A Passion for Women‘s Rights/ Carol Atkins

Nov. 2, 2008

The Great Depression was just around the corner when Carol Atkins and her family moved into a newly built home in a new Toledo subdivision in 1929.
Atkins, only six, quickly realized she lived on an island of good fortune. Her father was a doctor, and her family prospered, while others struggled to find enough to eat. Their lovely home stood alone in the field until the economy improved years later. Atkins knew she had done nothing to earn her comfort. She was just lucky.
Years later in 1953, she didn’t feel so lucky. She had plans to work internationally and had set her sights on getting a foreign service degree from the University of Michigan. She fulfilled all the prerequisites and confidently walked into the U-M counseling office to declare her major. She was shocked when the counselor laughed and suggested she find a job as a diplomat’s secretary if she wanted to see the world. Girls weren’t allowed to major in foreign service, he explained.
Atkins, now 85, said she realized then that life is inherently unfair. Only the acts of caring people can help even out the odds. And that’s why she has spent a lifetime working on feminist issues.
“I didn’t get into this because I was a noble person. I was angry. I saw this as a social problem, created by people, which could only be changed by people. It didn’t have to be that way.”

HALL OF FAME
Atkins was recently inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame for her work in women’s rights. She is known for organizing a demonstration at the boys-only Little League World Series in the early 1970s. She wrote Putting it Together, which explored the theories and vision of the women’s movement, which was selected as part of the Michigan Women’s Commission archives.
This past summer, she published two books, The Trouble with Turtles and Rainstorms and Fairies. Her two plays about the women’s movement were both performed in Manistee—In Their Own Words: 19th-Century Suffragists Tell It Like It Was and Our Foremothers, Our Friends, a conversation between and early and modern feminists.
The following is an interview with Atkins, who now lives in a sunny condo in Manistee with her husband, Ned. Her son, Larry, was also visiting.

NE: Did your mother work full-time?
Atkins: Before she met my dad, she worked as a nurse. In fact, that’s how she met my father—during World War I. He came to a hospital in Newport News, Virginia, to treat the wounded soldiers, and she was the superintendent of nurses. In those days, all the nurses had to stand to attention if a doctor walked in. Think of that.
She stayed home and raised three kids, but she had some gumption. Each summer, she drove us all over the country—to Florida, to California, to the World’s Fair in Chicago. These were the days before there were motels and she had to get pretty creative when it came time to finding a place to spend the night. My convictions about a woman’s capabilities came from her.

NE: What did you do for a living?
Atkins: I was a stay-at-home wife. My husband was a chemical engineer so we moved around a lot—this last move to Manistee was the 20th move in our marriage. So I discovered that writing a column was something I could do at home wherever we lived. I had three children. I took time off, and I don’t begrudge that time.

NE: I’ve often thought that women still earn less than men because they stay home when the children are young, or work part-time to handle family matters.
Atkins: I totally agree with that. Men and women are now earning nearly the same right out of college, but as women get older, the gap widens and widens. I don’t see any way to change that. When you have babies, that’s what you want. You want to take care off your children.
So I don’t, in any way, want to disparage a full-time mother. I have a lot of respect for women who have made their lives meaningful this way. But I couldn’t do it full-time. It wasn’t in me. I didn’t find running a home intellectually challenging enough. I think that’s where the idea for throwing elaborate parties came from. Full-time homemakers want to make their lives harder and more interesting. I think that’s true.
But there are all these other things that need doing. My advice is, do something that’s needed in the world. Make a difference in the lives of people. My feminist work was something I felt was really needed. I wanted to change how women saw themselves. We’ve done very well in educating girls, but I still want to get equal pay.
Ellie, my grand daughter, is now working in Jerusalem for a private company helping to establish different governmental departments. It’s so complex that I wouldn’t have the slightest idea of how to explain it. But she was able to get the education that was denied to me.

NE: Here’s a question for you Larry. What was it like growing up with a feminist mom?
Atkins: My mom taught us to treat everyone with respect. She would give us a list of chores, and my dad would come outside to make sure I had done all the trimming exactly right. But it went beyond the chore list. It was respect for the home. You don’t leave dishes on the table for the dish fairy.

NE: Carol, when I grew up, my mom said she was a feminist, but the girls had to do all the indoor chores, and the boys mowed the lawn once a week, which I found mildly annoying. Was it the same at your house?
Atkins: You know, it was. I unconsciously asked my daughter to do all the inside work, and the boys worked outdoors. I didn’t see that at the time. But my feminism didn’t develop until my late 40s.

NE: Speaking of feminism, what do you think of Sarah Palin and her candidacy for vice president?
Atkins: I don’t think we really know who she is. One side says she is good and great, the other side makes such cruel fun of everything she says.

NE: Does her stance on women’s rights bother you?
Atkins: I don’t think she’s ever seriously thought about the circumstances of other women, the desperation in which they live—here and elsewhere around the world. In the Middle East, you have women who are told to cover themselves as if their bodies, as if their very beings are poison. It’s an ownership thing. ‘This is my woman.” As if she didn’t own herself, as if she were a child. Religions, throughout history, have taught women to be subservient to men.

NE: What about Governor Palin’s stance on choice? She doesn’t believe in abortion, even in the case of rape, incest, or the health of the woman.
Atkins: That’s her position, and I’ll respect it. But if she wants to make the choice for other people, that’s where I draw the line. Abortion should be up to the individual woman. Having a child is not a passive thing; it’s an active thing. The woman is responsible for the life of a child. Her body nourishes it, she’ll be held responsible for the child’s safety and the child’s entire development. If a woman wants to abort, she will find a way, either safely and cleanly with medication or illegally and dangerously or by going to a different country. It’s always been that way.

NE: Speaking of women and rights, equal pay is often the top issue. But should we gauge a woman’s success on what she earns?
Atkins: Money is not the whole story. But that’s the way a lot of people think about power. Money is a way of being free. When you’re not dependent on someone, your behavior is different. Instead of putting up with abuse, you’re free to walk out. This society is based on money. I don’t agree with it, but I have to accept it.
It’s one reason I advocated for the first women’s shelter in Manistee in the 1980s. I helped run the campaign to achieve the shelter. I did this also in Pennsylvania.

NE: How do you get women to the point where they say, “I’m not going to take this emotional or physical abuse anymore.”
Atkins: I think most of these women blame themselves when their husbands get mad. You have to get them to stop blaming themselves. They say, ‘I made him mad.’ No, he’d find something to be mad about. He feels he has power over her and that’s the way he exercises it. When I was raising money for the shelters, I’d get death threats. The husband would ask, ‘What was I doing? You are interfering with my marriage.’

NE: Back to the money issue—when my kids were young, some moms would say, ‘I don’t have to work. Do you?’ Not working became a status symbol.
Atkins: I think that’s nonsense. I’m not interested in social status. I’m interested in doing something that’s needed in the world. That’s why I wrote my books and the play about how women fought for the vote. The Manistee chapter of the AAUW (American Association of University Women) asked me to—I don’t think they knew what they were asking. So the next year, they asked if I would write another one on women’s issues. And I did.

NE: It seems one of the hot feminist issues is whether a woman is doing herself and society a disservice by choosing not to work. Any advice?
Atkins: I think they’re marking it harder on themselves if things change—if their husband loses his job or they get a divorce. Look at what’s happening to the economy as we’re speaking. My advice is to keep up in your field of study so that later in life, if you have to work or if you find a cause you want to work for, you’ll be up to speed.

NE: Another issue that comes up is sexualizing women. When I walk through the mall with my four-year-old, I have to avoid the gigantic pictures of gorgeous, half-naked women.
Atkins: It’s just a way for advertising and companies trying to make money off us. We’re continually made to feel that we’re not beautiful enough, and our bodies aren’t perfect enough. They’re creating a feeling that we need to fix this or that. It’s never about our accomplishments, but how we look.

NE: So, I have to ask, did you burn your bra in the 1960s?
Atkins: No, but I thought it was a good way for women to get some attention. I worked on getting girls into the Little League. We had a NOW (National Organization for Women) chapter in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, a little town that was known for hosting the world play-offs for the Little League. We had a chapter of 10 women, so we organized a demonstration in the early 1970s to get an equal league for girls. People (in the chapter) kept dropping out of the demonstration—their husbands didn’t want them to do it. Finally, it was just down to me and a few other women. On the day of the demonstration, another left too, with her husband.

NE: Did you go ahead with it?
Atkins: Oh yes, we had organized NOW chapters from all over the state. We had all these balloons made—‘Give girls a chance.’ We were giving them out, and the parents were delighted until they saw what they said. But none of the buses had arrived, and it was getting close to the game. I was really nervous. Everyone had gone into the stadium, and the parking lot was empty.
And then suddenly, they started rolling in. Bus after bus after bus. The women came off the buses, and they all had the same look on their face. ‘I’m going to do this thing.’ It was something they didn’t want to do, but had to do. And we went into the stadium, and ran around the bases three times, yelling, ‘Give girls a chance!’ And, oh, we had boos. My friend was listening to it on the radio. The announcer was saying, ‘What’s this? There are women with balloons running on the field! They’re running the bases. They’re yelling, something. I can’t make it out, they’re yelling... ’ And suddenly, he was cut off. It’s made me think, how much do you hear on the radio is actually monitored. Who’s controlling what you hear? It’s scary.

NE: Ned, did any of your friends pressure you to keep Carol quiet?
Atkins: No, no one ever said a word to me. I understood Carol’s passion for her work, and I really admired her for it.


Options

The rabbit hopped funny,
It didn’t take long to find
the reason,
She had only three feet.
Other than that she was okay –
soft fur and an appealing face.

If only she had the regulation
number of feet
she could hope pretty and care for
herself as well.

But it is her own fault, you know,
clearly her own doing,
She chewed off her foot herself
and left it in a trap


“Options” was published in
Rainstorms and Fairies, Atkins’ newest book, available in area bookstores.