{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/qb9v11w90x/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Forsberg, Joan Bates, 2009 June 9"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/013/original/yale-blue.png?1678220072","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Preferred Citation"]},"value":{"en":["Forsberg, Joan Bates, 2009 June 9. Oral Histories Documenting Yale University Women (RU 1051). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.\n\n https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/resources/2559."]}},{"label":{"en":["Source Metadata URI"]},"value":{"en":["https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/archival_objects/801879"]}},{"label":{"en":["Publisher"]},"value":{"en":["Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library."]}},{"label":{"en":["Rights Statement"]},"value":{"en":["Access to the materials is partially restricted. See Collection Contents for details.\n\nOriginal computer files may not be accessed due to their fragility. Researchers must consult access copies."]}},{"label":{"en":["Identifier"]},"value":{"en":["mssa.ru.1051 (EAD ID)","RU 1051 (Call Number)","ru_1051_2012-a-041_forsberg_joan_bates_audiorecording.mp3 (Digital Object ID)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2009 June 9 (Creation)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Description"]},"value":{"en":["The materials are open for research. (Accessrestrict)","Joan Bates Forsberg was born on the January 15, 1928, in Chatham, New Jersey., where her father was superintendent of schools.  Her mother trained as a teacher; following her marriage she became a homemaker, though remained very active in church and community.  Forsberg went to Endicott College, MA, with the intention of pursuing a radio broadcasting career, but transferred to Drew University when she received the call to ordination.  She graduated in 1950.  She was admitted to Yale Divinity School which, at that time, capped the numbers of women students to ten per year.  She received her Master’s in Divinity in 1953, by which time she had married a fellow divinity student, Robert Forsberg.  She was ordained as a Congregationalist minister in 1954.\n\nFor nearly twenty years Forsberg’s primary role was as wife and mother, raising a family in New Haven’s inner city housing projects, where her husband was part of a group ministry.  During this time she was a social activist, involved with Connecticut Planned Parenthood and its campaign to legalize contraception in the state, which culminated in her involvement in Griswold v. State of Connecticut (1965). In 1968 Forsberg took up the challenge of procuring legal and safe abortions through her involvement with the Clergy Counseling Service for Problem Pregnancies.  This period saw the development of her feminist consciousness, which ultimately led her to end her marriage.  \n\nAfter working briefly at the Yale Divinity School’s Continuing Education Center, in 1971 Dean Colin Williamson asked her to become the Divinity School’s first Advocate for Women.  Initially the position was combined with that of Registrar because of funding issues.  In addition to carrying out the registrar’s administrative duties, she was responsible for counseling women students, directing programs for women, teaching a course on Women and Ministry, and participating in the school’s liturgical life.  Almost immediately the Divinity School’s Women’s Center was established under Forsberg’s leadership, the first of its kind at Yale University.  In 1977 she was promoted to Assistant Dean and then Associate Dean for Student Affairs and Director of Admissions, positions she held till her retirement in 1993.  She was appointed Lecturer in Practical Theology in 1974 and received a Doctor of Divinity from Berkeley Divinity School in 1978. \n\nYale Divinity School established the Joan Bates Forsberg Scholarship in 1993 in honor of her distinguished career in social and pastoral ministry. (Bioghist)","Forsberg begins her interview by recalling her early life in suburban New Jersey, and the expectations placed upon young women of her class and generation.  She speaks at length about her mother’s life and her importance as a role model, and then recalls the childhood experience which first made her aware of gender discrimination. Her call to Christian ministry and ordination is discussed, and the changing role and empowerment of women within the church is a recurring theme in the interview.  Forsberg returns a number of times to the difficulties of balancing marriage with ministry, since she experienced them in her own life as well as observing the struggles of her peers and, later, of her students. She reflects on how prevailing theological positions, specifically those of neo-orthodoxy, helped shape her identity as a woman.  An account is given of her reasons for applying to Yale Divinity School, her experience as a student there, the prevailing social and political culture (particularly in respect of the attitudes to women amongst the faculty and her male peers), and the challenge of being a member of a tiny minority within the student body.  The liminal status of women at the school is explored in her account of the history of women’s accommodation on the campus.  The 1953 Batchelder study on women at the Divinity School, and the ways that its findings related to her own experience, are addressed. Then she describes the sex discrimination which she herself suffered, especially when she married in her third year.  \n\nForsberg describes her life as the wife of a committed, radical minister and the challenge of raising a family in some of New Haven’s poorest neighborhoods.  A detailed explanation is offered of her role in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), why she became involved, and how this helped shape her growing awareness of feminist issues in the late 1960s.  She then explores the relationship between second wave feminism and the development of feminist theology. \n\nThe major portion of the interview is devoted to Forsberg’s twenty years as Advocate for Women and the work of the Yale Divinity School’s Women’s Center. She explains how the position came about and its evolution in the early 1970s, as the numbers of women students began to rise once the numbers cap on women was eliminated.  Many of the pressing gender issues of the day are recalled:  the campaign to appoint women on the faculty, the barriers to women’s ordination, sex discrimination within the churches, consciousness-raising, the reworking of the curriculum to teach and then mainstream feminist theology, and the challenge of introducing inclusive language into the Divinity School’s sacramental and liturgical life.  Forsberg recalls her relationship with Dean Colin Williamson during the early years of the Women’s Center, and the significance of Margaret Farley’s appointment as the first woman on the faculty. The issues surrounding the appointment and tenuring of the feminist theologian Letty R. Russell are also covered.  She pays tribute to the ways in which Russell brought together students, faculty and administrators to organize on gender-related issues.  Forsberg recalls the responses of male students to feminist theology and activism at the School, and comments on the ways in which fissures created by race, class and sexual orientation complicated gender issues. (Scope and Content Note)","https://preservica.library.yale.edu/explorer/explorer.html#prop:4\u0026amp;f2c953cf-e9e3-4a1c-a2f2-39f550702520 (Other Finding Aid Note)","This material was originally acquired in 2009 as a direct network transfer from Yale shared network attached storage and artificial logical AD1 forensic images were created. AD1 images were extracted in May 2020 and resulting files processed. Audio files which had been originally recorded in short sequential tracks, were merged together into a single processed master wav file with fre:ac software. (Processinfo)"]}}],"summary":{"en":["The materials are open for research.","Joan Bates Forsberg was born on the January 15, 1928, in Chatham, New Jersey., where her father was superintendent of schools.  Her mother trained as a teacher; following her marriage she became a homemaker, though remained very active in church and community.  Forsberg went to Endicott College, MA, with the intention of pursuing a radio broadcasting career, but transferred to Drew University when she received the call to ordination.  She graduated in 1950.  She was admitted to Yale Divinity School which, at that time, capped the numbers of women students to ten per year.  She received her Master’s in Divinity in 1953, by which time she had married a fellow divinity student, Robert Forsberg.  She was ordained as a Congregationalist minister in 1954.\n\nFor nearly twenty years Forsberg’s primary role was as wife and mother, raising a family in New Haven’s inner city housing projects, where her husband was part of a group ministry.  During this time she was a social activist, involved with Connecticut Planned Parenthood and its campaign to legalize contraception in the state, which culminated in her involvement in Griswold v. State of Connecticut (1965). In 1968 Forsberg took up the challenge of procuring legal and safe abortions through her involvement with the Clergy Counseling Service for Problem Pregnancies.  This period saw the development of her feminist consciousness, which ultimately led her to end her marriage.  \n\nAfter working briefly at the Yale Divinity School’s Continuing Education Center, in 1971 Dean Colin Williamson asked her to become the Divinity School’s first Advocate for Women.  Initially the position was combined with that of Registrar because of funding issues.  In addition to carrying out the registrar’s administrative duties, she was responsible for counseling women students, directing programs for women, teaching a course on Women and Ministry, and participating in the school’s liturgical life.  Almost immediately the Divinity School’s Women’s Center was established under Forsberg’s leadership, the first of its kind at Yale University.  In 1977 she was promoted to Assistant Dean and then Associate Dean for Student Affairs and Director of Admissions, positions she held till her retirement in 1993.  She was appointed Lecturer in Practical Theology in 1974 and received a Doctor of Divinity from Berkeley Divinity School in 1978. \n\nYale Divinity School established the Joan Bates Forsberg Scholarship in 1993 in honor of her distinguished career in social and pastoral ministry.","Forsberg begins her interview by recalling her early life in suburban New Jersey, and the expectations placed upon young women of her class and generation.  She speaks at length about her mother’s life and her importance as a role model, and then recalls the childhood experience which first made her aware of gender discrimination. Her call to Christian ministry and ordination is discussed, and the changing role and empowerment of women within the church is a recurring theme in the interview.  Forsberg returns a number of times to the difficulties of balancing marriage with ministry, since she experienced them in her own life as well as observing the struggles of her peers and, later, of her students. She reflects on how prevailing theological positions, specifically those of neo-orthodoxy, helped shape her identity as a woman.  An account is given of her reasons for applying to Yale Divinity School, her experience as a student there, the prevailing social and political culture (particularly in respect of the attitudes to women amongst the faculty and her male peers), and the challenge of being a member of a tiny minority within the student body.  The liminal status of women at the school is explored in her account of the history of women’s accommodation on the campus.  The 1953 Batchelder study on women at the Divinity School, and the ways that its findings related to her own experience, are addressed. Then she describes the sex discrimination which she herself suffered, especially when she married in her third year.  \n\nForsberg describes her life as the wife of a committed, radical minister and the challenge of raising a family in some of New Haven’s poorest neighborhoods.  A detailed explanation is offered of her role in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), why she became involved, and how this helped shape her growing awareness of feminist issues in the late 1960s.  She then explores the relationship between second wave feminism and the development of feminist theology. \n\nThe major portion of the interview is devoted to Forsberg’s twenty years as Advocate for Women and the work of the Yale Divinity School’s Women’s Center. She explains how the position came about and its evolution in the early 1970s, as the numbers of women students began to rise once the numbers cap on women was eliminated.  Many of the pressing gender issues of the day are recalled:  the campaign to appoint women on the faculty, the barriers to women’s ordination, sex discrimination within the churches, consciousness-raising, the reworking of the curriculum to teach and then mainstream feminist theology, and the challenge of introducing inclusive language into the Divinity School’s sacramental and liturgical life.  Forsberg recalls her relationship with Dean Colin Williamson during the early years of the Women’s Center, and the significance of Margaret Farley’s appointment as the first woman on the faculty. The issues surrounding the appointment and tenuring of the feminist theologian Letty R. Russell are also covered.  She pays tribute to the ways in which Russell brought together students, faculty and administrators to organize on gender-related issues.  Forsberg recalls the responses of male students to feminist theology and activism at the School, and comments on the ways in which fissures created by race, class and sexual orientation complicated gender issues.","https://preservica.library.yale.edu/explorer/explorer.html#prop:4\u0026f2c953cf-e9e3-4a1c-a2f2-39f550702520","This material was originally acquired in 2009 as a direct network transfer from Yale shared network attached storage and artificial logical AD1 forensic images were created. AD1 images were extracted in May 2020 and resulting files processed. Audio files which had been originally recorded in short sequential tracks, were merged together into a single processed master wav file with fre:ac software."]},"requiredStatement":{"label":{"en":["Attribution"]},"value":{"en":["Access to the materials is partially restricted. See Collection Contents for details.\n\nOriginal computer files may not be accessed due to their fragility. Researchers must consult access copies."]}},"provider":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/aboutus","type":"Agent","label":{"en":["Manuscripts and Archives Yale University Library"]},"homepage":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/","type":"Text","label":{"en":["Manuscripts and Archives Yale University Library"]},"format":"text/html"}],"logo":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/013/original/yale-blue.png?1678220072","type":"Image"}]}],"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/public/images/audio-default.png","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - open-uri20210827-32762-1djmsb9.mpga"]},"duration":14381.87102,"width":640,"height":40,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/public/images/audio-default.png","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-yalemssa.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/122/266/original/open-uri20210827-32762-1djmsb9.mpga?1630069592","type":"Audio","format":"audio/mpeg","duration":14381.87102,"width":640,"height":40},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["ru_1051_2012-a-041_forsberg_joan_bates_edited_transcript [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JOAN FOSBERG:\tI realize I tend to get verbose and more expansive as I talk.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat's good.  That's really good.  Because not a lot of people are necessary like that and I like people just to talk.  \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThe trick is to keep you on topic.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell, if you go right off topic, I'll bring you back, don't worry.  But sometimes when you go off into tangents, something interesting emerges, so I'm not too hung up on all of that.  I don't stay to the script, put it that way.  It is June the 9th and I'm here with Joan Bates Forsberg, formerly of the Divinity School at Yale, to do an interview for Yale Women's Oral History Project at her home in California.  And I've forgotten-- yes, it's 630 [Olden?] Road in Claremont, California.  Okay, Joan, I think that should be all right because you got a slightly louder voice than I have, so it should be fine.  If I look at it from time to time it's not because I'm not interested in what you say, it's just I want to make sure it's recording.  \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tGetting picked up.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  I'd like to start right at the beginning and go back to your own family and your background.  I think it's really helpful if anybody who is reading the interview gets a sense of where this Yale woman came from.  And the sort of attitudes and expectations of her background in terms of women's education, her own dreams of what she wanted to be when she grew up.  And given your age, it would be really interesting, I think, because you did come of age at the end of World War II, and that was a very, very crucial time, I think, in the development of modern women.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tMy high school years-- the Second World War, for America, started my freshman year and ended just as I graduated.  So my high school years were encapsulated.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo where were you born and grew up?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI was born in New Jersey.  Into a family of educators.  My father was a school superintendent in the town where we lived.  My mother had been a teacher there and have given up teaching there when she married my dad.  I had one older sister, a year and a half older.  It was a suburban town in northern New Jersey.  It was sort of a community town for New York City and Newark.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhich town was it?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tChatham.  It was then a very little town.  And it related to Newark, to New York City.  In fact, most of the men in town, in the morning, go on the 7:29 train and left, commuted out of town, and they used to joke that the only men left in Chatham, all day long on a weekday, were the clergy and the schoolteachers.  Because everybody else commuted and then they don't come back until 6:17 at night.  But my dad was there and we'd walk to and from school both ways each day, my sister and I, my dad.  So that was-- I like that, growing up there.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou said your mother was an educator as well, but did she work then, when you were growing up?  No, when I was growing up, she didn't work at all from when she-- she was active in things, she had been, she had trained some for the theater, so she was in the Chatham community players, and I remember seeing her on stage, and hearing her practice her lines in the house for various plays, and I was always kind of awestruck by this presence on stage that was my mother ordinarily, but who was this wonderful woman on stage.  And she was very active in the church and the Sunday school and she ran, she was in charge, she was the Sunday school superintendent, and she always did the worship services at the beginning of the Sunday school session, which is really, I realized years later, is where I learned about presence in leading worship.  It didn't have anything to do with male clergy.  I learned it from watching my mother stand there very quietly.  The whole room would get quiet.  And without any notes, she would lead all of these 100-and-some squirmy kids who would suddenly be quiet, through the service and tell whatever the story was for that hour of that scripture, or whatever.  And her poise and her sense of presence, I just took for granted.  Years, years, and years later, when women in ministry coming into the ordained ministry, used to say, \"I don't have any role models.  I've only ever seen men.  I've never seen a woman in the ministry.  I don't have any role models.\"  \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=0.0,300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/2","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And I suddenly realized, I had a role model from childhood on.  And I'm so thankful that I recognized that in time to be able to say to her on every Mother's day and every birthday, \"Thank you for doing that for me.\"  That was a gift to me for my later professional life that I somehow took into myself.  How you do that.  Or what it is to be present to be people in that kind of role.  And what a great gift that was from her to me without our ever realizing it at the time.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you grow up with the expectation then that you would go to college and get married and have children and become a suburban wife like her?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tOh, yes.  I think that my parents always expected that my sister and I would both go to college.  I remember one -- this is kind of poignant -- memory I have.  My dad was a graduate of Colgate University, and loved Colgate, and used to talk about the sports seasons and things.  My mother went to Barnard and did her master's also at Barnard.  And my dad, as well.  Anyway, one Sunday around the dining room table, I don't know what age I was, I was little, anyway.  And they were talking about colleges and where we'd-- and I remember saying, \"And when I grow up, will I go to Colgate?\"  And everybody laughed and laughed, and I felt so humiliated.  I didn't know it was a college for boys.  And then they sort of explained to me, \"No, no, girls don't go to Colgate.\"  My first experience, I think, of being excluded in the academic world.  That they laughed when I asked that.  And they weren't being unkind, it's just that nobody thought about Colgate.  It is now co-ed, of course.  But nobody thought about that at the time.  But the expectation was, I think I also expected eventually to be married.  That wasn't my primary goal in life.  Early on, I wanted to go into radio broadcasting.  There again, the show business thing from my mother for some reason.  And so I started off college majoring in that.  And experienced a call to the ministry, changed schools, and went to Drew University and majored in Bible and minored in philosophy at that point.  And then was determined to go into the ministry.  So, marriage was sort of off to one side.  Except, it was the era when most girls expected to have a ring on their finger at graduation.  Somehow my focus on, \"I'm going to go into the ministry,\" kept me from feeling that I was missing something by not having a ring on my finger at graduation.  But, I think I expected, eventually to marry and hadn't figured out how that would work.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you go to a co-ed college?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tDrew was co-ed, yeah.  In fact, Drew University was in the town next to Chatham.  Had been a boy's college.  It started with a theological-- it's a Methodist school.  It had started with a theological seminary.  Added Brother's College, named for two brothers who gave the money for it.  And it was a boy's college until part-way through the Second World War, when they were very short of men.  Suddenly it became co-ed.  And I was one of the early, quote \"sisters,\" of Brother's College.  And I commuted from home at that point for those couple of years of college.  And then applied to Yale Divinity School.  In all innocence, I had asked--\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou said you got the call to the ministry when you were at college. \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI was just wondering what you were like as a teenager.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tProbably boring.  Musical.  Very musical.  I played violin in the orchestra at school.  I started violin lessons in second grade, earlier than most kids do.  And so I was always a little ahead of all of the other kids, and I so I was always concert mistress in the elementary school orchestra and the junior high, and the high school orchestra.  Anyway, but, by the time I got to junior high and high, I wanted to play in the marching band.  You don't play a violin in the marching band.  So, I took up saxophone, so that I could play in the concert band.  Sang in the choirs.  Played violin in the New Jersey all-state orchestra and sang in the New Jersey all-state choir.  Music was important for me.  Not into sports at all at that point.  Music-- do you know what's interesting?  At this stage, I don't have lots of memories of high school.  I sort of-- I mean I studied well, I was a good student.  If you're father's the superintendent of schools you better, you know-- all of the teachers knew him, he had hired most of them.  So, A) you couldn't complain about the teachers at home over the dinner table, no way.  But I think studying and--\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=300.0,600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/3","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER:\tWere you ever aware of women teachers who might be encouraging you to do certain things?  Or was it difficult to be a brainy girl?  A smart girl at high school?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI don't remember that it was.  I don't remember that it was.  Lots of people in that school were good students and went to college.  It was kind of an expectation in that sort of community.  So you weren't looked down on for being no school.  The real problem was having a father in that position that at Halloween time -- I still remember at Halloween, we used to go out, and one year a bunch of friends say, \"No, no, you can't come with us.  We can't take--\"  And I thought, \"What?\"  \"Well, if we get caught, your father--\" and da, da, da, da.  It was like, oh, that's too bad.  But, I remember, I think a lot of my understanding of being a woman person in the world, a female in the world, was watching my mother, who had some skills and artistic gifts, and used those well and freely.  Who had an education.  She had taught at Northfield School for Girls for a couple of years, and loved Northfield, which is a preparatory school in Massachusetts.  Very fine one.  She'd always hoped if she had daughters they'd go to Northfield.  But if you marry a public school superintendent, you don't send your daughters to private schools.  So there you go.  But teaching, education work, important.  Church was important.  She at one point in her young life wanted to be a missionary.  And her parents didn't want her going that far away.  So she didn't become a missionary.  But a lot of her stories in the Sunday school lesson things that she did were about missionaries and the whatever sacrifices they made and the work they did, so church was always important.  And in marriage, what I say, which later played out in my life, I saw a mother who loved, loved teaching, and gave it up because it would interfere with her husband's position.  I saw a mother who was devoted to being very supportive of him and making sure things went well for him.  He had been married earlier, and his first wife had left him and taken their child.  And he was deeply, deeply hurt.  And to the extent that in my entire life, and my sister's entire life, he never ever mentioned the first marriage, the divorce, the other child.  Never.  It was such a hurt.  So deep.  And so my mother coming in and marrying him was deeply committed to taking care of him and protecting him, and you take care of the man.  You don't hurt him.  Which had a profound effect on how I was as a married woman later on.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat about your sister?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tShe was a year and a half older.  She was very pretty.  She was very musical.  She was athletic.  She was a cheerleader.  She did well in school.  And we were close.  It was very nice, that I don't remember a lot of rivalry or whatever.  And we had-- we each had a close friend who lived in the blocks around, and so the four of us would do things together.  My family had a two-car garage, but when neither of the cars were there, you could clear out the stuff on the floor, and the four of us roller-skated, and I remember the four of us roller-skating like mad.  And thinking about performing at roller-skates, whatever.  We did a lot of things together that way.  So, I remember that as being a quite placid, happy, childhood.  Well-loved.  Really high expectations from the parents.  A dad who was rather more reserved and didn't say a lot about what he felt.  Your mother used to say, \"Oh, your father is so proud of you.\"  He never quite said that to us.  Well, a lot of dads are like that.  And my mother being more demonstrative and emotional.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo, you went off to college.  When you went off to college, did you have any ideas at all, any dreams about what you wanted to be?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThe first year, it focused somehow on radio performance, and I don't know what-- I didn't know how to think about that.  \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=600.0,900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/4","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I didn't have any exact models for that.  I have yet to understand why that was such a powerful drawing card for me for a number of years.  I mean, it was for a number of years, and before I could even say it to the high school guidance counselor, who said to me, \"Have you told your parents about that?\"  Well, \"No, no, no.  That doesn't sound like something possible.\"  And it was interesting because that first college I went to in Massachusetts, Endicott, was at that time, a girl's, a two-year women's college.  Quote, \"a junior college.\"  Which, in my father's educational world, was looked down on.  And it was extraordinary to me, that once we found a school that had a major in radio broadcasting, that my father was all for supporting me to do that, if that was what I wanted.  And my mother said, \"You don't know how much teasing he has taken from his academic colleagues.  His school friends about that.\"   But he never said that to me.  He was right there for me and proud of me, and (inaudible).  I don't know what I would have done had the call of ministry to come.  I would have gone on to a four-year school and finished.  I'm sure I would have gotten my four-year degree.  But where I would have headed or how that would have worked-- Endicott, where I went, had an internship program for all of the people.  They had many, many majors in various fields, and so the two years that I was there, January was the intern month, and I went into NBC, and they had a placement for me, and I did odd sort of things here and there.  But I had the NBC identification badge.  I commuted in on the train.  And that was kind of a [heady?] and exciting--\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut ultimately it wasn't what you-\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tBut ultimately, once at that you youth conference, where I was a staff person, and something all came together at a closing service where they all talked about ministry, and whether anyone considered it, and I had this very clear, distinct, unambiguous feeling, that that was a possibility and something that I could do and should do.  And it almost came as a question from whatever, whoever was fleeting through, and inside myself, it was this loud, clear, unambiguous yes, and exhilaration about that.  And never looked back.  Never doubted it.  Never quibbled about that.  Never had any regrets.  Never anything that was-- it was clear and solid and remained that way for all these many years.  Even though there weren't many women going into the ministry in those days.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell, I was going to say, there weren't many ordained ministers around that were female.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tWhat I was lucky about, and I hear providence, whatever, the year I went away to college, my whole church called a woman from Union Seminary in New York to be the youth minister.  So, she was working at the church.  I was in Massachusetts, but I met her when I came home on vacations, and we talked about, she was headed for Parish Ministry.  Peg Reynolds, her name was.  She had a different name then, but she married a fellow student named Reynolds, so Peg Reynolds.  So, she was at that church, and one summer vacation, she took me into Union Seminary, to visit the seminary to see what it was like.  We talked about the ministry, and whatnot.  And she gradated, was ordained, (inaudible) Parish Ministry.  Stayed at Parish Ministry in New Jersey and one lovely follow-up was when I was ordained in my home church, in Chatham, New Jersey, in January of 1954, Peg Reynolds was the association minister and layed hands on my head in my ordination, and so the first woman minister I ever knew was there at my ordination.  And so for me, it wasn't how strange, it was, \"Okay, women do this.\"  The final, lovely touch about Peg Reynolds and me and this history in ministry together, was that she and her husband retired to Pilgrim Place, and when I came here to live in 1994, Peg and Jack Reynolds were here and we had time to share together.  And I can remember on the 50th anniversary of my ordination, I was thinking about that and I wrote her a note, saying \"50 years ago, today, at this very moment, we were together in [Standing?] Congregational Church, in New Jersey.  You were laying hands on my head.\"  And I wrote a note to her about what she had meant to me and ministry, and it was just lovely to be able to do that on a 50th anniversary.  Not many see a completion of the circle in that way.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat was your parents' response when you said that you wanted to go into the ministry?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tWell, they were approving.  And they also laughed, because when I was in eighth grade, and everybody else was getting ready to join the church,\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=900.0,1200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/5","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"good old independent Joan, I said, \"No, I don't want to be in the confirmation class.  I don't want to join the church.\"  And I don't remember what I was into, some sort of, \"No, I don't want to\" thing.  Trying to be an adult, finally, and take responsibility.  Because we always had to go to church when we were little.  My dad was a church treasurer.  And then he was an officer.  And we always had, the little bass girls, had to sit way up front and be very good all through church.  And then I used to say, \"Church is boring.  The only good thing about it is the choir.  If I ever go to church when I grow up, I'm going to be in the choir.\"  (laughter)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t(laughter)\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tAnd I was so (inaudible) about that, and so when it was time, and everybody else was going to confirmation class, joined the church, and I said, \"No, I don't want to do that.\"  I don't want to be a part of the church.  And my mother, very calmly and wisely, said, \"Well, if you don't want to be part of the church right now, I think probably the church doesn't want you right now either.\"  So that had all gone on in eighth grade.  So, sure, I come home from this summer conference after my first year at college and I say, \"I have had a call to the ministry.  I'm going into the Christian ministry.\"  Well, of course, my mother who had thought missionaries were wonderful and the church, was enthusiastic, and my dad, also.  My dad's dad was a minister-- was a Baptist minister.  I never knew him.  He died before I was born.  Deep in my heart, I think my grandfather, Bates, prayed me into the ministry from the other side, wherever, you know.  And so, ministry and church was very important to my dad.  And so they were very supportive.  Very encouraging.  But they did chuckle, since obviously, I hadn't wanted anything to do with the church at one point in my life.  And what a nice turn-around.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd why did you choose-- why did you apply to Yale Divinity School?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tWell, one summer, maybe the same one when I had the call, or maybe the next one when I was working, I asked some of the administrators, \"Okay, what do you do if you're going to seminary?  How do you decide where do you go?\"  One of them said, if you're going into Parish Ministry, go to Union Seminary in New York.  If you're going into Christian education, go to Hartford seminary at Hartford, CT.  If you're going into campus ministry, which was what I was talking about, I wanted to work with young people.  If your call is to campus ministry, go to Yale Divinity School.  They've got the best person in Clarence [Shed?] there, whatever.  And so since Drew had a seminary, but it was right next to my hometown, I had been there so long, you know, \"I'm out of here.\"  So, I never thought of applying to Drew.  And only applied to Yale.  Ever-optimistic, hopeful, sent it off, learned a month or so later from someone who had just recently come from Yale, that they only took ten women a year, and don't be disappointed, you may not get in.  And it was like (yikes sound).\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThere was a quote of a what?  Ten percent?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tTen percent.  When the vote came in the Yale faculty in, I think it was 1932, finally to admit women as students in to the divinity school, it said in the vote, ten percent of the student body may be women.  And they took routinely 100 students a year.  And so, they took ten women a year.  That never changed until 1957.  So we came in under the quote system.  Fortunately, I made it in the quota and got in school.  But that was the only seminary, divinity school, I applied to.  And I was very happy.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat was the application procedure?  Can you recall?  You said there was a ten percent quota on women.  Were there different criteria for the women?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI don't know.  I remember filling out the form.  I remember getting people to write references.  I don't remember anything in there about, \"Beware.\"  Or I don't remember any questions that would have alerted me to a difference.  I think it was probably the same application form.  I got aware of other things once I got there, of course.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDo you think if you'd known about the ten percent quota, that you might not have applied?  \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tNo, I think I would have applied, and I would have prayed harder. (laughter)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t(laughter)\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI remember when the response came back and I stood there with my envelope in my hand, I was praying to be able to deal with whatever was inside there.  But secretly, \"Please.\"\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid it even cross your mind at that point, that maybe there was something not quite just about that?  Did you just accept?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tJust accepted.  Never-- and through the entire three years, once I got there, and the three years as a student, it never crossed my mind to be critical of Yale because of that, to be resentful.  Some of us who were students there at same time, it never occurred to us to say, \"Why aren't there women teaching here?  What is this?  We were so grateful\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=1200.0,1500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/6","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"to be in there.  So glad to be accepted.  And it wasn't a time when women raised-- when some women raised-- when I raised questions.  Now, obviously, there must have been other women around doing that.  But, I don't think--\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI think in 1950 there probably weren't many.  Yeah.  But if your (inaudible) hadn't landed on the sea.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThis is true.  This is true.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  Was it-- I'm just trying to follow through a bit more.  Was it ever suggested to you, however obliquely, that you were taking a spot that might rightfully should have gone to a man.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tAhh, yes.  And it was more than obliquely.  And it came, oh dear, this is poignant.  The first week we all arrived, and the women were all housed at 301 Prospect Street, which is off the campus.  Couldn't live on the quad with the men.  That would-- that was sort of a no-no.  But, anyway, so we had this very nice house at 301.  And during the first week, the dean came down to greet the new women students--\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd which dean was that?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tListon Pope.  Wonderful man whom we dearly loved.  And he was Southern.  He was charming.  He was gracious.  And fine teacher.  He was rather shy of a guy.  But, anyway, he came down to greet the new women students.  And in talking with us in the front (inaudible) room, in Porter Hall-- not Porter Hall, at 301, sorry.  301 Prospect.  He said, \"Now, we're so glad you're here.  We're very glad you're here.  We want you to be--,\"  I presume he said, \"We want you to be successful.\"  He said, \"It was very hard to decide whom to let in.  You know, we only took ten women, and it was very hard to make that decision.\"  And so he said, \"We finally took all of the pictures of all of the applicants, and lined them all up, and looked to see which ten we thought would complete the course.\"  And we didn't know what response to give to that.  It was kind of an embarrassed laugh.  But the implication was that if you weren't gorgeous, then maybe you'd stay in school long enough to complete the task.  Because he went on to talk about how important it was, since we'd been admitted, and since they'd kept out all of these men from getting their Yale degree, that it was very important that we be serious about our studies, and that we stay and complete and our degree.  It was really like, \"You're here to be a student, not to look around at all these men.\"  And so, that was all in that context.  So, the implication was, we picked the ones who looked like they wouldn't get married late.  We didn't know enough to react.  We didn't know how to react.  And then, I still didn't know how to react, because I was very fond of Liston Pope, and he was a very supportive leader when Bob and I went in the inner-city (inaudible).  He was very supportive of that, in so many ways.  I think it was the way that many men didn’t know how to deal with questions of women and attractiveness, and women and men competing for places.  But it was very clear, and I remember his saying it, that, \"It's very important.  We've kept all of these men out of here to let you in.\"  So the obligation was, \"You will stay.\"  And it was frowned upon if you got married.  Of the ten women who came in in my class, one got engaged by March and dropped out in April so that she could marry the fellow who was graduating that year.  He was two years ahead.  That was sort of frowned on, needless to say.  For me, it played out in that I was granted a scholarship my first year.  I was granted the scholarship my second year.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWere these needs-based scholarships or academic scholarships?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI don't even remember.  I just remember applying and getting a scholarship, and that made a big difference to me.  So, I got through my two years, got married the end of my second year. \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas Bob a student?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tBob was a student.  He was a year ahead of me.  And so we engaged the end of my first year.  And one of the faculty did try to talk me out of marrying him, because Bob was such an extreme radical and had already moved off campus down to live with the poor, whatever.  So he said, \"You don't want to marry him.  He's too radical.\"  But that just confirmed it all the more, of course.  The dean didn't say I shouldn't marry, but this was somebody else.  So I went through my second year, got married in June.  Came back from our honeymoon.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd you didn't drop out?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tAnd I didn't drop out.  No, no, I was going to finish my third year.  Came home, opened the mail, and there was a little enveloped from Yale University and opened it up and it said,\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=1500.0,1800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/7","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\"We are sorry to inform you that we will be unable to grant your scholarship for the third year.\"  I don't remember it saying, \"Because you're married.\"  But I made the connection.  And other women since have said the same thing have happened to them.  When they got married, they lost their scholarship.  Because, maybe you wouldn't finish.  And besides, the man should support you.  The man in my course, having gone to live with the poor and given away almost everything he owned, wasn't.  But what he did-- he was a year ahead of me, he dropped out of school.  He went to work in Armstrong Rubber Company, building tires.  Partly to earn the money so that we could both finish school, and partly to meet some of the men in the neighborhood that he lived in and worked in the inner-city.  And then he came back to school in September, and we graduated together.  But it was that cutting of the scholarship because I got married which was another indication that this was not such a cool thing in the eyes of the faculty.  It was very important to them to get those men through school and graduated.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt sounds to me that there was a, maybe a sort of, ambivalence isn't the right word or not, but on one hand, you girls, because you were privileged, you were particularly privileged to get in there, because you were women.  And for that you had to be really serious about what you were doing.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tMhm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut, on the other hand, you were all, maybe not quite so serious because you were all going to get married.  And there wasn't-- so it sounds to me that there was this sort of ambivalence there.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThat's right.  I think they were two-headed about it.  And in fact, one person, I can't think-- I remember clearly the quote and I can't think when I heard it or where, but the whole thing had to do with, the problem with Yale Divinity School is the women, quote, \"Don't do anything with their Yale degree, they just get married and raise children.\"  Unquote.  And I thought, so raising children isn't a good thing to do?  And then your degree doesn't help.  But, \"the important thing was you don't do anything with your Yale degree and that's bad.\"  So, those of us who, quote, \"ended up doing something with their Yale degrees,\" felt sort of glad we had made them happy doing it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd yet, looking the records, it's quote obvious, that by the end of the third year, that all of the men were very anxious to get married by that time because, of course-- tell me about that.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tOh, my word.  At 301, starting in March, the phone would start ringing off the wall.  And men students, third-year students, who had never looked at some of these women, all of the time they were at school, were suddenly calling up to date people.  The reason, we finally figured out, that they were worried about getting a call to a church if they didn't have the requisite attractive wife who could run the mimeograph machine, play the piano, and teach Sunday school, you know.  They needed a wife, they thought, to get a call to a Parish.  And so, here was the, what did they call it, \"third-year panic.\"  And the phone rang.  And indeed, women would get engaged and get married, and away they went.  So the men were intent on getting married and some of the women were happy to get married.  And I was very happy to find Bob.  To find somebody with similar ideals and hopes, and whatever.  And so I gave up the idea of campus ministry because, if I were to marry, it was clear we were going to be in the inner-city.  And although he used to tease me later and say, \"Well, I kept you right by the Yale campus all these years, because the inner-city where we were was just six blocks from part of Yale.\"  So, but, it was-- so my goal when I got to divinity school wasn't to get married, but I was very happy to be led to Bob and have that work out.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat were the-- you said earlier on that the women lived at 301 Prospect, off campus.  Which, I assume, that means then, that all of the men lived on the quad.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tFor the most part, they all lived-- odd-balls like Bob who decided it was too ritzy on the quad got permission to move off-campus.  And married-- there were married men students and in those days the married students at Yale all lived in those Quonset huts down on Whitney Avenue, and out by the Yale Bowl.  And there were piles of them in the Quonset huts, the married students.  But the single students, for the most part, were on the quad.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  Was it-- so what was the social life like since you were in different, separated--\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=1800.0,2100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/8","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JOAN FOSBERG:\tLocations?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  I just wonder what the social life was like?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tWell, fellows kept drifting down to 301, and meeting-- in fact, Sunday mornings, because we had a kitchen in this house.  There were no kitchens and no meals on Sunday at the divinity school.  The dining hall didn't operate on Sunday.  So, there were a number of men who used to like to come for breakfast on their way to go to wherever they were working, at their churches.  And that was kind of fun.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you have anything to do at all with students from other parts of the Yale campus?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI don't--\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI just wondered if you formed any kind of impression of what Yale as an institution was like in the early 50's.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI was pretty oblivious to that.  I did know that a number of the men students dated students at the nursing school.  And in true, whatever it is, about this, somehow they were preferable to divinity school women.  If women had gotten into divinity school, they couldn't be very-- they couldn't be all that sharp.  They must be-- so some of them dated women, not there, at another school.  Let's see.  There were various other (inaudible).  Bob and I, you saw each other in class, and in organizations, and things at school.  And the dining hall, the refectory, was three meals a day.  So there was a lot of socializing there.  Bob and I kind of connected out at a professor's house, Professor Calhoun lived down Bethany.  A big, large property.  And he had, not a farm, really, but a huge, huge garden with all kinds of fruit plants and things.  And he was committed to pacifism, whatever.  And he put a notice on the bulletin board (inaudible) my first year.  My first week or couple of weeks of school.  It said, \"Anyone who would like to is invited to come out and plant Strawberry plants at Professor Calhoun's house and there will be a meal\" and whatever is afterwards.  \"And the money that you would be paid, will go to the FOR, the Fellowship for Reconciliation Toward Peace.\"  This, of course, not too long after the Second World War.  So, I thought, \"Ooh, that's nice.  That sounds like fun.\"  And I and my mother had been a charter member of the FOR, so okay.  So I signed up my name.  And a few hours later I came by the bulletin board and I look and right under my name it says \"Bob Forsberg.\"  And then, \"Hmm.  Oh, that's nice.\"  And then later he called, and he said, \"I see you're going to be planting at Professor Calhoun's that day.  Would you like, after the day is over, would you like to come back to 37 Spruce Street, where the rest of the group ministry and I live, and,\" I don't know, for supper or something or other.  And, \"Oh, that would be nice.\" (laughter)  So people met and connected in various activities.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat was it like to be a minority, maybe of one or two, in a class.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tUgh.  Hard for me.  I'm so shy.  It was even hard to walk in the dining room.  I remember the whole first semester, I never walked into that refectory by myself.  I always find and went with another women from 301.  I was-- I mean, we were so outnumbered.  And they all knew our names.  It didn't take them long to learn ten new names that came in.  It's a little harder to learn all of those guys' names.  And they were charming and very nice guys, but I was a little shy, so I always wanted another woman student with me when I went into the refectory.  I think I was much more quiet in some classes where, if I might have been one or two.  Summer classes, everybody pretty much had to take church history and [Roland Baton?] had a wonderful church history class in the auditorium.  And he seated us alphabetically.  And so, Bates, there I was in the front row.  And I couldn't see everybody behind me, so that was fine.  I think there were women students there who weren't bothered by that at all.  Who were pretty feisty and outgoing.  And knew that they were equal.  I mean, to them it didn't bother them.  I was a little more hesitant about that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDo you think it depended on maybe absorbing an attitude from whoever was doing the teaching up to your class that maybe some faculty were more in favor of educating women in the divinity school than others?  Was that ever an issue, do you think?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI don't remember that with anyone that I studied with.  I'm trying to think with.  [Roland Baton?] surely not (inaudible).  \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=2100.0,2400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/9","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I don't remember feeling anything from the faculty in terms of less expectation, or less than approval or appreciation of having us there.  It was all in me.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd what about the men who were your peers?  Were they, whether it was said in fun or not, did they ever imply that, \"Oh, you just came here to get (inaudible).\"\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tEvery now and again you would hear that.  You know, \"Oh, you just came here to get married.\"  They would teasingly say it.  And I would say, \"No, no, I came here to get my degree just the way you did.\"  And I was pretty focused on that.  It was never mean from them.  But, I don't remember it being a tense about women and men there.  Maybe because they so outnumbered us.  They could afford to be charming and gracious and pleasant and all, I don't know.  And there were lots of marriages among students eventually.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  Did you notice a change in anybody's attitude when you got married?  Between your second and third years?  \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI don't remember that.  I don't remember that happening.  We--\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOther people have reported to me in other places in Yale that when they got married then there was a sense that they were less serious.  That their focus has changed.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tNo.  No.  And I may have been-- it's interesting, because Bob was seen as such a radical, by everybody, and it was clear, his lifestyle and his commitment to social justice and to the poor, and his living it out and his making statements and whatever and really living out what he said.  He was seen (inaudible).  And we, once we were married, first lived in the tenement where we was.  And we got fired out of that because the landlord didn't like his having a youth group of young people there on Sunday night and bounced us out.  Which made me very happy.  It was a terrible, terrible building, with holes in the floor, and rats in the background, and all of that sort of thing.  So, we moved then, to low-income public housing over on Grand Avenue, to the Farm Court.  And rode our bikes up to school.  I may have avoided whatever people thought.  They may have just thought I was weird to marry the local prophet, or whatever, or maybe they thought I was serious because I did?  But I never picked up any negative or down-putting attitudes from men at that point.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhat was it like to kind of, on a daily basis, to be moving between two worlds which were so utterly different?  Yale and--\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t--and then going back to the projects.  It was like, \"Hmm.\"  I don't know.  I may have just been so busy and so in love and so whatever that I didn't reflect about it very much.  It was funny where we lived on Grand Avenue, it was a heavily Italian section of New Haven at that point.  Of course, a lot of (inaudible), but particularly, and we'd ride our bikes.  And, Bob, as part of the group ministry and the Parish, in order to be identified as clergy, not as a bill collector or landlord or something, they would wear a clerical collar and a Sear's work shirt.  And very often, he would be wearing that as we'd ride down Grand Avenue on our bikes on the way to school, and he might have his clerical collar.  And people-- we'd pass, and people would say, \"Good morning, Father.\"  And then they didn't know what to do with me.  (inaudible)  They weren't quite sure if he was really a Catholic priest and living with that woman, or what.  So, the neighborhood was one thing.  School was all right, that was different.  And I remember doing, well, the year I was engaged and just before I got married, I was taking Christian ethics with Richard [Neeber?] and my term paper was on the Christian ethics of wealth and poverty.  So, that came up.  The fact of being up against the poverty situation.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOne of the things that I wondered about was, you say Bob was very radical, but quite clear you were both socially engaged and I suspect many of your peers were, also socially engaged.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI'm just wondering what the culture of the divinity school was like generally.  And whether it was different from the culture in the colleges?  \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tAhh.  Interesting question.  Because I don't know what it was like downtown in the colleges.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  It's just that I remember reading somewhere and for the life of me I can't remember where it was, but I read somewhere, whether it was something that you had written or somebody else had written, that in the 50's\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=2400.0,2700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/10","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"people said of the divinity school, that you couldn't be a Republican and a Christian.  \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tRight.  (laughter)  Yeah, that was when I entered the women's dorm the very first time.  And you probably read that, because that was one of my striking first-week memories of the Yale Divinity School.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo it was you, yeah.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tAnd I came out of a suburban Republican town.  I mean, my parents were Republican.  The one time my parents didn't vote Republican was when they voted for Norman Thomas because my mother had known him as she was growing up in New York City.  He was at Union Seminary.  He ultimately went into politics, but he had been a seminary student.  Came down and worked at the church where she was a teenager.  And so she knew Norman Thomas and trusted him and so when he ran as a Socialist for President, she and my father always voted for Norman Thomas.  And he remembered her.  He would come out some place in Jersey where they'd go and he'd greet her and remember her from growing up.  But other than, strict Republican, understand.  So I get to New Haven, I get to Yale.  And I'm coming in the front door with my suitcases and I was starting up to the second floor and on the second floor I hear this loud conversation with one woman saying to a second-year woman, saying, \"But you can't be a Republican and be a Christian!\"  And I thought, \"Oh my goodness.  What have I gotten into?\"  And it was interesting.  The person she was talking to came from Wellesley, Massachusetts, which is definitely Republican.  So there was a very acute sense about social issues and concerns at the divinity school.  Two of the faculty while I was there ran for the city council in New Haven, were alderman.  Bill Neil and-- oh, his name will come to me.  But, anyway.  So, they were sort of involved in politics and Bill Neil, who was a professor of preaching -- he was a lawyer, actually -- but he was a professor of preaching and speech, whatever.  And some others, there was a group of students anyway who did a radio program, \"Religion at the News Desk,\" which dealt with political issues in the country and other sorts of things.  So there was this aware group of students and faculty.  It was, you know, 1950 wasn't that long after World War II.  And there were a number of students at the divinity school who were there on the GI Bill.  Had come back, had been in the service, or, like Bob, had worked for the Quakers overseas after the war, rebuilding villages.  So, there were some older students who were aware of the world and who were socially concerned.  I don't know what that was like at the college downtown.  Or at the other graduate level schools.  It might have been different.  More people coming back to law school, perhaps.  I wasn't aware of that, but, at the div school, yeah, there were a number of very, very concerned active folks on that issue.  The women's issue was not yet, had not yet surfaced.  That wasn't one of them.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt was going to take a while, I think, for that to surface, wasn't it?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYes.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWe need to watch our time.  Because it's almost lunch time, isn't it?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tOh, yes.  Is it 12?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt's coming up to 12, yeah.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tAll right.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat would be a good point to stop.  We can pick up again after lunch.  So let's just turn this little person off.  It doesn't bother me at all.  Okay, we've just had a rather long lunch, and we're back to carry on with the interview.  Joan, I think, before we switched off the machine before lunch, we were talking about Yale culture and the culture of the divinity school, in particular.  And I was wondering, you talked a little bit about being a married, a female married student, and I was just wondering what, if you can remember, what the proportion of married students were amongst your male peers.  And, indeed, where did their wives fit into the culture and social life of the college?  And what was their relationship particularly with female students?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tWhen I was a student, I don't remember really knowing many student wives.  I knew, there was one, a Quaker couple who lived down in the Quonsets.  Which we sometimes would have a picnic or something with, because Bob had known the husband who was a student in Quaker AFC.\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=2700.0,3000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/11","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I don't remember the wife having any particular connection with the student body.  I don't remember any student wives that had a connection to the student body.  Isn't that interesting.  I think the married students socialized with one another.  And that was probably much more the case than -- because they lived off campus -- much more the case than being involved, terribly involved with students on campus.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd I suppose some of those students also maybe had small children of their own?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tMhm.  And so, I think that-- there may have been other people that had connections, but I just don't-- there would have been, while I was there, at the most 30 women students.  And probably not that many, because some got engaged and dropped out.  And our-- well, one student wife who we had something to do with, was a woman who herself had been a student and graduated and she and her husband -- he was then in graduate school at Yale, at [Batchelders?].  And they lived as sort of the house parents, or whatever you want to call it, at 301.  And they were a delight.  And we interacted a lot with them.  But they were both students.  He by then in the doctor program and she was finishing the divinity school.  But, I don't remember-- it was sort of separate, the married students were in their own social life kind of thing, apart from--\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt's interesting you should say that because you're going through the div school archives, they're quite a lot of flyers for teas and rather sort of family-oriented cooking, cooking get-togethers, and all those sort of things.  And I just wondered who they were for?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tWas that after the dormitories, the married couples places were built in the later, late 50's, 60's.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI think these would have been the-- they might have been the 50's or 60's.  So maybe after your time?  \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t(overlapping dialogue, inaudible) Quonsets down there and out by the Yale Bowl.  In, I think it was, '57, when the faculty voted to keep women and let them in freely, they said we need to build a dormitory, and Liston Pope had been pushing for married couples housing.  So they built a deanery on campus, because before then, the dean had always lived out in [Spring Lead?].  They built [purval?] for the women, which is now gone.  And they built three dormitories for married couples, that faced-- two faced on Cantor, and-- maybe all three faced, anyway there was kind of a E-U shaped thing at the corner of the driveway and Cantor Street, whatever out there.  And those folks socialized with each other a lot.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight, well, that's probably-- none of them are dated as far I can remember.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tBut they were closer to the campus, and I think maybe people came and went and there was more interaction because you could sort of do that on foot more easily, and you saw each other more easily.  That may have been-- and there were a number of student children in-- there was a nursery school, which was kind of a teaching one, that some of the div students in Christian ed helped with and whatever, so there were faculty, small children, and some students, small children in that nursery school.  My sense is that there was more of a sense of cohesion-- maybe not cohesion-- but at least availability to one another once all of those things were built and once the women's dorm was there.  Now, interestingly, (inaudible), the Women's dorm on campus, there was Porter Hall and the women were now living just by the pond.  Which I considered being on campus.  When I came to work , in '71, my God, this little procession, all of the women still lived in Porter Hall, and this little procession of women in from Porter Hall that sat in my office, and I said, \"What's up?\"  \"Well, we want to know why we can't live on campus?\"  So I say, \"Say some more.\"  \"Well, we're there in Porter Hall and we're at the back past the driveway, past the parking lot and everybody else is on the quadrangle.  We want to live on the quadrangle.  Why can't women live--\"  \"Good point.  All right, I'll talk to Ray Wood about it.\"  He was the business (inaudible) and the dean.  So, crossed the hall to Ray Wood.  \"The women say--\" this was my line, \"the women say they would like to be able to live-- and what would be the possibility of women being able to live in on the quadrangle?\"  He gulped a little and (inaudible), anyway, so presently the women were able to live on the second floor, I think of one dormitory first, and the next year they added some.  Pretty soon, they were all out of Porter Hall, only men in Porter Hall.  Women are all in the quadrangle.  They're all on the second floor so the men on the first floor can protect them\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=3000.0,3300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/12","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"and whatever.  Okay.  The very year that happened.  The very year they're all on the second floor-- by this time there were more and more women coming because it's been a couple of years, so we're up to maybe 90 or whatever.  (inaudible) a little delegation in my office.  \"What's up?\"  \"We want to know, how come we can't live in Porter Hall, they've got the best view over there (inaudible).\"   (laughter)  I said, \"Ahh, right.  You'd like to be able to live in any dormitory on campus.  The Quad or Porter Hall.\"  \"Yes, why not?  Why can't we live in Porter Hall?\"  I suppressed my scream and said, \"I'll talk to the (inaudible).\"  And so, presently, it was women who had lived on the second floor of Porter Hall, and on the Quadrangle.  And pretty soon, they were all over all of the dorms and there were mixed bathrooms, and mixed whatever.  And some of the parents would come through and have conniptions.  \"What do you mean mixed bathrooms in a dormitory?\"  I said, \"I don't live there.  Don't ask me.  That's whatever.\"  So that all broke down.  But, when Porter Hall was first built, that was just envisioned as the one place on campus for the women.  20 years later, \"What do you mean on-campus?  We don't feel we're on campus.\"  Oh, dear.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOh, dear.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tIt's all expectations and perceptions.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  Did you have any interactions at all with the wives of faculty?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tAhh, good question.  I am trying to remember-- there was a time when there was a regularly-- couldn't have been once a week, maybe it was once a week, once a month, once every so often-- on Thursday afternoon, a faculty wives' tea in the common room.  And it was always beautifully done.  (inaudible) set out.  They were at a round table at each of the room with cloth and china.  It was just very nice.  And students were invited and you came and everybody socialized, and it was lovely.  And met the faculty wives, there, and stuff.  There came a time when some of the faculty wives said, \"I'm going to work.  I'm not doing that anymore.\"  And then some of the faculty husbands would bring the food for them.  And then finally, the faculty wives' teas vanished.  And I don't know-- I can't think of the dates on that.  I don't know whether the faculty wives' teas were in the 50's.  This is where I get confused.  I can't remember if this was when I was a student or--\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t--when you came back--\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t--when I came back.  And, I do know when I came back, it seemed to me we tried to do some sessions out of the women's center with some faculty wives to try to make some connection.  I'm a little foggy on that at the moment, sorry.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat's okay.  If any recurs, you can always come back to it another time.  Don't worry about it.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tIt obviously couldn't have been a huge part in life, or I would--\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t--no, I think quite possibly.  Thinking, again, a bit more about your time as a student at the div school, do you think you and your women peers, did you ever feel there was a conflict or a confusion, maybe, between how you were to act a student, be good and serious like the men, and be a typical 50's woman.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t(inaudible)  Heavens.  I don't know how to get my head into that.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI suppose, I'm picking up on the general stereotypical ideas of a 50's woman.  Especially middle class woman.  Suburban, married.  The whole revolutionary road.  (laughter)  Although I hoped it wouldn't end like that.  But, that that was the other thing that you were supposed to be achieving, which was the nuclear family with the requisite three kids and the station wagon.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t(laughter) Yeah, right.  We may have been a little removed from the pressure of that by being on at 301 and talking to each other and also talking about where were we going to work, where was our call to ministry.  What was going on in the campus, in our formation.  So, we probably took precedence over fitting into the other social role.  Because my memory was a feeling, until I got married, and tried to figure out who I was, as Joan Forsberg, \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=3300.0,3600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/13","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"as opposed to, how that's different from Joan Bates.  That I was so absorbed in that one role that my identity was divinity student on way toward ministry sort of all of repeats all of the time is my recollection.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas there--\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t(overlapping dialogue, inaudible) like when I got home to New Jersey on holidays, and my family, whether I-- I don't think, well, probably because I fell in love with Bob and, you know, that whole year I was wrestling with, \"Can I marry this guy?  Can I live the kind of rehearsed life that's going to take?\"  So, I'm a student and in love with Bob.  Then engaged to Bob.  So, I saw a marriage coming, anyway.  So I (inaudible) think that was going to fit that role of being married.  I don't remember us talking about it as women together.  Except for when I was married and some of the (inaudible) was the primary vow.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMaybe that's just simply part of what wasn't talked about before women's lib.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI think that, yes, it might have just been unconscious.  About, unaware, or un-- nobody was raising as overtly the issue of why aren't you this kind of woman?  It was there in the media.  It was there in the magazines.  It was there while you were in college.  Everybody talked about, what are you going to do after graduation?  Are you going to be married?  But once you sort of make that, I'm going to go to divinity school and be a graduate student, that social pressure of the 50's kind of fell away.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas there much discussion when you were a student of the whole issue of women's ordination?  Because that was something that, of course, was very, very big in the 60's and 70's and continues to be a contentious issue.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tRight.  I don't remember having discussions about it.  I was, well, in those days it was the Congregational Church who hadn't gone UCC, Congregational, and it had ordained women since 1853.  So, I never experienced anybody in my way saying, \"You can't be ordained,\" or, \"You shouldn't be ordained.\"  And the only other women that I knew having specifically for ordination were also Congregational, maybe one was a Baptist, and they ordained women.  The northern Baptists, not the southern Baptists.  In my class, there was a woman from, she was from Hawaii, but she was going to go back and work in Japan.  And she wasn't headed for it, and she was Quaker.  So she wasn't headed for ordination.  There was a woman from Puerto Rico, who eventually became the provost, she wasn't headed for ordination, she was-- most of the others that I knew that were headed in a church where they could be ordained.  So, it wasn't the struggle that it was in the 70's were.  Some were and some weren't.  And some people were just going to do Christian education and didn't need ordination.  So, I don't remember it as being a lots of conversation dorm about that.  Some were going to work for the YM, YW, and student work.  It was a much bigger issue in the 60's and 70's is my memory.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou mentioned Elizabeth Batchelder, is that how you pronounced her name?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYes.  Yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou mentioned her just a few minutes ago.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tDoes she show up in the (overlapping dialogue, inaudible) a lot?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tShe does.  She does, yes.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tBecause she did the study.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI actually found the report, it was called \"Women at YDS, 1931-1951.\"  And if I understand the report correctly it concluded that the single largest factor in non-completion, women not completing, was marriage followed then by cost.  Even though women were getting, turning in, just as good as grades as the men.  And it also found that many women experienced a conflict between marriage and vocation.  That was-- and I just wondered, does that resonate with your own experience and the women that you worked at the college, at the school, with?\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=3600.0,3900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/14","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JOAN FOSBERG:\tSo those were all women that graduated just before I came, right?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tShe ended the study before I came.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIn '51.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThat was my first year that I was there.  That more ended in marriage and didn't--\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat the main reason women didn't finish the three years was getting married, and I think you've already alluded to that, haven't you?  \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tWe had the one in my first year class, I think was the young one who dropped out to get married.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd then the second thing was cost.  And you talked about your own experiences, but not getting--\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYes, getting the scholarship.  (overlapping dialogue, inaudible)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd the other thing was that women did seem to experience was conflict between vocation, I don't mean job, I mean vocation and marriage.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tAnd that's the one that I was up against with the vows, which takes precedence?  Which do I give in to?  That's interesting.  So some of those earlier women were struggling with that then, too.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo you feel that that really was something that was in your own experience?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI'm trying to think of any of the others that were in school at the same time I was.  Whether they were wrestling with that.  Other than the ones who actually did get married.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas this something that you and Bob talked about?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI don't remember talking about it much with him.  I remember saying things such as, when there was something that would be very important to me, that he didn't see as important, and I would say, \"It's really-- it would be easier if you were interested in another woman.  It's really hard--\" you know, I couldn't compete with that.  It's really hard to compete with God.  If you say what's pushing you this, that, and the other, is because God -- how am I going to argue with that, you know?  And should I argue with that?  Or sometimes I just quietly got hurt or felt rebuffed about something.  I remember this particularly, just before we got married, wedding presents started-- we were married June 7th.  End of the school year.  Present started coming in and be delivered to us.  And so one day I'm saying, \"Oh, it's so exciting.  Something's coming in.  I can't wait for you to see something.\"  And he was just.  And I said, \"Well, it is (inaudible),\" and he said, \"Just wait until everything's there and then just tell me and I'll see it all at once.  This really bothers me.\"  I said, \"Well, every girl's entitled to enjoy the things about her wedding.\"  And he said, \"Not everybody girl (inaudible) and things like this before.\"  And what are you going to say to that, you know?  Like, \"Well, damn, don't I have a right to,\" or you know.  It was just like-- so time and again on issues like that, when it came up to something about sacrifice or--  instead of saying anything, because it seemed his commitment was higher, and mine was more sort of selfish, or whatever.  I would just go quiet and swallow it.  And I think if you do that for enough years, you have a heart attack and get divorced.  (laughter)  Or something.  And so in ways I would try to, in ways it would come up, but I don't think we talked about it in the same way because I didn't know how to present my side of it, or what I would see as my side of it, as cogent, or as reasonable--\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tLegitimate?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tLegitimate.  I think that, as I think back now over all of those years, I think probably as we got closer and closer to separation, as I got closer and closer in the 70's to being aware that I was missing part of myself, that I tried to talk about it, and that was very hard.  And he couldn't quite get his head around it.  As most men can't.  But I don't think the 50's-- it's hard to remember back.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt is very, very difficult, and I'm kind of pressing you on things.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tNo, but it's very good.  It's very good questions.  If I'd only been, you know, more aware of those years it would have been helpful.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut that's the whole point, isn't it?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThat's the whole point.  If it had been okay to be aware.  What's [Maralee's] wonderful term out of that article?  Selective non-intention?  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tSelective in-attention or something.  Right, if it's going to cost you your marriage or your engagement, or if it's going to cost you feeling judged, then you selectively don't pay attention.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  I also, in going through the archives, that same time, I found references to a\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=3900.0,4200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/15","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"position called, in quotes, \"Advisor to women.\"  Do you recall any such person?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tAt the time that I was a student?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhen you were a student, yeah.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tAdvisor to women?  Do we know who she was?  Was it a she? (laughter)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI've no idea.  But there was a report in the mid-50's.  It wasn't actually the Batchelder report.  But it was something else that I found, states with some glee almost, that women at YDS had, quote, \"Available to them seven sources of counsel.\"  And that was everything from the home president through faculty advisor through mental health department and the advisor of women.  There were seven different positions, and those were four that I noted.  It immediately raises in my mind that there's a sort of sense of woman pathology, that women were a problem, and they needed all of these different sources--\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t--to help them.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tTo help them.  \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tWhat kind of a statement was it?  Was it a university kind of statement?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo, it was a divinity school.  It was in the minutes of, I think it was, I think it was, maybe it was the dean making a report to either the faculty or to many an outside body.  I just can't remember.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tAnd that women now had seven sources of help.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, seven sources of help.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tInteresting.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI don't remember that there was anybody on campus to go to as women.  I don't remember who the advisor to women would be.  My third year, which was my first year of marriage, when I began to feel like something might be coming unglued, I went to the health center downtown to see the shrink.  It was very interesting, because you would go in, and nobody would look at each other in the waiting room.  If there was another div student over there, you studiously avoided them because seeing a shrink in the 1950's was a sign of sickness, weakness.  It was not okay.  Not commonly done.  It was a sign that you were in trouble.  That was very different by the 70's.  But that was a source of help at that point.  I don't remember.  And theoretically your faculty advisor was, but they were all men.  There were no-- I don't remember any women around.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt just makes me wonder, did men suffer because of the nature of the studies that you were doing and the fact that you were making these major life-changing decisions to go for ordination and stuff like that.  I just wondered if men suffered the same sort of crises.  If indeed anybody was suffering these crises.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tOr if anybody even recognized then, if they were.  I don't remember any--\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBecause I would imagine that it was not just intellectual difficulties and social difficulties, but also psychiatric or even spiritual.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYes. (overlapping dialogue, inaudible)  When I was a student, Kenneth {Lauteret?], Professor Kenneth Lauteret, wonderful man, who wrote The History of Missions and whatever, and a really saintly guy, lived on campus, lived in one of the dormitories.  And he had a men's group, a bible study group or something.  And Uncle Ken, everybody loved him.  And I think guys had somebody to go talk to.  Although we could have gone and talked to Betty Batchedler when she was there, but I don't remember anybody else.  But, I don't remember, in the 50's, people talking about depression or psychological problems and whatever.  And maybe we didn't in those days.  And maybe we were fewer women, it was just different.  In the 70's, different story.  And I had two or three in my 21 years there, men students who attempted suicide.  The year before I started working there, in 1970, or early '71, there were, one of the reasons I think Colin came through with a steady physician, was that women came to him and said, \"You really need somebody here.\"  And there were evidently a couple of women in Porter Hall who were around the bend.  One or two with alcohol, and one with real psychological split kind of.  And they felt they had nobody to go to,\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=4200.0,4500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/16","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"their friends didn't know how to help them.  And it led, as the men's students realized this, it led them to say such things.  When I first started my job I went and talked to the men, tried to get a sense from everybody about how things were as a div school student.  And the general attitude from the men students was that the women students at YDS were the bottom of the heap.  They wouldn't date any of them.  They were trouble.  I just got this very disparaging--\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tReally?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t--from many men students that I tried to talk to in groups.  And I think it came from the fact that some of them were ill, and having problems.  And that sort of colored it for everybody else.  I'm not sure that there weren't men that had alcohol problems, but if you have a larger mass of people, you can get (inaudible).  And, as I say, once I start working there, I think there were more men suicide attempts than women in trouble.  Now, when I came aboard, this was another thing, Colin was saying, well, they had to have this split job because he had to put me into something that opened up.  There was no way to start a new position.  So, I had to go into some regular job, like the registrar's job which was coming open.  Do that half-time and be advisor to the women.  The other half.  And I quickly had enough sense, fortunately, to say, \"Let's not call it advisor to the women.  Because that will make it sound as though the women are needy and need help.  Can you call it advisor to students?  And that makes it less loaded for the women.  Although, I understand, that I'm going to be particularly attendant to the women.\"  And/or the black students, who were also having really serious troubles fitting in and the early 70's was a horrendous time on campus.  They ate by themselves at a table.  But because I lived in a black community, sang in the choir at a black church, I had a little bit of a connection with some of them, which was helpful.  So we called it advisor, but it's that very question you raised, were women seen as a problem?  And was that seen as pathology?  And it was really, women kept saying, what they said to Colin was, \"Some of us are training to be ministers.  And we don't even know what a woman minister looks like.\"  You know.  Well, fortunately, I was ordained.  Had been a minister.  So that helped.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tJust about the time that you were graduating from the divinity school, a report came out raising the question of whether since there was this dropout rate amongst women that maybe that women coming into the divinity school should be discontinued, or at least curtailed.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThat's right.  As a result of the Batchelder report.  I remember that.  The quote was either cancel them out altogether or--\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t--lower the numbers even more.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYeah, I always heard between get rid of them altogether or open it up and take the quota system off.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.  Right.  Yeah.  And it was decided that, no, they wouldn't discontinue it.  So, I just wondered, what do you recall of that debate, if anything?  \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI wasn't in on it.  But I remember hearing about it.  And was it '57?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t'53.  This was '53.  But then it was a problem that then continued into the late '50s and this whole-- in fact, I remember reading a letter from Dean Pope to somebody called Carol Rose, who was in some--\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYeah, Carol Rose.  She graduated a year ahead of me.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  She was working in New York in some church organization.  I can't remember what it was.  But there was a letter from him to Carol expressing his alarm at the, quote, \"mortality rate,\" amongst women divinity students.  And apparently at that point, in 1958, was the highest it had even been in the school's history.  So, it was obviously, this was a problem, a besetting difficulty.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tWhich must explain why the dean was so, to our class, \"You must finish.  We've kicked all of these men out.  We don't want you getting married.\"  In essence, \"We've picked women who we think wouldn't get married.\"\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd yet, clearly the fact that they decided no, that they should continue to admit women at some level or another.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI once heard, and I don't know whether if it's an urban myth or not, that it went to the Board of Permanent Officers, and it passed by one vote.  And I don't know if that's true.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI have no idea.  Because I think there were no voting-- yeah.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tSee, in our class of ten, one dropped out.  \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=4500.0,4800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/17","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"We only lost one out of our ten.  But obviously other classes didn't do as well.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI didn't realize it was that.  That by '58 it had gotten that bad.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell, according to the language that was used--\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t--it sounds that way--\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tin this letter, that it was obviously a very pressing concern at the point.  Whether any, there weren't any women faculty at all, were there?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tNo.  At one point-- was this while I was a student or when I was-- you'd think I could keep this straight, couldn't you?  A woman who would for a term was there half time or one afternoon a week or something doing Christian education.  That might have been in the '50s.  My memory as a student was that Paul [Veeth?] did Christian education and retired, and we waited for Randolph Cohn-Miller to come, because he came from California and he was talking a different way about Christian education.  And we were all eager for him to get there.  So, whether there was ever a woman teaching anything Christian, then, I don't know.  In the70's, when I was there, Iris Cully would come up every week.  She and her husband taught at Union in New York.  And she would come out and stay the night in one of the married couples dorms and teach Christian education and go back.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThere was a woman that you mentioned to me before, because what I'm trying to get is this idea of mentoring and modeling, which you've, I know, became a part of your job very much in the 1970's and afterwards.  But I was just wondering, what mentors or models did you have?  Role models that you had when you were at the div school?  Yeah.  Yeah.  You did mention Nancy Forsberg.  \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tShe was a year ahead of me.  Interestingly enough.  And she was--\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI take it she's no relation?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tNo relation at all.  But she was from New Jersey, not very many miles from Bob Forsberg and me.  Bob was from Summon, New Jersey, in the town next to Chatham, for heaven's sake.  And Nancy Forsberg was down the road a little bit.  She was very tall.  She had majored in campus ministry and I think she went to Ohio State as campus minister.  She did a lot of drama.  She was very dynamic.  And she was headed for ordination.  That was the first woman's ordination I saw, was Nancy Forsberg's.  She was either-- maybe two years ahead of me, or one year ahead of me, anyway.  But, wasn't hired by-- but to see her going through it was, you know, is important to be at her ordination, see that really happen.  And then the women minister at the-- the woman student who was working at my home church in New Jersey who took me into Union Seminary and talked with me and stuff, that was kind of mentoring, but she had no connection with Yale.  She unfortunately was (inaudible).  I'm trying to think.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas Miss Barney there?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tMiss Barney, bless her heart, she was the registrar and sort of in charge of everything for Dean Pope.  She arranged the classes.  She did all of that.  But she wasn't in the role of-- she was really administrator, and not in a woman minister role at all.  So, we knew her, but not in that role at all.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd she never invited that role?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tNot that I know of.  Not that I know of.  Much more running the school.  I'm trying to think if there were any men clergy who were-- there was one interesting guy who, I can't say a role model exactly, Parker Lansdale.  YMCA person.  I think a graduate of YDS.  But, anyway, his field, and he taught a course in group dynamics, which was a new field.  And I forget what else it was called.  And he had such a different approach, such a listening responsive approach.  Such a non-hierarchical approach, and he had us do things, he had us do all kinds of exercises about stuff, which then pointed out how we reacted and what the assumptions we were not aware of.  It was my beginning eye-opening experience of group dynamics.  And to watch him work, and he was totally open on where women sat, where men sat, on the roles of men, women.  So, he became for me the kind of open to the future free-wheeling non-hierarchical sort of leader I wanted to be.\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=4800.0,5100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/18","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And what I admired about somebody working with people.  And because I was headed for campus ministry, he became for me, really important in that role, I think, in terms of practice of working with people.  And he wasn't-- he was sort of before his time in terms of being equally open to men and women sort of stuff.  There were academic kind of people I looked up to, but it wasn't in a role model sense of whatever.  Isn't that interesting.  I hadn't thought about that.  Parker may be the closest for me of how I wanted to work with people.  When I got to some big green campus somewhere.  (laughter)  Which in fact, ultimately, in 1971, courtesy of Colin Williams, I did.  But it took a long-- a 20-year detour.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  Was there anybody on the faculty who was particularly encouraging to you?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYes.  There were some men faculty who were very (inaudible).  Rolland Bateman.  Wonderful (inaudible) who did our wedding.  And wonderful Quaker.  And just a delight.  A wonderful human being.  And his wife, too.  She was fond of students.  Fond of us and very encouraging to Bob and me.  And so, personally, I felt their interest and (inaudible), because Bob had worked for the Quakers in Italy, there was a nice bond there.  Franklin Woodrow Young taught New Testament.  And he had been a Baptist, a Southern Baptist, and had become Episcopalian.  And I took a course in the gospel of Jesus, the gospel of John with him.  And there were times in that classroom where everything just became transcendent.  I mean, just because of his spirit and how he taught.  He would get away from his notes and just-- and there were times when you could reach out and feel his spirit in the room.  I just was convinced.  So, anyway, when it came time to be ordained, I really wanted him to do my ordination (inaudible).  A) Do I dare ask him, B) He's an Episcopalian, and they don't-- so I remember going to his office and asking him, and he smiled, and he was so encouraging and I said, \"Well, I didn't know if you'd be allowed to do it as an Episcopalian.\"  And he just grinned from ear to ear.  He said, \"I'll use my Baptist ordination for that.\"  (laughter)  But he was so for me and with me and supportive, I never forgot that.  He was a real scholar and (inaudible), but he was a nice human, real human being, about that and encouraging of my ministry, which was really great.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThinking about your possibility of ordination, do women preach in the Marquand Chapel, just as the men did. \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tA few did.  I was such a coward, I think it had to be cowardice, I never did.  Well, and Marquand Chapel in those days, the (inaudible), three days a week was a faculty member.  I think it was Monday, Tuesday, Thursday.  Wednesday, I think, was a senior student.  And Friday was the choir.  Which was a wonderful choir.  Which was all-male.  But it was a wonderful choir.  So there was one day a week when a student preached.  But there were preaching classes, and of course, if you were headed for (inaudible) you were supposed to take a preaching class.  And they were heavily and predominately male.  There was an alternative.  If you didn't take a speaking and oral preaching class, you could take written communication-- I forget what it was called.  But it was a course in written communication.  Guess what I opted for? (laughter)  It was taught by [Halford Luckett?], who was just a wonderful, wonderful-- he was also a preaching professor-- wonderful humor, wonderful way with words and just a delight all the way around.  So I took the written communication course.  And never had a course in preaching in my life.  Ended up working back at Yale Divinity School.  Had to preach early on.  Of course, because I was the only woman there.  I mean, Margaret, too.  But, I was-- and so, I got up the pulpit for the first time looked out and here comes Bill Neil, the preaching professor, and all of the faculty come in, you know.  And I just had to say to myself, they've come to worship God.  Do your part of it, but they have come to worship God.  And you're not it, you know.  So, I-- but I never got over being terrified when I preached.  Just in general principles.  It's an awesome thing to have the nerve to presume to break open the word of God for anybody.  But, interesting, yeah.\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=5100.0,5400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/19","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Because I would prepare for it.  I would be, you know, terrified.  I would be working feverously.  I would be up all night.  And come in the chapel.  And when I would stand up, and somebody stand at the pulpit, and gradually, in the 70's, we got so that we had the pulpit down on the floor level, and communion table, and all, instead of all high.  And I would step into that, and it was if, it literally was if I stepped into a circle of grace.  And it was somehow, I understood that it wasn't my preaching.  It wasn't anything about it.  It was something shared.  And this was a holy conversation with friends.  And to offer it like that.  And not to be so self-centered about it.  And so I would go calm and it would be all right.  It was okay.  It's just the preparing for it was hell.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI wonder if men feel the same way about preaching?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI don't know.  And not all women do either.  I couldn't believe it, the number of women who couldn't wait to get in the pulpit, and were sure they had something to say.  And I thought, \"Oh, hell, I've been doing this for years and I'm still terrified.\"  They were coming out of a different mindset in a different generation, and a different, whatever, I don't know.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell I suppose it's a very public performance for a woman, isn't it?  That you're putting yourself out there as an authority.  As a teacher.  But especially as an authority.  And that has always been problematic for the church, hasn't it?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tOh, yes.  And for women-- I mean my whole sense, interestingly enough, I felt the burden every time I was preparing was, they haven't heard many women preach.  That yet, this is '73, '72, '71.  there weren't that many women around.  I thought, and see if I blow it, there it will go.  They'll say, \"See, women can't preach.\"  I just really felt that somehow I had to do well for all of them so that I didn't blow it for the women following me.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.  That's a burden.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tIt was terrible.  Now, actually, most of the time it went very well.  And I got very good feedback.  And because I could, with a group of people I knew, and whose lives I knew, to go somewhere and preach to a bunch you didn't know on weekends is a different thing.  But this is family.  These are peoples I know.  And so it was more like a holy conversation.  I could look them in the eye and respond to what I felt coming back to me.  And most times that was quite fine and it went well.  And celebrating Eucharist, the same thing.  I mean, the number of people there who had never seen a woman celebrated at the table.  It was interesting.  Including one Mormon woman, who said to me after the (inaudible), she wrote back (inaudible), I never-- I thought she was Roman Catholic-- and she said, \"I've never seen a woman celebrate.\"  Later, it turned out that she was Mormon for heaven's sake.  Okay.  And for her that was very exciting.  But, and that, because of the sacrament-- I don't know, because I loved doing sacrament, that felt comfortable, you could invite people.  Because Henry [Nown?] was always there and always right there form me.  So that went well, too.  But that being the first for a long time was sort of a little interesting.  Especially as the Episcopal seminary, you know, joins.  They particularly weren't used to women doing that, let alone serving.  Authority.  Thinking of authority.  And stepping into a  place of authority is not my easiest thing to do.  I like to stand in the back and watch what is going on.  Contribute something helpful, but not run it, you know.  It's all very interesting.  My whole style of administration was responding in many ways.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  Because you said, that when you first took the job, which we'll come to in a bit, that the first thing you did was go around and canvass opinions from everyone.  So you didn't come in with any pre-fixed ideas.  Yeah.  Yeah.  And I suppose, too, you wanted to work with some sort of consensus rather than oppose something.  \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tWell, I wanted to have this sense of what life was like on a campus.  Because, while I'd been working two blocks away at the Continuing Education Center, but that was with clergy coming back for conferences.  I wanted to kind of know what the mood was, what the feeling was, and what the needs were and stuff, and be open to that rather than respond to that.  I didn't have a clue about where people were those days.  And I'd been a parent\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=5400.0,5700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/20","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"of teenagers long enough to know.  It helps not to pretend you know everything.  (laughter)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI also want, you told me about how difficult was to kind of presume to take that leadership role, whether it was in the pulpit or serving at mass, or things like that, and I just wondered, looking back at your time as a student, whether there were trends in the curriculum.  In the pervading kind of theological culture that might have also made it more difficult for you to perform?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tAhh.  Now there's a very interesting question.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tActually What you were being taught.  \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThere, it's a little indirect, but I think it's not totally disconnected.  The theology when I came to the div school was, blocked out the technical term, neo-orthodoxy.  And that pervaded the campus.  And people talked about sin.  And people talked-- I came out of a quite liberal congregational church.  I don't remember the preacher ever preaching about sin.  And as I had said somewhere in one of my papers, when I came out of that whole thing and headed toward divinity school, I liked God, and I presumed God liked me.  I mean, that's sort of what I was taught.  And that there was joy and that there was a likeness, whatever it was.  I get there and it a sense of awe, God is way off there, distant, judgmental.  I took out of that-- now people hear what they, for some reason, need to hear or want to hear, or are perverse enough to hear-- may not have been what people were saying.  I took out of that there's no way to please that God.  You were always wrong.  You're always sort of wrong.  You never can be enough to please.  You could never do enough.  And a little sense of judgment-- I didn't know what judgment was-- but a little sense of frowning, maybe.  Disapproval, I don't know, from God.  Now, maybe some years of therapy and looking back, of course, what do we see?  A wonderful father who loved me but never said very much about.  I marry a man who loved me but never says anything very ever.  And whose way of life there's no way I can be good enough to do everything that needs to be done.  Why did I pick that?  I don't know.  What is it in me that needs to-- and here's the theology with that.  And maybe that sense that I could never do it well enough contributes somewhere to the difficulty about preaching.  Or maybe not wanting to preach that.  You know.  I never would have articulated that.  But maybe it would be hard to know what to preach if in fact most of you believes God loves you and accepts you and whatever, is more New Testament than Old Testament, and then, but the school says you have to supposedly preach this.  So, if you split that way or you're not totally able to say that stuff, maybe you don't want to preach.  Especially in that school.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhich probably does mean that for some people maybe, maybe some women in particular, it doesn’t increase one's confidence that one can do the things that you really want to do.  That you feel called to do.  Because there is this sense of judgment around all of the time.  \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tRight.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd an elite educational establishment, as well, constantly you're being measured.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThat's right.  And whether men ever feel that, I don't know.  Because I think the society in a way reinforces that thing for women.  Prove yourself.  Prove yourself.  You can't prove yourself.  But it tends to affirm men as being able to, being expected to be able to.  I may be off in the left field about some of this, but it's more the feeling.  When I was in seminary and in the years in between seminary and coming back to work in a Parish, \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=5700.0,6000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/21","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I very often was asked to preach at churches or speak at churches about the work that we were doing in the inner city.  That was okay.  I could talk about that.  I could talk about what I sensed as the presence of God at work in the city.  Because my whole thing was to invite them to see the inner city in a new way.  It wasn't about me.  I could find the right scriptures to do it, but it also wasn’t just about scripture, it was about what God was doing presently, in the world, right now, in that storefront (inaudible), and so I could really get into that in a way that preaching in Marquand Chapel was different. \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWe touched on this earlier, that I asked you earlier on, what it was to kind of move between the two worlds, is there a marriage student living, living in the hood, I suppose, living in the neighborhood, and getting on your bike and cycling up to campus.  When you settled into your parish work, with your husband, I just wanted, how did it feel to you then?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tIt was kind of -- I mean I was so...\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd you were [pecky?] on the doorstep so much of the time?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYes, but we were down, you know, we’re so surrounded by Oak Street and alcoholics on the street, and heavy black presence, some wonderful black women, older black women, who became, for me, just great support, who loved me, they didn’t care that I was white, they didn’t see that I was white.  I was so aware of being white and middle class, with a Yale education, and I knew I didn’t fit, and it was like, what are we doing here?  You know, are we an offense to the neighborhood?  Bob never felt that at all?  Never felt that at all!  You know, we’re all God’s children here together, we’re here to help each other, and maybe I can do this, and they can do that, or the whole thing.  And I’m in the -- “oh, my goodness, I’m going to offend somebody, I’m going to say the wrong offense just by being white.  In the Sixties, and the [leisures?] started coming out, “Black Like Me,” all the black writers writing, and I took that all to heart, it’s like I had to learn.  This was all the education I didn’t have growing up in white suburbia.  So, I took that all to heart.  When we lived in, after our neighborhood in Oak Street, we lived over in Elm Haven high-rise housing project, and I had, one kid when I moved in, and was very pregnant, and had the second there, was expecting a third by the time we moved out, and the social thing was, every morning, you’d gather downstairs waiting for the mail to come.  And sometimes, I just, it was so hard for me to go down there with my white face and stand with all my neighbors, why was I so self-conscious?  What was wrong with me?  And I would sit outside with my kids, and running, and the other mothers, you know.  Then I’d have mother say to me, and I’d be hugging my kids, you know, and have my mother saying to me, “You’re going to spoil that child rotten.  Going to spoil that child rotten!  Kiss him up that way all the time.  How come you never hit your kids!?”  You know, it’s a whole another world, and I didn't fit, and clearly I was, maybe, wrong because I was really didn’t (inaudible) class-wise, color-wise, I mean, and I was really, pretty, without thinking about it, I let go of the -- I tried to let go of the Yale identification.  I tried to be a neighbor, I tried to be a young wife.  I tried to be not an offense to all my neighbors.  On behalf of all the white people who had said terrible things to them all their lives, I really took it so hard.  And I would watch Bob breezing in and out, and totaling untroubled by all that.  Aware, you know, and clear that in the clergy group, he should put himself in the back of the line because the black clergy had been there first and the white clergy could be there to help him lead, and things were -- so the Yale student thing, Yale was very out of the picture in those years of trying to be.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas Bob at all aware of how you felt?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI think so, but I think it didn’t make any sense to him.  Didn’t make any sense to him.  In some way, why would you feel that way, sort of.  I don’t know why, I just do.  And nobody likes to talk to, about it.  And while we’re there, with the kids, and finally, \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=6000.0,6300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/22","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"there were two small kids, talking two year old all the time, or finally three kids, I felt as though my brain dried up in a new one, and I had to revive myself.  I had an education because it was hard to pull on it, because I had nobody much to talk to most of the time, about that kind of stuff, except the other members of the group industry, and we were all busy worried about what was going on in the neighborhood, and how to keep the cars from hitting the kids, and how to run a protest meeting, for Winchester School, because the heat would go off, and nobody worried about all kinds of things.  And finally, by the time I had three kids, and by the time I lived on Bristol Street, I became acquainted with a Rabbi and his wife, who lived around the corner, on the next street, it’s the one before Bristol, anyway, it was closer to Yale.  And they lived over there, and he was the Rabbi at the University, and she had a, she had three kids, three kids, four?  (Inaudible) her Ph.D, her dissertation.  She and I would get together.  I’d take my kids over there, or she’d bring her kids, and we would back-and-forth in talking.  It was wonderful because there was another women with whom I didn’t feel self-conscious, and to whom the whole thing about being a mother with young kids when you’re supposed to be living at your educated life, you know, so that was a life-saver at that stage in my life.  But, there was a lot of, sort of, lack of self-esteem in the years, in those years, in the inner-city, just because I was trying so hard just to learn, to experience the world, that I never experienced, and to learn and be present in it.  I mean, the whole, do-no-harm, first to do no harm, was so important, and in black-white relationships, in the Sixties, particularly before [Lauren?] was killed (inaudible) it was very difficult thing, and yet, at the church, they sang the choir, and they’d -- we’d be asked as a choir to go sing at a black rally, or if -- and I’d say, I’ll see you guys, I’ll see you guys on Sunday, “no, no, no, no, no, you’re not white, c’mon, you’ve got to sing with us, you know, you’re in this choir.”  They wouldn’t accept me, you know, they never -- the whole church was wonderful about not letting me get into that kind of self-conscious thing, but...\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd you were active in other ways, also, because another thing that came up when I was digging around was your involvement with the “Griswald vs. State of Connecticut.”  I’d love to hear about that.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tWell, that all came about because, when Bob and I were getting ready to get married, I knew I wanted to finish school, so I knew I didn’t want to get pregnant, and I knew it had to be a [background?] because nothing else was guaranteed, right, and I knew in Connecticut, no place to go.  Somebody said, and I know it was another student who said, down over the line, in Port Chester, New York, it’s legal, and they have a thing, and if you go down for the day, they have a whole kind of counseling thing, and if you talk about marriage from an emotional point, marriage from a financial point, marriage from da-da-da, and then the doctor will examine you, and prescribe birth control, and so all part of an all-day package.  I think there were three couples, I think six of us, went down there, spend the day at Port Chester.  So, I got acquainted with Planned Parenthood in Port Chester, and (inaudible) and so then, of course, periodically, I had to go back and check, so I would just drive down, over the line -- and it wasn’t long, let’s see, that was first year at the school, but then by the time we moved down to Oak Street, we finished the third year of school, first year of (inaudible) school, moved down to Oak Street, and my neighbors, the women, the other mothers around, would be saying, “how come you ain’t, how come you’re not” -- and I’d say, well, since I wanted to finish school, because we’re timing it.  “Well, how you going to do that?  You can’t.”  I’d say, well, there’re things you can do, and there’s a doctor.  “Well, I don’t know. Coca-Cola douches don’t work for me, and...”  I’d think, well I know, the doctor’s discussion really did help, and “can you take, you know where?”, well down in New York State, and like, oh, if you want to go, I’d be glad to take you with me.  So, before long, I’m driving once-a-month, driving a caravan loaded with young mothers, and lots of little children, and sticky lollipops, and you name it, off we go to Port Chester, down over the line, and everybody would get their birth control, then we’d come back, all joking with each other about, are we being followed by the cops, we’re bringing the contraband back into Connecticut, we’re giving it the whole thing.  \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=6300.0,6600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/23","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Too funny.  Plus, the other real bonus to that was not necessarily the birth control, but the conversations among all of us women about husbands, about sex, about teaching children about sex, you know.  I’ll never forget one women, saying, “Oh, my daughter, she’s a eleven there, and so we hadn’t, I haven’t told her any of this yet.”  And every women in the van yelled, “You are a (inaudible)!  God, women, talk to her!”  You know, this whole thing about talking to your daughter about sex, for God’s sakes, it was that kind of wonderful -- and by that time I was comfortable with them, of course, (inaudible), so for years, we’d go over the line and back.  And was in touch, was onboard with Planned Parenthood in New Haven, and doing various other things, so, then the Planned Parenthood decided to open a clinic in defiance of the law, intentionally, to break the law and to get the Supreme Court.  They’d been trying every other year.  And distant, even distant people would go up and try to testify at the state capitol, but no.  Mostly a Roman Catholic state people were going to say, I’m for getting rid of this law.  So, there was no way to get rid of it there, you had to go to the Supreme Court.  In Massachusetts, and Connecticut, were the only two states that had “the law,” which said you could buy birth control in the drug store, condoms, and such, and you could buy it and sell it, it was legal, you just couldn’t use it when you got home, that was illegal.  On the face of it, the fact that you would have to have a policeman under every bed in the state of Connecticut was so laughable that you couldn’t believe that -- but the thing was, you couldn’t get a doctor to prescribe it for a fear of getting into legal trouble, and if you were poor, you couldn’t -- and went to the clinic for your medical care, at Yale New Haven Hospital, Grace (inaudible) Hospital then, they weren’t about to.  I lay in an examining room one, one day, there was a curtain between the women in the next one, and the doctor saying to her, “This is so-and-so, you have six children.  You need to knock out anymore children.  Your body can’t take it.”  And she said, “Doctor, you going to help me?  Are you doing to give me something?”  And he said, “I’m sorry, I can’t.”  Hello.  You know, she’s going home to a husband who’s going to say, yes you will sleep with me.  In fact, some of the women that I took down to Port Chester, they get home and the husbands (inaudible) cultural.  Anyway, in order to get there, and defy the law, they opened this clinic in New \r\nHaven, and it was written up in the paper, and the first -- and I read about it, and it was, I had my third kid, and I wanted to get off the backroom, I wanted to get on film.  And, I thought, well, all right, I’m going to the clinic.  And one of my neighbors went with me, the two of us, and our two husbands, laughing and joking, saying “Ah, we’ll come pick you up in jail,” you know.  And we went on the second day, it was opened Monday, Wednesday, Friday, my memory.  Monday night, the police were all there, and everything’s a big hubbub written up in the paper.  Wednesday night, no police around, Dr. Buxton was there, Mrs. Grisswald, yeah, recommended that I use birth control, and Dr. Buxton examined me and prescribed the pill.  Thereby the two of them breaking the law, and I went out the door, I said, Estelle Grisswald, I really appreciate what you’re doing for all of us.  I know you’re running a risk, and all, and said, I’m sure there’s going to be trouble, if there’s anything I can do, let me know, I’m -- that was Wednesday night.  Friday they opened, the police came, closed it down, took them off it, were fingerprinted, and the next day, of course, I get a phone call from Estelle Grisswald, and said if there was anything you can do?  Yes, OK, there’s something you can do, you can turn state’s evidence for Planned Parenthood.  I said, you’re kidding?  Turn state’s evidence?  Yes, we need three people to say that, yes, in fact, we broke the law, so we would get this going.  OK.  So then, I said, OK, so, what do I do, once she reassured me they weren’t after me, they were just after her.  When you go down to the police station and you talk to, Blazzi? What was his name?  I forgot his name, something like that, B-L-A-Z-Z-I?  Anyway, we talked about detective (inaudible)  and so I see the detective, and we start to talk, and I said -- he looks at me and says, “Forsberg, you have any relation to Reverend Forsberg?”  I said, Bob.  Yeah, Reverend Bob.  You know Reverend Bob?  Yeah, \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=6600.0,6900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/24","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"that’s my husband.  I said, you know him?  Yeah, I used to be the cop on the beat on Oak Street when he had a church there.  “Really?” I said.  Oh, and he said “Do you remember ‘Sneaky Petey’?  And I said, Sneaky Petey walked through our stained glass window one night at church while we were having services, and I said, you remember so -- anyway, we went off for fifteen minutes about Reverend -- oh, we got to get back to this case and -- and he’s startled.  “All right, what happened to the clinic?”  And then he’s, and he took the whole story, and then he said, I’m sorry, I got to ask you for your pills, and I said, oh, all right.  So, I gave him the pills, then we were off and running on the case.  And they, so, it got heard in New Haven, so we had to go to the courthouse there.  It was a whole interesting experience all itself, with a lawyer asking me all these questions and so, about what happened, and then walking away, that’s all done, and he gets all the way here, away from me, and he turns around, comes back, looks at me, and says, “are you married?”  Hello?  Yes, yes.  It was like I never been in court like that before.  Then we didn’t hear anything for awhile.  So I went to the -- so it got voted down in locally, and in the state now went to the Supreme Court, it got rid of the law.  And the decision I think came down on June 7, something around ’65?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI think it was ’65, yeah.  Yeah.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t‘65?  And it’s like, mm.  And then in no time.  Well interesting, at that point, a couple of churches heard that I’d been in court on this, and they wanted, oh, don’t talk about that.  And even talking about birth control was touchy in churches, even in congregational churches, that I remember doing it and talking about the fact that it was a problem because of class thing, because if you had the money, a woman with money, I could’ve gotten birth control, safe birth control, in Connecticut with (inaudible).  But because I had to go to a public-run clinic, and because the other four women had had that, it’s unfair, and it’s a bad law, and you can’t enforce it.  Any law that cannot be enforced is a bad law, and made you get rid of it.  And then [Tricia?] said, “Mm, nobody’s talked about abortion, nope, not even a word about it out there.”  And then shortly the word was there.  And there it all was.  And then I got into the (inaudible) service for problem pregnancies.  That was four years.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo, what was that?  That was between the Griswald case and you coming to Yale, back to Yale?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tNo, because -- yeah -- no, the Griswald case was --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt was ’65.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t-- oh, so the Clergy Catholic Church, I started doing that in ’68, and yeah, I continued to, one year first, I did four years, and so I did the first year I was -- and then it was just too busy.  I just couldn’t carry it anymore, it took too much time.  The first year I did it, I’d go somewhere else, off campus, to meet people, so --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo, what was the Catholic service, tell me about that.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tIt was a group of clergy who’d been trained by some other clergy who had done this.  The clergy in New York had tested and found, I think, three sites where there were doctors who were good doctors, where it was legitimate to do.  One was in Puerto Rico, one was London, one was in Japan,  in the first days of the Clergy Catholic service, and it was legitimate to do abortions there, the trick was to get the women there.  And, to be clear with those places, that they would only charge the same amount of money, and that they wouldn’t rip the women off, and da-da-da-da.  And so that was a big deal, and we were all trained in how do you talk to women.  You talk to them for almost an hour before you give any information at all, just to be really sure she knows what she’s doing.  Why, and if you’re suspicious at all she’s going to resent this, and crack up, or that she’s a police officer in disguise, and then you don’t ever give out the names of the place.  But if you thought it (inaudible) and then you talk to their (inaudible) interested Puerto Rico, he said, how much it cost, how to find the place, da-da-da-da.  OK.  And so a number of people did that.  One father took his daughter to London.  I never had anybody go to Japan.  And then, after somewhere, maybe the third year, second, third year, we began to get names of doctors in the United States, New Orleans, somewhere else, I forget where, but several.  And so, people who couldn’t afford to go to Puerto Rico could get it in the States, and in that, because it was illegal, \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=6900.0,7200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/25","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"you had to do a lot more coaching.  You get to town, you called this number.  If it’s not the number, if they don’t answer this way, hang up and get out, and don’t do anything, call back.  Because it means the police are following them, and they’ll be on your trail.  If that goes well, I give them an address where to go, be careful when you get there, look around as soon as you get there, look around, make sure that you know how to get out of there if the police come, even if you’re on the second floor, and you jump out of the window, really.  It was sleazy.  It felt awful.  It was -- if they asked you -- we were contracted with them for a hundred dollars, are we presenting more that?  No.  And, then, you don’t remember my name.  On behalf of all the other women that are coming through this service, you don’t remember where you got this information, and I will not remember who you are if anybody catches me.  I will not know your name -- it just felt so undercover, it just felt so demeaning to women.  It felt really awful, and yet, this is a story that, married couples who’ve been trying, but (inaudible) failed, they already have four children, the last one’s sleeping in a dresser drawer, there’s no way they can afford it.  Uhh.  And what an interesting women who came through, she’s from Czechoslovakia, and said, “I don’t know why I have to come to you.  I don’t know why I have to go through all this.  We never have this problem over there.  You just go to the doctor.”  Like, what is wrong with America, that you have -- oh God, it was an interesting time.  And one interesting how we got all through the whole thing, and the same women, and all of a sudden, she stopped, and she looked at me, and she said, “Aren’t you a little afraid the police are going to catch you?” I said, I suppose that’s always a possibility, I just go with the assumption that I’m doing something to help women, and I’m doing it in good conscience, and I’m trusting that they will not undo this for other women too.  And she left, and I went to the phone, then I called Bob, and I said, “I just had a very unnerving response from somebody, and I’m not coming home for awhile, and this is why, I’m going to drive around, whatever, and when I finally come home with police cars on Bristol Street, I’m out of there.  I’m not coming home at all, I’m leaving the city.  Never heard anymore, it was fine, no follow-ups, so she obviously wasn’t -- but she scared me. \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAll of this -- you were doing all of this work really before second wave feminism took off.  I just wondered when you say consciously you were a feminist.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tInteresting.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIf indeed, you could say?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tWell, I think it was gradual, and it was in different ways, and in degrees, and one article in there, the one that says, did we really sing, the you know --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOh (inaudible)\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t-- counting down our men, now, or did we really sing that chapel today?  And it was Marquand Chapel, and we were singing this hymn which I’ve known all my life, and sung at, and all of a sudden I sing, “He that are men, now serve Him, against our numbered foes” and I thought, well, Hell, I’ve been doing this for years, what do you mean, men now?  So, the language thing connected at a level that never have actually connected before.  It’s like, oh OK.  So, little things like that, one at a time.  The one that connected for me, as I was going through the women’s liberation lecture series at Wednesday nights, at eight o’clock, and sitting in the circle and such.  Finally, and I can’t remember which session it was in, or how they got, I guess it was people talking about how they discovered themselves as women, versus in marriage, or something.  And they began talking about birth control, and I began to think, you know, I am so sick of being not have to do this.  And Bob had talked about getting a vasectomy, making it easier, but he never followed up on it, never said anymore, and of course, he’s, you don’t push.  It made things difficult because I, well, I start thinking about that on the way home, by the time I got home, I was, I had a, I kept thinking -- they keep talking about it, everybody’s got an issue, I finally have an issue.  Do you care enough about me, or not? \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo when did you --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tBut that was another, slight awareness, and it just kept coming.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, because, obviously, you were highly political giving where you were living, and the work that you were doing, both on a personal front, and also, on the social side.  \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tWhy didn’t I (inaudible)?  Got me.  You took some other people \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=7200.0,7500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/26","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"talking about for instances in their lives, and my saying, “oh, yeah, I guess I have felt that.  Oh, is that what they’re talking about?”  And then putting enough of those together... I think I said I was a feminist, and affirmed I was, and said I was, thinking that feminism meant not, what was the old definition?  Now, I’m going blank, sorry.  Isn’t that interesting, I’m totally going blank, and I know (inaudible).\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI’ll tell you what -- tell me like you discovering New Haven Women’s Lib?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tRight, well that was, I read it in the paper.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo, this would be 19 --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThis was in --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- before you, before --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tIt was in ’71.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo, were you actually at, back at Yale at that point?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tNo, I was still working for [Barker Wilson?] at the Continuing Education Center, and I, I wrote down the date -- and I started going to this thing, and so would’ve been Spring of ’71, and I started at Yale July 1st.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tSo it was just before, and maybe lapped over a little bit, but it was just before I started -- and you’d think I’d be able to see the, I thought I wrote down the date -- anyway, because it struck me when I found the book.  So, I saw the ad and went in, and you know, discovered myself sitting on the outside of the circle, near the door, then got, got aware that, hey, that I was scared, that become more aware that each group talked about (inaudible) in different stages of their lives, and I could relate to things.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo, it was women of all ages?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tIT was women of all ages.  There were high school women there.  There were students from [Outwards Magnus?].  There were women older than I.  There were women my age who were very aged, both who spoke, presented, and they were in different levels of consciousness, obviously.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd was it ethnically-mixed as well, or was it --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI don’t remember that it was.  Now, that may have been that I was so self-absorbed, as I was getting my eyes opened, and I couldn’t see anybody but me.  Certainly were lots of white women.  The [day shippers?] I could spot,  I don’t remember, there may well have been a color difference, but I don’t -- that wasn’t on my mind, at the time.  And I think the longer -- when those eight weeks were over, I found more places where I can identify an emotional level, which you have to do at some point, you can’t just be in your head, that, right, there have -- I think, I always thought it was sort of petty for women to complain about things that happened to them, particularly white, middle class women who have a very easy life, and to complain about what seemed like minor putdowns, or, you know, c’mon, grow up, you can deal with that, so, he didn’t really mean that.  I mean, all these negative excuses for the men.  So, that was a part of it.  Ask me later about an article about somebody who, when she was in the movies, later on after I got started in Yale, but I think -- and sailing back again to the definition of feminism, that a feminist is somebody who doesn’t -- it has to do with how you interpret the world, and now I can’t pull up what I want to say about that, I hope it comes back to me because, in a way, I could say I’m a feminist, I’m on the side of women, and yes I think things shouldn’t always be interpreted from a male point of view, whether -- and that’s a nice, clear, rationale, I think.  The real becoming a feminist though, is more than that, and this you can argue and carry out, but it doesn’t take you very far.  You need something that rings a bell in your gut about ways that it that you’ve experienced put-down, and therefore, shouldn’t let other women down.  So, I think it was a very gradual process.  I think I knew that I needed to be a weigher, as I started, if you’re going work with, and be an advocate with women, you better \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=7500.0,7800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/27","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"be very aware in where they are, and listening, and not arguing with them.  These are younger women, they’ve had different experiences.  They’re coming out of somewhere else, and you better learn, and I really understood my role as being quiet, and learn, and if I had something useful to say, just say it, but other than that.  I know what I was going to -- I suddenly realized it was back in campus ministry, but I certainly didn’t have the answers to them.  During that first year, working at Yale, with this article, it’s probably somewhere, you’ve probably read it -- now I’m going to go blank again.  It was one of the very first academic articles written by women about the assumption of society that women are secondary.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas it something like Shela Tobias, somebody like that?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tNo, it was somebody before her, wasn’t at Yale, it was in an article, and there was lots of responses to it, and when I came across it, it was like, it suddenly made sense in a whole new light.  It obviously affected me somewhat, what I wanted to talk about it, takes leave for awhile.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYou can always write it into the transcript, so don’t worry about it. \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tBut I wonder, I think, Sandra, the whole awareness thing was gradual, didn’t (inaudible)--\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI’m going --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t-- maybe most women my age who came from another place, assuming we were equal, assuming that men were of good intent.  Never having known any really mean man, nobody had ever been mean to me.  Nobody ever told me I couldn’t get ordained, c’mon.  It’s like, I had to learn to shut up when women talked about being put down for ordination, and then, they would all talk about this, that, and the other, and then, I somehow instinctively knew, don’t say, oh I never had any trouble, because obviously a lot of women did, and just hush.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas this the same point where you began to, at least, articulate in your mind what was troubling you about your marriage?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI’d say, yeah, that it all began to come together, I think.  And it took me a long time to admit that.  When did I...so that’s a muddle for me.  In ’70, I was so busy, and I was so new, and I was learning so much, and there was so much going on, that it’s hard to sort out when things happened, but...\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you have your first bout of illness before you went back to school, was that --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tNo, it was the end of my -- it started -- it was the end of my first year, it was many, it was many -- that’s ’72.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell, let’s -- we’ve more -- we pretty well got you back into Yale.  It’s interesting that, that a job such as, that was specifically an advocacy job can up in the Div School, I think probably longer than anyone else, more or less, on campus.  I mean, there was the Office of, for the Education of Women, which of course was run by Elgar Wasserman, but I think that was mostly to do with co-education --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- and making that --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThe college had just gone over to --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThat’s right, in ’69, it had gone to co-ed.  But, clearly, she did have concerns about the position of women, but I’m not sure that there was any specific advocacy role, at that point, so you were the first person.  I just wanted to know how that came about, and why it came by in the Div school?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tMy -- there may be a lot more to it that I know -- what I understood was, that the student, that the women went to college, and it was, they said, we need somebody on our side we can talk to, he recognized that and said, yes, you’re right, and did what he could, which was to create half of a job.  He didn’t consult a board of permanent officers.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBecause this was moment when things were grinding to a halt because of the economy, wasn’t it?  I think it --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tMaybe.  197 --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t’71 was the year, maybe that was just before the oil crisis, maybe I’m being a bit presumptuous there.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI forgot.  I was just aware of the students having, and Colin, having said yes, which was the key thing.  But then, the interesting way in which he had to implement it was just to put me into a job, which I knew nothing about and had no training for --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd that was, that was to be --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThe registrar, (inaudible) after a woman\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=7800.0,8100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/28","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"who was very efficient and had been a full-time registrar, and her assistant at the time was Dietra MacDougle -- she was married then, but had different name.  Anyway, and this was Marson, the registrar, said to me, when she met me and she knew I knew nothing about this, and was coming in from being, coming in from outside.  But, she was very gracious, and she said, you may want to keep Dietra on, you don’t have to, but she’s been my assistant, and she’s a very good worker.  She’s very quiet, and, she said, but she’s a very good worker, yeah.  So I said, fine.  So, I said to myself, an assistant who knows the job, see, somebody who knows nothing about it, coming in, supplanting her, it’s just, interesting.  This could be difficult.  So, I made it my business to get acquainted with Dietra, and talk to her, and I remember seeing her, I did not know anything about this job, I’ve never been to the registrar, and you probably know I’m in this job because they really want an advocate, and that’s sort of why I’m here.  And I need you, I need you to teach me what to do, I need, you know, in helping you, and I promise you, if you will help me get through this until we get this underway, I will get you, see that it will get you promoted, as least to the sister of [edustar?] and then move on up as fast as we can make that happen, because you really ought to have this job, and this is sort of a necessary thing at the moment, but I think it may be hard for you, and so, it will help if you (inaudible) for me, that would, I would appreciate it a lot.  And she’s very close (inaudible), and she’s very discreet, she’s very quiet, and she agreed.  And she was right there for me.  She would quietly say, “we need to do this now, this kind of reporting needs to get done.  It would be well if you did this,”  or she sort of brought me along, saved my life, that whole first year it the registrar’s office, so that I -- she carried some of the load, and she just saved my life.  So, I didn’t do anything terrible.  Meantime, I’m trying to create a new job over here that, also, I know nothing about except I’m a women, right?  And she didn’t say a word about that, but evidently, she just watched, watching, as it happened.  Granted, she began to get clues that this was a good thing, because she cared about the women students too.  And her own self of her self as a women who, in those years, and one day -- oh, a two year that I’ve been there, how long have I been there?  Two, maybe three -- she appeared at my door, and she said quietly, “I’m going to have to leave earlier today, I’m going to see a lawyer about a divorce.”  Oh my goodness, you know, a whole another women’s issue, kind of thing. \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo, how did you set about creating this job that you’re, yes.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t-- with the women?   I wish I could remember.  First, was the gathering the women that I knew that were around, and it was students that (inaudible) --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOf course, you start, when did you start the first --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tJuly 1st, so it was summer, and there weren’t any classes, so you can sort of gather -- and some people were there over the summer working, and so I got to know as many as I could.  And, I just said to them, you know, there’s this new thing that’s just opened up, we have the chance to do, and I need everybody’s help because I need a group think on this.  I’m, you know, don’t know what needs doing, and why don’t we meet and talk about it, whatever.  One very helpful person in that was George Lynnbeck’s wife, I. Lynbeck, who has graduated at Div school.  They lived on Orem Street, right down the street.  She was a real feminist advocate, and she taught at southern Connecticut, and she was a dynamo.  And we’ve known each other, and we’ve sung in the choir together, and stuff, so she was really right there, in support, and she was really helpful.  And these women so --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWere there any women, by this time, were there any women on the faculty? \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tMargaret Farley was coming on at that September, or maybe she was appointed July 1st, but anyway, there had not been, so this was the summer where we started getting acquainted, and talked about what needs to be -- well there probably ought to be a place for women to meet, there probably ought to be a center so that we can see each other, the few of us -- there were only twenty eight women in the student body, it wasn’t like there was a whole lot of people.  Was one issue, we would probably going to need to ask her some space, OK.  One very helpful, I’ll never forget, one women at the school was going to classes -- maybe she was enrolled at, she was a Unitarian for God’s sake, but she was going to classes at Berkley -- and she knew a lot of the Berkley students, \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=8100.0,8400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/29","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"and Berkley was about to affiliate, it affiliated July 1st, exact same time I did, with Yale Women’s school, but the Berkley students were not happy.  No, I don’t think anybody was happy about it, except the two deans, because they saw, long-term, it was a good thing for both schools, but there’s something to be told that the school you enrolled in, and were giving your tuition to, was suddenly going to be part of Yale?  Who wanted -- so this Barbara Henry, bless her heart, who was working in the office across from me, but she’d been doing, so she knew the Berkley students she had been going to Berkley cut classes.  She came over one day, to my office across the way, and she said, “let me just say that there’re going to be a whole lot of very, unhappy students here, in September, if the school students come from Berkley, because they really don’t want to be here.” And --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI take it, those were all men?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYeah.  They were all men, except for her.  And she said, “You might want to spend some attention on them too, because they’re going to be new, and then anybody can do to make them feel welcome, is going to be good.”  Thank you, that was a good heads up.  I might not have thought of that, you know.  So, people were sort of like, helpful at little things.  I forget what we felt we’d do at the beginning of school, it seems to be we had some plans for getting off the ground at the beginning.  It’s all a little instinct mood.  I do remember the opening of school, or before the open of school, there’s always a faculty retreat, which was held then in grand nature, or something, it’s something, because, oh -- whatever that place is down in southern Connecticut -- well, an area down there that’s a big, Episcopal center, and the faculty retreat was to be down there.  And it was always like the weekend before school starts.  So, I had heard nothing about it, of course.  And I was at some meeting with women’s group, and by Lynnbeck’s house, and she said, “so when are you leaving for the retreat?”  I said, “I’m not leaving.  What retreat?”  She said, “The faculty retreat!”  I said, “well, yeah, but --“  “You didn’t get invited?!” “Uh, no.”  “Colin didn’t invite you?!”  I said, “No.”  She said, “Well, it’s starting this afternoon, starting tonight, you should be down there, just to --“  I said, well why can’t this.  And she, runs off, goes to the phone, calls up the center, “I want to talk to George Lynnbeck,” gets a hold of him, “George, Joan ought to be down there, c’mon, da-da-da, you tell Colin you have --“  She comes back in a few minutes and says, “OK, Colin says nine o’clock tomorrow morning, he’ll introduce you, you’ll talk about what you’re going to do at the retreat.”  And I’m going, (gasps).  One of the other women says, “I’ll drive you down, I know where it is, I’ll drive you there.”  Somebody else said, what else can we do?  Any -- you know, da,da,da,da.  So, they’re all coaching me, what I should wear, what I should do, what I should -- I said, tell me, what should I say?  Let’s work out an outline.  What do I say to the assembled male faculty about what this new program, none of them know about, which Colin has put in place over their heads.  Hello.  Fortunately, I know some of these men who’ve been old friends, you know, some of them.  And, OK.  This is Friday, Friday night, we’re doing all this.  Like, oh my God, nine o’clock, Saturday morning, down in, where -- so I get down there, I walk in the building, here comes Margaret Farley downstairs, in her habit.  “Joan, where have you been?  I’ve been waiting for you.”  I said, “Margaret, I’m so glad to see you here.”  So, she says, where have you -- I said, I wasn’t invited.  “You weren’t invited?”  I said, “No, why Lynnbeck called you and said...”  So, she says, “I’m so glad for you.”  So, do we, we have no time, right, we walk in.  Big meeting room, big circle chairs wrapped, big empty space, circle chairs, all the way around, people sitting in all the chairs, all the way around.  One empty chair over there, one empty chair over here.  Margaret is over here, I have to walk across the circle until I get in place. Fortunately, I sat with Ed Duvall who was the chaplain at Yale (inaudible) I forget, somebody, some other friend, faculty person I knew, and meantime, people were sort of looking at us, and some of us were like, “what is she doing here, wha” -- not hostile, just curious, you know.  And then Colin introduced me, and said what the new position was, and something about why, and who I was, and that I was going to say a few words about what plans would be for the ball.  So, I can remember, the outline was something about, the women felt, in order \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=8400.0,8700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/30","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"for -- I don’t remember how I said it, but the general idea was, needed a place to gather and to be together.  They needed, something or other, and a presence, some kind of presence of somebody who could be helpful in discerning how women are in ministry, or what, I can anyway I forget what the second thing was that took place, something that was, OK.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMaybe as a model, as a role model, as a role model for ordinary --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI don’t think I used those terms for those guys, but, if somehow a presence who could say to the faculty what they felt they needed, that they felt they had no one to whom they could, at the moment, that they could safely go.  And, I understood that you were all care about that, you care about all your students, your sympathetic with, but somehow, there’s a hesitancy on the part of many women at the point to, to go, because of vulnerability, that’s hard.  And so, they feel they need a presence who can express their (inaudible), but there was a second something in there.  Anyway, so I got all through it.  The first question, “so are all the women now going to just take all their food and go eat over in the women’s center?”  Uh, no.  No, that’s not the point.  And there were questions like that.  People, they just couldn’t -- why would the women need this?  Why would they need it.  But there were some, Charles Forman, very sympathetic.  And so, there were some of these people who had known me and had known Bob and me, in the street, and knew I wasn’t crazy, and knew I wasn’t a raging, screaming, angry woman.  And so, were happy to be (inaudible), and then there were a whole bunch I didn’t know at all, but they weren’t hostile.  Nobody was hostile.  It was a little puzzled maybe.  I was like, and there was Margaret, thank you God for Margaret Farley right there.  So I think I stayed for the rest of the conference. I don’t remember anything much more about it than that, but that was the beginning of the (inaudible) at the Div school, we did, we did get the school, Ray would,  bless his heart.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo, you mentioned the women’s center.  I just wondered, where did that fit in, the decision the have a women’s center, where did that fit in with you canvassing views, and opinions, and feelings, from the student body, both male and female.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tWell, I think it came from the women -- I’m sure it came that summer, and talked a little bit about what do we need, and what would be helpful, how do we, what should we be doing, what would you like me to do?  And I think that’s when we decide we need a place to gather.  The common room was too big.  We needed some kind of place where we can build community about the women.  And so, they said, you need to go tell Ray Wood that we need -- we started out by talking about suite, a room.  We need a room where we can meet.  So, I got up from Ray with the business properties guy.  I don’t know, his room, office is right across the hall from mine.  So, I got up from my chair, I started out of my office, and behind me, before I cross out of my step, into the hall, I hear a voice say, “Ask for a suite, tell him we need a suite.”  I though, well geez.  So, I kept right on my way, and I asked to talk to Ray, and said, “The women feel, it would be really helpful, but we need a suite, we need someplace to meet, da-da-da.”  And he was like, “Well, I’ll talk to Colin and I’ll see about it.”  And the next thing, by the end of the day, we -- and so we could have the suite, such and such, and Beecher House, da,da,da, on the first floor, of the first one coming in, for the women to have a women’s center.  It was wonderful, because we could have a small meeting.  They could decorate it, and do what they wanted, and it became a very interesting place.  The men, I don’t know how the men at rest rooms, the men -- basically men’s dorms, not rest rooms, because the women hadn’t moved out into quad yet. \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhen you talk to the men about what do women want, I suppose, what sorts of responses did you have, from the men?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI’m trying to remember what the questions were, when I met with some of the men, I think I was just trying to say, tell me something about what it’s like in the student body, what’s the climate, what’s it like, I’m just coming back after been away.  I’ve been on the fringe, da,da,da.  Oh, the women are saying they think they need, you know -- I forget, I don’t, I can’t remember how I phrased it, but I wanted to hear from them how did they see life on the campus, and I assumed they, if they were going to be defensive, it would show.  If they were going to be angry, or if they would think this was stupid, or whatever.  And that’s where I got these responses about the women students, are just below us.  I mean, they were just --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo it was, quite hostile?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tIt was down putting.  It was just more, well, we don’t think much of them.  And so, that may have been hostility in another form.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo why did they think --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t(Inaudible) -- I can’t remember the way all of them reacted, I remember that reaction because it was painful --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=8700.0,9000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/31","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"JOAN FOSBERG:\t-- there may have been other, more. \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhy do, why do you think, why were they saying that the women were, were this kind of low form of life on campus?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tOnly, my guess -- it partly came from having seen the problem with the women, for that alcohol problems, and I think it was a polar, bipolar thing, with the other women that had the severe problems, and equating all women with that, and maybe it was, we’re the majority, and we don’t want to be bothered with, you know, why would the women have anything special, or something, to come and be with them.  I don’t know what it was, it was just --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tCould it be --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t-- it surprised me.  It wasn’t, oh, it’s great to have them as fellow scholars.  I mean, I didn’t hear that anywhere. \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI just wanted -- you’re tying to compare and contrast what it was like in your day, when you were a student there, back, you know, thirty years before, or twenty years before.  Was, were the women different from your cohort?  Were they maybe more hostile towards the men?  Were they just simply so bound up in their own intellectual feminist concerns, so that the men were irrelevant, and so the men maybe felt pushed out.  I’m just trying to get a sense of what it might --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI (inaudible) knew, because I’m trying to think whether there was any real sense among the women then, before I got there, of being feminist, or being active feminists or anything.  I don’t, I don’t know that.  Certainly not an organized king of feminism among them.  It was much more individual, I need help or I need somebody to talk to.  I need a role model, or we need a role model.  But it wasn’t --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo, it wasn’t standing up of women’s centers as some sort of collective action?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tNo.  That was, the few people that I talked to in that sermon?  No, that was twenty eight.  How many were students, some went away for the summer, and stuff.  So it was maybe six, seven I met with all summer.  And their recommendation was, we need a place to meet.  Some came back to campus, haven’t even heard about this, and didn’t know that there was going to be anybody there, whether -- and the men, I don’t think, felt threatened yet.  I don’t think they saw this as something coming to encroach on the -- I don’t know what, why they were down.  I was so surprised by it, that I, that’s all I remember, is the sort of shock, and the, oh my word, this is really, sad, because I didn’t remember men thinking or speaking that way when I was a student.  I knew they dated nurses at the nursing school, and maybe a preference to do women, or for whatever reason, but I didn’t hear this kind of, very low, low (inaudible).  Maybe it was just the men I talked to (laughter) so I wish I could remember more about that, it would be helpful to know, wouldn’t it?  If you ever get to talk to Dietra, it would be interesting to know what her recollections are of the mood of students at that time, and whether she was really aware of it -- that’s a puzzlement for me.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tComing back to the, coming back to the Div School, obviously, women’s issues were certainly becoming a concern.  And I just wondered where they fitted in maybe into the sort of the other, sort of, pressing moral and political concerns that were clearly exorcising students, right across campus, let alone Div School students.  I just wondered, did it have the same traction as...because you came back just after Kent State --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThat’s right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- killings of students also demanding I think more choice and authority in curriculum matters.  I think that was another thing that was going on. \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThat was a very interesting thing.  At the Div School, when I came back, we were still on Pass/Fail, they had gone into that kind of Pass/Fail and they were beginning to be debates about it, faculty, some of the faculty were not happy about it, because they said, we have some who are going out for doctoral work, you’re never going to get it, what kind of a transcript is this, to say Pass/Fail, Pass -- they may have been the highest in the class, and some of the best students of course were doing the Pass/Fail, I mean, they were confident in their own ability, and they didn’t need count that, but that was a big issue on campus at the time, was the Pass/Fail.  Trying to think.  About the -- I mean, women some of the women were conscious of wanting to (inaudible), some were clearly wanting a place to meet, and have something represented. \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas anybody pressing for \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=9000.0,9300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/32","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"the inclusion of the study of women’s issues in the curriculum, in ’71-72, your first year?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThat’s interesting.  I don’t remember that, which is not to say it wasn’t happening.  I don’t remember that, I do remember, as we met that summer and talked about what we needed, we needed more women in the faculty, and we needed them in the serious subjects, Bible, and then we had Margaret in Ethics, thank God, but so that a woman’s perspective would be taken seriously by the men, as well, because men had to take Bible courses, they had to take theology, they had to take, they didn’t have to take counseling, which is the way it works.  So, we knew there was a press for women faculty and there began, either that year or the following year, a strong press for a courser, a women in ministry field-based course.  I can’t remember in what year that started.  And it may have started, the first one we did, may have been women in campus ministry, because there were like five or six women who had gotten field-based placements, and (inaudible) all working with the(inaudible), one was going to work with Phil Zader, in the head chaplain’s office, one was going to be, they were going to be scattered chapels -- so they were doing, really, just field-work kind of thing, and they wanted to be able to meet in a course and talk about women in campus ministry, and talk about it by themselves, so, they wanted me to teach the course.  Joan is not real faculty.  She is not academic, she’s not, OK.  So, we have to have some men teach the course.  So, we had three male chaplains,  Sam Sly, wonderful Sam Sly, who is a [Congregationalist?] black, had been at Yale for years, and had been, in my class or the class ahead of me, (inaudible) and so we were old friends.  So, Sam, he had been campus ministry there forever.  Phil Zader, maybe, who was the associate chaplain to Bill Coughman , or whoever, and who, there’s a third one, there was a third -- anyway, there were three men and me.  It was, all right, I could teach with the guys, they were some really Yale people teaching.  (Inaudible) campus ministry, all women students, comes out to maybe seven or eight of them, women students, and four faculty, three men and me.  It was great fun, it was really very interesting, and we had it reflecting what was happening in their work, then at some point after that, a year or two or whatever after -- we got the point where I could teach a course on women in ministry, and the campus ministry, was women in ministry.  And some years -- I guess it was usually co-taught, but not, wasn’t Carl Hilbert, who was head of the Christian Community Action downtown, I forget, anyway, it was different, so it was sort of co-taught, and it could be women in any kind of field-placement, and those are really, rich years of discussion, and of consciousness, I mean, everybody was consciousness.  At least one year it was co-taught, I co-taught with Barbara Dinneson, who was a practicing (inaudible) graduated Div School, practicing (inaudible) just in town.  And she was wonderful because she had to handle things which were really important.\r\n\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd did you, you had a conscious-raising group as well?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI think we must have, at that sort -- I think I was in one with women my own age, which met regularly, and I think, I can’t remember what else was going on, whether we had something meeting with -- after that summer, I forget how long we went on with that group, you’d think I would remember, there was too much going on -- but clearly women were talking about the issues.  It was, the ferment was starting, and things started getting raised --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas women’s ordination really becoming a --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI don’t remember that first year, but soon thereafter, and one key -- I’m jumping around on time-wise, and there is a newspaper article somewhere about this.  There was a point, at some year, ’55, ’56, ’54, where Lee McGee, who \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=9300.0,9600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/33","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"was the fiscal, and regularly ordained fiscal priest, one of the early ones, graduated the (inaudible) school.  And she’d been one of the regularly ordained ones, and the women invited her, wanted to invite her to campus.  And she came, and she did several sessions, talking.  And they wanted her to celebrate Eucharist.  The chapel committee said she can celebrate Eucharist down in the common room, or out in the hall, or in Marquand Chapel, or at any other time than the usual hour on Friday morning, but not at the regularly scheduled hour for Eucharist, which was nine thirty, Friday morning, at Marquand Chapel.  And their reason for that was, that there would be many people coming, several of whom would feel, because of conscience, that they cannot receive, and it is not fair to put them in that position.  Women, of course, felt differently about -- wait a minute, this is an ordained, she’s a Yale, da,da,da,da.  It got to be a very heavy issue, and what came out of it was, that on that Lee was going to celebrate on Friday, I think on Friday afternoon or something, somewhere else, but on Friday morning, at the accepted hour, we would have what Jeffrey Rothorn -- I love Jeffrey Rothorn -- Jeffrey Rothorn, a good Anglican Welsh, Anglican who was teaching at his chapel, and (inaudible) women who were very angry because -- his suggestion was a Eucharistic fast.  We all said, a what?  And he said, somewhere in churches, don’t ask me, I’ve forgotten now when or what, troubled how when people couldn’t come together for something, when only water was served, wheat for the service, for the prayers, preaching, water what, what is served.  A Eucharist needs water, because we are not yet there, able to fully celebrate, and that was agreed to be the service.  And there’s a picture in, wherever that newspaper article is, from the New York Times, the religion editor for the New York Times was a graduate of Yale Divinity School, came up to me, and got a picture from the balcony, of the whole crowd, gathered around the table.  I’ll never forget, it was so powerful, sort of the service that Jeffrey preached.  Michael Allen, who was the dean, Berkley’s dean, he was there.  He was fully in accord with this.  There we were, around the table, drinking only water and realizing what a poor substitute for the whole thing, and therefore what a poor substitute if the church were that beholden to people of God, you know.  It’s getting (inaudible).  We go to celebrate, and then leave, celebrate -- I think in Marquand, that’s later than things, but that was one major, major issue, and it was the year of the irregular ordinations, which every year that was, I forgot, should be able to remember, but was, somewhere in the early ‘70s, right?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYes. I think it has to be --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBecause --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t-- because you had, then you had the conference, didn’t you, on women’s seminaries, or women’s seminary?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThe (inaudible) Seminary Conference?  Yeah, right.  And, because, somewhere, must have been early ‘70s, because then there was an Episcopal, the general, whatever the thing is every three years, the big, wingding national --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.  Syne -- \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t-- things.  Is that what they call it (inaudible).\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, I think it’s the [Synetes?]\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tAnd, and it was after this kind of thing, and they were going to debate, and the issue was coming up, I think it was in ’76 the issue was going to come up, and so we had several people from the Div School, G.L. Bigwood who was (inaudible), and who was the financial aid officer, and one or two for the women, I forget who all offered, were going to go, and were going to be there, and so, what I say, we better send them off with prayer and singing, we can’t just let them go off to that meeting, and so -- everyone, all the women, we all gathered in the chapel.  We had a time, they talked to each one and talked about what they hoped would happen, we prayed with them, for them, sang, sent them off, and it got voted down, of course.  Then, three years later, it was going to come up again, the next big, three-year whatever, whatever, which I think was ’79, and again, we sent them all off the same way, and they voted, the vote was yes.  And the vote came through at night,  \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=9600.0,9900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/34","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"some were gathered in the women’s center.  I think Leddy was there, we had a big, you know, kind of celebration and everything.  The next morning, I’m in my office, and here comes Jeffrey Rothorn, with a red rose, and he said, have a rose, for you see important women around this issue, I’m celebrating with you, the vote, of the church.  He had red rose for me, he had to have own for his wife, it’s a wonderful, gracious (inaudible) and it was so moving.  You can tell, there’re a lot of special things happen too, but Lee’s being there was clearly, earlier than that, so, and that issue just was there all the time.  For some of the women, [Methodist?] Church was going to ordain women, but the process they had to go through, all of the examining committees, all through the seventies, always men.  And time, after time, after time, one after another, the [Methodist?] would come back from those conferences from their exam, they’re being interviewed, just raging, or silent with fury, about how the questions that were raised, about, you know, and after about one or two of those had happened, I said, whoa, we’ve got to get together and talk about how, how we answer some of the questions that come up.  They seem to be something similar, like marriage, like, da,da,da,da.  I remember like, how are you going to do this if you have children, how are you going to -- How is it helpful to answer those questions?  So, we had, you know, sessions with women about, OK, here’s a question that may come up from some committee which is unaware, and had not thought about this, and is thinking in all terms.  OK.  Think of three different responses you could give to that question.  Maybe you have an angry response, what would that do, how will feel?  Maybe you have, sort of, meek response.  What would that do? Maybe you have -- what else could you -- think of three different ways you could respond to that question, and let’s play it out and talk about what might be most effective in what situation, and we just did that, we just didn’t role play about how you deal with idiot church committee questions, from people who’d never thought about this before, and try to say, OK, if you have thought through your answers before, you won’t need to blow up in their faces, you’ll need to do this, you can be kind of quiet, and in charge.  And that went on for a long time, because there were a lot of women coming up for ordinations who were running into a lot of committees, who were not with it, quite.  One wonderful women that had long, long, long blonde hair, all the way, so she could sit on it.  And she was at, I guess it was at, the ordination for deacons, they have a (inaudible).  I think it was the one for deacons, she was the one of the group, and they do it in a group, and the bishop was very kindly, very friendly, nice guy and all, but didn’t know how to respond, wanted to do something welcoming, or indicate his concern for her, she was -- and so he reached out and stroked her hair, like she was a little girl, you know.  She was (inaudible).  He saw this gesture to try to be affirming, she felt like a little girl being patted on the head by daddy.  And to talk that through, and to talk through with other women what that felt like, and how to do that, and give her chance to mend.  It was a fascinating time.  It was new ground for everybody.  It was new ground for the women, it was new ground for church committees, and bishops, and men, and everybody, we were all flogging through this together, very --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWas there any difference between how these issues were addressed at a place like the Divinity School, which is part of a big, world-class university, and the Seminaries? \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI don’t know, I didn’t talk to -- you really know who you’ve got that you can talk to who’s at, seminar -- at a [Triciarite?] Seminary at that time, where it might have been...\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI just wondered if it was just more difficult for women at the Divinity School, where which maybe had certain constraints, I’ll note, that a Seminary wouldn’t have -- the seminary would be meeting the needs of a particular church --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tOf the church, right.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI’m not quite sure I’m trying to say, but I just wondered if there were different things that happened in different places, that --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYeah, I don’t know if it even had so much to do with the school, as with the church.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tRight.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tChurches. The school certainly was supporting women going for ordination. The problem came with the church bodies\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=9900.0,10200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/35","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"who were seeing something new and didn’t quite know what to do with it, particularly if it was somebody who was married, and coming through, and maybe she and her husband both would be there, and be need to be placed, and good heavens, what would she do with that?  (laughter)  There were a lot of questions that had never had to be answered before, or even looked at.  And, so we were sort of new, but the women were coming at it with a new sense of being empowered, and being entitled, to equal treatment in God’s family, and not all the churches had quite gotten (laughs) there yet.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo, a lot of what you were doing with the women in the women’s center, and elsewhere, on campus was strategizing ways --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tWhich was the way of empower, and it could be strategizing around stuck in classes, or the way to respond to thing.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you get much feedback from women students about how they were fairing in class, the kinds of issues that were coming up in class, and maybe some of the challenges that they were facing there?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tNo, I heard -- the language was an issue for a lot of them, and some of them did it verbally, and some wrote notes, and put them on the lecture, (laughs)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo, yeah, yeah.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t-- you know, quietly to each other about it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo, what was the, what was the language issue?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tIt was always referring to God as “he,” assuming God is male, always referring to humankind as man, mankind.  Those are obviously the two central ones, what else?  And that, of course, comes up in hymns, comes up in scripture, comes up in theological writing, nobody had ever thought about this before in terms of the whole human family being “they,” or “the people of God,” or sometime, or if it’s “man” in the scriptures, sometimes “man,” sometimes “woman,” sometimes “he,” sometimes “she.”  It took to all the Old Testament stories, which have Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and pretty soon you started having Sarah, da,da,da,da, adding, there were some other people there too, (inaudible) (laughter) You’re messing with the scripture.  It was hard for everybody.  It was a whole new territory.  And the mankind issue is sort of like my (inaudible) never served him. Wait a minute, I’ve been doing this, I’m not a man...\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd I suppose, also, a lot of symbolism?  I mean, there was the case, where you mentioned --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYeah, the banner --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThe banner, yeah, yeah.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThe resurrection banner, which was distinctly --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo what was that?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t--a large, large banner.  Somebody had put it up for a chapel service, we had a lot of artists.  I guess this guy was one of the artists in the student body.  Large, covered the front of the chapel.  Posters are after the Res -- after Easter.  And it was a distinctly male figure ascending, I can’t even at this point remember distinctly the figure -- what I remember was the women began calling me, a Jesus, coming from the shower, because it was so clearly, broad shoulders, you know, this was not a wimpy, female figure, whatever.  Anyway, and, there was Iris Kelly who came on campus one day a week to stay the night, I knew I remember him coming back -- who saw this (inaudible) chapel, and she thought this is not true to the -- the ascension is about everybody.  I mean, yeah, the Resurrection is a for everybody, it’s not just for -- so she wrote this thing, which, A, deeply hurt the artist guy, who had done the thing, or angry about, I don’t know, he was not happy, and some other men were angry.  For Iris, the women did not immediately jump to defend her because, even because of the timidity, or fear of getting in, the unsureness about how to say where they were around there, but Iris felt pretty alone out there with this, and she said to me, later on, that she wondered where there the women were, and why they weren’t supporting her, and they were, apparently, weren’t ready to, at that point, in something public in the written document conflict.  Later on, I’m sure, three more years, five more years, it would’ve been right, there, you know.  Certainly, and it would’ve been more women.  Those early first years, there were not all that, and we were still outnumbered, and so, we were a little cautious about taking on the whole school, knew just what that felt like. \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo, Margaret Farley, she was the first full-time faculty member, and she was teaching hardcore ethics.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYes, yes.\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=10200.0,10500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/36","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER:\tWhen did the, when did the women students begin to ask, maybe men too, I don’t know, but when did the women start to ask for the inclusion of women’s issues in the curriculum?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThey asked first for more women faculty, and that, of course, as I was saying to the (inaudible) in the Divinity School.  In a university school, where you have to be vetted pretty well, and you have to be a real academic, and so, if you’re going to be in -- and they really did try.  There was a New Testament, a women New Testament scholar from Norway who was with us for either a semester or a year --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThey just wanted women in --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThere just weren’t enough to get.  And I remember one discussion, and it’s even in there, there’s a little note in one of my (inaudible) in there, which says, “write Rosemary Ruether.”  You know who Rosemary Ruether is?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  Yes, the --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tShe was there in the dining room, at the next table to us today.  She lives here.  But there was, one of the items, said, “write to Rosemary Ruether” and I remember doing that, because it was like, somebody suggested, one of the faculty said, well, if you’re going to have a women here, so that, in a, try, you know, she’s trying to get somebody like Rosemary Ruether, because she’s a real scholar and she would be respected, and that would, that would kill.  OK.  Rosemary Ruether is teaching at the Black College in Washington, D.C.  Is that a college or seminary?  Anyway, she was teaching down at Washington.  And she’s Roman Catholic.  And of course, Margaret was (inaudible) so I remember writing her, and saying, you know, we have the women, and we have a predicament, and we really, deeply want women scholars, and your name has been suggested.  We only have pittance of money, I realize this is, like, an insult to offer you this much, and say this, but literally this is all we have, and it’s more a case of the women, we need you -- I don’t know, whatever.  And then, there’s a thing, the letter back from Rosemary, and another letter (laughter) and she came, she agreed to do it.  And I remember her flying in.  You know, and she’d get there a little bit early, and she and I would sit in my office, and talk about our kids.  (laughter) But it was, she asked, she said, “I think it would better if I came every two weeks and did it over the course of a year, than just one semester.”  Well, that had one advantage of it going on longer, but, it had the disadvantage of a break in between.  So, if somebody flies in, is there for two or three hours, and you don’t see them again for two weeks, you lose the energy that was needed to keep that sustained, although it was exciting while she was there on campus, but she couldn’t build a continual community, and that -- and then Letti was right, when Letti came and was invited to --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo when, when did Letti come?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tAlmost, ’73 maybe?  Seems like that.  And she would come up from New York, and stay overnight at the women’s center, and gathered the women that were in the dorm, anywhere around, and they’d sit around, have pizza, and talk, and da,da,da, and she would sort of do the community building, always doing community building.  And then she would teach the next day, and then she would go back, home to Europe.  And as I said, at the end of that semester, she went into Colin and said, “you need somebody here teaching theology, all the time, and you need me here.”  (laughter) And he said, “yes, you’re right.”  And then, somehow, I don’t know how he scrammed some money, so then, the next year, she was there, all year.  I think she was still commuted maybe?  Her husband, Hans [Folkadike?] was teaching at Union.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSo, she was teaching Fems theology?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tAnd very articulate, and she was a real scholar, and she’d go back my meetings, and she was like, like -- Hans died, he had a heart condition, and he drowned, and all the sound at one point.  And then, issues where she moved up to New Haven and was there full-time.  And it was a real battle to get her tenure through, and I don’t know why that was -- who understands what goes on at tenure gatherings, and...I think it was couched in the fact that feminist theology wasn’t real theology, or something or other, like liberation theology is not real theology.  Yale just gave its honorary degree to Gustave Guttierez’s liberation theology.  Anyway (inaudible) --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSometimes it takes awhile for these things to (laughter)\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t-- takes awhile, to be accepted.  So, but Letti made a big difference, and because she could articulate stuff, and was very bold about it.  She was much more bold, and way ahead of me, on what the issues were, and how to say them, and where to say them, and \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=10500.0,10800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/37","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"much more gutsy about saying them out loud.  And, I had a point, what was it.  And, you know, some of them were a little intimidated by her, but, she was very, very good.  Her classes were always community-building, conscious -- I mean, you came to her class, there were always refreshments, and it was a time of gathering, and talking, and sharing, and then into the hard work of the class, and stuff.  At the end of every semester, she had a gathering at her home.  A shalom meal and wine, and several stories, and we can’t -- so always helping people learn to build community in order to move ahead.  Anybody working at justice issues, you can’t do it alone, and you need to work at that.  And she demonstrated that even, as she taught about it.  She was very good at strategy.  She was very emphatic.  She spoke up in faculty meetings, and she and Margaret worked well together.  And Letti, as I said, started gathering regularly all the women administrators, and the financial aid person, and Dietra, the registrar, and me, and this one, and the various women faculty, and always the question was, how’s it going, and in your responsibilities, what do you need, what you need, what you need help on, what can we do to help, what else could people see is happening here, ought to be happening on campus?  So, for the administrative faculty people, she was doing continually the consciousness, be aware, and that’s the kind of thing which was really important, really important, and support from all this.  I learned a lot from her, Dietra learned a lot from her, certainly was very good.  And you heard Liz, and people outside who read her things, and knew what she was doing.  Liz Moore said today, Letti was her hero because she was out there, had doing that, which was great, just...\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you ever get any sense, at all, those, as the women were building a community of their own through Letti’s work, and through your work, and just simply having women there on the faculty, was there, did you ever get a sense of what men were feeling about that?  Because, there’s also the whole issue of ordination, did it not sometimes feel that women were dominating [sophistry?] at the Divinity school?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tWell, threatening, at least.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI don’t know if they were called dominant, but they felt threatened, some of them, and got a little defensive about this, or that.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid they reco --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tSome men yes, and some men no, I mean, it depended on the guys, again, it was just depended on --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you ever get any first-hand complaints, or expressions of concern, from men?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tOther than the graduate who wrote us, and tore into us? (laughter)  Michael?  Oy.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes.  This is a letter you dug out, December 12th, 1976, yeah, from one of your, one of the ex-students, tell me about this letter.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tWell, he, it’s so unclear, it’s old, kind of thing, and he writes to “Reflection”, so it must have been after that issue of “Reflection,” the 1976 issue of “Reflection,” and the very fact that he writes it at eight A.M. Sunday, before he goes in to, whatever -- what things that bug me, something about it, “I just reread the through the two articles, and at first I was amused.  Real people don’t take themselves so seriously.  You have to be amused at women’s concerns.  And these real Christian folks don’t, however, after (inaudible) I was concerned, concerned because I’m very much for a vital role for women in the Church, concerned because I would like to see Christian women become ministers and priests, but, then, the Forsberg/Russell mentality is the kind of attitude in understanding of the Christian tradition, which is going to prevent full-personhood for women in the Church,” quotes, unquote around them.  “Forsberg talks of ordination as if it were a right, with absolutely no regard for professionalism, or confidence.  Joan, let me ask you, was Lee McGee first of all an Episcopalian, secondly, did she have a valid seminary background to qualify her for the ministry?  If she did, then being indignant that the Church refused her sanction,” I must’ve, in the article, I must’ve talked about her wanting to be irregularly ordained.  “Ms. Russell, it saddens me, that you have access to ‘training men and women for the ministry,’ I’m sad because you lay aside the richness of the Christian tradition.  Yes, you’re achieving for women, for some nebulous category elevated to theology called feminism,” nebulous category, I mean, the down putting tone of all this, and the supposed serious concern, \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=10800.0,11100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/38","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"“You talk of generational theology from, of generating theology from the experiences of women.  For God sake, Ms. Russell, if that’s what you want, start your own Church,” (inaudible) “If you all women, or clergywomen, present in the active ministry of Christ churches, stay within the Christian tradition,” there’s only one proper tradition, right?  “Understanding the poverty of Western Protestantism and it’s lack of understanding of God’s creation/ blasts the reality of women being made second-class members of the creation/ but for your sake, when you do it within the tradition of Chris” -- (inaudible) “You have a responsibility to enable the men and women you teach to make ‘decisions’ within our traditions.  You don’t rewrite the traditions to suite your own personal needs.”  Now, he’s a good Lutheran, so he’s worried about tradition, and somebody, “Finally, once again, let me make this point to you, and you staff, specifically Forsberg and Russell, if you want to be effective in making the Church’s theology full - male and female, He created them -- then for God’s sake, develop ideas and expressions of God and women that are there, than to fabricate.  You see your kind of trite theological expression enables your opposition to destroy the few inroads people do make in the real world of the Church.  God blessing, by Michael.”  Well, it sort of, it’s the only written kind of thing about us.  Who knows what the member saying with each other in dormitories, who knows what, in within, which traditions are, my guess is, the Episcopalians were more in trouble because it so (inaudible) traditions, and the Congregationalists, the UCCs, who were sort of the (inaudible) you know?  I don’t think Presbyterians necessarily were troubled.  Nope, right.  I think, I think faculty we’re pretty even-handed, and I’m not remembering any real problems from faculty as they struggled to understand what was going on.  (laughter)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you ever feel, in the face of all these new controversies, which were also very much in the public eye, newspapers were full of, full of all these “revolting women” kind of things.  Did you ever feel it was a burden to come to work?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tNo.  I loved working at Divinity school.  It was exhilarating.  The daily worship kept you going.  It was wonderful no matter who was preaching, no matter the music, the organs, just to be there in that place.  There was enough support around that it was exhilarating, and, it was, tiring sometimes, you know.  And, the things that, sometimes students with really severe problems and the times that I sat in my office and watched people just lose it, just rage, and you know, you were afraid they were going off the deep end, so you sort of sat there quietly, you know.  Sort of contained it, a little bit in prayer to them, maybe they wouldn’t go do something drastic.  It wasn’t so much, I think the struggles over the theology, and the [training?] problems, there were enough with Letti, and Margaret, and there was enough support around in the midst of that, there was a comradeship, that it was OK.  Yeah, it was hard, and it was painful and stuff, but you felt like you were making some progress, and it was going to get better.  It was a human thing, people coming unglued one way or another, or students having a sudden death of a parent, and just being confronted with that -- or once, oh God, what a terrible -- had once a wonderful second-career male student.  He’d been way up in the government in New Jersey.  He’d been in the financial, he’d been a banker, and so he was at some official position at the New Jersey government, when he felt [called?] an Episcopal priesthood.  His wife, of course, had married a banker, not a priest, (laughter) anyway, he had come to Divinity School.  Wonderful guy, Bob, oh wonderful.  Had a bit of history of heart trouble, was well-liked out on campus, everybody liked him.  His wife was wonderful, it was just joyful, and he was joyfully going out of his way, training for priesthood, everybody was glad for him, da,da,da,da,da, and, one night, his heart went into fibrillation, and died.  And the next morning, and they lived in the married couples \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=11100.0,11400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/39","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"house.  Well then, as the word got around the next morning, then we all got to chat, the whole community just shredded, you know.  Things like that were hard, in a way that wasn’t easily comforted.  I mean, yeah, on the face, its comforting being in a community, but it was painful to lose students that way, or to see, or the ones that tried to commit suicide, and didn’t make it, but then you can go see them down at the psychiatric unit, which I sort of would do, and try to be some kind of bridge back to, whatever.  But the issues themselves, I think because we felt we were making progress, and that this was important work to do, yeah you have to slog through this, at least you’re not -- we weren’t alone, that was the main thing, all live and learn.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAll this time that you’ve been talking, you’ve talked very much about the divinity school, and what was going on there, without really any reference at all to the University --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tUniversity.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- yeah, and, it seems to be a good time to ask you about this position that was created through affirmative action, which was the liaison officer for women, and what that role was, and how that fitted in to the rest of the campus medical school, and nursing, and Yale College, and all the rest.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tRight, I think each one of those had some, a woman representative who came to me.  I think, my understanding was, that we were giving our input about what was happening in any given school, to Jackie Menz, or whoever was, at that point, in charge, so that somebody in the University had a picture, and a wall picture, because I clearly only had my own, as you can tell, I didn’t know what was happening elsewhere at the University, I was pretty absorbed.  And the trouble is, the Divinity School is up on the hill --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes, it’s physically removed, yeah.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tIt’s physically removed.  Bunches of people go through that University and never know that there’s a divinity school, there, so we were sort of a world unto ourselves, and that’s how I lived up there, until I went down, you know, every month down the hill to HGS, to meeting with the liaison women, and then I started connected, and could hear what either was, or wasn’t happening, or what the concerns were with how the number of women in various schools, that kind of thing that I think was reported each time.  I, my feeling was, there was never anything I was supposed to necessarily bring back to my school, unless, you know, I could sometimes say to the women, or whatever, wow, we are really lucky.  And some of the things that Colin supports us in that’s not happening in other places, we just need to be thankful, and be appreciative, and let them know we appreciate you know, whatever keeps going ahead.  It was more a reporting in, for me, a reporting in of the facts, what was going on, hoping to use the seminary conference, struggling to get women faculty, doing that kind of thing.  Not too much strategizing at all.  I don’t remember strategizing in that group.  It was more reporting, and so that somebody had the whole picture.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tDid you, did you, how did you feel when you went to those meetings?  Did you feel that the Div School was actually doing at least as much as other places in the University, and maybe doing more?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tMm, hmm.  I think, just about every time I was aware that we were being granted, that the women at the Div School were being granted, either privileges, or access to things, or encouragement, that maybe wasn’t being offered in some of the other schools, and I don’t know why that was.  I do know that, I do know that Colin Williams -- he was so great because he really did want it to go well, and as I probably said to you, I don’t know who I said to, that he used to go off to other conferences, there would be a, what is it called, the big association of seminaries, you know ATS, Association of Theological Schools, whatever.  And they all get together, and they talk deans, and stuff, the school, and he would hear horror tales from other seminaries, you know, the students, the women blowing whistles and things [about the language?] and this happened to him, that happened, all sorts of people cutting up, doing all kinds of things, and I think he came back so grateful, (laughter).  People weren’t sort of acting out in some, really, difficult way where we were, that I think he was happy to do what he could.  One other time when we had a major consciousness-raising thing happen.  In the early years, it was when Ann Wilson Schaff, who I don’t know if you know that name, \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=11400.0,11700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/40","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"but she wrote a couple of books on things, and one was on women, well, it’s probably (inaudible), she’s a psychotherapist.  And I’d heard her have a conference, a retreat conference, at [Perfection?], Pennsylvania.  She was dynamite.  Whoa, would you ever come top dinner?  Yep, so she came to do a three or four day thing at the Div School.  She was attractive, she was sharp, she was very articulate, she knew the issues, and she was pushing on all of the issues.  And, men were encouraged to come, these were sessions in the common room for everybody.  After the first session, it was really interesting, people came as couples, and all kinds of people were there, and she was wonderful.  And as the meeting went on, the women were like (gasps) and the guys were going, (laughter).\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSquirming, (laughs)\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThe next day, Colin sees me in the hall, he says, kind of talked to me about it.  I said, yeah.  He said, “I was at the meeting last night, with yeah Ann Wilson Schaff.”  I said, “Yeah, wasn’t that interesting.”  He said, “Well, I noticed a lot of couples when they came in, were holding hands, and when they left, they were barely speaking to each other.  You think this is a good thing?”  (Laughter)  Oh well, I said, “I suppose they were becoming aware of some things, and she was able to say some things that maybe the women students hadn’t been able to say to the men in their lives.”  I trust that that was good thing, and he sort of looked at me, and thought, oh, dear Joan, what (laughter).  It was a really -- because every time she talked, the women got really turned on, and the guys, most of them got, but somewhat hadn’t heard this kind of stuff before, and hadn’t heard it so well presented, and so persuasively presented.  So, it created a lot of hubbub, but it was a major campus consciousness-raising thing, and I think, I don’t remember any women, or any reacting negatively to it.  There might have been some who were a little scared, but, it was the most outspoken feminist thing about why our consciousness is different, and what’s been missing all along.  And she just laid it out very well.  It was beautiful, and very -- and I didn’t worry about my job, but I realized Colin was worried about what it could do to the moral of the men at the school, and maybe I should be watching what I was bringing onto the campus in the way of speakers, or something.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWhen you talk, you do present a picture of the women being fairly united across faculty, administration, and student body.  There were certain things that you were all working towards in wanting to achieve.  I just wondered if there were any issues that divided women.  I’m thinking, for example, what about race, because I’m assuming, by this time, you had a fair number of black students, or at least some, anyway. \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t(laughter) Over the course of twenty years, there were a fair number, but they were in small increments (crosstalk) --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, and also, um...\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYeah, there were a number of issues that still divide women in society --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, and, yeah, I --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t-- married-single, gay-straight, black-white, for-not for.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd were all those fissures, if you’d like, were they surfacing at this time, as well?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tAt different times, and in different ways, in is one reason it was a good thing to have the women’s center.  We could talk to each other without being overheard in the common room, about the differences.  One painful difference, one of the women who was a coordinator of the women’s center was married, and had a child, and you used to sometimes bring the baby into the women’s center, and there were some women, very, very feisty, feminist women, who weren’t happy to have babies in the women’s center.  Whether they had a thing against marriage, or not, I can’t remember whether they were lesbian women or not, but they were, that bothered them.  And I guess, sometimes Ann’s husband used to come in, you know, to get the baby, and that bothered them even more, having a man come into the women’s center, eh, give it a rest.  Um, the racial one was hard.  We all wanted to be supportive of the black women.  We were glad the black women students were there, and of course, we wanted them active in all the things we did.  They weren’t always as interested in doing what we were doing.  We weren’t necessarily their agenda.  They were there to get their degrees, get an education, and then be yeah.  And, there was a black seminary, an organization, of course, too, for the black students, and the black seminarians wanted them, with them, so they were always torn between their definition, their time, their energy, their self-definition, \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=11700.0,12000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/41","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"were they more black, more female, more what?  And that was painful for all of them, I know that was.  And, there’s just no easy way around that one.  All those women are now leading denominations, or teaching in seminaries, and doing really great stuff, but it was -- that was an issue.  The lesbian-straight issue came out more, maybe, in the ‘80s.  Well, came out more in the ‘80s, because while there may well have been lesbian women there, and gay men, in the student body, nobody was out until Chris Glazer came along in whatever year Chris was there, and he was an out, gay, Presbyterian, and just a really fine, solid guy, who was exhausted by the end of two years because, when nobody was around at night, people with questions would go seek him out.  And the ones who were too cautious to come out leaned on him, and were a real drain on him.  It was very hard, so for two years.  So, then he took an intern here.  He came back out to California, he was active in the Presbyterian Church in Hollywood, created something called the Lazarus Project, which is resurrection, whether it had to do with AIDS people, or just gay men and whether -- that project is still going at that church.  And then Chris came back, and to take his third year, and he said, “I’m not going to do anything about the issue anymore.  I need to get my degree, I need to keep my health, I need to graduate.  I’ve learned from my [Presbyterial?], although they encourage me, in the beginning, that they will not ordain me, even after I get my degree, so I need to figure out what else to do, and so I’m not going to run” -- he had run, almost single-handedly, his second-year there, he ran a big, we call them conference, on gay issues in the ministry, and brought in, had speakers, brought and raised money to bring in speakers, had sessions, you know, answered questions, set up people to preach in [chamban?] He exhausted himself, he was wonderful, and it was after he came out, then little-by-little we began to be aware.  More where people were a little more bold, but, in the ‘80s, even by the time I left in the ‘90s, it was still not very -- it’s much more open now.  There ended up being a gay-lesbian organization on campus, and it was opened to anybody who wanted to join to be supporters, so that there were straight students in it, and gay students in, and there was never a question of who was who, or what was going to be -- you never identified yourself.  If you were concerned about the issue, you did that, and that I think was in the ‘80s, and that was good to have happened.  But I do remember, in the women’s center, some intense discussions among straight and lesbian women, in the late ‘80s.  Lifestyle, we got, I don’t know, political points of view, race thing.  I think because, the lesbian women knew they couldn’t be ordained, and so that’s a bitter thing.  If somehow you get a calling to the ministry, and you know you’re not going to be allowed to be in, so, that makes you very pointed about it, and so, um...I don’t know.  Class is always an issue, in every group in the world, and every conversation, it just doesn’t surface quite clearly.  Trying to think, what it is.  It wasn’t a major issue addressed, it was in the student body.  I can’t think of a (inaudible) but, but I know that’s (inaudible).  Faculty women and student women were pretty much of a mind, or at least the -- we, that the students were all, I think, understood we were all with them on the issues, and concerned about the issues, and there wasn’t anybody standing against them.  It was wonderful to watch Margaret as a staunch, as a Roman Catholic sister, but, you know, willing to be critical, intelligently critical of Church, and at some point, got some issue, somebody said there something, and she said, “Oh, I’m, I’m prepared to go and talk to the Pope anytime.”  You know, “I would take this issue, I would take this issue, and go make a case for it if there were an opportunity, to go \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=12000.0,12300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/42","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"and do that.”  And so, even the Catholics who felt they ought to leave the Church because it was, they, hard for them, behind the times, to see someone faithfully staying within it, but not ranting and raving with an edge about it.  It was a wonderful model (inaudible).\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI think, hear from other people that I’ve spoken to, that she expended an enormous amount of energy just with students, helping them, mentoring and --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tAbsolutely.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- guiding, and advising.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThat’s exactly right.  Exactly right.  And she, during one of the strikes, maybe more than one of the strikes, was one of the first faculties to say the picket line is around the campus.   I’m moving my clients down to Church of Redeemer on Whitney Avenue, and always opening the class with prayer about that situation, and always being, lifting that up, and being concerned.  And so, most of the faculty moved off campus, and others said, you know, didn’t see the point of doing that.  And, so, the faculty was sometimes divided about that sort of thing.  (Inaudible) And so strong, but even tempered, and never flakey, always sort of -- and she co-taught a course with the dean in the medical school, and she co-taught courses at law school, and she was a --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, she, I think she, certainly was -- many of the faculty at Div School, she was the one that would tell her to be out-and-about, and, and, and --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tOut-and-about.  (Crosstalk)  That’s exactly right.  That’s exactly right. \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, Yeah.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tIn fact, that --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBut that, I suppose, her subject lent it to?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThat’s true, that’s true.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tSince she was teaching ethics. \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYeah yeah, that medical ethics was a big class, which led -- oh this is aside, aside, but it’s so lovely, I have to tell you this one.  When I had my second heart attack, on the airplane, and landed in California, and off we went, my daughter and her friend, and I, off to the hospital, and it’s two days before Christmas.  And it’s a strange hospital in Palo Alto, and don’t know where, what is going on, I’m, whatever, and they run some tests, and a doctor appears.  A nice, charming, young, good-looking doctor, and he comes to tell me that the test shows that, in fact, (inaudible) some blood, so I’ve had a heart attack, whatever.  He said, “Well, so tell me, where’d you, I, where’d you come from today?”  And I said, “Oh, from the East Coast.”  “Oh, where about?”  “Oh, New Haven.”  “New Haven!”  And I said, yes.  He said, “I grew up in Hamden.”  I said, “You did?”  He said, “Well yes.”  He said, what did, somehow, anyway, I worked in Divinity School, I work in Divinity School.  He said, “Divinity School.  Do you know Sister Margaret Farley?”  I said, “Yes, you know Sister Margaret Farley?”  “Yes, I took her courses!”  (laughter)  So, here I am, miles from home, and the first words of the Lord says, here’s a young doctor who knows Sister Margaret Farley, we have to -- nothing can go wrong, right?  (laughter)  So her teachings in that book were always wonderful.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYeah, yeah.  Do you think that, because you were young when you had your heart attacks, you were under fifty, weren’t you?  Do you think that the kind of work that you were doing, and the kind of involvement, commitment that it required, did impair your health?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI think the very first one was I was very, very tired, and I know I pushed that physically over, and I had no clue, up to then, and that wasn’t, I -- we just connected with physical exhaustion.  Although, I was in the hospital three weeks, and the day the doctor came and said, “We’re going to let you go home tomorrow.”  And I looked at him, “Tomorrow?  Home?”  And it was back to (inaudible), and he left the room, and I cried, and cried, and cried, because I didn’t want to go home.  I thought, what is this about?  I don’t want to go home to have to do dishes, or to, whatever, whatever, I don’t want noise, or the confusion, nice quiet in the hospital.  But, anyway, I got myself together, but, I didn’t, I then wrote that off, OK, that’s just -- you’re depressed, after a heart attack, you’re frequently depressed, it just seems like a lot of work to go back to living a normal life again.  I’ll have to take responsibility for myself, anyway.  That was OK.  Six and a half years later, second one, as I said, was on the plane, I was on my way to tell my family I’d make -- you know, I wasn’t coming back to the marriage.  I think that had a lot to do with the stress of \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=12300.0,12600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/43","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"decision which I was calling and had to make, but didn’t feel good about, and it feels, which will be judged for, and which will be severely disturbing to my parents, given my father’s sit -- even my father had once been divorced, and never, ever talked about it.  Like, oh, he isn’t going to want to hear about this either.  So, I think that impacted that.  And what, how much connection that had with the heart valve that went to spasm, I have no clue.  I think there’s a major mind-body connection that causes things to happen that we have no clue about.  So, the second time, I didn’t rise up to overwork.  (laughter)  I said, there’s more going out here, and we’ll just do what we can about it.  I wish I knew more about the [Rusty?] University English Times when I was there, I had more connection for you, because, the study is not limited to the Div School, and clearly my experience was...\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOn the other hand, it’s great to have the experience of the Div School, and as I interview people, I get a bigger picture --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tPicture of it, yeah, yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- and the things that they have in common, and the things that --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tMargaret probably had much more sense of the whole University.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell, she certainly, you know, had some things to say, but that, yes, yes --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThe student body, and other places, and atmosphere in other places, yeah.  And she would perceive things, also, as a recognized faculty, she would’ve experienced things differently too.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tShe was on faculty committees as well, yeah, so --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tExactly, university-wide, surely.  So, it won’t be just limited to my (laughs) limited experience.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWe’re coming to near the end because you’ve been talking for really, quite a long time, and --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYou were very patient.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThis is in the middle of your tenure at the Div School, there was a women’s center report.  I’m not sure it was written by you, I think it may have been written by --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tTeletha?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tTeletha, yes, I think it may well have been Teletha.  This was from 1980, and it expresses concern at “the lack of intellectual commitment at YDS to explore the role of women in religious history at clergy’s scriptural studies” and that’s actually late, given, given what had been going on for ten years --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- I was kind of surprised to read that, that that was, that was highlighted as a concern at that time.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tIsn’t that interesting?  Now, if Teletha wrote it, and it may well have been, because she was working with the women’s center, and she graduated about ’80.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, well, this is definitely 1980, because I made a note of the day.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tAnd she is a real student.  She was a graduate of Pomona College, and she a gung-ho academic, and cared a lot about, oh --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI, I, should, I should qualify that a little bit.  The concern was framed very much as a failure to integrate women’s issues into the main curriculum, and to mainstream it --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tOh OK, that’s where the lack of seriousness, or the lack of --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYes, yeah, yeah.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t-- it was on the part of the institution to, now, to move ahead, and integrate it in. \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, because I was suppose it was seen as maybe sort of ghetto thing, as something, it was --\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t-- this is the women’s stuff, and this is everything else.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI think that’s right, right.  Yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd that, um, and the continuing frustration of appointments, failure to appoint women.  \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tRight.  Because by ’80, (inaudible) was there.  Hm.  We had one, wonderful woman, Old Testament scholar, Bonnie Kiddle, who died of cancer in her early ‘40s, or something, which was really, you know, so -- it was really hard we lost her, we need good women, and in difficult ways, it wasn’t just money, it was like, what, Bonnie, come back.  And, men students, and women students alike, really appreciated her teaching.  There were all kinds of people who said they’d never studied Hebrew with anybody like that before.  They’d never had such an enjoyable, whatever, and to lose Bonnie, it was really hard.  And so that, I’m sure, when the search went on, that she wasn’t necessarily replaced by a woman, and I don’t think.  You know, so to lose somebody who was really good at whatever -- but the people in the main, and everyone there too in Bible, in theology, in ethics, didn’t teach women’s view of that, except Letti would do an occasional women’s, you know, something or other \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=12600.0,12900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/44","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"in theology, but most of them were, Bible’s Bible, and da,da, and never mind your standpoint, supposedly, although every body’s got one.  So, I think probably Church-related seminaries were putting in other kinds of courses that we didn’t, by then, that’s probably right.  And I don’t know what’s in there now.  I haven’t seen a recent catalogue, I don’t know --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tNo, I don’t know.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThere are a lot more women faculty now.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tOh, yes.  Yes, an enormous number more.  Yeah.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tWhich is very heartening, and they’re in all fields, you know, across the, across the board.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnswering Joans -- you very recently went to, to Union as the president?  Yeah.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t(gasps) Yes.  Wonderful Saree Joans, oh God.  Yes, stellar.  So, yeah,  and so maybe there are some things in the curriculum now, with that slant, but I don’t know, in my time, except for the field-based ones, where you were specifically trying to help people see their own role, and ministry, and understand that gender component. \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tHow do you think, when you were a student -- I want to backtrack here -- when you were a student, you had, you had a [Caucasian?] for ordination, and I think, I remember rightly, it wasn’t something that was particularly discussed at that time.  Then, then of course, in the ‘70s, ordination, especially the Episcopalians, and the Catholics, became a huge, huge thing, and I dare say, that some of that disjoined it as well. \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t(chuckles)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd I just wondered how much did secular feminism, the second-wave feminism, took off in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, you know how secular feminism impinged on what was a theological issue?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tHmm.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tMaybe, maybe you have actually discussed that, in that you talked about your involvement with New Haven women’s liberation, and maybe that sort of developing a new consciousness.  That was happening all over.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYeah, I’m trying to think of how the secular ones impinged on the church theological thing.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tClearly, it impacted Letti’s theological writings, and other people’s theological writings, which then helped women students stand up straighter, and feel there was a solid ground to stand on for ordination, because they didn’t -- it wasn’t just their yearning to be ordained, but there was some valid theological kind, whatever, but it was underpinning, which Letti sort of -- which wasn’t there before some of the feminist theologians started to write, clearly, you know, and you know.  How would it have impacted it in other ways?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI suppose the linguistic issue would’ve been another one, wouldn’t it?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tProbably so.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tYeah, that man-made language.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tAnd you know where some of that would’ve been interesting to, to inquire about, would be people who were in religious studies department at the graduate school, in the actual -- how much did things impact down there where that academic part was so -- I mean, I know that the women who were coming to for doctorates in ’69, ’70, ’71, ’72, when they would suggest their thesis topics, the male faculty were like, “Huh? What?”  You know, and they fought a terrible battle, and maybe Margaret talked about this, I don’t know, but there’s a --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell, she certainly did talk a little bit about relations between religious studies, and the Divinity School.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tAnd I think, um--\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd of course, there were other women coming out, like Carol Christ.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYes, Christ, and there were three, two or three, uh, really who’d become eminent scholars, who were having the battle of their life down there, with the male faculty, who had never had anybody coming through, raising some of these questions, or making some of these assumptions.  And, struggled \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=12900.0,13200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/45","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"around them.  I don’t know why I think it would have shown up, more clearly, there, than at, in the Divinity School curriculum.  Why would I think that?  I don’t know.  Well, because at the Div School, you didn’t have to write a thesis, and so, a student could be wrestling with things, and coming to a conclusion, but not have to put it out there, necessarily, for a faculty person to attack, and that might not have been as clearer, kind of thing.  So, there may have been a lot of impact on some students’ theological thinking, that I’m not as aware of, or that didn’t surface as a fight somewhere, or maybe it’s just a struggle between the students and individual faculty.  Clearly, that would have a clear sense -- I think the second-wave feminism was impacting, it wasn’t impacting the men as much, but it was certainly impacting the women, as they came in, and that impacted some of the classes, but whether it was impacting the male students, other than reacting to the women... I think Letti’s teaching really impacted men’s students, Margaret’s teaching... trying to think if there was any difficult person, who was coming at from a gender, with a gender concern.  I can’t think of any, but I just may not know. \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tBy the time you retired in seventy -- in ’93, what am I talking about, in ’93, how many women students were there at the Div School.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tIt was fifty-fifty.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIt was fifty-fifty by the time you left?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tIt was fifty-fifty for several years, and I have to admit, I held my breathe every time we counted, because I -- this is going to sound very strange -- I did not want it to go over fifty percent on the basis of, if the women predominate, the boys will flee, and that’s happened at church-related seminaries.  When the numbers of women went up, past fifty percent, the men quit going to seminary, because it’s devalued.  That’s the whole thing we talked about , it’s a women’s world.  So, if you can keep it at fifty-fifty, the men will stay, even some of the boys will stay (laughter) and the women, and everybody, has a chance at something more like equal education, or whatever, so, in my eyes, the best thing was not to have a majority of women, but up to the point of fifty percent, I was hatching every application that came through (laughter in the early years.  It was like, no, don’t tell me you’re turning down, we accepted you.  You’re a woman, don’t say you’re not coming, we need you.  Sometimes the women would come and interview or something, and they’d decide to go to Harvard or whatever.  But then I realized, Harvard needed women too so (laughter).  So, if, I think, for some, several years at least, it had been fifty percent.  I don’t know where it is now, I hope it’s around fifty-fifty now.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI have no idea.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI think it’s about the same.  It sort of got there, and held.  One advantage the university Divinity School has around that, is a number of men come to the Divinity School, to do a two-year [MAR?] and then go on to graduate school, or law school, or medical school, or something.  So, but, they want a kind of biblical base.  They want some theological kind of thing.  May not be going into ministry, but they, you know, so that helps keep the number of men up, because then they can transfer some stuff, or do cross (inaudible) downtown.  And women, too, can do the same.  I think in church-related seminaries, all you can do with a theological [premise?] is go in the ministry, and you suddenly feel overwhelmed by all those other people going through the ministry, you’d go to another school, and that becomes predominantly women, and, I think probably Harvard, maybe Union, which is independent, not church-related, Yale, stayed closer to the fifty percent because there were other options.  I mean, because there was a wider \r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=13200.0,13500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/46","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"thing you can do with your degree if you were a man, and you didn’t have to feel so threatened by the way -- I don’t know what the figures are today. \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd of course, there’s another “ism” that’s kind of turned up in the last twenty  years in the second-career.  So, ageism is another thing that’s changing the student body, isn’t it?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tOh, radically.  And more so, again, moreso in church seminaries than the university ones, and it was a very interesting, when that began to happen in the ‘80s, it was more women, there were some men, second-career men.  One of the very first second-career people who came was a man and his social worker, lived in out in Bethany or something, and he came in, and he was terrific.  He was already socialized, and he’d been active in his church, and he knew  what he was doing, and it was great.  There are some others who’d been teachers, people in the school system, but more women than men in the second-career, and, and in some cases, the women had been housewives, and mothers, and been out of the academic world, or even out of the professional world, and that was a bit of a problem for some of the male faculty as they saw the women come in, they hadn’t been in school for awhile, their transcripts were old, their transcripts -- and they didn’t get going, they didn’t hit the road running, the way the students who had just come from college, you know, if you’ve just been in the academic world, and you spun out in June, and show up in September, you're wheels are still running.  If you’ve been out of school for twenty years raising children, it takes a little while to get used to that new conversation, not to mention (inaudible).  But so, I remember one, two wonderful male faculty guys who, because I knew some, they were worried about some of these women, and weren’t going to pick up quick enough, and were going to fail, or were having difficulty, because everybody has to take a Bible course first thing, and those are stiff.  You can postpone a little theology for another year, but the biblical ones sometimes were stiff.  And Richard Hayes, bless his heart,  one of the ones who’d come down to my office and say, “Joan, I want to talk to you about.  I’m concerned about so-and-so.  And do you know anything about her?  She’s having trouble with -- is she having trouble in other courses, do you know?  Is there anything I could do?  How could I be helpful on this?”  In one case, even, “she’s really flunked this test, and I don’t want her to flunk out, help me think about a way we can do something so she can complete this semester, and not” you know, whatever.  And he was earnestly, really, wanting it to work, for her.  I mean, there really were men faculty who wanted it to work for the women, particularly the second-career women who were more at-risk during the first year.  Now, what we came to discover over time was, during the first year, as new students come in, the ones right out of college, zing, zing, zing, they’re doing fine.  The second-career people are picking up more slowly.  Second year, second-career people are getting on a role, the just-out-of-school people are getting a little tired.  They’ve been in school a long time, and they need to break, they may just start to take off, or drop out for a year, or drop out totally.  So, the pace changed, and by, in the third year, they’re all caught up, and everybody’s, you know.  But it’s just that, it took a little while to be able to see that, and articulate that to the faculty, and say, if you can hang on a little, and give a little extra help here,  and a lot of them did that.  But, it was, it was so interesting to watch, because it took me awhile to figure out that dynamic.  Well, of course, if you haven’t been in school for twenty years, even in Divinity School sounds threatening when they start throwing these big, [Escalogical?] vocabulary, like, what?   So, that was interesting.  The hard ones, the second-career ones were the ones who came from a totally different background and had no church upbringing, and for whom everything was new.  If you’ve been in the church, been active in the church, even if you’ve been out of school for awhile, you at least knew what the names of the biblical books were.  If you came in out of, some kind of experience, of the holy, which hadn’t been preceded by a lot of Bible, that can be more difficult to get aboard, but a lot of people succeeded well.  And I think, by the time people got out to the churches, a second-career man or woman with a theological education, and life experience, and self-confidence, and some wisdom from learning, is a real help to congregations in a way that moreso than twenty-four, twenty-five year olds that are still learning some things that aren’t taught anywhere in school. (laughter) But it was, I thought it was amazing, in which, when the job came along, the first ten years, in the ‘70s, I was the right gender\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=13500.0,13800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/47","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"and sort of the right place, in the right gender, to me, there, in that job, because it was willing to start in to come in numbers.  The second, during the ‘80s, I was the right age, because there were all these second-career students coming, I was the right age for that.  And by the time I got to ’90, to the ‘90s, I was the right age to leave, and it was (laughter).  And it worked amazingly well.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tAnd so you were glad to leave in the end?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tI was ready, yeah.  I mean, twenty one years, and I was aware.  I didn’t have any new ideas, and I probably wasn’t going to make the effort to do it.  I was aware I should do some ongoing, continuing education or something, and I was like, not, not right now, that’s all I -- it’s like, OK, time to be on our way here.  When I first took the job, I thought, OK, I’ll work to sixty five, and that’s what I did, and it was the right -- and as I say, I wound down every year, for ten years, seven more years, six more years, and I got myself in a condition to say, OK, this is life, time to do this, and that’s OK.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tLooking back on your twenty one years on the, your work on the Div School, and obviously more years if you include your student years, what do you think was your greatest challenge, and also what do you think was your greatest achievement?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tHmm.   Greatest challenge.  Hm. Specifically from the school?  They almost all seem to be life...\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tLife challenges.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tWell, for my years at the Div School, what I remember was the largest challenge, was wrestling with, could I, how would I do marrying Bob, what would happen with my faith, did I have enough faith, and could I do that?  That kind of challenge to a totally different styled life, it wasn’t the academic challenge, it wasn’t the ordination challenge, nobody challenged me about that, I mean, nobody gave me a hard time about that.  Where I wrestled with God, and with myself, and whether I could do it or not, was could I live out a commitment of marriage, and which was going to demand a lot, and not be easy.  And it was worth taking the risk, and try, and doing it.  You know, twenty five years.  I would be a totally different person without that, and life would not be nearly as rich, or special, or rewarding without it, so even though it didn’t go on for another twenty five, that was the best thing for me, because it taught me so much about myself, and of course, we grow.  And it became, for me, those early years, particularly became for me, the real theological education, which I needed once I got to the job at the Div School, I mean I sort of needed to have wrestled with challenge, and ability, and inability, and all that kind of stuff that one faces.  Or ministry: can you be a ministry and get yourself out of the way enough to be helpful?  And that may have been, at the Div School, in terms of, particularly, well -- Bob Abernathy who came to the Div School, for years, sabbatical year, from CBS, NBC, who does he work for?  He was a news caster.  Robert Abernathy, you know, does religion and ethics at the -- I’m looking for it, the sabbatical year, and he was there, and he asked, at what point after community service, you know, something about how did I do that, whatever it was that had happened to him, and within the group, and within the fac -- and I said, I just try to get myself out of the way.  And I think that’s the way, the way I felt about my role there, the whole time.  Now, that sounds sort of weird if you think that you’re supposed to be leading, or creating something, or leading something, but it seemed to me that it wasn’t about me, but so much is being taught at the University, people seem to think it’s about them, as a professor, or as a student, I have to have this,\r\n\r\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=13800.0,14100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266/transcript/31927/annotation/48","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"(inaudible) I must create this program, I must have credit for, take credit for things, and I think to stay in a mindset where you really, really wanted some things to happen, or you wanted to be able to enable them to happen, but to be out of the way, get out of the way, keep yourself out of the way, so that it could happen.  That takes some effort, spiritual discipline.  Beyond that, of course, dealing with the whole, I mean, the whole, who am I as a woman-thing because of the juxtaposition of the woman, new woman’s consciousness, and the new job, and the new social side, (gasp) it’s interesting then, and (inaudible). How to grow in your own life, and struggle with that, and not have it impede your work, or clutter your work, or God forbid, mess up your work.  I’m just so afraid that, when the word came out, that we were, that I was getting a divorce, that I would be, that many people would think, you’re discredited now, you know.  People had thought we had this great marriage, which we did for a long time, but it wore down.  And I wasn’t sure how much of an offense that would be, to people.  People were very good about that, and I wasn’t the only -- as a serious person that god divorced, so, but, the personal challenges, probably of my own life, were bigger than the, the job challenges were fun.  How do you, how do you help us all, us all women, us all, people of God, move into this new territory.  So that was fun and exhilarating.  Was sort of draining at times, but I think the biggest challenge was the personal growth, and not, trying not to have that interfere with, or complicate, the ministry at the school.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tIs there anything else you’d like to add?  You all talked out?\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t(laughter)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI think you’re getting tired.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tWell, I’m not tired, I’m just sort of, I don’t think there’s anything left.  Have I left out anything you wanted to --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tI can’t think of anything, yeah.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tWhen you talk around, you know, everything generates something else, and you talk around it then, (inaudible) whether I’ve been focused, and not to be helpful to your project.  (laughter)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tVery helpful, indeed, and thank you very much indeed.  That was wonderful.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tYou are so welcome.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThank you.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\tThis is lovely to have somebody take your life seriously, and ask about it, so it’s a great privilege.  \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell, I mean, that’s the privilege of doing the job that I do, is that I get to put my nose into other people’s affairs all the time.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t(laughter) And you do with such grace, it’s very comfortable.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tThank you.\r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t-- to talk with you.  Who knows what -- \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\tWell, let’s see what uh. \r\n\nJOAN FOSBERG:\t-- is it going on or (inaudible) did it record actually? (laughter)\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:\t Well, gosh, yes, I hope so, otherwise we’re in trouble.  (laughter)  I couldn’t ask you to do all of that again. \r\n\r\nEnd of Audio File","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48959/file/122266#t=14100.0,14381.87102"}]}]}]}