WAPUSH Interview with Dr. Bonnie Morris

Interview by Brooke Soderbery

March 2025

 

Bonnie Morris: One of the things that I can say right off the top is that I have devoted more than 40 years to women's history, and it's shocking to see it very abruptly banned and demeaned. Just at the point when we're trying to get a Women's History Museum on the National Mall to see the federal government drop Women's History Month as a celebration is not just a step backwards, it's a catapult into the Jurassic era, but having lived through tremendous pushback, even in the best of times, I feel very confident that by the time you're in college, things will change and there will be a fresh landscape for the work you're doing.

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Brooke Soderbery: I mean, additionally, one hopeful thing amongst this is that because the College Board is a private organization, there's a path there to utilize this course as a way to get some women's history out there, hopefully, amongst all this federal rollback. To start off with, can you just share a bit about your background and kind of what got you into working as a women's history historian?

 

Bonnie Morris: How did I get into becoming a historian? Well, my lifetime happens to overlap with second wave feminism very much advancing and becoming a real part of pop culture from the time I was about 10 to college. I actually entered puberty with second wave feminism: women on the radio, women's studies classes, women having meetings, women's presses, women's music festivals, and independent women's publishing. All of that was blossoming, and I was very much aware of it. I happened to go to a private Quaker school. We had women's history and women's studies offered to students from pretty much from fifth grade on. I joined a women's studies class when I was 12, and I was able to identify as a feminist from age 12. I took a more advanced women's studies class in high school. We focused on trying to get the Equal Rights Amendment ratified, we marched on the State Capitol, so similar to what's going on now. My first job out of high school was fundraising for the ERA, going door to door, explaining why it was important. I wrote a paper about my experience confronting people who were hostile to female equality in my sophomore year of college. Then my university introduced the women's studies minor while I was still an undergrad, and I rushed to take all the courses before I graduated. It shifted my focus, and I decided to apply to grad school to get a PhD in women's history. There were really only two places in the whole country where you could do that. One was Binghamton State University in upstate New York, and the other was Madison State University, Wisconsin, both very, very cold places. I got a full teaching assistantship at Binghamton, and I did a six year program. I was actually in college for 10 years altogether, 10 years of higher education from freshman year to doctorate. One of the great things about my program in Binghamton, New York, was that it was a community right on the trail of 19th century women's history activism. It was maybe an hour and a half drive to the Seneca Falls. It was on the path to feminist activism peace groups. There was a women's peace camp, women's bookstores, and it was a town that had five lesbian bars. I was able to start teaching pretty much my second year. I have been teaching more or less since 1984. That would be 40 years right now. I was able to work with designing my own syllabi and my own classes at a pretty young age. I was in a community of really smart, smart women, but it was a very isolated, cold town in the Upstate. We were snowed in a lot of the time, which I say happily now because there were very few distractions. It was not like being in a party college town or a college town with a big sports program. It wasn't like Chapel Hill, etc. We just studied together and went to lesbian feminist events and talked about them and wrote about them. It was the equivalent of sixteen years of focus and not six. I was less sure of myself than I am now, like most people in grad school, think of imposter syndrome: what am I doing here? But we started going to conferences, listening to other women reading papers, and getting a sense of what we could do— that the field of women's history had to be taken seriously. I got a lot of pushback. People, including my own parents, were like: what are you going to do with this degree? You're never going to make any money. You could do so many things. Why can't you just go to law school? You would be throwing away your high IQ to do this sort of feminist scholarship. I disagreed. I was very much part of a burgeoning cultural movement where there were women's centers and women's bookstores in every city in every state, and there were underground newspapers and women's music radio shows. Every summer, I worked at four or five women's music festivals and had friends who were performers and sign language interpreters. I could go into women's bookstores and envision one day my books being those shelves. 

 

Brooke Soderbery: It's very interesting, especially what we talked about in the beginning, with your efforts in high school to fight for the ERA— it feels very much of my life now.

 

Bonnie Morris: Hang onto it. If you look back at what you tried to do, it's so important.

 

Brooke Soderbery: Touching on some of your books specifically, I was going through What's the Score: 25 Years of Women's Sports History, which shared a lot of insight about what it's like to teach about women's sports at the college level. What are some lessons you’ve learned that would be important for WAPUSH, and what’s the value of teaching women’s sports?

 

Bonnie Morris: I think that women's sports history encapsulates almost everything that is important to discuss in terms of sexual stereotypes. It’s like men should be masculine and play football, women should be feminine and be cheerleaders. It's okay to do a little women's sports, but you shouldn't do it to the point where you look unattractive. People don't want to sponsor women's sports because they're afraid they'll get bad publicity if any of the women come out as gay. It's tremendously underfunded, whereas money is thrown at male athletes by well known brand name companies. All of the issues that are germinating to women moving forward to be equal citizens are present in our attitudes about women and girls sports. Part of the deal is that even before we get into the contemporary debate about transgender athletes, women's sports is just an unfinished revolution. You want to identify as a woman: welcome to the revolution. It's not done. Just getting equipment, facilities, air time, equal pay, coaching roles, and women in athletic director positions. I saw an opening to offer a class that would ground my students in the actual history of how laws changed, both at the Olympic level and in the US, to permit women to do sports and be active. Everything from ski jump, that wasn't permitted to women until a few years ago. to ice hockey and pole vault that were added really late for women. The old messages that sports were dangerous for women are obviously in contrast to people not rushing to eliminate rape and violence in our society. The argument that we are protective toward women is pretty bogus. Rather, we require girls, just like boys, to do PE right up until you get out of school, and you could make money being a good athlete. Then we save those roles for men. It's a great landscape for looking at discrimination. It also is something everyone is familiar with. Everybody is familiar with sports, from TV and clothes and celebrities we admire and cheering for Olympic heroes. It's a great starting place to have a discussion about feminism that's not so threatening, but also lends itself to really good practical studies that would fit beautifully in an AP exam. Who's the first one to win a gold medal? When were Black women permitted in public swimming pools, and what impact has that had on the smaller number of African American swimmers? Where do we see women being used by the United States as state actors to represent equal opportunity in the US by being sent on goodwill tours around the world (that happen with black tennis players)? How do we use sports to meet our rival countries on the playing field? Why do when we root for one team or another, the women's jersey is always pink, no matter what the team colors are, thinking of the Super Bowl this weekend? To what degree do we use athletic metaphors in our news broadcasts or our SAT exams? When does that disadvantage women who don't usually play football? I hear all the time news anchors of every political party say, well, I'll be a Monday morning quarterback, or, you're punching above your weight there. There's quite a few. The assumption is everybody listening is a sports fan or has been immersed in sports culture. We let boys do that from a very early age, with baseball trading cards and little baseball mitts, and girls tend to lag in sports literacy unless they have a lot of brothers or a dad who's a coach. The book represents some of the issues that I introduce in the classroom over a normal semester, and the class has been sold out every semester, everywhere I've taught, since 1996. I've been teaching it for 30 years without stopping, except during COVID when I wrote the book. I tried to make use of the time. Hopefully I'll continue to do a lot of presentations about why we should know about women's sports. I'm speaking at a library in Michigan for Pride Month and at the Metropolitan Club, which is a women's sports club in San Francisco, in April. I'm sure I'll do some Women's History Month events through the Women's History Museum I work with.

 

Brooke Soderbery: Just in my math class the other day, there was a question that heavily relied on understanding how the yards on a football field worked, of which not everyone did.

 

Bonnie Morris: Rushing, fumbling. I remember being confused, reading in a children's book: he punted, but it didn't mean, actually, with a football, but instead avoiding the question or taking the easy way. The interesting thing, for Americans is that we have a particular kind of mental block about female athletes, but it is very different in England, where you have a tradition of boarding schools that are single sex, and both boys and girls are really required to do sports while they're away from home as a way to keep everybody active and loyal to the school like Harry Potter. You look at boarding school girls books from England, and there's always a girl on the cover with a hockey stick or a tennis racket. She's fierce. We have very few kids books about girl athletes in the United States. But that could change. That would be great if it changed. That's just a point of cultural contrast. There's so much we can learn.

 

Brooke Soderbery: This next question touches on some of your books. Something that was talked about in the Feminist Revolution was this idea of feminist art, music, and literature, and the role it played in spreading ideas and fostering community. What do you think are some of the most significant works of music and art that students should know?

 

Bonnie Morris: It's a good question. I think that you don't hear about women composers and sculptors and artists and how their work was often suppressed, or they put it under a man's name. It was difficult for them to get time away from early marriage and work. It was considered scandalous to be paired with a male tutor and be alone with him, so many women were not able to get education. It's important for everybody to understand that if you did assert yourself as an independent woman in the Middle Ages, you were subject to witch burnings and charges of heresy. The best group that looks at how women's art has been suppressed is an activist organization called the Guerrilla Girls. They look at the way that museums don't display women's art and put it to one side, but that there's a lot of images of women nudes that patrons get to look at. I don't have a quick list right off the top of my head, of art and music that everyone should know. I tend to specialize more in the literature and activism of the 20th century, when we start to get women who are writing about their experiences as immigrants. Anzia Yezierska's book Bread Givers is very important, and obviously, Margaret Mead, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, but also african women writers. I love Zora Neal Hurston. The writing of mid century Black women, which would include, I just am not coming up with the names, I would have a list if I’d known. But the kind of music that became the soundtrack for women organizing, includes: suffrage songs that were all about getting the vote, the music that women did in World War Two when the men were off at war, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, who were a mixed race, Big Band orchestra. And obviously, we have the all American Girls Baseball League being active in World War Two as well. Then we start to get into writing songs like  “Which side are you on?” by Florence Reese, and women who would not have called themselves feminists, but who wrote music that showed their loyalty to the issue of their community, whether the community was coal miners or African Americans or working class women. By the time we get to women going out to war work in World War Two, the cat is out of the bag, and women are going to be marching for civil rights and equal rights. There's a huge push to use contemporary media, which is the music of young people and the concert stage and big gatherings like Woodstock, to push forward ideas of liberation. The women's music movement that I archived really began in the late 1960s and occupied the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, to make awareness of women at the soundboard doing lights, playing drum kits, really loud music, and instruments that we don't associate with women— really loud rock. The women's music movement also centered lyrics, compositions, ballads, on what was happening to women's bodies, whether it was birth control, sexual assault, the right to play sports, or loving another woman. It had to be promoted primarily underground or just through word of mouth, before there was an internet. Women started their own recording companies, publishers, and production companies, so they could stage their own works and not have to go through disapproving mainstream guys or whomever. That gave a whole lot of women new skills in music production, and then we start to see women owning their own companies, like Ani di Franco later on. It's all been a wonderful, rich era of art radicalizing people who were not necessarily political, but they go to a show, an art show, a concert, and they're amazed. They see women can do technical work, or be sculptors, and run for Office. Now that legacy has slowed down somewhat because it's made possible all of the mainstream goals of general feminism: getting women into medical school, law school, higher education, business roles, and on another level entirely, behind the camera in Hollywood. I generally cover all these things in my writing and in teaching women's history. If we look at the history of media, when did women start making their own movies? What were women allowed to do when television comes along? How were women portrayed in commercials? What is the beauty myth, and how do women feel perpetual anxiety about looking good while also pursuing goals that have been restricted to men until recently?

 

Brooke Soderbery: That's interesting to me because one of the first ways I really be involved in thinking about feminism was because I got really into Riot Grrrl music over COVID

 

Bonnie Morris: Riot Grrrl and some of the women-only concerts because women were getting groped in the mosh, so you have a mosh pit that's women only. In other ways, letting women have a full experience without worrying about sexual harassment. 

 

Brooke Soderbery: Now, as a final question about books, I have some questions on The Disappearing L. You explored how lesbian cultures and spaces have been erased and marginalized. What role do you think digital spaces and social media play in replacing and transforming the function of this loss of physical spaces? 

 

Bonnie Morris: Things change. I sure don't mean to sound like this ancient person. The first thing I want to say is that all of us who did totally radical lesbian culture were shocked when around the time we all started to be over 40, just by virtue of getting older, we looked square. We're like, how could we be square or retro or oppressive or old fashioned when we were running around naked in the woods, climbing up on trapezes, doing radical art. But things changed. So two of the biggest changes that occurred as gay and lesbian rights mainstream is there was much more of a shift to gender identity, which then pushed back against lesbians for having woman only space that might push out trans women. The mainstream also brought more LGBT books into regular bookstores and a couple of the artists that started out playing in the woods became very famous: the Indigo Girls and Melissa Etheridge and Tracy Chapman. But that's it. Everybody else did not become famous. So it was important to a lot of women to continue, having built these venues when we were not welcome elsewhere, we were reluctant to give them up. So what I was noticing was that for a variety of economic reasons, including books being sold on the internet, bookstores altogether were vanishing, and people were meeting each other online. They didn't want to go out. They were downloading music. They didn't need to go to a show. And concerts became hugely expensive. Like to get master based, limits and production values changed where people wanted to go hear the Indigo Girls, but if they were going to go out, they want a huge concert experience and not sitting on a hay bale in the woods with a person who's not famous. We're driven by those market issues in the United States. We like fame. We like glamor. We like famous celebrities. Folky people always go to their favorite concert in unknown venues. Obviously, a more recent change has been the impact COVID had on shutting down physical spaces like bookstores. But it was already starting to happen. And the question is, if you can't see a large segment of your community gathering in a place, you don't reckon with the diversity that is that community. Women who had been terrified of coming out and very much hiding in the shadows, were very moved to go to their first women's concerts, where there might be 400 lesbians, and they had been in a room with more than 20, or they had only gone out to bars, which were a liquor soaked, loud experience. The cultural alternative to bars not only was a boon to women in recovery from alcoholism, but it meant younger women could go out and do a lesbian feminist thing. You didn't have an ID to go here and then when some of that activism migrated online, people were able to create radical change at the touch of a button, and communicate with other feminists all over the world, which is fantastic, but we had less marches in the streets and gathering as a touchy feely, huggy cookie eating event. I want people to not forget that you used to be able to walk into a feminist bookstore in any city and meet women. There would be wine and cheese nights, poetry readings. You could hear Alice Walker, whoever, and it was one of the only ways a lot of independent women of color made money, was being on that circuit, and that's vanished. It was also a way to inspire younger women. I was able to meet all of my heroines, all of my favorite authors. I was able to meet and occasionally even party with them because it was a less hierarchical scenario where you were able to do a workshop with women who would really give you advice on writing. For years, I hung out with Allison Bechdel, who is very famous now with Fun Home and the Bechdel Test, and who would have thought. Where you have a few people really breaking through, they are very clear about what they owe to these early days, but they're also able to look at where younger women are using the skills we lack, a very good technology, and create platforms and businesses and outreach that can make an impact beyond what we ever thought of.

 

Brooke Soderbery: With that, how do you think since the 20th century era to now has the relationship between lesbian activism and the broader like feminist movements evolved?

 

Bonnie Morris: It's really devolved. I think that there's a queer movement that is very deliberately not distinguishing between the LGBTQ and that has a tendency to sort of disappear the specifics of what happens to lesbians, lesbian moms, or what happens to gay men in different eras, whether it's AIDS or, more recently, monkeypox, or whatever is intended to impact them more than than lesbians. Some of these are issues that beg the question of where we need to be distinctive or specific. Sometimes that's in health, and it's been very worrying that the CDC took down all the sites and data on LGBT health and HIV. They put a little bit of it back. What's happened now is there's two different camps. Let's say people who were very interested in mainstreaming, wanting queer people to have the same rights as every American and who pushed for gay marriage, gays in the military, gays in the church, gays raising children, and gays on the PTA. To many, that's shocking, but it's not really revolutionary. In the same way you have another group that wants to be like, the hell with the family, smash the state, get out of the military, smash the church. People who are very critical of traditional family faith and put on a uniform. Those folks are still feminist scholars, postmodernists, and queer theorists who want to interrupt or interrogate what we assume is true about couples, families, and children. That's much more threatening to a lot of people. These two groups don't always get along, and when we want to pass basic legislation to protect gay rights, it's been difficult to unite everybody. I would say, in the 21st century, one of the biggest changes is, when I was coming out, there was no such thing as gay children. There was no such thing as a trans child. You were aware of your sexuality at 14 or 15, but you didn't join a youth group until you were about 18. The assumption was people did not start having sex until they were 17 or 18. And of course, that's not true, but it was reflected in the anxiousness gay rights groups had about any involvement of young people. There was a real anxiety about being conflated with pedophiles. And of course, Anita Bryant had launched a very successful campaign in the late 1970s, charging that gay people were recruiting children to make their numbers continue. When I came out, even when I was as old as 19, I had women move away from me at a discussion group I joined and refer to me as “jail bait” because I was under 21. Today, it's totally different. We're talking about the rights of trans kids, the rights of nine and ten year olds who identify with whichever gender. We look at services medical or social and the ability of middle school age kids to have a rainbow support group. That is the biggest change: the changes in awareness of identity starting earlier and support either being offered, denied or canceled for young people. Simply waiting around for gay marriage does not address or solve all of those issues. We also have a very checkerboarded nation where you have rights in this state and not that state, and that's true for abortion and contraception also, so you could get married in California, but is that recognized in Alabama? You can adopt in New York, but what if your company moves you to Iowa? Where are your children legally your own? Who decides? It's terribly frustrating because we're a very mobile country. On the other hand, we've moved more toward a telecommuting model, where you can live in a place where you have rights, but you're working online all over the country. So for some people, technology is the solution. 

 

Brooke Soderbery: I’m out of time on this Zoom call, so can I end this interview by asking if you support the creation of an AP US Women’s History course?

 

Bonnie Morris:  I do with all of my heart and soul and anything I can do put my name on it. I’m the author of 21 books. I was a reader, then exam leader, and then wrote questions for the College Board for 20 years, so I have good credit there. I’m an advisory board member of the National Women’s History Museum scholars group. In many other ways, there’s a lot I could do to push this great dream forward.

 

Brooke Soderbery: Thank you so much.