, in this regard | 2:41 | |
but, you know, women taught, women voted. | 2:46 | |
I was like, really? | 2:51 | |
- | Yes. | 2:52 |
- | I didn't know anything else. | 2:53 |
- | Right? | 2:54 |
- | So yeah, so actually, | 2:55 |
seeing that people had to make choices about things, | 2:58 | |
that helped me understand more about why | 3:02 | |
white women weren't more forthcoming. | 3:05 | |
- | Say some more about that. | 3:10 |
- | Well, in other words, | 3:11 |
when I saw how white women could be punished. | 3:13 | |
- | Ah. | 3:16 |
- | By white people, other white women and white men, | 3:17 |
- | Yes. | 3:20 |
- | Because it wasn't part of the culture. | 3:21 |
- | Right. | 3:23 |
- | Then I began to understand that, why, they | 3:24 |
weren't always front and center, | 3:31 | |
- | Got it. | 3:35 |
- | You know, supporting you, or me, or whatever, | 3:35 |
because they couldn't support themselves. | 3:38 | |
- | Ha, wow, that's | 3:40 |
- | So, you know, a part of me really I think | 3:43 |
became much more forgiving, if you will, | 3:49 | |
as a result of that experience. | 3:55 | |
Because, once you got to know someone | 3:57 | |
a person with a name and a face, you know, | 4:02 | |
not just Reverend Molly's picture here and there or whatever | 4:05 | |
it made a difference. | 4:10 | |
- | Yes. | 4:11 |
- | It made a difference. | 4:12 |
So that whole business of showing up? | 4:13 | |
This was all a part of, for me, showing up. | 4:16 | |
- | Absolutely. | 4:20 |
Oh, glad you did. | 4:22 | |
So, you know, getting at the end here, | 4:24 | |
In the end, what do you think is the greatest legacy | 4:27 | |
of the Re-imagining community? | 4:28 | |
- | I think the greatest legacy of this, and I teach now, | 4:32 |
I've been teaching for a number of years now, | 4:37 | |
at Luther Seminary, | 4:39 | |
- | Yes. | 4:40 |
- | And the greatest legacy of this, for me, | 4:42 |
is young, white males who come into class already feminized. | 4:46 | |
- | Umm | 4:50 |
- | I mean really, | 4:51 |
and who take on other males who aren't there, | 4:52 | |
and you don't have to do that work. | 4:55 | |
- | Yeah. | 4:57 |
- | Okay. | 4:58 |
- | Right. | 4:59 |
- | That's the greatest legacy to me. | 4:59 |
- | Yes. | 5:00 |
- | Is that the other side of the equation, for the most part, | 5:01 |
Get it, understand it, and are partnering with, | 5:09 | |
are partnering, and now we have more women than men. | 5:14 | |
- | Uh-huh | 5:20 |
- | Right, and now we have more clergy couples | 5:20 |
than the church ever had. | 5:25 | |
And women are willing to serve | 5:27 | |
these little 5-point parishes and 3-point parishes | 5:29 | |
that we couldn't bring enough men in to do. | 5:36 | |
- | Right. | 5:39 |
- | Also one of the things that Re-imagining has done, | 5:41 |
is it has given us more seasoned clergy | 5:44 | |
who are choosing this as a second or third career. | 5:50 | |
- | Uh-huh | 5:57 |
- | And that is a blessing. | 5:58 |
- | Uh-huh | 5:59 |
- | That is a real blessing. | 6:00 |
- | You know, some of the goals of Re-imagining | 6:01 |
were to bring inclusive or expansive language | 6:03 | |
into the church, and feminist theology, | 6:05 | |
What is your perception of how that is today? | 6:08 | |
- | Oh I think we're getting there. | 6:10 |
- | Do you? Yes. | 6:12 |
- | I really do. | 6:13 |
The reason I say this is because, if you can believe it, | 6:14 | |
in the first instance, you know coming up Lutheran, | 6:17 | |
we didn't even cross synodical lines. | 6:21 | |
- | Right. | 6:25 |
- | We did not cross synodical lines. | 6:25 |
And it was said and said many times, | 6:29 | |
Oh, they are too liberal, they are going to hell. | 6:31 | |
- | Right. | 6:33 |
- | They're going to burn in hellfire. Okay? | 6:34 |
- | Uh-huh | 6:35 |
- | Turn and burn, honey. So. | 6:37 |
(laughter) | 6:38 | |
- | And so, if we thought that way about other Lutherans, | 6:42 |
I mean, how far out were the Jews and Muslims, | 6:46 | |
and this and that. | 6:51 | |
Okay, In the civil rights movement, which I contend, | 6:52 | |
was the most ecumenical movement in this country's history. | 6:55 | |
- | Yes. | 7:01 |
- | My Dad had to be alongside other people. | 7:02 |
You know, we were taught not to talk to Catholic kids | 7:06 | |
before all of that happened. | 7:11 | |
- | Right. | 7:12 |
- | Okay, so here he is marching | 7:13 |
with the Catholics, and the this and the that, | 7:15 | |
he's driving the church people crazy. | 7:17 | |
I mean, because of the religious nature of the movement. | 7:19 | |
- | Right. | 7:25 |
- | That is was opening doors to other people. | 7:26 |
Your gonna, well next thing you know | 7:30 | |
you're gonna be preaching Judaism. | 7:31 | |
Guess what, we already do. | 7:33 | |
(laughter) | 7:34 | |
You know, and Dad always had such a great sense of humor, | 7:38 | |
the point that I'm making here is that | 7:43 | |
this opened the doors for us as women | 7:47 | |
to be way more ecumenical than our churches were. | 7:52 | |
- | Mmm | 7:55 |
- | Because this battle was being fought all around the world, | 7:57 |
everywhere you went, and of course, the interesting part | 8:02 | |
about the Mexico meeting | 8:06 | |
was we didn't have a tract that was for religious, | 8:11 | |
we just had the NGO's. | 8:17 | |
- | Ah | 8:18 |
- | So the religious had to get themselves together | 8:19 |
on their own. | 8:22 | |
- | Ah | 8:23 |
- | And I had enough money from my denomination, | 8:24 |
to actually bring somebody with me to the conference, | 8:28 | |
you know, and stuff like that. | 8:30 | |
So when we went to Denmark, the church was, | 8:34 | |
the Danish church allowed me to open the Danish church | 8:38 | |
to have a meeting place. | 8:44 | |
- | Hmmm | 8:46 |
- | The NGO's didn't have a meeting place. | 8:47 |
We were always scrambling for a meeting place. | 8:48 | |
- | Oh wow. | 8:50 |
- | So we learned interesting things, like, | 8:51 |
People had come without knowing how expensive | 8:56 | |
it was going to be, and of course, you know, I have to say, | 8:58 | |
there were all kinds of classes | 9:02 | |
who were there at these meetings and so, by the time | 9:04 | |
we got to the second meeting, which was five years in, | 9:08 | |
we'd had meetings at The White House, we'd had all | 9:11 | |
kinds of meetings, | 9:14 | |
- | Wow. | 9:16 |
- | Yeah, so we were much better prepared at that point. | 9:17 |
And so, we brought back, and so my Lutheran sisters, | 9:20 | |
everybody but the Missouri synod, | 9:27 | |
they were all at the Danish convention, | 9:29 | |
and so you know, coming back, and the Methodists, | 9:33 | |
you know, everybody was there. | 9:37 | |
- | Yeah | 9:38 |
- | And the Baptists, and this and that. | 9:39 |
So, we got to see worldwide, and experience worldwide, | 9:41 | |
the struggles of the women in Asia, | 9:47 | |
the struggles of the women here, | 9:48 | |
- | Ah | 9:50 |
- | And everyday after our meetings, then you know, | 9:51 |
we could come to the church, | 9:55 | |
you know we could have meals together, | 9:57 | |
- | Ohh | 9:58 |
- | You know, all sorts of really wonderful things. | 9:59 |
So, we were able to process this as world women, | 10:00 | |
if you will , world religious women. | 10:07 | |
And know that it was better in some places | 10:09 | |
worse in others, so, being hosted by the Danish church | 10:12 | |
made quite a | 10:17 | |
- | That's amazing. | 10:18 |
- | Quite a, yeah, anyway, long and short, | 10:19 |
so for me, this was really kinda my rootedness, if you will, | 10:24 | |
going out to the larger world and back again. | 10:33 | |
And each time you make one of those journeys, | 10:38 | |
your faith is challenged and supported | 10:43 | |
in ways that you never thought it would be. | 10:45 | |
Okay, so I used to say, when I was a church executive, | 10:48 | |
that God was black woman with a big purse, | 10:53 | |
and she did not like ugly. | 10:55 | |
(laughter) | 10:56 | |
She'd smack you with that purse. | 10:58 | |
- | I love it. | 11:00 |
- | It was really funny, somebody sent me a cartoon. | 11:04 |
And it was this pastor, he just "women this and that" | 11:09 | |
and there was this purse coming out of a cloud, | 11:14 | |
(laughter) | 11:16 | |
coming down, | 11:17 | |
(laughter) | 11:18 | |
I kept it, | 11:19 | |
- | Perfect. | 11:20 |
- | Yeah, I kept it forever. | 11:20 |
- | I love that image. | 11:22 |
- | I knew that we were someplace different, | 11:23 |
when our seminary, the whole seminary read The Shack. | 11:26 | |
- | Ohh | 11:33 |
- | And had two of us talking about it, | 11:34 |
and one being non-Lutheran and me. | 11:36 | |
I mean that is, that covers so many bases | 11:39 | |
that I have to unpack it a little bit. | 11:44 | |
One is, nobody ever thought of a woman, you know, | 11:46 | |
until we started all this woman, woman talk , if you will. | 11:50 | |
And thinking about God, the God-head as not being male, | 11:55 | |
except in the person of Jesus. | 12:00 | |
And those are hard hard images to get out of peoples' minds. | 12:03 | |
And then finally, we were reading a piece of literature, | 12:08 | |
which was a bestseller, but I thought it was badly written, | 12:13 | |
but that's neither here nor there, | 12:15 | |
but where God is a black woman. | 12:18 | |
- | Um-hm | 12:19 |
- | Okay? | 12:20 |
So that opened windows and doors | 12:21 | |
that we couldn't get through, with even me as a student, | 12:26 | |
an art student, painting Jesus as a Jewish man | 12:30 | |
with black hair and olive complexion, and modern dress, | 12:33 | |
and a jean jacket to be exact. | 12:39 | |
(laughter) | 12:41 | |
But, this opened up the ability to think about God | 12:42 | |
in a different way, where these two things intersect. | 12:49 | |
- | Exactly. | 12:54 |
- | Yeah, so for that, I thought that we made great strides. | 12:54 |
And I teach with a woman who is head of a department, | 13:02 | |
I repeat, head of a department, at Luther Seminary, | 13:08 | |
and she, she, is a Roman Catholic Theologian. | 13:13 | |
- | Ohh | 13:16 |
Oh yes. | 13:18 | |
- | Yes. | 13:19 |
- | Right. | 13:21 |
- | For our institutions to open themselves wide enough, | 13:22 |
or be forced to open themselves wide enough to accept | 13:26 | |
a woman Theologian, who is Catholic? | 13:29 | |
- | Um-hm | 13:31 |
- | Oh yeah, we've come a long way baby. | 13:32 |
- | Oh yes. | 13:36 |
Vivian, this has been great. | 13:37 | |
Is there anything that you want to add | 13:39 | |
that we haven't talked about? | 13:40 | |
- | Oh well, I'll think about it later. | 13:41 |
(laughter) | 13:42 | |
No, this has been great fun. | 13:44 | |
You know, I'm so in the present and future, | 13:46 | |
that my husband was the rememberer. | 13:53 | |
(laughter) | 13:55 | |
- | Oh yeah? | 13:56 |
Well you remembered a lot, I think. | 13:57 | |
- | You know, we all have our stories, | 14:00 |
and that's all we have, really. | 14:03 | |
- | Yes. | 14:05 |
- | And you know, and the story, | 14:05 |
in which we all become part of the narrative, | 14:09 | |
is really our faith story. | 14:13 | |
- | Uh-huh | 14:15 |
And you have a rich story, you really do. | 14:17 | |
- | I do. | 14:20 |
You know, I can't imagine me being born to, | 14:23 | |
other than the people I was born to. | 14:26 | |
- | Yes. | 14:28 |
- | Because they were so, they allowed us think | 14:29 |
whatever we wanted to, you know, and, so | 14:33 | |
I had a brother who was a, younger brother, | 14:37 | |
who was a Black Panther. | 14:39 | |
- | Really? Wow. | 14:42 |
- | At the same time, Dad was doing his civil rights stuff. | 14:43 |
- | Ahh | 14:46 |
- | And in fact, my Dad became quite enamored | 14:46 |
of the Black Panthers' breakfast program. | 14:51 | |
And so the two of them | 14:55 | |
would go around together and make talks. | 14:55 | |
- | Oh, well I can why you are the way you are, Vivian. | 14:58 |
(laugher) | 15:03 | |
You have great roots. | 15:04 | |
- | Yeah, this apple didn't fall from the tree. | 15:07 |
- | No it did not. | 15:08 |
- | As my Mother says, you're much nicer than I am. | 15:10 |
(laughter) | 15:13 | |
- | Well, thank you, that's great. | 15:17 |
Item Info
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