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Voices of Feminism Oral History Project: Reeve

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Voices of Feminism Oral History Project: Reeve Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Northampton, MA PATRICIA REEVE interviewed by KATHLEEN BANKS NUTTER November 21, 2003 West Roxbury, MA This interview was made possible with generous support from the Ford Foundation. © Sophia Smith Collection 2004 Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Narrator Patricia Reeve was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1953, the daughter of a chemical engineer/lawyer father and an Italian immigrant mother who “broke with family tradition” by attending nursing school and continued working as a nurse until Pat was in grade school (by then she had three younger siblings). She was raised by “devout Catholics” and is also the great niece of Ella Reeve Bloor. While Pat was a sophomore in high school, her mother died; until her father remarried a year later, Pat “assumed responsibility for the household.” She graduated from Northern Illinois University (B.A., History, 1975; M.A., History, 1978) and is a Ph.D. candidate at Boston College, expecting to finish in the next few months. After several clerical and retail positions, she joined 9to5 as an organizer in 1979, working in the Boston area until 1985. Thereafter she joined the faculty at the Labor Studies Program, University of Massachusetts, Boston, working primarily with non-traditional students. From 1997–2003, Pat was director of the Labor Resource Center at University of Massachusetts, Boston, coordinating the labor education program there. She was a co-founder of WILD (the Women’s Institute for Leadership Development) in 1986 and remains on their board today; she is also active in the Gay and Lesbian Labor Activists Network. She and her partner, Debby Briggs, adopted a special-needs child in 1996: today Laurie is a thriving thirteen-year-old. Interviewer Kathleen Banks Nutter was for many years a reference archivist at the Sophia Smith Collection. She is currently adjunct faculty at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. She is the author of “The Necessity of Organization”: Mary Kenney O’Sullivan and Trade Unionism for Women, 1892–1912 (Garland, 1999). Abstract The oral history focuses on the various phases of Reeve’s life but is especially strong on her union activities and her career as a labor educator. Restrictions None Format Interview recorded on miniDV using Sony Digital Camcorder DSR-PDX10. Four 60-minute tapes. Transcript Transcribed by Luann Jette. Audited for accuracy and edited for clarity by Kathleen Banks Nutter. Reviewed and approved by Patricia Reeve. Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Bibliography and Footnote Citation Forms Video Recording Bibliography: Reeve, Patricia. Interview by Kathleen Banks Nutter. Video recording, November 21, 2003. Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection. Footnote: Patricia Reeve, interview by Kathleen Banks Nutter, video recording, November 21, 2003, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, tape 3. Transcript Bibliography: Reeve, Patricia. Interview by Kathleen Banks Nutter. Transcript of video recording, November 21, 2003. Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection. Footnote: Patricia Reeve, interview by Kathleen Banks Nutter, transcript of video recording, November 21, 2003, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, pp. 20–22. Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Pat Reeve, interviewed by Kathleen Banks Nutter Tape 1 of 4 Page 1 of 62 Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Sophia Smith Collection Smith College Northampton, MA Transcript of interview conducted November 21, 2003, with: PAT REEVE West Roxbury, MA at: above by: KATHLEEN BANKS NUTTER BANKS NUTTER: This is Kathleen Banks Nutter. I am at Pat Reeve’s house in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. It’s November 21, 2003. Thank you so much. It really does mean a lot to me that you are my first oral history for this project. And the information you did in part in your biographical form was really helpful and so I’d like to start from that. Tell me about your childhood, a little bit, your parents, especially, and their background. REEVE: Just jump in? BANKS NUTTER: Please do. REEVE: Well, in my background, the more dominant personality was very much my mother. She was an Italian immigrant from Sicily who had a very definite sense of propriety and it didn’t always conform with middle- class values but often it did, because she did aspire to middle-class status. Just by virtue of being so Italian-identified. That permeated some of our house. I grew up not really completely understanding that my father wasn’t Italian. It wasn’t as if he was an afterthought but her culture really shaped the family. My dad — he was a quieter presence in the house although he had a pretty good temper, but he deferred to my mother in terms of management of the house. He was sort of Heinz ’57 background, and was the first person in his family to go to college actually, and he did that on a GI bill, and that’s actually where he and my mother met each other, was when he was at the University of Michigan. BANKS NUTTER: And what was she doing there? REEVE: She was working as a nurse. I’m trying to remember — it must have been roughly 1951-50. I’m not sure. Her father had died literally on her 18th birthday and she had already gotten his permission to go to nursing school when it became clear that she wasn’t going to get the scholarship that she should have gotten actually. And, the more I know about them, the more I’m impressed that at 18, she was able to persuade him to let Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Pat Reeve, interviewed by Kathleen Banks Nutter Tape 1 of 4 Page 2 of 62 her go off to school and leave. That was really a departure from what was expected of her. And more than that, that she had the gumption to move that far away from her mother after her father died, to go to work in her — she was born in Italy but they settled in central Ohio, Marion, Ohio, and then she ended up working in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which I’ve always found fascinating because it’s not as if women in that generation were moving around particularly after the war, but for an Italian immigrant to do that is really a break with tradition. BANKS NUTTER: So when you say your mom was dominant and it was an Italian immigrant household that you grew up in, what does that mean, I mean, how did that materialize itself in your life as a child? REEVE: Catholicism and being, you know, Italian descent were completely intertwined. Even still, my sense of what it means to be a Catholic is very much filtered having grown up with an Italian immigrant. Also, she and my father were in agreement, actually, about this — it’s not as if this was her role and not his — they were very much, very old school. Children were to be seen and not heard? Although I think they took a lot of delight in their kids. But, frankly, they were also overwhelmed. They had four children. She was working, he was working and he was going to law school at night. So for the first several years of their married life, I’m sure they were sleep-deprived. BANKS NUTTER: If nothing else. So, was that, in that she was working, and this is in the 50s, when our vision is often Harriet Nelson who’s at home baking the cookies, and your mom was working full-time while having kids, did you have a sense of that as a child, that your household was different, or was it maybe not so different in that way, do you think? REEVE: I had no sense that it was different, and it’s interesting because my mother died when I was 15 and my father subsequently remarried and what I later learned, my stepmother challenged my father on this, was that with both my mother and stepmother, he had basically prohibited them from working after a certain point, a decision he now regrets, particularly with regard to my stepmother. She challenged him, told him it was either she goes back to work or she gets a divorce. And my mother, I think, had she lived — she died in ’68 and things hadn’t changed that much for her generation. Her sisters are very different; they were like her and became very different. But she didn’t challenge him. BANKS NUTTER: Now, one of the other things and you’ve already sort of brought it up, too, is that this was a devout Catholic household. I guess, first if you could maybe clarify for me, in part being a non-Catholic, what does that mean? What does it look like, feel like, taste like in a day? From a child’s point of view. Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Pat Reeve, interviewed by Kathleen Banks Nutter Tape 1 of 4 Page 3 of 62 REEVE: There was a way in which the observance of the faith was involved in every part of our life, everything from Sunday Mass — and God help you if you weren’t ready to go out the door when my father was ready [laugh] — to the fact that I went to a parochial school, an all-girls school, from first through eighth grade, and I was really, for those eight years, immersed in the Catholic universe. I had no conception of what it meant to go to a public school — and it wasn’t even so much that, it was more that my universe was Catholic, sort of, defined.
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