 I came today with books, and so I'm actually going to start off with some reading. I arrived with this, Why Does Patriarchy Persist? by Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snyder, and it's based on a talk, a conversation that they had at NYU, which was so profound and so important that they were asked if they would please publish it, and they did. And sometimes you can just get stuck in the introduction, and it's quite remarkable. So I'm going to read this because I think, for me, this has targeted something that I haven't heard anybody else discuss, and I think it's really relevant to our conversation today. Because part of the reason we're looking at what we're looking at is because we live in a patriarchal world, in a patriarchal country. So she writes, our work began with a question, does patriarchy persist not only because those in positions of power are loathed to give up their privilege, but also because it has a psychological function. And I wrote immediately, what means psychological function? And she says, by requiring a sacrifice of love for the sake of hierarchy, and then she says, think of Abraham commanding God to sacrifice his son Isaac. Patriarchy steals us against the vulnerability of loving, and by doing so becomes a defense against loss. In this slide, we suggest that forces outside our awareness may be driving a politics that otherwise appears inexplicable to many people. This understanding then implies that psychological dynamics also may drive the backlash against any progress towards equality. Any dismantling of patriarchy poses a threat, not simply to status and power, but to psychological defenses that protect us from what have become some of our deepest fears and most shameful desires. And I find this really profound and an enormously important point, and I think it raises the question and the issues about why is it that we're stuck, and it brings up something that I certainly hadn't thought of, and I don't know who else has. Many of you may remember that Carol Gilligan wrote that very groundbreaking book in 1982 called In a Different Voice. It's hard to imagine that 1982, I guess the older you get doesn't feel like it was that long ago, but at the time it was a revolutionary book and made an enormous change in the educational system of this country and I think around the world. And I think that Gilligan addressing the question of patriarchy with the same psychological lens as she did over 30 years ago is a lucid analysis of why there is patriarchy persisting. And it's not a power play but it may be a human psychological dynamic. So I think today's discussion we're focused on abortion and the current attacks on our laws and against women and if we're following Gilligan's thesis, it's embedded in a patriarchal power system that overrides women's rights, bulldozing our lives in overtly and covertly undermining ways women in always due to a psychological reaction. And in order then to overthrow it we have to change our psychology, which is a whole new challenge. First recognizing it and then working to change it. So I hope that that gives you all here some food for thought and those who are watching our video at any given time. We are here now in the present doing this but if you are watching this you could be watching this a month from now, two months from now, six months from now and it may indeed still be relevant. So until we have ferreted out what we face we will face it over and over again with the same heavy hands, both metaphorical and literal against our minds and our bodies. I have asked here at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art why on earth we are surprised by the inequalities and obstacles we face given that we are living in this world and we have now been provided with I think a new insight. And I think we are at war, which I'm sorry to say. There are gloved hands destroying swaths of our population, women, children and people of color. And we are facing a control and an invasion of privacy in our lives that we really haven't known quite like before. So I'm very grateful Clara to you and Rachel to you for your cold arms. They're here to remind us of how we survived in the past and what we have to demand to control our lives in the present for our choices. When my children were young one of the first things I always taught them was that the most important part, thing that they had to learn was about options and that freedoms are directly tied to options and options and choices. And the more options and choices we have, the more freedom we have. And without options and without choices, our lives become more and more limited. And I think that we are witnessing that very profoundly at this time. And pregnancy and childbirth fall under that rubric and so here we are with choice. And I just wanted to read, I have Gloria's book here, My Life on the Road. And I quickly want to read to you her dedication. This book is dedicated to Dr. John Sharp of London who in 1957, a decade before physicians in England could legally perform an abortion for any reason other than the health of a woman, took the considerable risk of referring for an abortion a 22 year old American on her way to India. That was Gloria. Knowing only that she had broken an engagement at home to seek an unknown fate, he said, quote, you must promise me two things. First, you will not tell anyone my name. And second, you will do what you want to do with your life. She writes, Dear Dr. Sharp, I believe who knew the law was unjust would not mind if I say his name so long after his death. I've done the best I could with my life and this book is for you. And I think we can probably all agree that the, what Gloria Steinham has done with her life has changed our lives and our daughters and son's lives and those after them. So that was Gloria's choice and I'm grateful to her for it. It's a pleasure to introduce my speakers to you today and Clara Bingham is a journalist, author and documentary film producer whose work is focused on social justice and women's issues. Her most recent book, Witness to the Revolution, Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies and the Year, America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul, was published by Random House in 2016. Before she began working on Witness, Bingham produced a documentary that exposed the ravages of mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia. The Last Mountain premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011, screened in theaters in over 60 cities and won the International Documentary Association Parry Lorenz Award. Bingham's second book, Class Action, a landmark case that changed sexual harassment law, which she co-wrote with Laura Leedy Gainsler, was adapted into the 2000 feature film North Country. I didn't realize that and I did see that movie. It's a marvelous, marvelous movie if you haven't seen it. It's starring Charlize Theron and Frances McDormand, who I think received Oscar nominated for their roles in that film. Class Action tells the harrowing story of a group of female, is it Tachanite? Tachanite minors in northern Minnesota who became the first women to ever sue a company as a class action or groups for sexual harassment. It's a really riveting story. So Bingham is also the author of Women on the Hill, Challenging the Culture of Congress, which chronicles the lives of four female members of the 103rd Congress following the 1992 year of the women elections. As a Washington D.C. correspondent for Newsweek from 89 to 93, Bingham covered the George H.W. Bush White House leading up to and during the 92 presidential election. Her freelance writing has appeared in many publications, including Vanity Fair, The Hub, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Ms. and United Press International. Her article, Codenames and Secret Lives, how a radical underground network helped get abortions before they were legal, was published in April of this year. And is the reason for this program, because Clara wrote to me and said here, I have written this and I read it and I said, oh my God, we've got to do a program. So I'm delighted, Clara, that you're here. You can go online to Vanity Fair and you will see the article. Rachel Carey is a writer, director and filmmaker based in New York area. Her first feature film as writer-director, Ask for Jane, starring Cody Horn, Kate Cortellou, Sara Steele, Sara Ramos, Ben Rappaport and Allison Wright will be premiering at festivals in fall 2018. She started her film career for Artisan Entertainment as a casting assistant on projects for Good Machine, The Indie Powerhouse. After receiving an MFA in film directing from NYU, she worked as an assistant editor, wrote and directed a couple of plays and also wrote a novel, Debt, which was published by Silverbridge Press in 2013. An option to be turned into a TV series. Other recent projects include writing and directing the one hour dramatic TV pilot takers, which screened at several film festivals including the series feast and the Hoboken Film Festival. She's a member of New York women in film and television and of the NYC theater community. And if you have an opportunity, Ask for Jane is the film that has brought us here today in coordination with the radical underground abortion network that Clara has written about. And it's going to be wonderful to hear the two of you talk about how you came to what you've done. And I'm going to turn the mic over now to Rachel. Thank you. Thank you very much and thank you everybody for being here. Thank you so much to Elizabeth. So I directed a film, Ask for Jane, and I'm going to give you the story of it and then show you guys a few clips from it. And then Clara and I will have a discussion because her article is about the same group. So in 2016 I work as part of a theater company in New York and one of the actresses had seen, I believe there's a documentary called She's Beautiful when She's Angry, which is about the history of feminism and had a two minute section on the Jane collective as they are sometimes called, although they didn't call themselves that, which was a group of women in the late 60s in Chicago who ran an underground abortion network where they helped women get abortions illegally. And ultimately learned how to do the procedure themselves. There had never been a narrative film about this and Kate thought there should be one and she wanted to act in it. And she asked me to write the film and we raised money and shot it. At the time when we started in May 2016, it seemed like an interesting historical piece because Hillary was going to win the election. And we weren't especially concerned early on about how much things would shift in the ensuing years. But what I have is we are now in, we did a long festival run. I think we played at 14 or 15 festivals and we are now in the sort of mid stages of a small theatrical distribution. We played a couple of theaters in New York and we're opening in LA. So that's sort of where the film is right now. But what I have is a few clips provided by our distributors. So I think they all have come see the movie on them, but they're each about a minute long. Just to give you a flavor for the way we tried to sort of build out the world. A lot of the focus of the film was just on what the time period was like for women and why this was necessary. And I'm happy to talk more about the group itself, as I'm sure Clara is too, because they're fascinating women. And we were lucky enough to have one of them consult on our film and she spoke to a lot of them too. So I want to take over the sex education program, update it. Clearly our kids aren't getting the basic information that they need. Such as what exactly? What basic information does someone need at 15? Birth control? We just had a student die from drinking rabies. No, we don't know that she was pregnant. Her friend said... I know what her friend said. I also know that Sister Ann Marie has been doing our health education program for 30 years. And at all that time, we have not had one complaint from a parent, not one complaint. So the first thing Sister Ann Marie does is to separate the boys from the girls. And then she talks to the girls about how they have to protect their virtue so they can save the boys' souls. And then just moves on to cleanliness during your period. It just makes me crazy. You should just hide a pamphlet about birth control in the school library. It's hard enough hiding you. What do you think? Well, I think it's illegal. You could lose your job? Yeah. I mean, if I walk around asking everyone for the name of a good abortion doctor. Right. So, does that mean you don't want to help them? Because I want to help them. It's not that I don't want to help. I'm just concerned. Because I had one once when I was 17. And the guy took all the money that I had. And I almost died from the infection. And now I don't know if I can even have kids. And I don't know if I even want kids. But that guy took that from me, you know? You're Jane? Both are. You're both Jane. I'm not comfortable with the idea that you're going to use me so you can go out and get pregnant. No, no, no. It's not for us. Abortion is a serious procedure and it's a crime. I mean, why would you look for a doctor before you got pregnant? So, do you have your medical license? Excuse me? Your medical license? No, I'm the one who interviews the girls. They don't interview me. You understand? We're not planning on getting pregnant. Who is? No one. No one is planning to get an abortion. I've had it with this. Get out. But if someone didn't plan on getting pregnant and their birth control failed, isn't it better if they come in right away instead of trying it at home alone with a coat hanger? Which is why I agree to do these, because I've stitched up women who've almost died. Do you understand? Yes, but we're just... I take you or I don't, and I charge what I want. It's the way I do things. Then you're not the right person for us. We got 15 calls this week. That's a lot. So, I was thinking instead of me calling them all back, we could divide them up. Each of us could counsel a couple of them and make sure they want to go through with it and set up the appointment. What do we say? 30-year-old mother of four, six weeks pregnant. I got a 20-year-old college student three weeks. Yours is easier. Maybe. What do I say to a mother of four? I mean, I've never been a mother. I don't know. I hate phone calls to strangers. Donna, just do it. Yes, go. I'm not good at this. Stop. It's lunchtime, sweetheart. Hello? Hi. This is Jane calling. Hello? Well, maybe it wasn't a good time. Should I call back? Please call back. Please call back. This is Jane from Women's Liberation. Oh, thank God. Yeah, I know. I was nervous to call to you. I'm just starting this. You know, we're here to listen. So I can give you details about the procedure? I just, I can't. Can't what? I can't have another kid. Yeah, I understand. So that's sort of an introduction to the way that we covered this particular group. But I think Clara can probably talk more about some of it. And I can talk as well about sort of the reality of how they actually operated a little bit as well. Of the mother of four was so moving. And it's an example of how there are so many, there were, Jane had so many different clients. And I interviewed seven women who were, they called themselves Janes. And one of them was a woman named Martha Scott who had five children, one of whom had special needs and she got pregnant. And she called Jane. There were advertisements in all the feminist and underground lefty newspapers saying, you know, are you pregnant and you don't want to be called, you know, called Jane. So this was just their code name. And then there was this one number with an answering machine. And then everyone would take the, they had great names for each other. So there was the callback Jane and they, everyone, there was a real hierarchy. And anyway, Martha Scott called Jane. She received a safe abortion from this service. At that point they were still working with a doctor. And she eventually right after this happened started working. And this happened a lot of times that the women who would have the abortions through Jane would be so kind of revolutionized. I mean, they really were radicalized by the experience. So we can just dial back because I'm interested at Rachel and why you took on this project and how it came about and how you researched for it. Because what I was amazed by was how really accurate it was. And there is a wonderful cameo with one of the Janes, a woman named Judith Arcana in one of the scenes. She pops up. So I think she was probably your secret weapon. But tell us how you made this film. So we started with a little Kickstarter and funding campaign. And then Judith Arcana, who was one of the Janes, who was very active in the group, found us and set us right on a lot of stuff. But to go back to why I decided to make it, I think I was fascinated by the story, but I was also fascinated as Kate was who worked with me and putting it together on why we hadn't heard about it. The Janes, I think, performed over 10,000 abortions in the late 60s and were arrested. Seven of them were arrested were known as the Abortion Seven, one of whom was Judith Arcana, who came on. And had this big, high-profile case, and we were sort of astonished that we didn't know the story. And there was the documentary. There's a pretty good one from the 90s. But I think we thought it should be a narrative film because that would be a way to tell this story. And the other reason, and get it to more people, the other reason I think I was excited was because it's not horribly depressing. And I feel like a lot of, even the tone of some of the clips, there were funny parts in the movie. You know, I think a lot of pre-Rovie Wade stories are so dark, and the films that are made are so dark that it's a little bit grim, sort of watching them. And to me, this group of women was a kind of like a hopeful way to get into a dark subject. Not to say our film is Schindler's List, but like the Schindler's List approach where you find this one little hopeful story and you kind of follow it through so you can talk about all this darker stuff without it being unwatchably sad the whole time. I think that was something that appealed to me, too, about telling it. So we made this fundraiser and then Judith came on and read our script and set us right about a lot of things, and she's really very, very cool. And so we'd done research before that, but I think the reason it was accurate was partly because of her and partly because I tried to shoehorn as many real stories in as I could into the script in various characters. Let that we just tell you guys just briefly what Jane was. So it was started actually in 1966 by a woman named Heather Booth who was at the University of Chicago and she was a civil rights activist and a member of SNCC and a member of SDS and was very, very political and she was a very political, well-known person on campus at Chicago, UChicago. And a friend of hers from the civil rights movement called her and told her that his little sister was pregnant and could she help her get an abortion? And Heather, at the time, was not involved in women's issues. In fact, the feminist movement had barely existed in 1966. But I think just because she was an activist, this person approached her and she found a movement doctor. He was a former civil rights, he was a black civil rights activist in the south side of Chicago and he agreed to perform the abortion and it was $500 in 1966 money, which is a lot of money, it's almost about $1,000. Now, and so she suddenly, once this one case occurred and it was safe, her phone started ringing off the hook and she realized she needed to come up with a code name so she invented Jane and just would kind of field the calls and get to this doctor whenever she could and in about 1967, a woman named Marjorie Tobankin who was also an SDS activist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison got the same request, a young girl from Madison needed an abortion, did she know anyone and she had heard about this Jane woman and so she called the number and found Heather Booth and raised money for the girl to go take a bus up to Chicago and have a safe abortion. So that was sort of the early days of Jane and then when it started snowballing, Heather Booth got married, had children, was in grad school and could not field all these calls and so in 1969, she handed it over to a group of Chicago feminists and they created a bigger organization that was totally underground and they kept the code name Jane, they were able to get an answering machine which was very early, it was some huge thing, the size of a big suitcase and they started recruiting, they had about 20 women at a time working for them and they started advertising and the numbers just skyrocketed and they found different doctors, I love the interviews with the doctors, that's the kind of thing that's so great about having a narrative film about this because there's no footage of what those bizarre interviews were like at that time in 1969, only 7% of doctors were women and so what I was fascinated by with this story is the context and it's so hard for I was born in 1963, I can't even imagine what it was like to have no female doctors to have abortion be illegal, the level of patriarchy was so entrenched and extreme that everyone took it for granted really but so these women eventually hired a doctor who became their regular doctor and he performed sort of for the first year and a half, 69, maybe around 71, almost all the abortions and they were almost 20 a day, three days a week, there was an underground, it was like an underground railway of women coming from all over the Midwest and a lot of college students at the Marjory Tobank and University of Wisconsin they were in colleges all over that area and the word got out and the volume increased and then there was a moment of truth when they learned that this doctor was in fact not a doctor he had never gone to medical school and he had been trained by the mob because for a long time the mafia conducted an illegal abortion ring and so he had been trained he was conducting perfectly safe DNC procedures and so the women pressured him into teaching them how to do this and so they had always been assisting and their other amazing thing about this service is the interface with the doctors was so horrific women were getting robbed, raped they were just completely vulnerable to these doctors and so they wanted to make this a female-centric experience so the women were completely briefed on exactly what the medical procedure was their hand was held during the procedure they were brought to a nice living room they would rotate from different people's houses and have a place where they would call the place where they would pick you up and then take you by zigzag car in case they were being followed by the FBI to the location where the abortions took place it was all very elaborate but it was all about making the women feel empowered themselves so that this wasn't a humiliating experience and that's why it was so empowering for women like Martha Scott, they had an abortion through Jane and they were immediately, I want to sign me up but they learned and so eventually about six women were performing abortions and ultimately between 1969 and 1973 they performed they think they had an idea because of course all the records were destroyed around 11,000 it just gives you a sense of the need and the volume and then they were busted in 1972 they became known as the abortion 7 and then waited and waited for trial while Sarah Weddington was arguing Roe v. Wade in front of the Supreme Court and so their lawyer knew that if Roe v. Wade was made law these women would get off the hook and that's exactly what happened so January of 1973 Roe v. Wade became the law of the land and the charges were dropped so it was very dangerous because they were facing about ten years of jail each one of them and most of them had children that's the other thing is that the right wing likes to make abortion like it's something for irresponsible young women who just are selfish and don't want to have children and I think many of the women who they helped were already mothers and just could not manage having more children I think the statistic remains the same on that it's more than half our mothers right now and then meanwhile no one has the statistics on exactly how many illegal abortions were provided before Roe v. Wade and how many deaths there were but it's somewhere between 200,000 and a million 200,000 abortions per year were performed illegally and most big city hospitals the one in Chicago certainly had this had special wards for women who were suffering from complications from illegal abortions and so it was you were taking your life in your own hands to go get an illegal abortion and many women died you know had just like the case that you showed in the film had or had severe infections became infertile it was just a really dangerous thing to do so the Jane helped women feel safe and the fact that the women could then learn how to do the abortions themselves which actually isn't that complicated a procedure and one woman Alice Fox who I interviewed after that became a a gynecological nurse for the rest of her life it changed all their lives and was very politicizing most of them weren't even feminists when they signed up but they suddenly understood which is an interesting thing and this happened with Gloria Steinem too that abortion was not a private issue that it was actually a political issue and Gloria Steinem's story is kind of amazing in 1957 was a journalist and then suddenly abortion became an issue and she went and covered the first abortion speak out in 1969 here in New York City and all these women got up and told their personal stories and she suddenly realized that she wasn't alone and that this was really this was a galvanizing political issue that really was the fuel behind the second wave feminist movement and she wrote about it in New York magazine and that was it that was her conversion moment where she went from being a feminist I mean from being just a journalist to being a really committed feminist advocate so there's so many different angles to all of this and all the women in your all the actors were very young obviously because they were playing all these women in real life in their early 20s what was it like for them and teaching them too what kind of how to portray this era I think I wanted fairly young actors for some of the roles because I thought we sort of forget that in the 70s it wasn't uncommon for people to you know get married at 20 and a lot of the women were younger or college age who got started although not all of them I don't think we had any trouble getting people interested in doing the film I think a lot of the young actresses were very excited about acting but I think it was really interesting for them to think about and that's certainly a response we've gotten in terms of screening it as people really don't aren't aware of some of the dynamics that were going on and so they were talking to Judith when she was on set about how it was and getting that sort of context how your screenings did you have talk backs afterwards and were they revealing in any way they were it was very different than a typical I always joke a typical film festival screening as people go how many shoot days was this they asked about these very technical what was your camera and this time it was like in 1967 I got an illegal abortion you know there were a lot of very personal stories that came out which was gratifying because I think it was it was important to people to see this represented because it was so many people's experience I was thinking one of the more interesting responses from for me personally was my uncle came to a screening in California we were showing at the Napa Valley Film Festival and he lives near there he had this odd response because this was exactly his generation and he was like it made me he said I spent the whole movie wondering if any women I slept with went through this and I just never heard about it and so for him it was like what this was happening and I found that really striking because he was there and it didn't and he's a fairly liberal guy it wasn't like he was this real conservative he was you know part of social movements but he just didn't think about what could what was actually happening among women having to deal with those circumstances it was sort of invisible to him and so I thought that was one of the more interesting responses I got because even I think even people who lived through it especially men just it didn't process that behind the scenes at a college dorm women were having these kinds of discussions or experiences that were in many cases said really traumatic for them that's well I went to see your opening here in New York with a friend of mine who I've known for 15 years and on the taxi ride home she told me about her abortion that she'd never told me before so I thought that it was clearly it brought it was something she hadn't thought about in a long time and she was 18 when it happened and now she's 55 but it the movie completely opened her up you know to that experience and also how terrifying it would have been for her if she could not have finished her college education if she had to have the baby she now has three children grown children so it was that was my own little personal experience with seeing your film yes we got a lot of sort of I've never told anyone this before right you know so where did you feel tell us though where did you film it we filmed in Brooklyn for Chicago right we couldn't afford to do Chicago we were on a tiny little budget and then I had a little money I was going to have somebody go shoot just sort of B-roll around Chicago and then I looked and I was like I kept looking for like where's quintessentially Chicago but not you know the lake or downtown and and then I kept going it looks kind of like Brooklyn so we ended up just using Brooklyn sort of flat near the water built around the same era so we were shot around here for the most part and how long how what was it it was 24 shoot days which isn't so bad for indie film but it was so many locations and just speaking roles it was we were changing locations you know two times a day or so because there were all these little scenes at various places different houses and houses and rooms and again so that was the challenging part I noticed also you had you threw in a anti-war rally and you know the moment where the girls were having to figure out who were they which side are they on you know are they going to the rally are they going to sort of carve out and start working for women which was didn't seem political at the time but yeah a lot of the stories from that area I put it in but I've heard it from two or three people about you know sort of anti-war rallies where they had women get coffee and so I threw in a reference to that but I've heard that you know from several people that sense of women getting activated because they were just being treated like secretaries at those rallies yeah that Heather Booth it tells an amazing story and it's really how the feminist movement just rose out of the anti-war the civil rights in the anti-war movement and Heather Booth was you know at all these SDS meetings where she wasn't able to bring up any women's issue without being shouted down and realized that after a few years of trying that they were going to have to pull out you know they had to pull out of the sort of mainstream left, new left organizations and do their own thing, the way that the black power movement had done as well and so that the sense of betrayal that all the women who I interviewed had from their comrades and armed these men who they had been in Mississippi with, who they had gone and marched on Pentagon with, where they were fighting for social justice and freedom but these men were completely blind to the fact that they were being so critical about women and so that was why I was interested in Jane because I'm interested in what radicalizes people like when is the moment when you change and you suddenly see your life through a completely different prism and realize oh my god you know this is completely crazy sexist and so Heather Booth was one of the first and she started and along with Arduth Arcana the Chicago Women's Liberation Union which was one of the first women's liberation organizations and was the kind of sort of housed it was the home of Jane unofficial sort of home of Jane and and each story of all the different women who needed Jane who worked for Jane was also a personal conversion story of like understanding who they are and where they are in the hierarchy of the system and for example our bodies ourselves came out in 1970 and now we would look at this book and think oh you know fine there's some illustrations about what happens when you have your period and that's but it was the first time it was published by the Boston women's health collective and it was a completely radical piece of literature and it was stapled together back then and it explained how women's bodies worked it was very basic how you get pregnant all the different kinds of birth control you know every different issue that women might have and with illustrations and it helped women take control of their bodies and so the Jane women had bought it by the hundreds and they had crates of them and handed them out to everybody needed an abortion and that was their way that alone was a very radical thing our bodies ourselves Judith talked about that that was something she corrected in the script I was like oh and they have a copy of the book our bodies ourselves and she's like it wasn't a book it was a pamphlet that we photocopied basically and stapled together at the time which I thought was really interesting and then The Joy of Sex came out in 1972 and that was sort of the sexual version of our bodies ourselves because that too was very graphic about different kinds of ways of having sex and was very open and kind of demystifying of sex and was another sort of empowering important piece of literature for women then and then of course there were the parties with Judith Arcana I remember when I was interviewing Judith Arcana on the phone she said you know it's incredible I was talking to these younger women and they've never seen their own cervix before and I went okay because she's intense went around Chicago and there were other feminists who went across the country having you know groups of women and showing them their cervixes so there were mirror parts there what? mirrors they had mirrors on the floor so that women could squat over the mirrors and look at themselves because that was happening all over the place along with consciousness raising groups that was sort of another way of just you know empowering yourself so the women the Jane women were so brave they were risking their lives every day they were being followed a lot of the cops knew what they were doing and the ironically never did anything about it never prosecuted them because often they were sending in some cases their sisters, their wives their other like the receptionist in the office of the precinct that was near where Jane operated came in for her own abortion so there was a wink and a nod that went on but they were constantly having to move location and very nervous and so when they got busted it was because this the sister law of a woman who went in to get an abortion was very upset that she was doing this and was you know against her having an abortion and so she told she reported Jane to another precinct that was not kind of in the know about what was going on and so they the scene of the bust which I opened my article in Judith Arcana her job at the time was driving the patients basically from the place to the what was it called the places where they would meet the front the front of the place and she was being followed and she you know made her delivery of the woman who got an abortion they were up in a high rise apartment building and and then when she was heading back down she walked out of the elevator into a wall of five Chicago detectives who you know essentially cuffed her right there went back up to the apartment and they were looking they you know busted through the door they were about three women who were pre-abortion or just had had one and a bunch of women in the waiting room and they stormed into the apartment and said where is he you know and they were like who you're talking about you know where's the doctor and so they just didn't when they didn't see a male doctor they didn't really know who to arrest and it was completely confusing to them that there wasn't a male doctor performing all these abortions and ultimately they loaded about eleven women into paddy wagons they had to spend the night in prison and it's Sefer Judith Orkana who was nursing at that point and she had a baby at home and her husband was a lawyer he was able to get her out that night but they that was ironically too after they were arrested and booked and had hired a lawyer and were awaiting trial everyone kept on performing all the abortions they literally they stopped for about two weeks and then the women who had been arrested did not do any but everyone else did so they just kept on going just because the need was so enormous and so New York legalized abortion in April of 1970 and when that happened their demographics of who they were taking care of changed because anyone who was rich could fly to New York and there were places where you get pretty cheap abortions in New York and then fly back but if you didn't have the money if you had A. you didn't have the money or you were young or you had children at home and you couldn't get away then you were still stranded it wasn't that helpful and that's what women are facing now if you live in one of the seven states that only have one abortion clinic you have to drive in Kentucky from all the way from Appalachia to Louisville for example and then somehow find a place to spend the night so the issue of access was important in 1970 because there were a few states where it was legal but very few women could get there and so Jane was still just as busy as they were before abortion was legalized in New York and the economic disparity too of rich women like Gloria Steinem and my mother who later told me she had gone to London twice would go to London, Puerto Rico there were Mexico there were like specific places where you just fly out of the country everyone from New York I spoke to said why didn't you talk about Puerto Rico that's where we all went and I was like it was a Chicago movie they went to the mob but it was the regionally that was operating and then I think now there are networks now that are actively bringing women to places states where they can that's already in play to an extent and networks that are funding travel the overnight so that women can travel because it really now today as it was back then it's really a class issue it's interesting because they're kind of they're quiet and I don't know the name I know there's at least one listed on our website that does transit from states to states on askforjane.com it's askforjane.com I'm trying to remember I don't want to get the name wrong but I know I know there is at least one that sort of basically runs a sort of railroad service for women who need to go out of state now it looks like Missouri will be on that list too unfortunately but yeah they're operating as well as to a degree there are women learning to perform it themselves in some of those areas but that's a lot more under the radar so that would be something we wouldn't in fact Jane was very under the radar there was one book written about it by Laura Kaplan she changed all the names and that was published in 1995 and then very little was written about it and when I wrote my book Witness to the Revolution I interviewed Heather Booth and Marge Tobanken about other things about their anti-war activity and they both told me about Jane and so I wrote about Jane in my book Witness to the Revolution and in fact Marjorie Tobanken and Heather Booth later became fast friends and only about 10 years into their friendship because they were activists for the rest of their lives did they discover that they talked on the phone back in 1967 and were referring each other because they didn't know each other's real names so I thought that was an amazing little moment but wait where were we sorry the movie deals with this a little bit but it was at least half black women by the end it started with this sort of white women in college primarily white women not exclusively and by the end it was at least 50% black women in the Chicago network because just the socioeconomics of it that's the way it played out and there were few to no black Jane's for most of the time they were operating although there were a couple toward the end I think as far as Judith remembered it so it was the dynamic but I think that's exactly what we're seeing now in many ways it's just a financial question for a lot of people and also I think because we're so far away from the women's liberation movement and women have come so far that it almost seems to have caught us by surprise that states like Alabama Missouri and Ohio we'd be passing these banning abortion or passing fetal heartbeat bills which is essentially banning abortion and that there would be seven states with only one clinic that's happened very surreptitiously because the movement really wasn't very evolved I think there was a sense of women resting on their laurels and Hillary was going to be president and the second Trump was elected and then these laws started bubbling up I think it's completely re-energized the women's movement and we now realize how asleep at the wheel we've been to let these state laws come into place and it took years and years of making sure that they had 100% Republican legislators and governors so that they could roll so many bills through so I think it has re-energized and that's why I wanted to write about Jane because it was an example of what you can do if you need to take the law into your own hands and how important it is to understand that abortion is a human right that women can have absolutely no freedom really if they don't have reproductive freedom and it's just so hard for us to imagine what it would be like to not have reproductive freedom Any questions? Yes? First of all thank you so much for being here with us today I'm curious I haven't seen a full film yet but I remember one in the earlier clips that you showed the main character with early terror was saying something along the lines hiding the other woman whom she was working with and so I was curious like A what the dynamic with them is that also got me to thinking about kind of more equality you spoke about how so many women from anti-war movements were then energized and working at work or related feminist work because they were sidelined in these other movements and I'm curious the space of queer women with Jane were there alliances there statistically if you know how many queer folks were involved or how those movements for queer liberation might have intercepted or with the ones for you Yeah they're romantically involved They were lovers and they lived together and they lived together but I don't know the statistics I'm sure that there were a number of queer women I don't know the statistics on the percentage Yeah I don't either but what I do know and Elizabeth can probably speak to this well was when the movement first started with now and Betty Friedan it was straight and when about 1970-71 there was a real sense that queer women were discriminated against by the movement and it was sort of the whole issue but do you want to just make change in a moderate way and not turn people off or do you want to just allow women to everybody in the movement to be who they want to be and so there was a a rift in the movement between straight and gay and that caused a lot of controversy for a while Can you speak to that at all? I don't know how much I can speak to well I can First of all it gets my eye when Betty Friedan is pinpointed as somehow having been a very important person in the women's liberation movement in the women's movement Betty Friedan was a woman who lived in the suburbs and women who lived in the suburbs were very different from women even white women or Jewish women who lived in urban areas the experience of Friedan was decidedly different not only from people of different economic and racial backgrounds but also people who are of the same as in white and Jewish who were living in urban areas so her book was just a very small slice of women who were I don't know if you're all much younger but there was Father Knows Best and there was Father Knows Best Margaret I'm home Margaret I'm home and there's Margaret with her apron and the kids that's not what was going on for women in urban areas that simply wasn't happening so I think I think one glorious speech to this so eloquently always because the movement itself once women had to separate out from SNCC and from the SDS movement and realize that they needed to come together as women and put together their movement that was spread across racial and economic lines that was not a white woman's movement those were women of all strikes coming together isn't that correct do you want to add anything to that please I see what you're trying to convey to young people about Ben and her dad's place in the middle of the movement she was very important in one sense but she was not inclusive she didn't care about people war and welfare she didn't care about in fact she bought to have those people to not get involved with them because she thought of their movement her movement was a bourbon white women's movement to include women's color lesbians and other she her focus was now which I think is where the same thing and it's very important for inclusive and it's important because history is being rewritten as though Betty Friedan was really the person in this movement and was leading this movement and we really have to in fact newspapers even now are citing other newspaper articles where somebody has cited Ben for them so if you really go back into it it's not where the women's movement started it was very inclusive and very broad and you're called out of that it's certainly evolved out of that it's more inclusive and democratic well there was a group called the Lavender Menace who were queer women rebelling against the Friedanites and the now moderate who were afraid that if women were open about their sexuality would turn off all the men and that they would be considered, you know, feminists would be considered man haters and that would really hurt the movement so that was the the dynamic I think lesbians and queer women were suffering as men were as male homosexuals were at that time but they were suffering inside the women's movement which is why it was so men were suffering inside the men's movements I mean, you take a look at the exhibition that's up and you see what men were suffering from 50 years ago and how far that's come and in many ways it's so interesting, I just finished a book by Sarah Headspin which is it looks at life and time in a way that we don't normally think about which is to say that the past is always in the present the future is always in the present and we forget that we think that past is past and the future is going to be the future but we are living in a discussion we're having now is all about past which really now is in the present not just because of what we're facing in so to speak but it's relevant it is in the moment and I think that it's really important these new ideas that are coming out about psychology about the way in which we perceive ourselves and our fears of loss the way in which we perceive ourselves in terms of our age and that was then and that was 50 years ago closes us down intellectually and emotionally to being in the moment and determining what it is that we have to do in the moment I was wondering quick both of you who have been dealing with this and who are younger feel about with lowly waiting threatened of what you feel can be done to let younger people know that the past is becoming the present and that that could be the future because I've heard so many people say it's inconceivable to them that abortion will be illegal but how do you convince them that it could become illegal and they have to fight it that's why I wrote my article when the second abortion did look like it was being threatened in different states I remembered Jane and having written about it back in 2016 and I thought wow I want to get more I think history and telling history can be a very politically charged thing to do I kind of see my role as a storyteller and oh for sure that was a big reason I made the film but it's interesting too we've had a number of screenings with Andrea Millier who's a super cool lady who's the head of the National Institute for Reproductive Health and she's pointed out that there's something like over a hundred small laws that have been past restricting abortion over the last couple of decades it's like the death by a thousand cuts I think one of the things when Clara talked about how it's like we've sort of the movement has been a little passive on that issue is because they're these tiny little laws in far away states from many people's perspective and I think that hopefully I think we're trying to activate people to, ideally it's not just thinking about Roe v Wade but about arguing all of those cases what they all represent and why it's important when some little rollback is made because essentially that's the approach that people have been taking on this issue the sort of anti-abortion people it's been these small moves that won't track and that add up to something because if Roe v Wade is overturned it may not be overturned it may go to the states and then New Yorkers may be fine and I think that's dangerous you know what I mean it's going to be it's going to be about speaking up for wherever it's happening which is something we can do now without waiting for that one move to be made it feels like we're all sitting and waiting on the Supreme Court when in many places they're finding ways to make it effectively illegal before that changes and I think that's something and just get involved and participate with Planned Parenthood and the other abortion rights groups and get out there and protest and organize and realize that we've got a war on our hands there has not been a Me Too movement for abortion I mean the Me Too movement which started before the hashtag Me Too has opened up the opportunities for women to speak about their experiences women are still hesitant to talk about abortions yeah it's much harder to talk it's it has now the same shame that rape and incest and other things that Me Too had before the Me Too movement women spoke of and we need to have that trigger that has got to change people have to say okay I have had an abortion and not feel that people are looking down right it can't be taboo speak out it's radicalized that's what really energized the movement in 69 was everyone started having speakouts where they would talk about their own abortions and just that act of having speakouts there have been a few of those online in chat rooms where women have come forward talking but I think the more it is made public in public forums and is no longer a taboo subject but a more powerful it can be I know on abortion one of the concerning things is that at the time I think the law really targeted the doctors whoever was doing the procedure was who they went after and the rhetoric is sort of shifting toward targeting women as well which even at the time in 1970 that wasn't who they were going after primarily and I think that's made it potentially riskier in some ways now in terms of who they're going to go after when it's illegal well thank you all for coming and thank you Elizabeth for having us and thank you Rachel thank you both and I do encourage you all to read Clara's article on Vanity Fair's online and to have an opportunity to see a call ask for Jane I saw it actually when it was playing in an art theater out in Santa Fe when I was out there I wasn't unable to make the screening when it was here in New York and it was a full house and it is a very emotionally moving film and I want to thank you very much for directing it you know it's interesting you were talking about the budget and it being a low budget film there's something about the grittiness of a low budget film if you don't mind my saying that I don't mean it in a condescending way it's not slick like a Hollywood film so as a result there's a realness to it authenticity to it and that is a very powerful thing and I think we are facing a moment where conversations and authenticity are pretty essential if we're going to keep things moving so thank you both very much and thank you all for joining us today