Oral History Interview with Allie Hixson, Part I

BETSY BRINSON: Year 2001. This is an interview with Allie Hixon, H-I-X-O-N. The interviewer is Betsy Brinson. And we are doing the interview at Campbellsville University in Campbellsville, Kentucky. [INTERRUPTION—TAPE STOPS] BRINSON: Let me just begin, because I need to get a voice level from you. Give me your full name, please.

ALLIE HIXON: Allie Corbin Hixon.

BRINSON: Okay. And shall I call you [ ]? [INTERRUPTION—TAPE STOPS] HIXON: Um-hm.

BRINSON: Well, thank you for agreeing to talk to me today. As you know, we’re doing this in part because of the up-coming March 22 panel on the modern Women’s Movement, they’re calling it— HIXON: Um-hm. Good.

BRINSON: The leadership and what-not.

HIXON: Um-hm.

BRINSON: I’m going to ask you a lot of questions about you 1:00today, Allie, but then I’m also going to ask you some questions about things that may have been going on in the modern Women’s Movement in Kentucky, just to kind of get some input from you, to see if some of those things were happening in Kentucky or not.

HIXON: Okay.

BRINSON: But to start with, tell me your birthday and your birthplace.

HIXON: May 28, 1924. Adair County, four miles out of Columbia, Kentucky.

BRINSON: Okay. So that makes you how old today?

HIXON: Well, I’m seventy-six and in May I’ll be seventy-seven.

HIXON: Well, it’s certainly crucial to all of the things that I have done in my life. I was the middle of 2:00eight children. Actually, Mom lost, uh, lost a, a baby at, very young infant, her third child. And then I had—so before that I had my eldest brother who is dead now, my sister Minnie who is eighty-two and has been over to my house all week, just packing up a storm as I’m getting ready to move. She can work circles around me. And, then Christine is the sister that I, I suppose was most closely related to, two years ahead of me. And then I came along. And because I was known on the farm as the, the runt, the weak one, unlike the others, I was spared from, you know, chopping corn and doing the hard work, along with Mom, out on, in the garden and in the fields. And for that reason, 3:00I was allowed then when, six years later when my two brothers and younger sister came along, I became the regular babysitter. But I always had a book in one hand, whether, whether I was minding the children, or—Mom would say, “Now,” you know, “ Put these beans on and st-, to cook when we’re out in the field,” or whatever I had to do, I could, I could, you know, just find time. But I always loved to read. And I think probably, Mama, Mama’s aunt who ran the library and was head of the library in Columbia, Minnie Triplett, for whom my, my oldest sister was named, really instilled in Mom a love of reading, although she and Mom never got beyond the eighth grade. But I think some of that was important. But I’d be glad to—the other thing I guess I should say that certainly has affected my life, in addition, 4:00I mean, to, being physically not very strong at birth, I fell victim to the, the infection that killed my younger sister, the one I mentioned, Eula Nae, the third child, and something you hardly ever hear now about, eryfipelas. It was actually, I’ve found in my research over the years that it— BRINSON: How do you spell that?

HIXON: E-R-Y-F-I-P-E-L-A-S. And I’ve been through so many doctors and hospitals, it always amuses me when they struggle, you know, to remember such a name. But at any rate, it was swine-borne, probably carried by fleas. But my— BRINSON: Did your family raise pigs on the farm?

HIXON: The sister, the sister died with it, when, the, kind of an eczema-like-looking infection, you know, over her heart got to her. I got it on one leg, 5:00and that leg has always been larger, and I’ve had trouble, probably with the art-, trouble, I’ve had bloodclots as a result, I think. But at any rate, Mom, having lost one child, was determined that she would not lose me. So she got another doctor, and—well, Mom is a whole story in, in her own right. I don’t know how much you want me to talk about her. I loved both my father and my mother. And Dad— BRINSON: Well, tell me a little bit about your mother.

HIXON: Tell—okay. Well, Mother was married very young, about seventeen. And this Aunt Minnie, the librarian whom I have mentioned, tried her best to keep Mom from marrying. And told her she’d see that she got through her education, through college. But Dad had this big 600 acre farm that he had bought purely on debt—and 6:00this would have been about 19 and 18, you see. And Dad was the first one to have a buggy and a big black horse, and he could really cut a shine. And, of course, she fell in love with him. And the advice—and her mother had been widowed. Mother had Aunt Fannie two years, a sister, two years older than she. And Mom was just a babe when her father, who, who had, part of the Triplett family in Columbia, very, very, you know, very upstanding people. He died. And this put grandmother back into, what I called Southern Appalachia. We called it Burton Ridge in my time. Back with her people, and very poor economic status. So when mom turned Aunt Minnie’s plea down, 7:00you know, she, all her life—well she loved Dad—all her life, she would say to me, “Allie, don’t make the mistake I did. Get yourself an education and don’t think about boys and getting married.” Because she really, she was a strong worker. And we would have lost the farm during the Depression had it not been her work. Dad was kind of a romantic fellow. As I said, he inspired me. He—that’s probably where a lot of people, you know, say, “You’re such a speaker.” Well, my dad was great at speaking and, and being involved in politics. But Dad was not a practical management. And indeed he, we would have lost that farm had it not been for Mother. And I saw— BRINSON: How was he involved in politics?

HIXON: Oh, well, I remember things like Dr.—Governor Chandler running, and Dad right out there, 8:00you know. And Mom never had anything to do with, with politics, you know. Of course, in the first place, what—this, this relates to our whole story of the need of equality for women. I learned right at a very early age that Mom was not expected to go into town perhaps once a month. Dad got whatever—if she needed a dress, why he’d get some kind of black material. I remember the look on her face. She, she made all of the clothes for us. But she wanted something pretty. And he came back with a piece of almost black—it had some tiny little flower, floral designs, but her face just fell when he brought that back. And things like that. But, of course, you remember— BRINSON: Did your mother vote?

HIXON: I was just going to say, you know, of course, women got the vote in 1920, but Mother, Mother 9:00didn’t ever get any indication about any of the women going to vote. In fact, it was very, very common for men to, to keep women from voting in those days. And this is, this is still hanging on. I remember when I moved from Louisville down to Greensburg and volunteered at the, at the booth there on a festival day on the square in Greensburg, where we were putting out—I was actually sitting with the Democratic Women’s Club. And we had forms for people to register to vote. And two women came up to me, and I said, “Hello. Would you like to register today?” And they kind of looked at each other. And I said, “It’s, it’s just very simple.” And I was, I said, “I’ll be glad to help you.” And they looked at each other. Now this was in about 1976, somewhere along there. 10:00And they said, “No, we’d better not. Our husbands wouldn’t like it.” And those two women turned away. And I thought, “Oh, ye gods, it’s still going on,” you know. I was just getting into the active movement when I was retiring from my teaching career, in order to do what I finally had got me a vision of seeing. After a Ph.D., I had not learned the basics of the lack of, women’s inequality. And so I said the people who need educating are the people in the communities and out in the public and so that’s what I’m going to do voluntarily. But at any rate, Mom made a, made a big impact on me. But as I said, I want to give credit to Dad, too.

BRINSON: When you were growing up Allie, did you, what did you think you—what kind of career interests did you think you were thinking about as a girl?

HIXON: Well, okay. That’s the other important influence of Mother. She named me after 11:00Miss Allie Cundiff who was one of the first women that you, was honored for Kentucky Women Remembered, you know? She was from Columbia, a schoolteacher. She happened to be teaching at my little one room grade school, to which I walked for a mile and a half for eight years. And Miss Allie was a very intelligent, wonderful woman. I, when I met her up in the years, you know, she was now having some physical problems but she was still sharp in her mind. So, and Mom gave me only—people would say, “Well, what’s the rest of your name?” But my name, she only gave me Allie. And I always thought, well, I, you know—then I found out that Mom only gave all of the girls a, a single name. But when I got a little hint of what feminism was all about, I stuck the Corbin in there because it, I thought, where’s the Triplett, you know? It doesn’t say Allen, Allie Triplett Corbin. So-

BRINSON: Well, 12:00Corbin was your last name growing up?

HIXON: That, Dad’s name. You see, see.

BRINSON: [ ] HIXON: And it took me a long time before I realized that there was a lot that, in all of the education I had had, all the way through my Masters degree at U of L, and then my Ph.D. that women had been written out, you know. And of course that’s when, and I—you probably want me to talk about it later—when I hit, discrimination hit me so in the face when I got my Ph.D.

BRINSON: Were, were there things, Allie, that you couldn’t do as a girl growing up, because you were a girl, that you wished you could have?

HIXON: Well, Mother kept—Dad particularly. I don’t think Mom pushed us to do anything specifically except that she was, she was always pushing me to be the person she hadn’t been able to be, the educated person, I think. 13:00And Dad never wanted us to socialize. I mean it was a rare thing if we were allowed, and Mother had to intervene for us to do that. Even to go half a mile or a mile to what we called play parties, candy pullings, or once in a while—there was no dancing in my, our home, and no music un-, until Dad got the radio and started listening to the news, and then I began to listen when the others didn’t seem to be very interested. And I began to learn something about the world at large, you know.

13:38 BRINSON: Was there anything that you recall, though, that you thought you wanted to do, but you were told, no, that girls couldn’t do that, only boys?

HIXON: No, I think, because the, my sisters worked right alongside my brothers on the farm. The only thing we could not do was to be in the public. He did not—and Dad did not want us—he 14:00just wanted to keep us at home and keep out of trouble. And Mother, who was rather shy, who was rather shy anyway, as I said, didn’t even get to go to town very often.

14:15 Now, the thing about the voting I must tell you that, probably the first sen-, that—you know, we all say “click,” and you have the smaller ones and then you have the whammy when you turn your whole life around, you know? But I remember, and I must have been somewhere between six and, and eight. But Dad had hitched up the wagon with the mules. And he loved to go to the stockyard and gossip with the, and get hold of the news and see what the politics was and so on. And it was voting day. So, Mother evidently had said she wanted to go to town too, and she would like to vote. And I was, I was standing out under 15:00a big tree where I had a swing. And I saw her on the porch, and Dad getting ready to get into the wagon, and sat down in the wagon. And I saw the look on her face when he said, No, why he’d get whatever she wanted. But it was not women’s place to vote. And that stayed in my brain for a long time. I didn’t know why this was. I thought it was just personal between them, you know. I had no idea that women had to work all those years to get the vote in 1920.

So it’s little things like that. But the other thing, the only other thing that—Mom wasn’t one to give you a lot of advice now. She felt she’d made her own mistakes, but she did try to, to steer me. But there were—the only outlet I had for something to read and people that I could talk to, and it’s really, it’s really what was called, a group called the tent-meeting gang, 16:00called the Brethern in Christ. People that used to have, you know, tent revivals around. And they’d go into our school and have Sunday School on Sunday. And I loved to get anything I could read, you know. And of course I, I’m Unitarian in religion right now because I’ve learned a lot about the nature of religion and all of that, but this was, this wasn’t exactly holy roller thing, but they did baptize people in the river, you know, and we had a fiery Hell-brimstone preacher. But he was a nice man. And he took a shine to me. And I, I, I would come up and he’d see that I had a little seat right up close underneath his pulpit. And he had something of eloquence in his voice. So I think I honed my speaking ability [laughs] partly on this preacher’s style. But I could go, and one woman 17:00who belonged to church, about half-way between our house and the schoolhouse, started seeing that I was the only one in that family that would ever go to Sunday school, never went to church or anything. And I would go by myself, when, you know, it, the weather was safe and that sort of thing. So, but, they had the whitecaps. Now, I’m sure they’re called—Disciples of Christ is the proper name, I believe. But they were called whitecaps, the lingo, you know. And you still, they’re still around. They wear the little white gauze cap and then they had a black. And they, you know, the dress is somewhat like the, well, you know, the group that wears the long dress.

BRINSON: The Amish? Or the Mennonites?

HIXON: Yeah, the Amish. Now, they weren’t Amish, but they—no jewelry, no makeup, that kind of thing. And that didn’t, you know, that was fine with me. My sister sure didn’t go for that, but it didn’t bother me. I was thinking of things in my head I was trying to put in. But apparently, and I’m sure 18:00I was not much more than six or seven years old, and they had that tent meeting right on the outside of our farm because Dad had given them some stuff to build tents and so on, and they had the big dinners on the ground, which I thought was very exciting. And, of course, music and all that. But then they’d get around to, to getting everybody so emotionally involved. I mean, I heard a few shouting and things like that. But they would also sing the songs that would, would bring you up to the altar, and you’d kneel down. And then you’d get saved. Well, Mom usually didn’t go to those things. Dad was always there because he liked the music and the people and so on. But she happened to be there. I think it was the last night of that meeting. And I guess they were really struggling to get some more people saved. At any—or else I fell, I fell, I don’t want to say victim—it was, it’s part 19:00of my rich heritage of understanding what people are like and what various faiths are like. And I am—this is why I call myself Unitarian Universalist and belong to the Unitarian Church in Louisville, is that the whole world, you know, has much in common with its love of mystery and the feeling that there’s more than just the plain earth itself. But at any rate, the next thing I knew, this music just got into me, and one or two I think had come, gone up the aisle. And I found myself just walking up. Then I was so frightened. Of course the, right away the, the sisters of the religion came around and surrounded me and knelt down with me, and, you know, and then I didn’t know what to do. I was scared to death. You know, I had my head down, but I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. Finally, I felt Mom’s hand tapping my shoulder and I almost cry now, when I think about it. Oh, was I glad to see her. 20:00She picked me up and turned me around. And Mom who never, as I said, would ever make a public speech of any kind, turned around and then she said, “Well, I just want to tell all of you that I don’t think my sweet little girl has done any sinning that requires her to be saved at this time.” And she led me back down the hall. And I tell you—and then later, they, some of them, they came out and what they were doing were getting younger women to sign up to be missionaries in Africa. Well, of course, adventure and all of that, you know. Now, I didn’t get baptized. My sister did. But I, I had gotten scared off. I didn’t get baptized. But I was, what, what was I to go, to do in that time, as we, you know, as we grew up. There wasn’t, there weren’t any clear alternatives to what was there, for us. And I said something to Mom about maybe 21:00I should sign up and be a missionary. And she was making up a bed, and I remember, she turned around, and she said, “Well now, I’ll just tell you Allie, if you want to ruin your life, you just go ahead and you sign up to go to Africa and be a missionary, but if you do, all of the things I’ve tried to get you to understand about being educated are going to go out the window.” And she turned back around. And I didn’t have to get told anything else by Mom. I knew I had to just stay on the education track [laughs] which is what I did.

BRINSON: Right. Right. [ ] HIXON: And, so, while she was not very given to, to telling you a lot of things—she th-, felt she made her mistakes too early and she was paying for them, and she did have a hard time, although she was a good, good woman.

BRINSON: Tell, tell me when you first started getting involved in women’s activities.

HIXON: Well, 22:00actually, when you think that I still didn’t have the, the picture, or any idea of inequality, of constitutional inequality of women, I remember that when I got to high school, and I won’t try to tell you how hard it was for us to walk four miles to Columbia, or we even tried to [ ]—the one, the one sister, my older sister and I, who was really more interested in the educational part than the others, the two of us would sometimes ride a horse to Columbia, and, you know, and park it, [laughs] park it somewhere. And it was until—and I was very shy the first year, you can imagine, with the kind of background I had. But by the second year in high school, when I was a sophomore, Ms. Hesscamp—was it David Hesscamp? I just saw her at the 1942 class reunion 23:00this last year, and I’m so glad she’s still there. I had some wonderful teachers in the grade school and in high school. But Ms. Hesscamp started putting me in plays, a character role of some kind. And so I learned that I liked being on the stage, and, you know, I had funny parts and, and so on. Then I had a wonderful English teacher. And I believe it was a history teacher, either, either Ms. Flowers the history teacher or Ms. Hesscamp, put me on a, on a, you know, the Friday programs for all the school at the assembly, Friday assemblies. Put me on—I had memorized the Declaration of Independence for her. She had asked me to do that as a project. And I got up on the stage and gave that to great applause. They used to talk about it for years, about how 24:00I was just the star, you know, in drama and speech and so on. I had no inkling, “All men are created equal,” that it was anything but all men. And even though I got involved in debates with some of my—formal debates, we were trying to learn to debate—not one word about that. Okay. When school, when I graduated in 1942, then I was back on the farm. Now what was I going to do? Well, my sister who had gone on to Lindsey-Wilson— BRINSON: In North Carolina?

HIXON: In, in Columbia.

BRINSON: Oh, in Columbia?

HIXON: In Columbia. You know, they have a college there. And she had, had run across w-, I guess after she had begun to teach in the lower, in the country schools. I guess 25:00maybe a two-year teaching certificate, or whatever she had. She has a career in her own right, and she’s written a book about it and included all of the history of my whole family. It’s a wonderful document of a lot of people in Adair County in, in high school and so on. But she w-, some, she made contact someway with a, a man who was promoting finding girls in very poor areas to come to Spencerian Commercial School on— BRINSON: What was the name of it?

HIXON: Spencerian Commercial School.

BRINSON: Spencerian.

HIXON: As far as I know, it still goes on in some fashion.

BRINSON: And where was it [ ]?

HIXON: It was in Louisville. And so, Minnie had told him that I was the smartest one in the family and I should go there, and he should go out and see Mama. And my parents, my Dad, you know. Well, Dad wasn’t going to—he loved me 26:00and bragged on me when I won the spelling bees and all of this. But he didn’t intend me to leave the farm. He thought I ought to find some good man and get married and be a farmer’s wife. But Mom heard him, heard him out. And he, what he guaranteed was that, that I would be given, I would be taken to a home that was really approved by them and I could babysit and wash the dishes, do things like that, and enroll in the Spencerian Commercial School at ho-, at hours that, which could be arranged. And then Mom had to pay some money, which was pretty hard—in fact I ended up, with the first job I ever got, of finishing up the debt of that. She signed a contract. He wanted her to sign it in, in, for a year, I think. And 27:00Mom and I kind of both kind of looked at each other and sa-, and she said, “No, Allie doesn’t need a year.” Nine months was his next contract offer and so she agreed to that and signed it. So then, my bro-, my eldest brother put me on a Greyhound bus. I’d never been to Louisville in my life. And I, he, they took me right to the, to the door of this house. It was the—well I should tell it, I should tell you. It was the Hassenours. You’ve heard it probably—ah, no, you’re not from Kentucky. Well, everybody that is in— BRINSON: Say, say what it was again.

HIXON: The Hassenour family restaurant. And he had a little restaurant down on Breckinridge. And I would, they would give me bus money and I would, I could come to the restaurant and eat my lunch. And I stayed there 28:00for about three months, and then I was getting dissatisfied and very homesick and couldn’t see where, where I was going, you know. And then a, a lawyer’s wife up the street who had another one of the girls that I had become friends with asked me to come there and she would help me a little more. And so I did that. And finally, I decided, if I don’t know enough—oh, I had had, I had had a coup-, a man and a woman, two of my teachers, besides the other teachers I’ve mentioned, took quite a bit of interest in me. Miss Mary Lucy Lowell, who had been there for a long, long time, got the—you ever heard about the NYA program? The National Youth Administration, you know? Eleanor Roosevelt promoted that so that when girls, people, boys and girls could get some help in the, from the country. And 29:00she said, “Allie, I need you to help me check papers and things.” And in other words she gave me, she made up a little job for me. The first time I’d ever had any money in my life. Then I had, I had begun to learn bookkeeping with a very fine, the man that was the band teacher was a fine teacher. And I liked that. And I had a little shorthand. And I thought, now what? This was one reason Mom thought maybe that I had possibilities when I, she knew I’d had, hadn’t been able to do some of that in the high school. So I thought, I can’t, I can’t just keep on like this. I have to either go home or I have to get a job. So I switched off to going to night school to try to finish that contract. Well, I ended up, first job I got—interview, I got [laughs] was secretary, the lowest secretary on the totem pole, but that’s alright. I got a job in St. Matthews at Kentucky Farm Bureau. And 30:00it’s funny because, I’m telling you, I went from the lowest- to the highest-paid secretary, to secretary to the executive director. And they were good men to me, but— BRINSON: That’s good, good background.

HIXON: Yeah.

BRINSON: Let, let me jump ahead now, for you. When, when did you first become interested in feminism?

HIXON: Well, I didn’t get interested in feminists per se, I never even heard the word, I supposed, until [laughs] when all of us learned with Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. That’s when feminism really became clear. If I saw the word, I hadn’t really locked in on it. But I was asking myself questions. Because, then, the other thing that I must put in here is that I don’t know where I was, after three years as a secretary over at Farm Bureau, I still thought it’s a dead-end 31:00job. You know, the raises were not coming. Well, you know the story of women. And now it’s World War II.

BRINSON: I’m going to stop and turn the tape.

HIXON: Yeah. [INTERRUPTION—TAPE STOPS] BRINSON: Okay.

HIXON: Well, I was getting rather discouraged because I was about the—see all the time, I thought I could make, I’d get a job, I could save, even though I knew I had to pay board and buy my own food and clothes and everything. And I had a friend from Columbia that came up and roomed with me. And she got a little job with the Kentucky—Laurina Collins—she got a little job with the utility, Kentucky Utilities, worked there for years and years. But what I was looking for was enough money to go to college. 32:00And I had now decided, I’m, I’m just standing in place. I’m not going to get to college. Then, what do you know? Mom said, always said, “Keep away from men,” you know. I didn’t intend to, to meet anybody, but my friend was dying during the World War, to—Laurina wouldn’t like that if she hears that, but it—oh, she’ll laugh. She wanted me to go with her. The churches were having socials for soldiers from Ft. Knox, at the YMCA, would you believe? And even though we didn’t belong to the Baptist Church—we had actually been going to the Christian Church, which is the church I ended up marrying in—but I, I saw, she, she never had dated, and she wanted to meet a soldier. And I thought, “Oh, I, that’s the last thing I want to do, but I’ll go with her.” Well, to make a long story short, they take us in and we march down, and here comes this lovely, lovely woman, and she says, 33:00“Oh, here are two beautiful young girls. And here is a very nice man.” My husband, Bill Hixon, was coming out of the room where he had been playing his favorite symphonies, and he, the last thing he wanted was to be interrupted with something like that. And here came another young fellow whose name I don’t even remember. And before we knew what had happened, we were a foursome and we were led into a room and sat down to play Chinese checkers. Well by this time, I was pretty much teed off, you know, with the whole thing. And Bill saw me looking kind of glum and he said, see he’d understood we were from the Baptist Church, and he said, “Well, I bet you didn’t get that frown from no Baptist Church.” And, oh, I looked at him, and I saw the twinkle in his eye, and I laughed. Well, fifty-five years later, I love that man to death [laughs], and we still laugh about that incident. So, 34:00the point of this is, unlike any man I had ever heard of or had even thought of such a thing, he tells me, I, he, I only have nine days with him. He gets sent overseas, told me when he met me that he knew they were going to send him over. And went through the Battle of the Bulge and all that. I kept a-working at Farm Bureau. And of course, we, he wrote me more letters than the married women got. And I’ve still, I’m going to put those in, a lot of that in my memoire, which I’m now at that the beginning. But when he got back, and we were, we climbed on a bus—now bear in mind that Mom had told me she wasn’t sending me to Louisville to find some soldier. So when I told her I had met him, a nice man from Oklahoma, good family, she wouldn’t even let me speak of him. Because all she could think of was, if I just won’t let her talk about him, she’ll go on with her, her career somehow or other. And it just nearly killed me, that whole time I couldn’t 35:00talk to her about him. But we were on the bus going to Columbia, and me trying to think, “Oh my, what am I going to tell Mother?” And what’s he, how’s he going to—you know, not knowing that she had any kind of prejudice against him. But Bill turned to me on the bus, and he said, “Allie,” he said, “I’ve got one year of college.” He knew I didn’t have any, hadn’t had any. He said, “I’ve got something called the GI Bill,” that they’d just put out for education, “And I’m going to finish my college. Do you want to share it with me?” Well, I nearly fell out of the seat of the bus. I said, “You don’t have to ask me twice.” He said, “Well, if you can learn to cook, I’ll get a job on the side.” Because all I could cook was cornbread and peten-, pinto beans, and absolutely terrified, you know. But at any rate, we loved our three children and grandchildren.

BRINSON: So where did you end up in college?

HIXON: So we went, because 36:00he had been away from his folks so long, it certainly seemed fine for me to—and he said Oklahoma State. It was Oklahoma University then. You know this, this awful accident that’s just happened with the— BRINSON: Right.

HIXON: That was Oklaho-, was not Oklahoma State then. It was Oklahoma University. Oklahoma A and M. That was it. And, so, he enrolled in his science and mechanics courses and became, eventually got one of the first scholarships in western states to Harvard and went on to his Masters. But at any rate, I got my, my B.A. in English and Spanish. And I had taught. And we’d been married. Well this is, it’s very pertinent to women and men to know that some things happen by luck, such as my meeting an extraordinary man, 37:00open-minded, feminist at the heart, a family that had understanding of, of a partnership between men and women. And I, I thought, when I married him and he said that about going to college together, I thought, the first thing I need to do is find out what you do to keep from getting pregnant, because I sure don’t want to blow this opportunity. So I went to a very nice doctor. Happened to be a woman doctor, the one that the woman where I was boarding had told me about. And so here we are today, women still fighting for their rights of reproduction. So I’ve spent a lot of time on that, as well as on the ERA because of this. But at any rate, in those days, of course, the pill had never been heard of, but the diaphragms were available. So, I, I was one of the women who never had any problems with that. Some women said they didn’t work for them, 38:00you know. But I always thought, if you want something badly enough, you don’t get lazy enough or you don’t get—you know, you, you keep your mind about your business. So I had managed to get through college. Now my mother-in-law was a dear woman but she thought probably there was something wrong with me, no children in five years, you know. So I said to Bill, “Alright, if you’ve got a job.” I had taught, I was teaching my first semester at, at Stillwater High School. And Bill got this scholarship to Harvard. And I said, “Okay, fine.” I said, “Now, I’ve got my de-, if something happens, see, I’ve got my degree, I can take care of myself. But,” I said, “I think it’s about time I had our first child. So your mother will think I’m okay.” [laughs] So Emmy was born in Boston, you know.

BRINSON: Um-hm.

HIXON: And so, um— BRINSON: Well Boston must have been pretty exciting for you.

HIXON: Oh, 39:00g-, that, I mean, I could write a whole book over, over that. I don’t think you want all of that.

BRINSON: [ ] HIXON: But it’s part of the feminism that I learned, though. The shocks.

BRINSON: Um-hm.

HIXON: Well, I’ll tell you just a little bit of it that is so crucial to my understanding of the rights of women to control their own lives, their own reproduction. Of course we were going, because we were poor students—he was on the scholarship—we had no other money, except the little bit that we’d had where he’d—and I’d had from teaching. I had Emmy and this doctor came in. I was in the Boston Lying-In Clinic. The first thing that happened was, I, I’m pretty small physically. And they, evidently, didn’t know whether I should have a Caesarean or not. They never discussed this with me. But I went to the, to an appointment one time, and without a by your leave or telling me what was going to happen, they ushered me in and 40:00there was another woman on a table right behind me waiting outside, and when I got in that room, there was a whole bank of male medical students. And I was the, the target for the day. Can this woman have this child normally or—well, I’ve got enough temper in me, and some from my mom, that I thought what is going on here? And I was so furious. And this good old doctor finally, that was standing back, an advisor I think to the younger ones, came over and took me by the hand, and he said, “Honey, I’m going to get you out of here. Now you just relax.” So he got me out of here. I was so shaken and so furious that the next day I, I, I had to be taken, and we were, lived some time out of, out of Boston. Bill had to take me to the hospital. They just still had not told me was I going to have her okay. They filled me full of medicine. 41:00It took eleven hours that I didn’t know anything. Now I’m coming up the crucial, beginning to open my eyes. I come in—when I finally wake up the next morning—first a nurse had come in and said, “Oh, Ms. Hixon, you got a fine big boy.” And I was half-groggy, I said, “Oh. Well, I, I, I guess my husband will be happy.” About a half-hour later, here comes another nurse, “Oh, you’ve got the sweetest little girl that you ever saw.” Well I began—I just went ballistic. And about that time, or shortly after that, Bill came in. He had driven back from the house. And I was crying everywhere. And he said, “You mean you haven’t seen her yet?” And I said, “No.” “Well you do have a darling baby girl, and she yawned in my face. I looked at her.” You know, she loves that joke with her dad now. But he turned around, and he went to the door, and he yelled, and he said, got somebody, and he said, “If, if 42:00you don’t get this baby to my wife, I’m going to burn this place down.” Well I had this baby brought, you know, to me. But the other thing then that, that shook me up after that, when they got ready to release me—well first of all, there was, I was in a room with two people. Or maybe even more. I believe it was like a whole hallway with curtains in between. I couldn’t tell. But there had been a woman lying there in that bed for several days already, an older woman who had already had twelve children, who was lying there with a dead fetus in, in her. And they were not going to take it out. She had to pass it. And I thought to myself, what in the world is going on? Then along comes this doctor to me, and, to check me out. And I said, “Doctor, I want to ask you something before you discharge me. This is my first child. And I have been told that—I have 43:00been using a diaphragm.” Now this is Boston. “When—I’ve been told that when you have a child that you have to get refitted for the measurements and so on.” Lord, that man jumped up and he said, “Where did you get that? Not in this hospital! Not in this state!” And he just—I said, “What’s the big deal?” And he wouldn’t even talk to me. Well, soon as Bill came and I told him, and when I got discharged, we headed out for New Hampshire, which I found I could get it there. Now, that set me to thinking. If you talk about it being a click— BRINSON: Um-hm.

HIXON: Something is wrong. But I knew nothing about reproductive laws, now. Okay. Emmy was born in 1950. Now, I stayed at—I had the three boys. I knew just when each one got pregnant. And I paced them.

BRINSON: You have four children?

HIXON: I have three. I had three. I had intended originally to do four. But I, as I said, I’m pretty 44:00physically—I’m very tough-minded, but I’m not physically strong. And I had a really hard time having Bud, my, my artist child, and we were back to Louisville, and Bill had decided not to go on to a Ph.D. in science education, because he’d met people that had been there for years and years and we didn’t have the finances to do that kind of things. And he said, “I’m just going to get the professional engineering license in Kentucky” as he had in Oklahoma. And, and we bought a little house. And, and I— BRINSON: Didn’t, where did you live back here in Kentucky?

HIXON: In Louisville on Kentucky Street.

BRINSON: Louisville. Okay, okay.

HIXON: And, okay. After ten years—let’s see. Bud—Wally was born in ’55. I’m trying to get back to you when I really got into the feminism examination. 45:00So I began, I finally, I, I was now, without having, knowing, gotten the name yet, the, the Betty Friedan syndrome, The Feminist Mystique syn-, syndrome.

BRINSON: [ ] triple [ ].

HIXON: I found myself in a house with three pretty active children. A house without any help. The walls coming in on me, and neighbors so close you barely had a sidewalk between each one. And both of them had, with troubles of some kind. Not a pleasant neighborhood. And I began to get awful migraine headaches, and very depressed. And Bill came home one day and I had just, I just, I looked at him, and I said, “Bill, I have to tell you something. Now you either have to get me some help with these children.” Oh I had tried to, to take 46:00Emmy to PTA meetings a little bit, and I realized then, “I’m on the wrong side of the desk.” You know, the PTA was nothing. And I thought, I, I, I’ve given away my whole education, my, my career. So that didn’t help any. But I said to Bill, “Now you’ve got to make up your mind. Either I’m going, you’re going to get me some help in here with these children, and let me get back to part-time substitute teaching, or just take me out to Our Lady of Peace.” And he said, “Well, I guess we’ll get you some help.” And it has been his, his faithful pledge every one of the fifty-five years, I mean every one of the fifty years since then, I have had help at least once or twice a week if I needed it, all my life. But I have, I had two years substitute teaching which really 47:00reviewed, and I saw the conditions under which teachers lived, and substitute teachers even worse.

BRINSON: Um-hm.

HIXON: And then I heard about the, the opening up of a new humanities degree program at U of L. And by this time I had realized that I was too narrow, having only English as my major background. The Spanish was just a credit there, which I’d never used and was losing it and all of that. And so, Bill, this is the kind of person he is. I talked to him about it, and he said, “Yeah, well, the kids are big enough now to, to man-, we can manage. So go ahead and enroll.” So I had this wonderful Dr. Hassold and some other good teachers.

BRINSON: How do you spell it?

HIXON: H-A-S-S-O-L-D.

BRINSON: Okay.

HIXON: Dead now. But he was my main advisor and he liked very much what I did my thesis for. It was 48:00on an Arcadian poet, Edwin Muir. Have you ever heard about the Muirs who translated Kafka? Gave the English-speaking world the works of Kafka? You know what I learned by the time I got to my Ph.D. and went over to—Muir was dead when I, when I found him, but I fell in, in I just verily much fell under his spell. He was from the Orkney Islands, had the, had the rural kind of view that I recognized from my own farm days, and a very wonderful, wonderful person. My book is about the only thing on Muir that’s still out there.

BRINSON: Hm.

HIXON: But—I meant to bring you a copy. I’ll send you a copy.

BRINSON: Thanks. That would be great.

HIXON: But at any rate, I, I did that. And then, Dr. Hassold—this tells you something about the status of women, how slowly we are re-, are ready to move from one level 49:00that we think we’re safe with, you know, that you don’t move from. He said, “You know, you really ought to go on with this. Because now they’re talking about a Ph.D. program.” 49:13 See I was the first Ph.D. in English, University of Louisville. Not the first woman ex-, I was the first woman, but that was by accident. They certainly thought there was at least a couple of men ahead of me. They should have been there, but they didn’t do their papers, and I did. [laughs] BRINSON: [ ] HIXON: Nineteen-sixty-nine.

49:26 But anyway, 1963, wh-, 1961, when I got my Masters degree. And I was now, I had now gone to full-time teaching. Taught at Shawnee Junior High four years. Taught at Atherton. And I—and the American Association of University Women—see I had told him at the time, “Well, I’ve got a good teaching position and the children are doing well.” And, and I was a little frightened, you know. Here I had come so far. And I didn’t—it—and 50:00it took me some time. It began to kind of bother me that this, this very intelligent man felt that, well, you had something there, you should have gone with it. And I felt like, uh-oh, something’s not finished. And, right along comes the American Association of University Women which I had joined because some wonderful woman in Louisville, when I got my, my B.A. in 1961 invited me to join. You have to be a college graduate to join AAUW. But of course, you know, it is the organization that opened the doors of the colleges to women, by and large. And they put out, because, now, they are understanding and other groups, women’s groups are beginning to understand that women have to get opportunities to expand their vision. And one big hole was—would you believe in ’61—there were still so few women 51:00on college campuses— BRINSON: Um-hm.

HIXON: That they really thought—I mean there was only one woman at the time, doing, throughout my Masters study that I— BRINSON: As faculty, you mean? Uh-huh.

HIXON: Yeah, yeah. And so, the deal was that they, that the AAUW—and you probably saw that on the, the bio that you have of me—they gave me, they, I think there was another woman in Lexington that got it. And I’ve forgotten, it was a limited number of people. But you had to—they would pay, in my case, a transitional year to persuade me to leave the high school level and prepare for college teaching. So, I sent in the application, and when they called me back, I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.” And so I started. I, I went up, back to Dr. Hassold, and he and Dr. Curtis Webster, 52:00another wonderful man who directed my dissertation, really. Both of them. Oh, before they died, they both wrote me wonderful letters. And liked the book that I re-ed-, redid. But what I’m getting to is that I moved then over to Indiana University Southeast part-time while I was working on the doctorate. So, by 1969, there were four or five of us, maybe six, beginning the doctoral program the first time.

BRINSON: Now when you say you moved over, you, you mean [ ]— HIXON: To, to Indi-, over to New Albany.

BRINSON: To do the teaching there?

HIXON: Oh, yeah.

BRINSON: Or you moved physically?

HIXON: No, no. No, no, no. I w-, by this time we were living on Cherokee Road— BRINSON: Okay.

HIXON: Where I lived for fifteen years, [ ] when I moved and so on. And I had taught one year at, at Atherton.

BRINSON: Um-hm.

HIXON: And I, so, I got, I 53:00guess it was Dr. Webster or somebody put me in touch with Dr. Schusterman over at In-, over at the English department. So I worked for him part-time. And he loved having me. So here’s the, here’s where the big click comes. So I got, I’m getting my Ph.D. So Dr. Schusterman calls me one day, and he says, “Allie, I want you to go in and tell the Dean now that you got your Ph.D.” By the way, I’d been written a half a page in the Courier-Journal, first Ph.D. in English. And they’d come out to my house and interviewed me and all that. And—but that was a little after that when I was—oh, I was down in the dumps for sure, because here’s what happened. Neither I nor he anticipated any problem. My record had been good, teaching there. And he just simply wanted me full-time. And I was ready for that. This is a new man, dean who’d come down from Bloomington, Dean Crooks. I’ve even told it on the radio 54:00out at the Equality Lectures at the park. And I understood his wife had really gave him hell after that, when she heard about it. But at any rate, I think part of it reflects the fact that he, his conscious hadn’t been aroused either, about the inequality of women. 54:15 Because when I said to him, “Dean Crooks, I’m going to—Dr. Schusterman asked me to come in and tell you that I had my Ph.D. and he wants me full-time.” Now you talk about a primrose path. Well, he leaned back in his chair and he crossed his arms, and he says to me, “Well Mrs. Hixon, if I had the funds for another full-time job, it would not go to you. It would go to a man. For you have a job. You’re a wife and mother.” Well, they told over the campus that I shook my fist in my face. Well, I remember jumping out of the chair, and maybe I did—I hope I did. But I said to him, 55:00“Well let me just tell you something. If you offered me that job now, I would not take it, because I wouldn’t work for such a bigot.” So I turned on my heels and I came out of that college. And where was I now? Written up in the Courier-Journal, first Ph.D., advisors so proud of me. I don’t have a job. That didn’t seem to be the purpose of my—oh. And so for one—this is where I began to say, “What is going on here? I, all this education and I don’t know the answer to these questions?” So I went to the library. Now I got my education. I got hold of Abigail Adams. I got hold of Mary Wollstonecraft. I then realized that what Betty Friedan was talking about, about the syndr-, the homemakers syndrome, I had gone through it and come out on the other side.

BRINSON: Uh-huh.

HIXON: And so, 56:00I think I joined the, the caucus right away.

BRINSON: The women’s [ ].

HIXON: Well I was already in AAUW and begin to, to follow them. And then the Louisville Women’s Political Caucus. And then a, another woman who was in the doctoral program behind me had been wo-, had been teaching already at Bellarmine. 56:27 And she told me that they had tried to get her to come over to the Louisville Collegiate School, which is a very fine, then a very fine all-girls, female, preparatory school. You know what, the four years that I taught there—and, oh, they used to come down to my farm and visit with me. They were wonderful students. But the last year, it became very, very clear to me that these young women were still being groomed, and highly educated—Helen Lungley, the history teacher, and I, the English tan-, in tandem teaching, and, oh, all the good teachers were there, the French Teacher, 57:00Jules Set Kearns. Wonderful teachers. They had the best of the teaching. But these girls were still being directed to go to some Eastern college to be a fitting ornament, for the wife of a doctor or a lawyer or some man of substance. And they began to break down. And I thought, “What is going on again?” You know? And then Bill had gotten pretty, pretty much fed up with—oh, I know, his company, he was working with American Creosoting Company downtown, Louisville. And they were going to merge with, with, a, a company out in St. Louis or someplace. And we would have had to move and all that. And again, here’s Bill, this marvelous man—he’s got faults, he’s not an angel. But he’s, he’s [laughs] a marvelous man. He said, “Allie, there’s no way I’m going to interrupt your career 58:00and the children. And I’ll just—” he and one of the other men, man who was in charge of the sales department, decided they had enough expertise to put up their own wood treating plant in Louisville and not disrupt our families. So we, that’s why we stayed there.

BRINSON: Let me go back where you said the girls at Collegiate began to break down. What did you mean by that?

HIXON: Well. They, they were being given a, a different atmosphere intellectually. I mean, I’m sure there were very good teachers there. I don’t mean to put down the teaching per se. But they still, too many of them were still sent by families—it’s the families’ fault. But it’s the culture’s fault. I’m sure a lot of those women teachers, you know, they’ve been, they turned to the women’s studies in, in, by ’77 all of that scene was changing. But a lot of those young women—they got on drugs.

BRINSON: Um-hm.

HIXON: There, 59:00there was one or two suicides I knew of. Depression.

BRINSON: Um.

HIXON: They dropped out of sch-, out of college. It was a whole different era sitting in. And so, I, the more I thought about it and the, the, the clearer it became to me that if, you know, I had been lied as a, as a young female, that we were equal, and we weren’t, and I’d found that out, and that I understood now why Mom couldn’t vote when she should have voted. And then I understood how long it took women to get to vote, and had read all of that. Then you go back and you read Betty Friedan again. And you, you see, you know, what it, where it’s all coming from. And then you realize it’s, you know—I then got into the whole background of the history of women as far back as I could find anything. Not only to—Simone de Beauvoir and, and, 60:00who herself had her own awakening of the second sex, after the war, saying, you know, the dependency of women, and this has got to st-, got to be changed. So I thought, you know, the people who really need educating—now this was about ’74, because I, I’d retired in ’74. And by this time, we’d bought a farm close to my folks and Bill had found some of his Oklahoma roots were needing watering. He wanted to get—he, he’s no farmer, but he, he wanted to be, be out there so we could have trees and things.

BRINSON: I’m going to stop and turn the tape over.

HIXON: Yeah.

END OF TAP E