WAPUSH Interview with Mary Lee Sargent

Interview conducted by Shannon Bennitt and Serene Williams
September 1, 2024
 

Serene Williams: Can you tell us a little bit about your background in terms of education, what brought you to your political work and anything else you’d like to share?

Mary Lee Sargent: I went to public schools in Dallas, Texas and decided to go to a women’s college. I applied to three of the Seven Sister schools: Smith, Mount Holyoke and Vassar. At that time, diversity, equity and inclusion was not a thing and public-school students had a hard time getting into elite colleges. So, my fall back, when I didn’t get into where I really wanted to go, was Southern Methodist University where I majored in history. I went from SMU to the University of Texas, Austin and got a master’s degree in European history and was working on a Ph.D. I did all my advanced courses and my dissertation research, which was on the feminist movement after suffrage. I wanted to know what happens to a mass movement after it achieves its primary goal. I was looking at the activities of the National Woman’s Party and the National League of Women Voters in the 1920s and 30s. 

 

I didn’t finish the dissertation like so many people. I got a divorce, came out as lesbian and was teaching history full-time at a local college. The study of history informed my political work. I could have studied history and ended up as a reactionary or right-wing person, but I didn’t. I had a grandmother who was an active feminist in Texas. She was a charter member of one of the few groups, the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, that supported the Equal Rights Amendment early on. Many progressive women’s organizations did not support the ERA because they thought it endangered protective legislation that the labor movement and groups like the Women’s Trade Union League and the League of Women Voters had lobbied for. They supported protective laws like the 8-hour day.  So, they really didn’t support the ERA until the 1960s and 1970s. As a B&PW member, my grandmother supported the ERA and actively lobbied for the Texas Equal Legal Rights Amendment which finally passed in 1972. My grandmother worked on it for many years and went to the state capitol to lobby. So, she was a big influence on my life. She was also a Southern racist, but an avid feminist. I would try to show her that this was inconsistent, but she just didn’t get it. 

 

My parents were very interested in having diverse friends. They were anti-racist; they had Black, Hispanic and Iranian friends. So, my parents were a huge influence on me about diversity. I was also affected by things that were happening in the world. I opposed the Vietnam War from 1963 on.  My first march was in opposition to the war. I was extremely caught up in the anti-war movement. That impacted the ways I got involved in the Equal Rights Amendment because I began going to rallies and marches. I was giving money and signing petitions. I was also very involved in the early years of the violence against women movement. I helped found a shelter for survivors of domestic violence in Champaign, Illinois and was on their board for years. All these commitments kept me from devoting any organizing energy to the ERA. 
 

I had friends that were in NOW and I kept saying, “We are not going to get the ERA.” By the mid-70s, there was a backlash against the 60s. I thought we wouldn’t get the ERA unless we also used civil disobedience and direct-action strategies. Every movement for rights has required a whole array of actions. Civil disobedience gets attention and energizes people. That was not what NOW was doing. I don’t blame them. But I kept pressuring them to add that tactic. Finally, in 1980, ratification of the ERA was voted down once again in the Illinois House or Senate. One reason for its defeat was that Illinois required a 60% majority for ratification of constitutional amendments. It would get a majority vote every time it came up, but it would never get 60% in both houses in the same legislative session. When I heard this news, I was in California visiting my parents.  I thought, “Ok, I want to do something more. I am going to organize civil disobedience in Illinois to get more attention and get more supporters to Springfield to put pressure on the legislature.”
 

Shannon Bennitt: Can you tell us how you got involved with the campaign for the ERA in Illinois in the early 1980s? 

 

Sargent: Yes, I was hearing this radio report, being so frustrated that it kept being defeated. I got together the feminists that I knew. I had a whole sisterhood of active feminists in the domestic violence and anti-rape movement, also in NOW, working for the ERA. I began to hold organizing meetings. People were busy, this was the summer of 1980, and we really didn’t get anything together until the fall of 1981. Then we started to hold regular meetings at feminist centers in Champaign and Urbana, Illinois, the twin cities where the University of Illinois is located. 

 

I had a long association with Berenice Carroll, who was the Director of Women’s Studies at U of I, dating all the way back to 1966 in the anti-war movement. She was a major person I enlisted to help because as Director of Women's Studies she was connected to so many feminists. I taught history at Parkland College, my career for 35 years. One of my classes was women’s history and I recruited a bunch of students to get involved. So, we planned an act of civil disobedience when it was almost too late. The deadline for ERA ratification was June 30, 1982. Women weren’t free to actually commit because we needed them to be in Springfield, IL for the month. That’s a privilege that not many women had. 

 

We had straight and lesbian women in the group. Ultimately, 17 women agreed to get arrested, chain themselves in front of the House of Representatives, and try to disrupt a legislative session. We focused on the Illinois House because it was clear that they were not even going to vote on ratification before the deadline. They didn’t want the attention nationally because there were big elections coming up in 1982. They would prefer it just die not with a bang but a whimper. We were trying to say “No, at the very least, you have to commit and vote on this.” 

 

We organized ourselves and practiced the civil disobedience act of chaining ourselves together. Our plan was to do our civil disobedience action during our “Day of Rebellion”, a mass rally in the Rotunda of the State Capitol. The rally involved speakers, musicians, the whole works. From fall of 1981 we were getting the word out, because we were hoping that hundreds of people would converge on Springfield.  Berenice had two adult children, the rest of us had none and were free to take the month off to do 17 acts of civil disobedience. So that was how it was going.

 

Prior to the actions, we put out hundreds of flyers and posters that we sent to every women’s studies program or event that we could find. Berenice was very active in the National Women’s Studies Association; she was the president at some point. This was before gender studies; these were women’s studies programs at many colleges and universities. We sent posters out to everyone we could find. We did get a few women from other states to help in Illinois. We needed 3 states to ratify by June 30 (Illinois was the only northern industrial state that had not ratified). Illinois was one, but there were several others–North Carolina, Virginia, Nevada. Women were coming from across the country to join the NOW efforts; they were there lobbying and spending lots of time and money. NOW had an office and staff in Springfield and Ellie Smeal, the president of NOW, was there frequently. There was also a group of women fasting (the Hunger for Justice campaign) whom we became very close to. 

 

We were called the “Chainers” because our first action was to chain ourselves to the rails of the Senate. We had wanted to do our action at the House, but the representatives were very cowardly. They knew about our Day of Rebellion because we had to get permission, a permit, to have a rally while the chain-in occurred.  Although the civil disobedience was supposedly secret, our poster worried them about what we might actually do that would bring national media attention to Illinois. So, the House adjourned for several days foiling our plan to chain there. Consequently, we had to chain at the Senate. That’s how I got involved.

 

Williams: The AP U.S. Women’s History team is fascinated by the connections of your political work for the ERA and the political strategies used by suffragists. Can you tell us about how you were inspired by the suffragists? 

 

Sargent: I certainly can. Our wonderful logo on the poster is taken right from the British suffrage movement which was, in some ways, more militant over a longer period of time than the US movement. They did more actions with more variety than the National Woman’s Party or Congressional Union in the United States. From my study of history, and Berenice’s study (she was also a historian), we were totally inspired by the actions of the suffrage movement both in Britain and the United States.  We were also influenced by the Gandhian satyagraha movement for Indian independence and also by the US civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s which we had actually been involved in. I went to a segregated college, other than our divinity school and law school, which were forced by a Supreme Court ruling to integrate in the late 40’s or 50’s. I was involved in a local chapter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating committee, SNCC it was called, and we did sit-ins in the campus town, in our college president's office in 1961 and 1962. Back to the influences on me, one of the biggest was being raised in the segregated South and having parents who were anti-racist and seeing how awful and unfair racism was. Certainly, these were all influences - the civil rights movement, British & American suffrage movements, and the Gandhian movement for Indian independence, and my parents’ anti-racism.

 

Williams: As you know, I have written several Wikipedia pages about the fight for the ERA in Illinois in the summer of 1982, including a page for the Grassroots Group of Second Class Citizens. I think it’s fascinating what political tactics they used. Are there any other types of direct-action strategies they used?

Sargent: Yes, I made a list of our 17 acts in Springfield. We didn’t plan this, but the Grassroots Group lived on until 1991-1992. We were involved in many different causes. What we did in Springfield were sit-ins at the door of the Governor and the Lieutenant Governor’s offices. We chained ourselves in front of the Governor’s office at one point. There was an injunction against our chaining to anything in the state capitol which we violated. We were immediately arrested and taken to a court hearing. Fortunately, we had a sympathetic Democratic judge who found us in contempt of court but delayed sentencing until after June 30.  This allowed us to continue our actions until the ERA deadline.  We were sentenced after June 30th to 4 days and served the 4th of July weekend in the county jail. Two of our members were sentenced to 30 days because they were defiant in court. The rest of us were docile and cooperative. About 10 of us went to jail.

 

We did several door blockings of the Lieutenant Governor and the Speaker of the House and occupied the House of Representatives and the Senate. We disrupted the sessions and chanted the words of the Equal Rights Amendment. We should have been arrested many more times than we were, but they were nervous. The Republicans who dominated the chambers and the Governor were coming up for re-election and we were getting national publicity. The AP put out many stories; my sister lived in Stockton, CA and she sent me articles from the Stockton Record.  I was also getting articles from New Jersey, New York and elsewhere. We were getting TV and local press every night. Our actions did just what we hoped.  Our goals were not just to achieve ratification (which we felt was impossible since there were 3 states needed and only 30 days left to ratify). We wanted it to be known that women stood up for this and were committing civil disobedience. We were wanting this recorded in history and it was.  We got in the World Book and Britannica yearbook for 1982, Life Magazine Year in Pictures (two page photo by Annie Liebovitz), are included in a number of books on second wave feminism, and all our dozens of boxes of archival papers are deposited in the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard. We were recently contacted by the Springfield Lincoln Library, by ABC-Clio, as well as by you for the WAPUSH project about our work. So there has been a resurgence of interest. Our looking to history has paid off and we achieved one of our goals, at least temporarily. It is known that women stood up in a dramatic way for ERA ratification.
 

Other actions we took during the 10-year life of Grassroots were street theater, pageants, and celebrating International Women’s Day. During elections we had a group called the “Dancing Reagans” and we would do performances. There was a lot of skit-making and outdoor theater that we did.  We always did a “Witch-in” for Halloween where we called out those who opposed women’s rights. Twice a year, we held “Encampments Against Sexual Violence” on the University of Illinois campus.
 

Williams: That makes me think of “zaps” that were happening during the 1970s. Were you aware of that?

Sargent: No, I didn’t even know it at the time. Actions like Guerrilla Girls or zaps I did not know about that. There’s a whole guerilla movement protesting the lack of women artists displayed in art museums that came later. I was certainly aware of people in the anti-war movement doing dramatic things with puppetry and all of that.

 

Williams: What about Women Rising in Resistance? I know they did very interesting direct-action work for social justice causes in the 1980s.
 

Sargent: Ok, one of the things we learned from doing civil disobedience in Springfield was we needed to be using this tactic in our movement. Civil disobedience, direct action, more dramatic disruptive tactics. So, here’s what happened. Several of the Grassroots group became friendly with the fasters. After the ratification deadline passed, Sonia Johnson, who was the most newsworthy faster, ran for president of NOW. I went to the national convention in Indianapolis to be a delegate for her. She didn’t win, she wasn’t a creature of NOW.

 

The next summer of 1983, Mary Ann Beall, Sonia Johnson, and Mary Wood (all fasters) organized a Woman Gathering to tap into the energy that the ERA’s failure had generated. They invited activist women that they knew to meet. It was an interesting gathering because those who attended were involved with women’s spirituality and hellraisers involved with direct action politics. I was in the hellraiser group, and I had many friends, including my lifelong spouse, very involved in feminist spirituality. This gathering brought together maybe 100 women in New Jersey. We had 4 days of brainstorming about future plans. There was a session called “visioning into being” where we were invited to sit, meditate and think about the future of our movement for women’s equality. My vision was that we needed to have a national direct-action network that used the same logo and name when groups did direct action. This would give the appearance of an organization without having to expend the energy and time it takes to maintain one.

 

I came out of that gathering with ideas for the name of that network- “Women Rising in Resistance”. I asked my graphic design friends if they could do a logo of a woman coming out of a volcano. My artist friend, Jan, came up with the logo. The women that had been in Grassroots Group were totally involved in this. Whenever the Grassroots Group did actions, we also included the Women Rising logo on our printed material. We started producing things like protest planning guides that we would send out to our growing mailing list. Before the internet, we used our rolodex-this was 1982/1983.  It contained about 180 names of groups and individuals who were involved in direct action for feminist causes (e.g. a Columbus, Ohio anti-pornography group and an anti-war group in New London, Connecticut). Nikki Craft, who lived in Texas, was a leader in anti-pornography activism.  We produced and distributed “Practical Protest Planning for Everyday Life” and a brochure promoting the idea of Women Rising in Resistance. The brochure was meant to inspire by listing direct actions by women across time and cultures. WRR faded after a while because we weren’t putting energy into it and had moved on to other causes. However, before the 2017 Women’s March that followed the disastrous Trump election, I had a friend who lived in Champaign-Urbana in the 1980s who remembered the WRR logo and wanted to have a bunch of t- shirts made for the march. She also used the logo for her newsletter and had lots of t-shirts made which revived WRR in the DC area. Many shirts were passed out in New Hampshire as well.  That’s the story of Women Rising in Resistance. It had a life of ten or so years and then was revived in 2017, thanks to Kathleen Malloy in D.C.

 

Williams: Can you tell us about your work with Berenice Carroll? She was a professor at Purdue University when I was a student in the women’s studies program there in the 1990s. I wanted to major in women’s studies which was not possible at that time, so I minored in it and one of the prominent professors in that program was Berenice Carroll. I never took her courses, but I heard her name many times. It’s shocking to me that no one in the program ever told me about Carroll’s political work for the ERA. Was this work something you and Carroll had to hide in your professional lives?
 

Sargent: I did not have to hide because I was not under contract in the summers. Also, my administrators at the college were afraid of me. I was the kind of person they thought might sue them and cause unwanted publicity. I was on a 9 month contract so I felt very free. Berenice had to be a little more careful; she was Director of the Women's Studies Program at the University of Illinois, so she did actions that would not result in her arrest. She certainly was involved in the planning and court cases that followed our actions.

 

I forgot to mention, one of actions we used in addition to sit-ins and chains was “blood writing”. That was the only thing in my activism I’ve ever felt bad about because we lied to get pigs’ blood. We were going to write the names of opponents like Governor Thompson in blood, in front of the House, the Senate and the Governor’s office. For dramatic effect, we wanted to use real blood. We have since learned that mixing Hershey's syrup and ketchup looks just the same. But we didn’t know that then. As it turned out, animal blood was a regulated substance in Illinois. We called the slaughterhouse in Springfield and got some poor woman on the phone. We lied and said we were from the local university and were doing the play “Hamlet” and needed real blood for the gory scenes. She gave us the blood, and I’ve always really regretted that. We never told anyone where we got it, so hopefully no one got in trouble. After the ERA was voted down in the Senate, we went with our little ketchup bottles with a pointy end that would allow us to write and began writing names.  We were immediately arrested and charged with a felony. There was a lot of legal strategizing and meeting with our wonderful pro-bono attorney (Mike Metnick) who helped us with everything. Many years later, even with severe M.S., he again helped us when we were doing a gay rights protest in 1999-2000 and were arrested. So, he was our attorney again 17 years later. Things like the blood writing, Berenice couldn’t do.

 

I first met Berenice in 1966 at an anti-war meeting; from then on, we were connected.  Although I wasn’t University of Illinois faculty, my husband at the time was a professor there and we were part of “Faculty Against the War”.  Bernice and I were very connected in the domestic violence movement. She was a founder of “A Woman’s Place”, a Champaign, IL shelter I was also involved with and on the board of. I would speak in her classes regularly and I was on the advisory committee of her Women’s Studies Program as a community member. We were also in Grassroots together. She was the first person I consulted with when I decided we had to do civil disobedience for the ERA.

 

After 2003, we were together for weeks at a time sorting all Grassroots Group and WRR  papers and memorabilia to get them into a women’s history archival collection. I moved to New Hampshire in 2003. Berenice had all these connections; she has been the president of National Women’s Study Association. I kept waiting for her to arrange for placement of our papers, but she was so busy, doing research and writing, things that I wasn’t doing. When I moved to New Hampshire, I just boldly walked into the Schlesinger Library at Harvard and asked to speak to a curator of manuscripts and told her about us. She was thrilled as she had just received a big grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to collect Second Wave feminist papers. She was excited to get something from the Midwest since the collection contained lots of material from feminists on both coasts. So that sent me back to Champaign to work with Berenice and Jane Mohraz who was a member of the Grassroots Group and an editor at the University of Illinois Press. So, the 3 of us worked in Berenice’s basement. Berenice passed away about 3 years ago. She was probably about 10 years older than me and I’m 84 now. 

 

Williams: That’s how I heard about your story. Two years ago I worked at the Schlesinger Library and saw the chains as well as the ketchup bottle with “women’s blood” written on it. When I checked these items out in the reading room everyone around me working was fascinated by them and curious to know the backstory. 

 

Sargent: Thank you. What’s really wonderful is as I was downsizing to move to Philadelphia in Spring of 2024, I got a call from the new curator at the Schlesinger asking if I had other papers to add to the collection.  I had been in a number of other activist groups (Women Against Racism, The 85% Coalition for LGBTQ rights, etc). Being a historian, I had kept everything and assumed I would just have to recycle it all before the move. Because I had used archives in various research projects, I knew the value of a collection like mine. So, I told the curator at the Schlesinger, “I’ve got a whole new batch that’s not Grassroots, it's all my other stuff”. I had done many public lectures over decades which are now part of the collection.  

 

Bennitt: Anything else you’d like to share with us?

 

Sargent: I think I really alluded to it earlier, but it is something that has stuck with me over the years.  We were very much limited in understanding by our own unique situations as unmarried women who had a lot of freedom.  Because we were relatively unencumbered, didn’t have children and had the summers off, we were uniquely situated. I still look back and think we were naive because most women couldn’t do what we did, but I was so wanting more women than our 17 to do what we did. And they just couldn’t.  I also know that we were very brave and risk-taking, as well as unusually grounded in women’s history.
 

Sargent: Can I ask one question. Shannon, how did you get involved in this project?

 

Bennitt: Ms. Williams was my AP U.S. History teacher and AP U.S. Government teacher; she shared her work with Ms. Kelly about WAPUSH [AP U.S. Women’s History] and I really wanted to join. Last November I went to the National Council of the Social Studies (NCSS) and we had a poster. We talked to women from all over the country. They wanted to participate, and they wanted to help promote the WAPUSH campaign. Now I am doing an independent study this semester on the waves of feminism in the U.S. and how queer women have intersected with the women’s movement. 

 

Sargent: That’s great, Shannon, good luck. Don’t forget when you’re doing your research, there was a time when the National Organization for Women (NOW) would talk about the “Lavender Menace”. If you’re researching the intersection of queer women and NOW, there was a whole “Lavender Menace” period that you can find stuff about. Thank you so much for doing this, for including us and adding militant feminist history to your project.