AADL Talks To: Jan BenDor and Catherine McClary, Women's Rights Activists

Tue, 10/01/2024 - 1:42pm

When: June 24, 2024

Women’s rights activists Jan BenDor and Catherine McClary have been working together for over 50 years. Among their many pioneering contributions to regional and national causes are the Women’s Crisis Center, domestic violence reform, and legislation to combat job, housing, and sexual discrimination. Jan, a member of the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame, is the founder of the Rape Crisis Center movement in Michigan and has pioneered programs for law enforcement training in the treatment of domestic violence and sexual assault. Catherine, retiring Washtenaw County Treasurer, was the youngest person elected to the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners and has been recognized nationally for her work fighting home foreclosures and championing the rights of women and people of color. Jan and Catherine talk about their pioneering roles in the rape awareness movement, including their writing and distribution of the influential “Freedom From Rape” publication and their involvement in the passage of Michigan’s landmark 1974 Criminal Sexual Conduct Act, which would become a national model. They also talk about their work to establish the first publicly funded domestic violence shelter in the country and offer their perspective on the continuing challenges women face in the wake of the 2022 Dobbs decision.

Transcript

• [00:00:09] ELIZABETH SMITH: Hi, this is Elizabeth.
• [00:00:10] AMY CANTU: This is Amy. In this episode, AADL talks to Jan BenDor and Catherine McClary. Feminists Jan and Catherine have been actively working together on women's issues for over 50 years. Among their many contributions to local and regional causes are the Women's Crisis Center, Domestic Violence Reform, and legislation to promote equity and combat job and housing discrimination. Jan is the founder of the Rape Crisis Center Movement and has pioneered programs in the treatment of domestic violence and sexual assault. Catherine is the youngest person elected to the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners. She's been recognized nationally for her work fighting home foreclosures and championing the rights of women and people of color. Welcome, Jan, and Catherine, we're so glad to have you. Thanks for coming.
• [00:00:58] CATHERINE MCCLARY: It is great to be here, it's exciting and a little nerve-wracking.
• [00:01:02] AMY CANTU: I know. Before we get started -- or actually to get started -- we know today is an anniversary, not a necessarily pleasant one. Would you like to talk about that and give us a start on who you are and some of the work you've done?
• [00:01:19] CATHERINE MCCLARY: I'll start, I'm Catherine McClary. I'm currently the Washtenaw County Treasurer, although I'll be retiring at the end of the year. We did want to start with the abortion issue, that's really where I got started. Today, June 24th, 2024 is the one-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision that outlawed abortion. We have had legal abortion for more than 50 years now. I started working in 1970 with Clergy and Laity Concerned. There was a group at the Office of Religious Affairs at the University of Michigan, of ministers and rabbis who were helping women find illegal abortions as safely as possible. When New York changed their law July 1st of 1970, then we could make referrals for legal abortions. The clergy, as I read later, got involved in helping with abortion, particularly in New York, because the women who were dying were women of color. They had to go to back alley abortionists while the more, wealthy or well-off or middle-class white women were able to get a private doctor abortion. I got connected with the group in June of 1970, the law changed in July of '71. I was a biology major at the University of Michigan, and one of the things that I started doing was clinic inspections. We developed a protocol for places that we would refer to. Then the man that I lived with, who's now my husband, he and I did counseling of couples. So I would work with the woman, he would work with the man if there was a man in the picture, when they were determining whether they wanted an abortion or not. At that time we called it problem pregnancy counseling, problem pregnancy program. That term was later usurped by the right to lifers when they wanted to set up programs.
• [00:03:40] JAN BENDOR: And to deceive potential clients.
• [00:03:42] CATHERINE MCCLARY: That's where Jan enters the picture because she was doing work long before I was. But she connected with me to help her put the Problem Pregnancy Help Program at the Women's Crisis Center.
• [00:03:59] JAN BENDOR: Thank you, Catherine. Yes, my history with feminist activism goes way back. When I was 14 years old, I got on a bus and went to a national youth conference where I stood up and advocated that the conference vote to legalize abortion. This was in 1958, I want to say. I almost got it passed. Time Magazine had just come out with the data on how many women were dying of illegal abortions. I never really considered what that would mean for me, but I found out in college what it means when you're pregnant and there's nothing you can do locally. I did end up going to Washington DC, to what was pretty much a back alley. I don't recommend the experience to anybody, I really could have died from that whole procedure. It was pretty dangerous. But I managed to overcome that experience. I got to Ann Arbor to graduate school in 1967 in the summer. At which point soon afterward, there was a widespread terror for women. The John Norman Collins rape-murders, that were happening all over Ypsilanti, and a couple of them were in Ann Arbor and one was in California. There has been a book written about it that uses a lot of the trial testimony when they finally were able to try and convict him. But it was a time of sheer terror for women because you didn't know if this guy was on a bus with you or he was going to approach you in a parking lot. He was very clever and devious, and it forced women to really confront all their worst fears. A group of us started talking about what we could do, because I've never been one to sit around and worry when you can do something effective to stop the problem. Pretty soon, we had a couple of dozen women. This was in 1970, late '69, early '70. We decided that we needed a rape crisis center, for people to call to get help of all kinds. Problem is we couldn't get a phone number listed under the word "rape." We ended up calling at the Women's Crisis Center, and that was probably really a good thing because we ended up with a lot of other crises that we helped women with. Everyone was a volunteer, no one was paid. We eventually got some small grants for some of our services. I was looking for how to connect with people who were helping folks get abortions, and this would have been about '71.
• [00:07:12] CATHERINE MCCLARY: In the early days of the Women's Crisis Center, nobody called to talk about being raped, because just like Ma Bell would not put the word rape in the phone book, people just did not talk about it. The word sexual assault was never used, it was "rape." The law was rape, it wasn't criminal sexual conduct. We'll go into that a little bit later on, but the calls were how to find a decent gynecologist. If you'll remember in 1970, '71, it was impossible to get a good gynecologist that would really treat women.
• [00:07:51] JAN BENDOR: Listen to women patients.
• [00:07:53] CATHERINE MCCLARY: And listen to them, and the second question was how to get an abortion. Before we talk about...we got back to the mission of anti-rape work. But in the beginning, I was there to help set up the Pregnancy Help Program, do abortion inspections, and to work as a liaison with clergy and laity. What was really neat was after we had the program up and running after a couple of years, there was a woman who called me directly, she said "I'm from Ohio. I came to the Michigan Union, I looked on the bulletin board. Your number was there, I want a legal abortion." So we had become mainstream at that point, and women could get abortions. Then very shortly thereafter, in January of 1973, the Supreme Court had the Roe versus Wade case, and it became legal throughout the country. I thought we had done our job, and I could move on. A year ago, I found out that we're starting all over again. I'm just hoping our stories and our history will help inspire other women to do that work.
• [00:09:14] JAN BENDOR: I think there's a lot of them already inspired. I don't know about you, but I'm so proud of Michigan for what we did with the Reproductive Rights Ballot Initiative. I'm helping friends in Arizona do the same thing, and it's all over the country. So I think we've learned a lot.
• [00:09:33] CATHERINE MCCLARY: We have.
• [00:09:34] JAN BENDOR: And how to stop things. Continuing on the rape crisis center idea: We had the brilliant ideas, and some of us were in graduate school. of doing a survey of people, to find out about their experiences with sexual assault. We posted a please call notice all over, and we were amazed at the response. We heard from people who had been raped 40 years before, people who had never told anyone. The shame was overwhelming, and we ended up developing our own post-traumatic stress process. Because there wasn't anything...nobody talked about post-traumatic stress in 1971.
• [00:10:34] JAN BENDOR: We found out later that there's a lot in common between people who are victims of any violence, whether it's assault with a deadly weapon or a war. Whenever you are put in a position where you think you're going to die, you will have post-traumatic stress. That is a guarantee. We got to the point where we were really good about helping women, and we also had support groups. We had a whole program of support groups going on because people like to get in one group and they didn't want to change people. We kept starting new groups all over. It was pretty exciting, and then when we published the Freedom From Rape publication, that was when we really told the world, "We're here. We're doing this." We started talking about all the things that were against rape victims. This was very clear and it had been dramatized very well in some movies -- Town Without Pity. That was a great film where a woman was just completely shamed and shunned because she was a rape victim and everybody thought the man was wonderful. There was nothing wrong with what he had done. That got a lot of people who started thinking. We got some press, we got some help from the media. There was a lot of awareness starting to build that something had to be done, because once the complaining woman -- mostly women at the time -- got anywhere near the police or the court, she was getting raped again.
• [00:12:27] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Well, and we also had Chief Krasny at the time, who said to me, "If you're going to be raped, you might as well lay back and enjoy it." This is the Chief of Police in the city of Ann Arbor, which is... you know, at that time, Washtenaw County was a very rural, very Republican county. "Freedom From Rape" really broke all the boundaries and provided such incredible education. It was an amazing thing we did. It's the first publication of its kind. Jan and I were co-authors. There were a lot of other authors and artists that participated in it. Then she and I did the editing for it to put it together. The only study that we could find in the entire world on rape was by Menachem Amir in Philadelphia. We quote it in here, but we could never get a copy of it. Well, I worked for Congresswoman Abzug as an intern in the summer of 1974. That's I think when I may have caught the political bug. I actually may have caught it two years earlier when I helped a woman run for County Commissioner. But I told Bella that we couldn't get a hold of this research. She said, "Just ask the Library of Congress. I said, "Okay." You have little slips of paper when you need things. With her name at the top, and I wrote, "I need a copy of the study by Menachem Amir." It was on my desk the next morning. That's where we got some of the research for this. We used women's stories. We used everything that we had learned about it. We were giving it away locally, and we were charging the price of a stamp, which back then was $0.22. If you gave us a $0.22 stamp, we would send it to you. I wrote a letter to the editor to Ms. Magazine, and within a month, we had gotten 20,000 copies distributed.
• [00:14:45] JAN BENDOR: This is a different...
• [00:14:46] CATHERINE MCCLARY: This is the second edition.
• [00:14:48] JAN BENDOR: That's the second edition.
• [00:14:50] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Because we added some stuff in the middle on self-defense.
• [00:14:54] JAN BENDOR: The whole section on it.
• [00:14:55] CATHERINE MCCLARY: We did a whole section on self-defense. That's my fist. That's one of my roommates. Who played football for Bo.
• [00:15:08] JAN BENDOR: We were also working on building women's confidence.
• [00:15:11] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Yes.
• [00:15:12] JAN BENDOR: We had assertiveness training.
• [00:15:17] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Problem-solving training.
• [00:15:18] JAN BENDOR: Problem-solving training, and we ended up actually training police because there was nobody training them. I did the training for all of the Detroit Police officers at one time and then we did the Washtenaw County Sheriffs. It made a difference. They graduate from high school, they go into the military, they come out and they get recruited to be cops. Where are they go to learn this?
• [00:15:51] AMY CANTU: Was there support then? From where, or did you have to earn it?
• [00:15:56] CATHERINE MCCLARY: So, what we did...
• [00:15:56] JAN BENDOR: Gradually.
• [00:15:57] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Gradually, in Ann Arbor, we started by--I knew someone who was a cop and I asked him if he would do a little training for us on guns. He brings his gun and he shows us about nickel-plated guns. Guns were so simple back then. It was almost like back when the Second Amendment was written. There wasn't a lot of artillery and automatic weapons and everything. While he's showing us his guns, we talk to him about rape and that's how the whole thing grew. That's how we got accepted to do additional training. Because cops really want to be helpful. They want to help people, and they want to help survivors. If they have no clue and they've never had any training at the academy, they don't know what to do.
• [00:16:44] JAN BENDOR: The ones that have been in the business for a while, if they were exposed to an older generation of attitudes, they were almost hopeless. You almost couldn't get them to not laugh about rape. It was hard. But with the younger recruits and some of the medium-aged recruits, we got a very good reception. It was remarkable. The same way with a lot of the other people that we asked to help. But I would like to segue into the law reform. Because the longer we spent time with rape victims, the more we could see that the whole criminal justice system was a big part of the problem. If there is a bad behavior and you don't see any punishment from it, you are going to continue doing that bad behavior because it gives you a sense of power. Rape, as we have always said, is not about sex, it's about power. That gratification of having total control over someone and threatening their life it's a terrible addiction. It's a drug. We started talking about what we could do to change the law. It was remarkable how that all came together. We started thinking about it in the fall of '73. In sequence with Roe versus Wade. Then we started asking people what they thought we could do. Then we started holding conferences to ask people what they thought should be done and one conference we held in Lansing We actually had invited legislators, and we got a whole bunch of them. Before that day was over, we had bill sponsors. One of them was a Republican, one of them was a Democrat. There was a state senator and a state representative. They said, "I don't know anything about this, but just give me a draft, and we'll get it started." There's a strategy of lawmaking called double blue back. The blue refers to the back of what they used to put bills in a folder and staple it, and the backing was blue. A double blue back is when you start in both houses of the legislature. We started going to committee meetings as they were marking up our bill. The bill kept getting better, as we got more input, and we had fabulous help from some very surprising places like a couple of judges and a prosecutor in Detroit, who said, "Well, now, make sure we can use this because we have to be able to charge these crimes and get them convicted." Well, I had no experience in that realm at all. We actually got the bills introduced by April. There was a lot of problems at that point because the chair of the criminal justice committees were really the gatekeepers. You can't get a bill through unless they will let it out of committee. In the Senate, the Chair was a fellow who was going through a rotten divorce, and he just hated every woman on the planet. That wasn't too promising. Then the Chair in the House was a fellow who actually was a member of the Mafia, and I won't tell you his name because he's still around these parts. But he was very proud of his power. At one point in a committee markup meeting, I was going around as people were reading and studying and marking up and making suggestions. We're asking them to support a change, and there was a break for coffee, and the chairman came up to me and was in the back room where the coffee was. I thought I've been in this situation before. He said, he says, "I want you to stop running my committee."
• [00:21:37] JAN BENDOR: I said, "Sir, I'm not running your committee. You're the chairman, but I am making sure that this is the best bill that we can get through because it's going to be a model for the whole country." I was trying to appeal to his ego. He said, "No, I want you to sit up and just shut your mouth. Sit down and I don't want to hear from you anymore. If you keep doing this, I'm going to see to it that something happens to your family."
• [00:22:02] AMY CANTU: What?
• [00:22:03] JAN BENDOR: Well, that's how they do it. Something just went off in my head that it was just a bluff. I kept doing what I had been doing. We got that bill out, and it was exactly the way we wanted it.
• [00:22:20] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Except for marital rape.
• [00:22:22] JAN BENDOR: Yeah.
• [00:22:23] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Because that was the man who chaired the other committee.
• [00:22:28] JAN BENDOR: The divorce guy.
• [00:22:29] CATHERINE MCCLARY: We had to make a deal with him that to get it out of committee, we had to take that out. This is in 1974, when we got that legislation passed. It did become model legislation for the country. Criminal sexual conduct, four degrees and different penalties for different degrees of either penetration, or for touching, coercement. It was a model bill, but it was not until 1988 that we were able to go back to the legislature and get marital rape to become illegal.
• [00:23:10] JAN BENDOR: But we did get the complete de-gendrification of victim and perpetrator. That covered male victims. It covered what they called sodomy. So the sodomy law went bye-bye.
• [00:23:33] CATHERINE MCCLARY: The other thing that was interesting, I had learned a fair amount from my summer with Congresswoman Abzug, and being able to learn how the federal government worked. This was just amazing to see how the state government worked. What I seemed to know to do was, rather than working with the legislators themselves, we worked with support staff. We walked into every office with a copy of our bill and a copy of the summary and what we wanted to do. Many of those women were terrified at the end of the day to go out in the parking lot to get in their car. Our bill was put at the top of every legislator's box by their support staff. I learned a long time ago that if your staff is not supportive, the elected official can't get something done. When I was with Bella's office, there was another member of Congress from the Michigan delegation that wanted to write some anti-abortion legislation. His staff person, who I learned a tremendous amount from, she also was from this area, and she wouldn't write it and it never got introduced. That's the same way with this legislation if the staff is supportive. We were able to get this passed in 1974 [OVERLAPPING]
• [00:25:04] JAN BENDOR: It was signed into law in August. From the point when it was introduced to when it was signed into this law...
• [00:25:12] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Less than a year. It was pretty neat. We ended up distributing.
• [00:25:18] JAN BENDOR: Just four months.
• [00:25:19] AMY CANTU: That's incredible.
• [00:25:20] CATHERINE MCCLARY: It is. We ended up distributing 60,000 copies of "Freedom From Rape" due to that one letter to the editor. Which was a paragraph long in Ms. Magazine. People were sending me stamps by the bushel, and we were mailing them out all over the world.
• [00:25:40] ELIZABETH SMITH: How did you support the printing of the publication?
• [00:25:44] CATHERINE MCCLARY: We did fundraising for... Women's Crises Center was a private nonprofit 501 C3 organization. We just did our normal fundraising. We got a really good deal on the printing too.
• [00:25:58] AMY CANTU: Catherine, can I just ask quickly, you were already working for the county at the time?
• [00:26:08] CATHERINE MCCLARY: So, no. I actually ran a campaign for a woman who ran for County Commissioner in '72. Then I worked as her unpaid intern when I was going to school. Then I got this internship with Congresswoman Abzug. Then Liz said that she didn't want to run. She wanted me to run for her office. I said, "No way, I've got a life. I'm going to work for Bella." There wasn't really anyone else that wanted to run. Nobody filed. So I ended up filing. I worked for Bella during that summer, and I came back.
• [00:26:46] AMY CANTU: What year is this?
• [00:26:47] CATHERINE MCCLARY: '74.
• [00:26:48] AMY CANTU: '74, ok.
• [00:26:49] CATHERINE MCCLARY: I came back one weekend to campaign, and I came back a week early. I hit every door in my district that summer before the primary, because I had a primary. My opponent was saying I wasn't in town and I wasn't interested and I wasn't running. And I wasn't campaigning. So I'd show up on people's doorstep and they'd say, "Your opponent says you aren't campaigning." And I'd say, "Here I am."
• [00:27:16] AMY CANTU: Were you real clear with everybody right up front about the activism that you were interested in and the work that you were doing with this?
• [00:27:25] CATHERINE MCCLARY: In my campaign?
• [00:27:26] AMY CANTU: Yeah.
• [00:27:26] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Oh, absolutely.
• [00:27:27] AMY CANTU: And people really responded to that.
• [00:27:30] CATHERINE MCCLARY: What was interesting maybe it's bragging. It just was the most heartwarming headline I ever had after I had run for my second term. The Ann Arbor News wrote an article that said "Radical, frank, and powerful." Because I chaired Ways and Means and the board and stuff like that. They said that when I first came on the Board because I advocated the legalization of marijuana also. I participated in a drawing for the Ann Arbor Sun.
• [00:28:04] AMY CANTU: A famous moment in Ann Arbor history.
• [00:28:06] CATHERINE MCCLARY: They said, in the intro to the article Chong Pyen wrote this. He was really a funny reporter. He and I got along pretty well. He said when I was first elected, I raised the eyebrows of everybody on the Board, and now every Republican on the Board. Now I raise their hands when I want them to support the programs. We got the discrimination clause changed. In 1975, I went into our affirmative action... First, I got the Center for Education of Women to help us write an affirmative action plan, and then we redid our nondiscrimination clause. We included marital status, which is the first time that's ever appeared anywhere. We included sex and gender, and we included what we called at the time, sexual preference. I asked Jim Toy to come talk to the Board when we were trying to get that passed. He did. Floyd Taylor, the bank rancher from Salem Township, is sitting next to me.
• [00:29:21] JAN BENDOR: My County Commissioner.
• [00:29:23] CATHERINE MCCLARY: He leans over and he says, "What does gay mean?" I said, "Homosexual, Floyd." He says, "Oh, okay." They all voted for it. Because it was the right thing to do. There were really good people on the Board who wanted to do the right thing. I do want to get back... Because after we did "Freedom from Rape" Jan did an amazing thing. She has a friend Mary Anne Largen.
• [00:29:51] JAN BENDOR: Let me do something else first.
• [00:29:53] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Go ahead. Because I want to talk about the AV project a tiny bit.
• [00:30:00] JAN BENDOR: As a result of the visibility that we both got, we ran into these amazing opportunities to do more trouble-making, really good trouble. I got offered a job working for the Wayne County Prosecutor in Detroit. They had gotten some law enforcement assistance grant money. They had a lot of flexibility in what to do with it. Part of my job was to be the statistician for this very large office of over 200 attorneys, the largest such office in Michigan.
• [00:30:45] JAN BENDOR: But they also wanted me to help set up a rape crisis center for Detroit. In the Wayne County Prosecutor's office, they had me set up a generic victim and witness assistance program. What I was able to do was get in a position where I can improve the experience of just about anybody who was in the court to be a victim or a witness, which had never happened, witnesses would just get trashed by the defense attorneys. I was able to do trainings for the defense attorneys because we made something impossible for them, which is they could not delve into the victim's past sexual experiences. That was a no-no, and it still is. They had to know that we were serious about it and if they insisted on doing this stuff, we were going to ask judges to find them in contempt of court, which doesn't happen to attorneys very often, but it has a few. And this was an amazing way to make change state-wide because I got the chance to do trainings for all of the prosecutors in the State of Michigan. We had all of the emergency workers in Wayne County, which is a lot of people. We developed a whole protocol for the medical assessment of victims so that there would be appropriate evidence and Of course, much later, State of Michigan cut off Detroit's lab money, and then all those stacked up undone, and now they're finally through them and they've gotten several hundred perpetrators convicted who should have been convicted 30 years ago. But this all was really important because if you look at the court criminal justice system, it is a pretty amazingly complicated system. You can't just change something in a law book, you've got to change all the pieces that have to work together. The worst group to work with were the judges because they already thought they knew everything and we had to be super polite. "Yes, Your Honor, we're not going to do it like that anymore. Thank you." Some of the judges didn't ever get it, and a few of them have been de-benched as a result. But by and large, since most judges start out as prosecutors and defense attorneys, they had already gotten it by the time the next group came through, so we had to be very patient.
• [00:33:33] AMY CANTU: Can I just ask real quickly, just to step back for a second. Was this going on anywhere else in the country? How much of what you were doing was pioneering work?
• [00:33:44] JAN BENDOR: Yes. When we started this, nobody was doing anything, except there was some action in New York, because New York had started out with these speak-outs, where women were coming to microphones talking about how nobody helped them. But New York is a really very crazy legal system. I don't know if you've looked at the different states. We did get help after we got our law passed, and we had started implementing... Mary Ann Largen was at the time an employee of National NOW. She was in charge of the rape task force. National NOW no longer has these task forces, which is an unfortunate thing because it was a major way for us to work with activists in other states. We actually did a study 10 years after, and we compared one state that had changed their law to be very similar to ours and another state that didn't change anything. After ten years, Michigan had started out with 56 convictions for rape statewide for the whole state. Ten years later, we had over 1,500 and the same was true in the state that had modified their system like ours, Georgia, of all places. Georgia had also trained their judges. It makes a big difference. And they had a pretty good judiciary at the time. But the state that hadn't made any changes, no change at all. So it was a very interesting comparison study, with a control group. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:35:42] CATHERINE MCCLARY: That's an interesting question that you asked, because in terms of the rape law, we were the first, and we became a model for the country and that was in 1974. This publication also came out in 1974. And in 1975, we wrote a book called How to Organize a Women's Crisis Service Center, which I also did the editing on. So this was a way of spreading education and creating this across the country.
• [00:36:15] JAN BENDOR: Across the world, we had people in Australia.
• [00:36:17] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Yes. But in 1971, when the Women's Crisis Center was formed, right in the same year, a rape crisis center was being formed in Washington, DC, in Berkeley, and in San Francisco.
• [00:36:34] JAN BENDOR: Mary Ann Largen was involved in the one in DC.
• [00:36:37] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Yes. First, second, it was organic and even though we didn't have texts and e-mail, we did communicate and we kept in touch with each other and we called each other and we talked to each other.
• [00:36:55] JAN BENDOR: We published a newsletter for everybody who had been part of the effort so people would know what was next, and I do think that we discovered something really interesting. There were 34 states that passed some version of the reforms that we did, whether it was setting up the degrees of force. We were hoping that everybody would get rid of the idea of consent because you can't prove nonconsent. We went back to how do we do it with armed robbery? You don't consent to a robbery, do you? And you don't have to prove that you didn't consent. So that was really significant. But we also changed federal law. Mary Ann, who at the time, she was a legal assistant, and she got a job working for Senator Joe Biden. She was one of the authors of the Violence Against Women Act.
• [00:38:08] CATHERINE MCCLARY: We all worked together.
• [00:38:09] AMY CANTU: You all work together.
• [00:38:11] JAN BENDOR: It was a conspiracy. [LAUGHTER] Mary Ann, sadly, died last year.
• [00:38:12] CATHERINE MCCLARY: She found a grant application for HEW Health Education and Welfare, which is what we used to call DHHS, the Department of Health and Human Services. She gave it to Jan and Jan and I decided to apply for this grant to do a whole review and analysis of any films or videos. I think it was only film back then, that was available on rape, any educational materials that were in a media that wasn't print. We had a couple of friends who were videographers with the grant money, we hired a woman who served as our secretary and assistant, and then Jan and I reviewed every single thing there was in the world on rape to write this anthology and review.
• [00:39:19] JAN BENDOR: And we had a test audience.
• [00:39:22] CATHERINE MCCLARY: We had test audiences.
• [00:39:24] JAN BENDOR: "Focus groups" is what they call them now.
• [00:39:28] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Mary Ann was extraordinary. We put this grant application together. We actually drove to Washington, DC to Bethesda, wherever it was, that we had to hand it in to get it in on time. It was done in three different typefaces because we had three different people with different typewriters. There were 12 applicants total, but the guy who had to do the site visit to see if they were actually going to award it to us. One of our partners was a friend of ours who ran the audio-visual center for the University of Michigan, and he wanted to be able to come to Ann Arbor for his site reviews. We got $54,000 in 1975.
• [00:40:23] AMY CANTU: Wow, that's great.
• [00:40:24] JAN BENDOR: Which was huge money!
• [00:40:27] CATHERINE MCCLARY: After that, we then applied for funding from the City of Ann Arbor for CETA, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, and we got our first administrator, executive director, through the CETA program.
• [00:40:44] JAN BENDOR: It was a job-creating program for those who don't fondly remember CETA. But a lot of nonprofits were able to get staff created that way that way.
• [00:40:56] CATHERINE MCCLARY: With more staff, and with more volunteers, and with more visibility, we were able to work both with the university and with the city to promote the idea that we needed an assault crisis center. We couldn't just continue to...
• [00:41:17] JAN BENDOR: Publicly funded.
• [00:41:18] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Yes. So there was a mayor's task force on rape that was created. There was an assault crisis center that was created. The city put in a lot of funding, the county put in funding. I was on the Mental Health Board at the time, and eventually, the county took the whole program over. It was county-funded for years and years, and then it was transferred over to Safe House when they were up and running and viable. Safe House runs a program for rape survivors as well as domestic violence survivors. We were able to institutionalize all of our efforts. That was at about the time then the crisis center phased out because we were onto other things.
• [00:42:04] ELIZABETH SMITH: What were those other things that you had move on to?
• [00:42:06] JAN BENDOR: We weren't exactly letting too much grass grow under our feet, I must say.
• [00:42:14] AMY CANTU: Kathy Fojtik started with the NOW women, and Jan was a really strong member of Ann Arbor NOW. She started doing anti-domestic violence work, and they would have women who were survivors, women, their families, their children, and they would have homes of the NOW members where they were being housed. Kathy was on the Board of Commissioners at the same time. In fact, she was on two years earlier than I was. Then when I got on the Board of Commissioners, I was appointed to the Criminal Justice Committee of SEMCOG, Southeastern Michigan Council of Governments, and SEMCOG handled seven counties and a population of four and-a-half million people at the time. I met a woman who was the staff to this council named Ann Nolan, and I never knew it at the time, but Ann was a mentor and a champion, just as Jan has been. I got elected chair to the committee. She just talked to some of the old guys and told them it'd be a lot of work.
• [00:43:34] AMY CANTU: They said, no. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:43:37] CATHERINE MCCLARY: It's interesting being an elected official back in the '70s. 2% of women were elected officials. I'm talking library boards and school boards up to the presidency. There were 2% of us.
• [00:43:50] AMY CANTU: What was it like? Can you tell us what it was like?
• [00:43:53] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Well, I would sit in a meeting where vendors would come in and say, "Now, gentlemen, Blah blah blah, gentlemen" and I would say, "Excuse me. We're not all gentlemen here!"
• [00:44:04] AMY CANTU: That's great.
• [00:44:05] JAN BENDOR: At the United Way, when we went in for a grand application for the Women's Crisis Center, one guy sitting at the table said, "Oh, do women have crises, ho ho ho!" It was all I could do to keep it together. That was so insulting. You just had to have some good spiffy one-liners ready.
• [00:44:29] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Well, Ann taught me how to chair a meeting. She taught me how to put together an agenda, and we had tons of money from the federal government through the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, LEAA. All over the country, cops were spending this money on things like vests and ammunition, but also on things like boats and helicopters and tanks and stuff like that.
• [00:44:58] JAN BENDOR: It was the Nixon administration.
• [00:45:00] CATHERINE MCCLARY: It was the Nixon war on crime, and there was a lot of money. We have a domestic violence shelter in every one of our counties, because that's how we spent our LEAA money, through SEMCOG.
• [00:45:15] AMY CANTU: Well, that's good history to know.
• [00:45:16] AMY CANTU: Yeah. That's the original money that came in to start the domestic violence project Safe House, in a facility. I once asked Kathy how she got the house on the grounds of the former mental institution.
• [00:45:37] JAN BENDOR: The old state hospital.
• [00:45:38] CATHERINE MCCLARY: It was the superintendent's home. It was fancy and big. Jan and I remember the sweeping staircase and the carpeting we had to replace. But it was built for a single family, and it housed 28 families most of the time for a long time.
• [00:45:56] JAN BENDOR: It had a failing septic system.
• [00:45:58] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Well, we'll get to that. But at the time, it did not because it had been a single family. I asked Kathy how she got that. First, she looks at me and she says, "Now, that's a story worth telling." She went up to Lansing because they were just getting so burned out. All these women and their families were housing other families in crises. She doesn't remember who she spoke with, and I tried to do some research, and Kirk Proffitt was trying to help me figure it out. We think we know, it was a gentleman who was the chair of the mental health component of the appropriations committee. But someone she knew. She walks up, walks in his office. She says, "I need a house for SafeHouse. Where should I go? Where should I start?" He says, "I've got a house for you, $1 a year." That was it. It never went through a committee. It never went to a vote.
• [00:47:03] AMY CANTU: It just happened.
• [00:47:06] CATHERINE MCCLARY: It just happened.
• [00:47:08] JAN BENDOR: That was the late '70's and almost all of the '80's.
• [00:47:14] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Then Jan was president of the board for a long time. I left the Board of Commissioners. I was working in the private sector, and I got a call from Kathy Edgren, who wanted me to serve on the Board. That was in 1991 in September. I show up at my first board meeting, and the president of the board.
• [00:47:36] JAN BENDOR: This is the SafeHouse Board.
• [00:47:37] AMY CANTU: The SafeHouse Board, and the president of the board informs me that the septic has failed again because there are so many people there. Well, I grew up in Webster, Augusta, FC Townships. I knew about septic fields. I've dug them and built them because I built houses before. I said, "Two things. Number 1, do not tell anyone. Do not let the county or the health department know or you'll be shut down."
• [00:48:10] JAN BENDOR: They were fanatical about that.
• [00:48:13] CATHERINE MCCLARY: I said, "Do not tell anyone. And secondly, get on the phone and call Jack Spack because he was the one who pumped septic tanks." I said, "Get on his schedule and have him come every week and pump it out. Then it'll work until we can find a new place."
• [00:48:30] JAN BENDOR: Old Jack loved having the business.
• [00:48:33] CATHERINE MCCLARY: He was good.
• [00:48:33] JAN BENDOR: I don't know how much he charged, probably not a whole lot. He had a heart of gold.
• [00:48:38] CATHERINE MCCLARY: He did. Then our next step on the board was to figure out how we were going to get a new facility. What Jan and Susan McGee, who is the Executive Director of Safe House, and what their board had started a capital campaign. You'd raised $30,000 already. Susan asked me to go to lunch with her. I don't know why I was going to lunch with her. We go to lunch, and she says, I figured it out, $30,000 isn't going to build anything. It's all we've raised in three or four years. We don't know people who know people, who know people, who know people who have money. We don't even know the first tier. She said, "Do you think we could do a millage campaign?" I thought about it, and I looked at her, and I said, "Yes." Her version of that story is, I asked you if you thought we could do a millage campaign and you went away. She said, I was almost ready to call the wait staff over and see if we needed to call... She said, you were gone. I didn't know I was gone, but I plotted out the campaign and calculated what millage we would need and what it would cost to build the facility. I figured out whether it was feasible or not.
• [00:50:14] JAN BENDOR: What the public would pay for.
• [00:50:16] CATHERINE MCCLARY: What the public would pay for because she had asked me, could we do this? I looked at her, and I said, yes. That's what we did. And we have the first publicly funded domestic violence shelter in the country.
• [00:50:29] AMY CANTU: Housing and poverty and foreclosure, these are other issues that you have worked on. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about how it intersects with the pioneering work that you've done with the rape crisis center.
• [00:50:47] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Well, I don't know how much Jan and I together want to go into some of the work I've done as an elected official. There's been a lot. We are saving homes from foreclosure. We saved them from mortgage foreclosure during the Great Recession, we saved them from tax foreclosure. I started a program in 2019 to identify families who had lived in their homes for generations but couldn't prove they owned it, typically due to segregation, redlining, and racial discrimination. We have systematically worked with a team of pro bono attorneys to establish title in the family's names and return the property to them. We've returned $3.3 million in property wealth to families in this county. But my work has all built on... You know, I was 17 years old, I was a student at U of M. Jan gives me a phone call. She has really served as a mentor and an inspiration to me, and there have been other mentors along the way. The woman who ran for County Commissioner before me, Liz Keough I just learned a wealth of knowledge from her.
• [00:52:12] JAN BENDOR: We had some angels who dropped in when we needed help.
• [00:52:16] CATHERINE MCCLARY: We always did.
• [00:52:16] JAN BENDOR: We got a free lawyer to do our 501(c)(3). We didn't have a clue. People would just show up. Mary Ann Largen just showed up out of the blue. I think she might have seen your note in Ms. or something.
• [00:52:34] JAN BENDOR: She was a unique person because she was part Native American. Her father was a full-blooded member of his tribe so she had these perspectives, speaking of homelessness and houselessness. Her family had lived in terrible poverty and yet she still thought that violence was the worst thing that was happening to women and that to her was number 1. We made a lot of intersection connections through these experiences. Then speaking at conferences, and I wrote a chapter in a book published by the University of Alabama, of all places, we had a conference in Alabama. I think the whole movement was really ground-up because there weren't any really strong national organizations until much later. Now you have the Domestic Violence Hotline, the National Hotline. You have the center, I don't remember exactly the name, but it's a lawyers group that works on litigation against domestic violence for battered women and projects to get battered women out of prison because they've been convicted of a murder that was simply self-defense, but they were never allowed to argue self-defense. I think we plugged things in from the bottom up, and then we started to see national change.
• [00:54:22] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Both of us change systems, that's what we do. If we see an injustice, we do something about it. If it works, it works and people copy it and model it, and if it doesn't work, we try something else. We share everything that we've learned. As a treasurer, when I will sign a contract to pay for software modification, as an example, I write in the contract that if another county treasurer in Michigan wants to use that code, they have a right to it without charge because it's already being paid for with public funds. I'm a large county, and I'm an active treasurer so in order to get my business, they'll sign agreements like that. We've really helped counties all over and beat the residents of the state all over with those kinds of policies.
• [00:55:21] JAN BENDOR: One of our angels was Patty Boyle. Patty Boyle was an attorney in the Wayne County Prosecutor's office. She was at one point head of the Appellate Division. She and her husband, Terry Boyle, who later became a circuit judge, were absolutely instrumental to a lot of the implementations that we went through. I have to say I might get a little credit for convincing Patty Boyle to run for State Supreme Court, which she did.
• [00:55:58] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Successfully.
• [00:56:02] JAN BENDOR: It was very rare for a woman to be on the State Supreme Court in the '70s. The thing that's so amazing is now we have a woman Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court [LAUGHTER] and more women than men, I think, right now in the current court.
• [00:56:23] CATHERINE MCCLARY: We're starting and we have more women in our circuit court now because of the work we're doing.
• [00:56:31] JAN BENDOR: Just trying to talk to people about all the places that can be used for positive social justice change.
• [00:56:39] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Jody Bisdee, who's now deceased, also, was our first director of the Assault Crisis Center, and Jody had been a long-time volunteer who'd worked right alongside us, and she really made that organization something that could be then carried on by SafeHouse now today. In addition to all the mentors and the angels, and the women who just show up to help other women. I was raised by two very strong grandmothers, an independent Amish farm woman. My other grandmother was a very sophisticated businesswoman who served as a trustee, and in the 1950s flew on an airplane to go to her board meetings. My entire career has been spent trying to help other women get a seat at the table. I hope that telling our story is one way to preserve women's history and to inspire other women. You don't have to know things. You just have to do things. Then you'll learn what you don't know.
• [00:57:52] JAN BENDOR: Get people in a room. Make a lot of names and call a meeting.
• [00:57:57] CATHERIINE MCCLARY: Yeah, because other people know what you don't know.
• [00:58:00] JAN BENDOR: Right.
• [00:58:01] AMY CANTU: Now, both of you had very early experiences coming to the University of Michigan where you saw injustice. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you were at the IM building, and they didn't have was it showers for women? Can you tell us a little bit about that?
• [00:58:18] JAN BENDOR: My first year in graduate school, I was horrified that the one swimming pool was completely without any shower facilities for women students. Having been a high school competitive swimmer and a swimmer all my life, I just assumed I'd be swimming somewhere and I'd have to go home dripping wet, wrapped in a towel. I ran into another graduate student, Eleanor Lewis and we both decided this was not acceptable. We showed up at a Board of Regents meeting. Who makes the decisions around here? We said, "It's just really not fair. I don't want to risk getting the flu. I got a heavy course load, and I would probably fail out of my program." They, "Oh, we didn't know this." They really didn't. I learned later that Don Canham who was the athletic director at the time, and he was the guy that swore he was never going to budget money for women's sports until Title IX came along. But he apparently was apoplectic that the shower room had been split in half and half of all of five lockers and three showers, but that was a start. You didn't have to go home smelling like chlorine.
• [01:00:02] AMY CANTU: Wow. Didn't you have a similar experience? There wasn't enough housing for students?
• [01:00:08] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Whoa. How did you know about that?
• [01:00:10] AMY CANTU: I read about it in the Ann Arbor News.
• [01:00:14] CATHERIINE MCCLARY: Well, I also signed up to take a gym class in basketball because I'd played basketball in high school. That was the first year that gym was not compulsory for freshmen to take. They did not have enough women sign up so they did not have a basketball class. Of course, we didn't have a basketball team back then. But yes, when I showed up, they had over-enrolled the dormitories for women or for everyone. There were a group of us that they wanted us to sleep on the tables in the dining room.
• [01:00:56] JAN BENDOR: Sleep on your back or something.
• [01:01:02] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Well, I had a sleeping bag, and I had an umbrella. The umbrella was from my childhood. I loved it. I don't know It's gone now. I had a backpack in my books and my writing. We didn't take truckfulls of stuff to school back then. I had worked for the university the summer before I started. That was an amazing experience because I started to learn how systems worked and where you found out the names of people and where you found out their phone numbers. I mean, it was just an incredible learning experience. I just went over to Feldkamp's office because he was the housing director then. I breezed by his secretary. I walked into his office, and I set my sleeping bag over in a corner. I started unpacking my books and he goes, "What are you doing?" I said, "I don't have a dorm room. I'm going to sleep here until I have one." I was put in South Quad.
• [01:02:08] JAN BENDOR: Out of the rain.
• [01:02:11] CATHERINE MCCLARY: In the upperclassmen's dorm, I was put in South Quad that afternoon.
• [01:02:17] AMY CANTU: And both of those are very early in your life, standing up and just walking right in and saying, "It can't be this way."
• [01:02:26] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Right.
• [01:02:27] AMY CANTU: That's how you do it!
• [01:02:29] JAN BENDOR: I had already had some training in that by the way. I joined SNCC when I was 13 and my field director was John Lewis. I had learned non-violent resistance, civil disobedience.
• [01:02:45] CATHERINE MCCLARY: I have written her story because I write.
• [01:02:49] JAN BENDOR: I did have some early opportunity to see how that all works. I had also been through an actual violent assault by the Ku Klux Klan in Southern Illinois.
• [01:03:03] AMY CANTU: In Cairo, we're trying to integrate the pool there.
• [01:03:06] JAN BENDOR: The public swimming pool was segregated. We had been just protesting for a year, and they decided they were sick and tired of us and we'd go to City Hall. One time they decided they were going to come and beat us up. Well, we all went limp and they didn't know what to do. [LAUGHTER]
• [01:03:27] JAN BENDOR: [LAUGHTER] I was pretty tall for my age so they just didn't know how to pick someone up who's totally limp and carry them. They tried dragging us. When you're really limp, you're almost like a play-dough, you're sticking to things. That was good training.
• [01:03:52] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Well, I participated in the Black Action Movement to increase enrollment of people of color at the University of Michigan. Again, I was really young so I was not an organizer of it, but I was asked to set up a picket line at South Quad because that was my quad. We go out there at 5:00 in the morning, and I've got all these sleepy people with our little signs, and we put up a picket line around South Quad, demanding parity and equity for people of color at the University of Michigan. The next thing I know is when the food service workers arrived, they would not cross our picket line. That was really powerful and then the next thing I knew is Bo Schembechler had a fit because his football players couldn't get fed. [LAUGHTER] By the end of that morning, we were able to meet with Fleming and that's where we got the 10% commitment for the university just so they could feed the football players.
• [01:05:05] AMY CANTU: Well, their priorities haven't changed all that much. [LAUGHTER].
• [01:05:09] CATHERINE MCCLARY: No.
• [01:05:10] ELIZABETH SMITH: I was also curious about your early promoting the use of pronouns. At the time, it was "S/HE" but what spurred that and was there collaboration with other movements like the Gay Liberation Front?
• [01:05:23] CATHERINE MCCLARY: No, there was no collaboration with the gay movement at the time because it wasn't an out movement. I was sick and tired of being called "he" all the time, and that only 2% of elected officials were female. All of our language was changed to S/HE. Doesn't that make sense? I personally like it a little better than "their" because my grandmother, who was the businesswoman also corrected all my letters and sent them back to me red-lined and, this grammar is sort of... [LAUGHTER].
• [01:05:58] JAN BENDOR: My father was a newspaper reporter, and that was very big with him, spelling, grammar. [LAUGHTER]
• [01:06:07] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Again, it's one of those situations where we've come full circle, and I haven't really done all of my thinking through because I don't want to disrespect transgender people, binary people. But I don't want to lose the fact that some of us are women, and we're proud to be women, and we want to be called "she" and not have something neutral like "pregnant people." It's an issue I'm still trying to figure out how to articulate respectfully and appropriately.
• [01:06:43] JAN BENDOR: There are quite a few people who use the term W-O-M-Y-N to make that point, we're not wife of man, we are women. I think we're all working this out.
• [01:07:00] AMY CANTU: This is a tough question, but this is... The anniversary today: You must be frustrated that ALL this work, and then...?
• [01:07:09] CATHERINE MCCLARY: It's not for not and I'm not even frustrated, I'm furious. I am angry that we have one person on the US Supreme Court that thinks he's God. He wasn't even appointed by Trump.
• [01:07:28] JAN BENDOR: His godliness has increased over the years.
• [01:07:31] CATHERINE MCCLARY: But, movements, just like stories have arcs and cycles and it was such a high point for me when a woman could drive up from Ohio and just know where to go and get a safe legal abortion. Well, I think we still know that, and we still have that in some places. Now there's a whole lot more work that we have to do. The emphasis is now changing from abortion is health care to pregnancy is health care and we're really reaching out to a broader section of people who may never want an abortion, but they sure want to have a baby safely, and they want to have as healthy a baby as is possible, and they don't want to bleed to death because somebody's not willing to scrape out their uterus, so they don't die because it might be considered an abortion. Then there are some people who want to have in vitro fertilization, and clearly, those are fertilized eggs for it to all work.
• [01:08:43] JAN BENDOR: That makes no sense, that whole thing.
• [01:08:46] AMY CANTU: So do you think that is a silver lining that the discussion has opened?
• [01:08:49] JAN BENDOR: Well, it's broadened the issue from, "Oh, in my Bible, it says this" or by the way, there's no prohibition of abortion in any Holy book that I've been able to find. In fact, just to detour for a minute, the Catholics who are the most stiff on this issue did not have a prohibition until 1840 when Napoleon III, who was the emperor running out of soldiers, so he decided he'd force French women to have more soldiers and he did a deal with a guy who wanted to be Pope, and he said, "I'll surround the Vatican, so the only people who can come to the meeting are the ones that are going to vote for you, and he did." And so Pius IX made that canon. I like to say, The reason for the war on women is war. And I first learned about this from Gloria Steinam, by the way. [LAUGHTER]
• [01:09:56] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Well, and all of this is documented throughout history, when any one of the autocratic countries, Russia, China, they want more kids than that's what women are expected to do, and when they want less than they do forced sterilization.
• [01:10:11] JAN BENDOR: It was the first thing that Hitler did when he came to power.
• [01:10:16] CATHERINE MCCLARY: I would not call it a silver lining, I'm not that much of a Pollyanna. [LAUGHTER] But I take opportunities wherever I can find them and this is an opportunity to really broaden the issue from women of childbearing age who don't want a baby and maybe have failed birth control or whatever happens to an entire -- to 51 or 52% of the population -- and all of their partners and supporters. It really is becoming a little bit different conversation.
• [01:10:56] JAN BENDOR: I think the far right, which is all about power, they've really blown it this time because they took it from a niche situation, to now they're taking on over half of the population of the United States, and most of Europe, which is pro-choice, and quite a few other countries. It just strikes me as phenomenally stupid that they would enlarge their opposition [LAUGHTER] and arm it with more arguments. I'm angry, but I'm also laughing inside because I think, You make the same mistake twice, and it's on you.
• [01:11:50] AMY CANTU: I got you, yeah.
• [01:11:54] JAN BENDOR: I wouldn't be laughing if I were living in Mississippi right now or any of the Gulf states for that matter. But then I have to think about New Mexico and the wonderful governor who when she was on the Sunday news show. She was being asked about their budget and so forth, and she said, and it's very important here in New Mexico that we have proper health care for women in all ways they need healthcare, and we're making sure to budget for that. That's where everybody's gonna be.
• [01:12:30] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Well, and two years ago, we had a vote in a referendum, and I don't remember what the percentage was.
• [01:12:36] JAN BENDOR: Sixty percent.
• [01:12:37] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Sixty percent. But we had the same referendum, this almost the same exact wording, in 1972, and it failed. I worked every bit as harder probably on the '72 campaign. Then the '22. We were ahead in the polls because there was a slight majority of people in Michigan that supported legal and safe abortion. But 50 years later, there's 60 percent of the people that support safe and legal pregnancies.
• [01:13:16] JAN BENDOR: It's also the case that in '72, the Catholic Church had a lot more money to throw against [OVERLAPPING]
• [01:13:20] CATHERINE MCCLARY: They did. It was the Sunday before the Tuesday that really became [OVERLAPPING]
• [01:13:27] JAN BENDOR: Now, they had to spend all their money on legal self-defense.
• [01:13:31] CATHERINE MCCLARY: No, it was pretty awful, because we were leading up until then.
• [01:13:37] JAN BENDOR: They did that on a number of issues while they still had the money.
• [01:13:40] AMY CANTU: What is your advice for young people starting out the way you did, wanting to fight the good fight, and feeling very distressed and demoralized in this society right now? What do we do?
• [01:13:54] JAN BENDOR: I think role models are really important. As Catherine has stated, the people who influenced her and helped her get going, and I've had people to inspire me who didn't quit when the going got hard. I went to the same college as one of the three students who was murdered in Mississippi, and his last name was Andrew Goodman. That just fired up the students to do more. Even if you try to discourage people, we helped women at the SafeHouse who were wives of Mafia, and we kept them from being found. You just have to get better at fighting back.
• [01:14:44] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Well, a young person...because when you're young, you don't have any sense of time and you don't always have fear. You don't usually have fear. Each person has a different passion. I was a biology major, and I got involved in the medical piece. I also worked with the National Women's Health Network. I was not one of the founders, but I was part of their organizing initial group. I wrote the bylaws for the organization, and I served as their vice president for years and years to get the organization going. I did things that were health-related. Some women may do sports related, some women may do art related. Whatever your passion is, go out and do it, surround yourself with other women and older women. Not everybody is going to be your next mentor, but you never know.
• [01:15:52] ELIZABETH SMITH: What are each of you most proud of?
• [01:15:55] CATHERINE MCCLARY: My gosh. [LAUGHTER] It's a big one. [LAUGHTER] My 54-year relationship with my husband.
• [01:16:07] AMY CANTU: And you, Jan?
• [01:16:07] JAN BENDOR: Well, this is ironic because we both got married in the same year, and that was before we even knew each other. It's very interesting. Most proud of, well, I think you'd have to say there's personal pride, and then there's professional pride. I think it's all the people that I have been able to teach the principles of social justice reform, whether you're on the inside or the outside. I've been a teacher. I was at Eastern, and I've given guest classes to a number of places. I think it's very important that we pass this knowledge to others and it makes a difference. I've had students come up to me 10 years, 15 years later. I just run into one of them, and one of my students works for the County Health Department, of all things now [LAUGHTER]. But he said, ''The project you made us do and how to change systems has been the thing I've used the most.'' [LAUGHTER] I had them all do a little mini project where they decided on the class was social policy and how it's made sausage, and how to go about deciding what the change should be and who to involve, and they all had a mini experience of doing that. Then their report was on what happened. How were they successful? Who did they piss off? That's what I think I'm the most proud of -- is the people that I've encouraged and taught.
• [01:18:06] CATHERINE MCCLARY: My husband, Mike, and I met in September when I started at UVM. That would be September of 1969. We started living together January 4th of 1970, and we've been together ever since. He has been stalwart. He's been my soul mate, and he's helped with everything that I've done. He was really active in Clergy and Laity Concerned because he worked with the men. But the other thing is, when we were first at the university together, we were involved in anti-war efforts. I got really disgusted with trying to do anti-war work at U of M because it was so sexist and so male-oriented, and they just wanted the women to go for coffee. That's how I segued into the Women's Crisis Center into doing reporting for WCBN, and I became their county government reporter, which was a made-up title because I could get interviews and report on that. Mike and I met at WCBN because he was the engineer there, and I was a reporter. He's just been with me every step of the way. He always remained active. I forget what all the letters are, but he was always active in the draft. He never took a student deferment because he really felt it was unfair and elitist. We act and he's from the Ypsilanti area as well. In his draft board was the City of Ypsilanti. We actively harassed the draft board quite a bit, and we did a lot of other anti-war efforts the Moratorium in October of '69. I met Brad Little in New York City. He was running the War Resistors League, which is one of the best-known pacifist organizations in the world. He did some training on anti-war work. I came back to Ann Arbor. I signed up to be the contact person. That's how I met Liz, an so Liz became a really important person in my life. Liz Keough, and a really strong mentor, and she's the person who ran for County Commissioner before I did. I met her because I said that I was the Ann Arbor chapter of the Poor Sisters League [LAUGHTER]. I had no clue how you did anything, but to be the chapter. But Liz had a master's degree in community organization from [LAUGHTER] what's the school in Cleveland? Case Western Reserve. She joined forces with me, and we became very effective at anti-war efforts here. That's how you meet people. That's how you do things.
• [01:21:27] JAN BENDOR: It's funny that during that same time period, my husband, who was in graduate school in Indiana was doing the same stuff. He actually ran Eugene McCarthy's campaign for Indiana, which was an almost hopeless prospect because Indiana at the time, did not allow any politicians on the campuses of their state schools, which is totally illegal, of course. They started right off by having Eugene McCarthy drop in [LAUGHTER] to the University of Indiana. He was very much in that same position of activism. Then when he got his master's and went to Case Western for his doctorate, Ken State happened. No rest for the weary. [LAUGHTER] At any rate, we've been through a few, haven't we?
• [01:22:36] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Mmm hmm, yeah.
• [01:22:38] AMY CANTU: Well, gosh, we'd like to thank you for your service and all the work that you've done, and for talking to us, and inspiring other people.
• [01:22:46] CATHERIINE MCCLARY: This has been fun, Amy. Thank you. You've made it very easy.
• [01:22:49] ELIZABETH SMITH: Thank you so much.
• [01:22:51] CATHERINE MCCLARY: Thank you, Elizabeth. Thank you.
• [01:22:53] JAN BENDOR: Thanks to both of you. I don't know how many hundreds of hours you have to go, but good luck. [LAUGHTER]
• [01:23:03] ELIZABETH SMITH: AADL Talks To is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.