Women’s History Month just passed but in my book, women’s history is a year-round thang. I believe that this week’s Portrait, Molly Gonzales, would agree with me. Gonzales is the Advocacy Manager at the Alice Paul Institute in Mt. Laurel, NJ.
First question: You work in N.J. Where are you originally from?
I was born in Philly, but I grew up in Narberth, and while I would never move back to the suburbs, reflecting on my childhood, I actually feel very grateful for it because as far as suburbs go, it was quite progressive. A lot of earthy, crunchy people who were really into civic engagement in a very progressive way. It seemed like everyone was a vegetarian, and everyone supported women’s rights. It was a gentle way of easing myself into this feminist life I live now, because I was very accepted around there.
Tell me a little bit about the family.
I have a younger sister named Claire. She’s really cool. We’re three years apart, so sometimes we were best friends and sometimes we were enemies. But I love my sister. I’m really proud of her. We’re very different, but I think that’s what makes it fun. I feel so grateful that we’re each other’s best friend and biggest fan.
What was the biggest fight you got into with your sister?
[Laughing] It was almost always about the mystery of a missing skirt, or “Just because I haven’t worn these shoes in 10 years doesn’t mean I don’t love those shoes. So it doesn’t mean that you can come and take them!” There was a lot of sleuthing like, “I saw you on Instagram wearing my jacket!” It was always the most surface-level thing, which is how we were able to rectify it very quickly.
What did your parents do?
My dad’s a lawyer. My mom was a labor and delivery nurse, and now she teaches Women’s Health at Drexel. They’re two of the smartest people I have ever met. Growing up in their household was tough. They really believed in education and intellectually pushed me growing up. Not, “You have to do well in school.” It was like, “What books are you reading?” Because my mom worked in women’s health, we never got “the talk” per se, but I knew where a Fallopian tube was before I knew how to pluck my eyebrows. She raised us to understand health education, which I’m really grateful for, because it’s a field that is under attack right now. Women knowing about their own bodies has always been under threat. It’s never been something that has been celebrated or encouraged or taught in schools. I took that for granted growing up and now I realize that my mom is the coolest person I know. Because of the work that she does, I was able to go to school and be like, “This is how you get pregnant!” And she’s always been, and still is my fashion icon. She takes a lot of pride in her appearance, though she dresses for herself first. You want to mix polka dots and stripes? Fine, do you. I’ve started to really appreciate that as I’ve gotten older.
Did you ever get called into the principal’s office for knowing too much information?
No! I was clever about how I did information dispersal.
Your dad’s a lawyer. Is that where you get your passion for justice?
Yeah, he would debate us on everything growing up, and it taught me how to have an argument. We didn’t agree on a lot of things at all, but through having these debates with him, it made me better at coming up with arguments myself, using three different points, and each of them with a sub point, and this is how I’m going to come at this argument. It also made me a better educator. I do public education so I’ll think, what is the angle? How am I going to convince people that women’s history is exciting? How am I going to convince kids that women are leaders, and introduce all of these different feminist issues? My parents did a really good job in priming me to be able to make complicated arguments.
What did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be a race car driver. And then I found out that there were height limits for race car drivers. They want you to be shorter, which was a huge bummer because I’m six feet tall. I briefly wanted to be an astronaut but you can’t wear glasses if you’re an astronaut. I wanted to be a lawyer for a second, because I thought my dad was so smart. But I really don’t like arguing. I want everyone to get along. So that wasn’t gonna work either. And then I went to college, found gender studies, and I was like, “Anything I can do to keep studying this and teaching people about this is what I want to do.” So a women’s history museum is the perfect place for me.
What sort of extracurriculars were you into?
I played basketball. I was always the tallest girl so I didn’t really have a choice. I also liked Model UN. I liked diplomacy and learning about other countries. I wrote for our school paper. I really liked doing the arts and culture side of that. But I mostly liked sports, basketball and field hockey. I loved being around and hanging out with other girls, and the team-building aspect of it. I really wasn’t that good at it, but I don’t think that’s what was important. It was about learning to have trust in your body. I’m gonna bring everything to history, because I just love women’s history. When I learned more about Title IX and how there was a time when women were not allowed to play sports, it didn’t really register for me. I took for granted that I could go after school and shoot hoops with my friends or get a bat and mitt and play softball all afternoon. And then I learned about how playing sports gives you confidence in your body, that it feels really good to be strong and be able to lift heavy things. But most women were not given the opportunities that I had. My parents put me in sports from a very young age which really gave me a lot of confidence that I’m grateful for.
Where did you go to college?
I went to the University of Pittsburgh.
Who was your favorite teacher?
I would say everyone in the Gender Studies Department. First of all, I didn’t know you could study women’s history, gender and feminism. I didn’t know feminism was something even worthy of that, because in high school, my friends and I were feminists, and everyone made fun of us for it, and so I never thought that you could go to school and take it really seriously. And here are all of these professors who are teaching that it is more serious than any other subject. I remember feeling for the first time, really excited about learning in a way that felt like education had a real imperative in my life, that everything I was learning made me feel like I’m not crazy. Here’s this history of how patriarchy has structured our world. If you weren’t feeling crazy, then you probably weren’t caring or paying enough attention to all of the ways in which men have marked their supremacy in the world. And so I think learning how to deconstruct that and understand it’s not your fault, you can have power in shaping these things. It felt so good to learn about the achievements of women. It felt so good to learn about queer theory, to know that it was an area of study that I could pursue.
All of that was so exciting. And of course, everyone in those classes were immediately my best friends, right? It was like all these LGBT queer feminists became my friends because all of us similarly, had been ostracized for feeling a certain way or having different beliefs or identities. We were in small classrooms of 15 people, and we all cared so deeply about what we were reading. We were sharing it with each other, with open hearts and meeting each other where we were at and got excited for each other’s achievements. It was the first time I ever was like, “Oh, my God, learning is so much fun. And wow, you can do so much with this.” So, yeah, everyone who taught Gender Studies at Pitt was like a hero to me.
Tell me a little bit about coming out?
This might sound silly but I never felt a super imperative to come out until COVID, because I thought it was probably pretty obvious to my parents that I wasn’t straight, even if I was dating a guy (I identify as queer and bisexual), that it was probably pretty obvious, based upon all of my friends, and what I believed in. I mean there’s no way you guys actually think I’m straight. But during COVID, I was living at home, and there was nothing really to talk about. There wasn’t a lot of drama, and I was really bored so I told my mom I was queer. She was super accepting, all excited and happy. She even got a doormat that said, “This house has pride.” I know a lot of my friends did not have that story, so I’m very lucky. And sometimes it feels obnoxious to be like “I was bored, so I told my mom I’m queer,” but that’s what happened. My sister was like, “You beat me to the punch.” She’s also queer and wanted to have a moment with it too. That we were able to have a happy story is very endearing to me. I share this story with my friends because I think we don’t hear about a lot of happy endings. More often, we hear a trauma destiny, or a destiny of sadness, or a destiny of struggle. But sometimes, we need things to be hopeful and positive. I knew my parents were accepting of queer people. My mom had a lot of gay friends and my uncle is gay, so there was never a question that I was going to be in danger. That this was going to threaten my ability to be housed and fed, as it was for a lot of my friends and that’s why I felt I should not let this be unsaid. If they’re brave enough to say it, then I should be too, you know? And I think it’s important for people to see that this life is possible and it’s not a destined tragedy, it can actually be really fun and OK.
Agreed, when my nephew came out to me at 16, I said, “You don’t know how much is waiting for you. We have everything. We have our own nightclubs. We have our own magazines. We have our own movies. We have our own damn parades!”
Yes! And a culture of literacy like straight people haven’t come up with. The intellectual and artistic traditions of queer, gay, trans, lesbian people have always been so exciting to me.
So let’s get to what you do now. You’re the Advocacy Manager at the Alice Paul Institute So give me a very brief 411 on her and then a little bit about the center and why it’s important.
Alice Paul was born in 1885 in New Jersey. She was a suffragist who fought for women to get the right to vote. Something really cool about her is that she was a scholar. She has many degrees, and through each of these different educational opportunities, she becomes more hardened in her feminism. And what excites me about teaching kids about Alice is that she led the first protest outside of the White House. Alice really ramped up the suffrage movement in the United States.
She had gone to get a degree in England, and when she was there, she sees Emmeline Pankhurst and her two daughters giving soapbox speeches. They’re talking about why women’s equality is important and people are throwing garbage at them. She’s never seen anything like that before. So she’s like, “OK, I have to go ask them what’s up. I have to go learn from them. And she does. She learns how to give a soapbox speech. She learns how to do public education, and she learns how to do civil disobedience, too. She’s a Quaker so she often says, “Oh, that wasn’t civil disobedience. I was just doing what was right.” All while she was throwing bricks at cops! I find that really exciting that she contains so many different contradictions. So she comes back to the United States, and eventually forms this group called the National Women’s Party. They get a headquarters in DC, and they lobby like crazy. They protest for an entire year outside of the White House during what’s called the Silent Sentinels. And after the 19th Amendment is passed, everyone thinks “OK, we did it. We got the woman’s vote.” But she was all business, and said, “Our success does not mean we should rest.” This is just the beginning, women still can’t get divorced, women still can’t own property, women can’t run for office, all these things. So then she writes the Equal Rights Amendment and dedicates the rest of her life to advocate for the ERA. So at the Alice Paul Center, in her childhood home, we teach people about the suffrage movement, women’s history and get people more civically engaged. We offer a bunch of different free and subsidized programs for women and girls, and to all people on empowering themselves, with the ultimate goal of using history to inspire action.
That’s great and much needed.
Yes, we see some pretty devastatingly low voter turnout rates for Gen Z, for everybody, really, of all generations. The number of people who vote for president is in the 40% range. But I think when you learn the struggle of suffrage, when you learn that Alice Paul was imprisoned fighting for the right to vote. She went on a hunger strike and was forcibly fed when they put metal tubes down her esophagus and poured raw eggs down them. That she’s only in her 20s when she was put in solitary confinement in dungeon-like conditions, I think if you know about that, you’re gonna be inspired to vote. If you learn about all of the women who put their bodies physically on the line to face brutality from the police, held hunger strikes, and stood outside for an entire year, how they maimed their bodies for the cause, you can’t learn that history and not vote. Which is so important now. We’re nonpartisan, we just want people to be civically engaged.
Tell me a story of a positive response to the history.
I think a lot about how learning women’s history, as a woman, really changed my life. Understanding that it’s not just me, that the world around me was built in a certain way that didn’t include women. And I think that when young men and boys can learn that history, or learn that women can be leaders too, it has a ripple effect. So we had a group of little boys who saw some of the exhibits and asked, “Is it true? Girls can’t vote?” When we were like, “No, no, don’t worry, girls can vote now,” they were so excited. And this huge group of second graders started parading around the museum yelling, “Girls CAN vote!” They were getting really excited about civic engagement, which is what we should all want. We should all want to raise young people to trust the system that they’re in and to want to participate in it. And interactive history, like this, history that you can see yourself in, really promotes young, civic engagement in that way. There are so many attacks on any history that isn’t about straight white men right now. It’s a bummer. I think it’s going to prevent people from becoming civically engaged and having pride in their country. But if you can teach people all of the different participants in building this country, they will have more investment in it.
So what is your ancestry?
My mom always said that she was Irish but we were looking through a bunch of old pictures after my grandfather died and so many of them were in Germany. She said, “You know, I always kind of thought my grandma wasn’t Irish, because she was always making these very German dishes, and she’d speak German sometimes. Her last name is Sullivan, so she was like, ‘We’re Irish.’” But I think there’s a lot more to the story than that. My dad’s side is from Spain and Italy, and also Ireland, and I think Cuba too. I know that my dad’s mom’s dad is from Cuba. He was a chess player and I love playing chess, so I love thinking about that. My dad’s family is really meticulous with their ancestry. The family tree is etched in Sharpie, and everyone knows all the lore and stories, like who is who and where they came from. I always loved learning about all the stories of what it was like growing up in Spain, or what it was like coming to America. I think it’s exciting to think about what life looked like in these places, in the times when relatives were living there, and engage with the history. What did it look like to live under Franco’s regime in Spain, or Mussolini in Italy, or what did it look like to grow up in the United States in a time of immense disparity and racial divide? How did they navigate these things? There was an article about my grandma who was a teacher her whole life. In the early ’50s, she moved to Connecticut to live with two other women and that was pearl clutching enough that it was a newspaper story in her hometown. Young women, single women, teachers, living together and that was a news story? What was it like to live that life? Anyway, those stories are exciting to me.
For sure. So let’s do some random questions. What’s a tradition from another religion that you admire?
Religion is tough, because I respect a lot of the cultural practices of it, like the beautiful stained glass windows in the Catholic Church we went to, but so much of what they were saying was hurtful toward me. Admire? Well last year, I went to a Unitarian Universalist service. A woman was delivering the service, something I’d never seen before, and she sang a Joni Mitchell song at the end. Never saw that before, either. And the lesson that I got from it was that it’s hard to love people who make mistakes, but we have to do it anyway to welcome them back in. There were lessons of love and forgiveness and caring that I was like, “Oh, this is really special, and this is really beautiful, and I wish other churches that are worshiping similar guys could see that too. It makes me sad to think about how religion is used to hate people or tear them apart. Especially since so much of the Civil Rights Movement and the suffrage movement, the feminist movement were forged in the church. But now, a lot of young people don’t trust those spaces anymore.
Ever write a letter to Santa?
Oh yeah, letter writing is something I think is a lost art, and it’s something all of us should do more of. I write a letter to somebody almost every day. One, because when I worked in an archive, so much of what I was scanning were letters, and it occurred to me that none of my friends were writing. We’re texting each other all day. So none of that’s getting archived. None of our emails are getting archived, none of our DMs on Instagram. None of that is making it past our phones. So when our phones are destroyed, when we’re gone, all of the correspondence, all of the evidence that we lived and loved and laughed… all of that’s gone. And part of it is that I like letters. I encourage my friends to send me letters, even friends who live in Philly. I write letters to a friend who lives four blocks away. We use the same post box to mail each other letters. But there’s now this physical scrap of us appreciating each other and our musings of the day. And I’ve moved around a lot, so it’s such a delightful way to stay in touch with all my friends. When I’m feeling lonely, I have a box of letters from my friends writing, “We love you. You’re doing a great job!”
I read that you were an archivist. I often think that, “Wow, even something as simple as receipts, which were once a great way to research history are almost a thing of the past. “
It’s something that keeps me up at night. We are sacrificing so much of our material history. The first collection I ever processed was a collection donated by a woman who was a lesbian involved in ACT UP in DC. It was letters. It was party invites, it was thousands of pieces of paper from that period of time. I had never seen anything like it. I’d never seen the evidence of lesbians saving the day. But it was written in their datebooks, in their correspondences, in the receipts. Receipts of potlucks to raise money for an action. There were beautiful photographs from protests with love notes on the back, and in her date book notes like, “I’m going on a date with Lizzie tomorrow. And don’t tell Lizzie, but I’m also going on a date with Marie.” She had this whole life in a physical, tangible history that I had never seen before and there was so much humor in it.
She kept it all, including every single copy of the Blade, which is the DC gay newspaper. They have an archive too, but she clearly didn’t trust that archive. I have a stack of Philly Gay News just in case because we don’t know what’s going to happen to these virtual databases. Primary source materials can give us so much and there are so many things getting erased and scrubbed right now that it’s scary. So I feel a really strong imperative to keep everything. Working in an archive, I know the importance of keeping it organized and findable. I have binders for each year, and chronologically as people give me things, I put them in the binders. I don’t know what’s gonna happen with them, but it makes me feel good to know that there is physical evidence or the trace of existence of feminist life. That feels really important to me.