 My name is Molly Owens. What I want to start with is my grandparents. They, my grandfather fought in World War I and was given a land grant down by Tule Lake. They were from Band and Oregon. And during the Second World War, as you might know, there was a Japanese internment camp in Tule Lake and my grandmother was outraged and she went down to that camp regularly to take things to people and to work with, you know, do things for people. And so when I was a little kid, I would hear stories of her work there and her outrage. And then when I was a young teenager, we got involved in Vietnam and my grandparents again were outraged. So my grandparents raised us with a real awareness of politics and of questioning and of knowing the story behind the story. I went to high school at a Catholic high school and there were two nuns there that supported and encouraged my questioning of noxious, outrageous behavior against all the other nuns. They didn't let me in Honor Society until I was a senior because the nuns who were in charge were so concerned and outraged by my questioning behavior. But we got a new principal when I was a senior and she was wonderful and so she got me into Honor Society. I was so happy. So I had the opportunity to go to a couple of different colleges and I chose to go to SU which was Southern Oregon College at the time because it was close to home. And I grew up in Meryl, Oregon and I had been to San Francisco once. I mean, that was my life. It was very narrow. So I really wanted to just not be that far from home and I was so homesick my freshman year. But I got into the Honors Program and I met some women and some men who changed my life in terms of my thinking. I came to school over here in 1967. So I think the first one was Bob Casper and William Gabori. And then I met Joe Widmer and Helen Volcominer and Dr. Betty Harbert and just a lot of people who, you know, were all these young, exciting PhDs who just come out of a whole bunch of different experiences and they came to this campus and they were bright and they were inquisitive and they pushed us. And this Honors Program was just an amazing experience. They were all, again, they were organizing just above our heads so that the women students at the college had the same opportunities as the men. They were making sports for women start to become a reality. They were making, we got into student government. So they were making the role of women in that student government more accessible. And they mentored us while we became student senators. They, Joe yelled at us a lot so that we became physically stronger and more active. That's mostly how I remember her, but I kept signing up for her classes because she pushed us. You know, she believed that women could be just as strong and just as tough as men and you couldn't be a whiny little girl in her class. And I became very good at archery. And it was mostly, I think my experience with them was mostly through student government. They just as role models and as supporting us while we got involved in that. And in doing talks about it at the Honors College and modeling the role of women in that level of administration. So first, you know, really other than the nuns, but the nuns always seemed secondary to the priests. But those women were not second. They were strong, bright, articulate women with a vision. And Dr. Harbert and Dr. Volcominer, I think, had more direct impact on my thinking. Because I had class after class after class from them and they really pushed me to develop my intellectual thinking. But those other women really modeled women making change in a larger organization experience. So I continued to be supported in my questioning and my interest in politics. And met a couple of other women, Meredith Reynolds and Linda Johnston at the time. Who became my two best friends. And all the way through college the three of us were really involved in activism. And were really supportive of each other. And it was the first time I'd been with other women who were really smart and really questioning and just kind of out there. And I think we really supported each other in the things that we did from there on. A couple of years after I graduated from college I had the opportunity to go work in Micronesia, which I did. And I was there for, and I went because at that time the politics in the United States were just awful. And it felt really hopeless. And I felt like I had just given everything I could give to politics. And I wanted to do something else. So I went to Micronesia to teach. And that also changed my life. Little girl from Merrill, Oregon. And my dad had been in the South Pacific. He was with the Marine First Division, I think. And he had been on the front lines all the way up the Pacific as they fought the Japanese. And he had been in Micronesia. So he was really excited that I got to go there. And was real supportive of this move. So I was there for a while. While I was there I met an old man who had been teaching there, I think probably since the end of World War II, who educated us about what the United States real intentions were in Micronesia and how important Micronesia was strategically for the armed forces. And again opened my eyes about, you have to look for the meaning behind the meaning. Got married, came home, had a baby, kept teaching. And in 1980 I got divorced. And I had broken my leg and lost my job just before we separated. So I was looking for a job. And I cannot remember how I met these two women. But I met Mary and Taya who were the two counselors at the Displaced Homemaker Program at SOU in the Women's Center. And they introduced me to Rosemary. And they introduced me to a bunch of other women. And they said, we need a director. Would you like to apply for the job? So I applied for the job as a director of the Displaced Homemakers Program as a part of the Women's Center. And got the job and got introduced to all of these women and all of this politics. And I had been a feminist through the anti-war movement. Because you couldn't be a woman in that movement and not become a feminist. So much sexism. But I don't think I had the academic feminism. I didn't have a lot of the thought behind it. Yeah, I had the heart behind it. Absolutely. I think my grandma was a feminist. But the politics and the reasoning and the thought behind it really just kind of blew up for me. And it was an incredible experience. And so I got involved with a lot of other women who were doing other political things. And got involved with the Dunn House, which I'm not sure was even a house at the time. It might have still been just hiding women. Worked for the Displaced Homemakers Program for a couple of years. And then Neyraal was looking for an organizer. So I went to work for them as an organizer in Southern Oregon and Eastern Oregon. Really quite an experience. And it was just me. The organizers in Portland, there were four or five of them. And down here there was me with a really strong right to life movement. And I learned a ton because the woman who was my supervisor was an amazing organizer. Her name is Kathy Howell. And she's been an organizer for the labor movement and all kinds of stuff. She's really, really talented. So she taught me a lot about organizing. And we did a lot of work for Neyraal. And that was where I met Mary, who was an organizer with another grassroots organization in Portland. I'm going to tell you one incident that kind of crystallized a lot for me. I had gone up to Roseburg. My daughter was four at the time. So we had gone up to Roseburg to do a meeting. And we were meeting in a church. And so we were meeting in one part of the church. And my daughter and two other little kids were playing on the playground right out from where we were. And we saw these people come up to them. I went outside. And this right to life or had a jar with an aborted fetus in it. And he was telling my four-year-old daughter that your mommy kills babies. And I wanted to kill him. But I didn't. And we, you know, told him to go away and reported him to the police. Yeah, I mean, I did house meetings in Roseburg and Klamath Falls and Lakeview and Medford and Grants Pass. And that was the era the clinics were being long. And I, you know, after I stopped working for them, I still volunteered for them. And volunteered for Planned Parenthood and worked on abortion referrals. And took people through the picket lines to get abortions. And I quit when I had this amazing young woman that I had met in my work experience. She was a single parent with two little kids, just left an abusive relationship. And she discovered she was pregnant. And she decided to get an abortion. She was out of the evangelical Christian movement and had made this decision. And I helped her arrange an abortion. Took her to the abortion clinic, which was a doctor here in town who provided abortions. And he had this huge picket line around his building when we came out. And she said, I don't know what to do. I know those people. I go to church with those people. And she laid down on the floor of my car. And I started to drive through the driveway. And they started to mob the car. And I was overwhelmed with a desire to run over them. And I thought to myself, no, no, no, you don't want to do that. You go to jail. And then I thought I can't do this anymore. I am too angry. And so I didn't do it for a long time because I really had to get over it. That was such an awful experience. She was between a rock and a hard place. She had nowhere to go. And that was not an easy decision for her. It ripped her heart out. It's a response, I think, that a lot of people have when they confront something that is really wrong. And our moral moral-ness comes up in what we do with it. You know, I can feel that way, but I can't act that way. And my anger was righteous. Not right, necessarily, but righteous. My anger was that they would not put themselves in the place of this young woman. And I understand that they're moral convictions. I do. But I struggle with the fact that people on that side of the issue so often are so busy being judgmental and righteous and obstructive instead of being embracing and assisting and making change and making it different. I mean, if she had thought she could bring her daughter into a world or her child into a world where she'd have support and help, that would have been all the difference that she would have needed. But we don't have a world like that. And people who are right to life are not doing anything to create a world like that. So I am righteously angry at them. And, you know, I worked with a couple of people who were strongly right to life, but they spent hours every day. One of them, we worked at the Community College in the Student Services Building and she would spend hours every day helping those women find ways to afford to go to school. I mean, she dedicated her life to it. She was a financial aid counselor and she was heavenly. She went out of her way to make it easier for those women. So she's an example of what putting her life where she said her morals stood. So I really had to figure out more about how to be a single mom, how to protect my kid, how to continue to do this political work. And so shortly after that, I was talking to the people at Dunhouse and they were looking for, they were about to close. They didn't have any money and their last director had played not nice with the books. So Mary and I agreed that we would come in and raise money for them. So we did that together for a while and then she took another job. But we raised $40,000 in like three months. It was really a lot of work. But it was really nice to get away from the uncertainty of the organizing with NARAL. We worked really hard at Dunhouse, but it wasn't quite so uncertain and there was a space and I knew Erica was safe there. And so then I learned about being a part of a statewide network and part of a network that began to work with the police and work with judges and work with that whole part of the community while having a really incredibly serious sense of distrust because some of the women that came into the shelter were wives of police officers. They were women who were often well connected with the upper level of society. And so trying to balance keeping our location really secret and really safe and being out in the community and trying to raise money meant ultimately we had to find another space to have an office. And so we became a part of another organization that eventually kind of swallowed Dunhouse. And it meant working with people who were not feminists and it meant working with men who in my experience and opinion were abusive, at least emotionally abusive and coming out of being a part of kind of that safe cocoon of just a feminist community. So there was this period of time from like 1975 to 1980 to 1985 where I really worked in this really safe kind of, you know, it's funny to say that it's safe. You're working with pro-life people and batterers and all this other stuff but it was a really focused group and there was a group called Men's Alternatives to Violence. So then we were working with men who were also focused on the same issue. It was working with people who all agreed with kind of the same feminist philosophy. It was working with men who were committed to changing the way men acted and encouraged us to change the way we acted too. I mean it's kind of unreasonable to expect people to not be violent if your reaction to them is also anger. That was a big lesson for me, kind of a long lesson, but a really good lesson. So during that time I came out as well, which was really hard on my good Catholic leather and I found not just the feminist political activism but the feminist lesbian group. So there was the political community and then there was the community community. It wasn't based on politics, although kind of it was. So there was a group called Women's Source that was all about creating activity and community for women and through Women's Source in particular there was a gathering in the fall called the Fall Gathering. But it was held up at Lake of the Woods at the Girl Scout camp and it was a long weekend of just fun stuff. You know, plays and music and canoeing and hiking and just being a bunch of women in the woods. It was an issue for me that I had a child who was like four, five, six, seven during this period of time and almost everybody else was childless. And not only did I have a child, I was working for a feminist organization and I made about ten cents more than it cost me to live, so paying for childcare was really hard. The other part of that feminist group is that they wanted to do feminist decision making meaning everything had to be consensus. And I think if you don't have the experience of being a single mom it's really a lot harder to empathize with that experience and to understand why somebody can't just get childcare. And so there was a lot of contention about whether or not there would be, first of all, kids could come and secondly if there would be childcare. And there were some really vocal opponents. It was a seminal experience in my life and I really struggled with it and I carried a lot of resentment about it for a while. Interestingly as more of those women had children that changed. You know my response at that time was so out of my emotions rather than my intellect. I was one of the very few, I mean I was newly out. It was a hard place for me, hard experience for me. My job was in a, well you know different periods of time. Part of the time in my job I didn't feel like I could be out. Other times in my job it was fine. But my actions in the feminist community came out of a political place where as you're right there was another group, you know I don't know how to say this without sounding like a jerk. There was another group that was much more into, much more experiential. Much more into the arts, recreation. And they didn't have kids. They were able to really focus on their experiences and what the experiences they wanted to create. I came out of a lot of politics. I mean I had a political awareness since I was a kid. And for me feminism was really political. And all of the things that held women back were a part of that. So child care I guess was emblematic of that. Child care and poverty, both of those were really emblematic of those are things that hold women back that make it impossible for women to have the same experiences as men. And that single women while they still have to deal with less money don't have to deal with being responsible for another small human being. And it just makes for a really different life. But I hung out with those women on the political side. Not on the women's foresight. Those women tended to be lesbians and had been lesbians and didn't have kids and hadn't had male relationships. I don't think that one came out of the other. I think that they kind of did this. And I think, I mean I think any of the women that I still know they were all a little younger than people like me and Rosemary and Max all of whom were involved with the domestic violence work in the beginning and who had kids. All the other women that I can think of in that group well we're mostly younger. Some of them just moved here after from other places later. After a while the struggle of consensus building. No, it wasn't consensus building. It was because none of us had really developed the skill of building consensus. We didn't understand that to come to consensus usually y'all have to move towards the middle. Rather it became real opposing forces and we just banged heads. And I don't like banging heads so eventually I left. And like I say I think my feelers were hurt for a while about the lack of understanding about what it's like to be a single parent. As I got some more maturity I just developed the understanding that you can't really understand that unless you've experienced it. And I get how much people just want to have fun. But one of the things I kind of decided in there was I needed to put more energy just into the political. Because all these issues you know that the saying the personal is political is absolutely true. And one of the things that became clear to me was what a barrier childcare was. And what a barrier not having enough education was. And what a barrier not having access to certain kinds of jobs was. So I went from the Displaced Homemaker Program at SOU. I really don't remember which job I did. But anyway after I think after the job with the Dunhouse ended there was an opening at Rogue Community College for their Displaced Homemaker Program. And so I resigned from the larger program that was managing Dunhouse. Because it's just the struggle with again the decision making there. They were not a feminist organization. I thought the Dunhouse should be feminist. They wanted to make it a more mainstream social service which was fine. But it wasn't something I really even knew how to do. And I certainly didn't want to. So this job came open at the community college to run their single parent Displaced Homemaker Program. And that looked like a real opportunity. So they hired me and I worked half time in Grads Pass, half time in Medford. And Mary at that time was working at Head Start. And after a couple of years at RCC I joined this statewide Displaced Homemaker Network and then a national network. And I was chosen to be part of a 10 person governing board on the national level. And I went as a part of that to this amazing workshop on women and economic development. And had my eyes just wide open and came home and just was raving about it to Mary. And we decided that we needed to create some opportunities in Southern Oregon. So we had a conference here that was focused on the economics of women. And out of that came a group that took on childcare, a group that took on women in small business and a group that took on women in non-traditional careers. And so the Jackson County Child Care Coalition eventually came out of the childcare group. Southern Oregon Women's Access to Credit was a small business development program that a small group of us started and then Mary ran for 10 years. And Women in Non-Traditional Careers was a program at Rogue Community College. They kind of got bounced around with a couple of the job council did it for a while and Rogue did it for a while and it was kind of an idea that got bounced around until I think there was enough absorption of the ideas and the opportunities that it didn't have to be a separate program. It became a consciousness razor for the programs that already existed. And then we also started a teen parent program that was done between the ESD, the community college, the job council. I think there was another partner in there but it might have been the Child Care Coalition by that point. So I spent most of the 80s and 90s. I was on this National Women in Work board which was just the amazing opportunity of the century. There were 10 of us from around the country and we met quarterly. And we had a lot of projects, all of them around raising consciousness, raising the consciousness of people who were supposed to be helping women enter the workforce. And helping women themselves and then the people who work with them understand that just developing a skill isn't enough. You have to, often you have to develop the personality. The personal is not personality but personal skills. You have to have a support network. You have to know what to do about your kids. You know, just kind of there's all this other stuff that goes with being a woman in the workforce. And we spent about 10 years developing curriculum and programs and trying things out and supporting each other. And some of those women are still my good friends. It was a great experience. We did some lobbying in D.C. You know, for this kid from Meryl, Oregon, what an experience. I got to see the Indianapolis 500. That was my other big experience. So kind of professionally that was my life. Personally, getting divorced was soul-crushing. My husband was from Micronesia and we really liked each other but we could not ultimately make the two cultures work. He was a really smart, pretty important person in the Micronesian culture. I had a lot of opportunity in that American culture. We couldn't find a compromise. And so making the decision to separate was just really, really hard. And we had a three-year-old and ultimately it meant she just didn't know her dad very well. Impetuously marrying him and then unimpetuously having to untwine from that was a very hard experience. And it made me way more cautious than I had ever been before that. But it also made me really aware of, you know, living in a third-world country in third-world conditions made me, first of all, really appreciate other cultures. Micronesian culture is a really wonderful, caring, gentle. They live on these little tiny islands and as a result, they really go out of their way to get along. And they talk pretty openly about that. And they are just gentle, caring, generous, open, loving people. So living with them was a real gift. And then coming home and being a single parent without the dad there and at the time my mom was living in Chico. Eventually she moved up here and she was a lot more support then. But I just did it and my two best friends, one of them had gone to live in Mexico. The other one was here. So I had one good friend who was really supportive. But I didn't have much of a community. And I had gone through this teaching experience that was pretty rough and had resigned from a teaching position because I had a really unsupportive supervisor. So I was really feeling lost and alone and adrift when I discovered the Women's Center and went to work for them in the Displaced Homemaker Program. So finding the feminist community was a gift at so many different levels. Intellectually it was a huge gift. It was a way to make sense, a new way to organize everything that was happening and a new way to look at what could be done. And then there was the community and the experience of women really loving and supporting each other, which had not been my experience as a teenager for sure. And then in college the majority of my friends were men. So like I said, Linda and Meredith were really close friends. But I didn't have a bigger community. So experiencing community like that and realizing that you could work at that, you could create it. You could make it happen for yourself and you could make it happen for other women. And that not everybody had to be alone and adrift and experienced going through a divorce or going through a domestic violence experience or going through a rape alone. And you could have support groups even when you were in school, you know. There were all these places where you could have support. That was a new and amazing realization for me. And to, you know, to see and understand the philosophy underneath it. But then also to learn the skills that it takes to practice it was, you know, my life would have been really, really different without that. I think that being able to make all those political changes and make what, to me, I consider political differences through the women in economic development. I mean we changed a whole community. You know, a whole community became aware of the need for childcare. A whole community became aware of the need for better paying jobs for women. A whole community became aware of the need for access to credit. And we did it by bringing other women in, talking about it, working on it, experiencing what it took to do that. And then experiencing when you did that, it had all these ripples. And I feel really proud about that. That was a really exciting thing. And then, you know, to do the teen parent program. I had a lot of energy and we did a lot of programs that made a difference. So, you know, when I got older, more of my energy went into helping individuals get into those things and helping individuals and teaching. I love teaching. It was my favorite thing to do. But, you know, my experience as my life here really has been a gift. And I, you know, I don't really know how to wind it up other than to say, Dang, I've been lucky. And I've just known some great people and had some great experiences. And this community of women, I mean, what an amazing place to get dropped into. All these other women. Wow.