CATHERINE FOSL: Freibert interview, February 21, 2001. [INTERRUPTION—TAPE STOPS]
FOSL: Okay, why don’t we just start by your telling me where you were born and just a kind of quick synopsis of your schooling.LUCY FREIBERT: Okay. Well, I was born in Louisville at the old Norton Infirmary
in 1922, October 19, 1922. And my parents were Amelia Stitch Freibert and Joseph Anthony Freibert. My mother came from a sort of from middle-level family. I think they had five children and my father’s family had eight, I believe. Maybe one had died in, in infancy. We lived out in 1:00what is now Springdale.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: Little, it’s a little spot in the road on old Highway 22. And after
the crash, my dad realized that there was not going to be enough money coming into the garage for two families, because by that time, his brother had married and was having, they were having children. And so, Daddy said, “Let us move to the country.” He did not want my brothers—and I had only brothers—I had four brothers, just sort of stairsteps, younger than I, Joe, Dick, Tom and Ray. And so, he—well, actually Ray had not been born yet—but because Daddy and Mother realized that we couldn’t probably keep up two families with the garage income, we moved to the country. Now this was at the time of the crash— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: Right after the ’29 crash. I think that we probably didn’t move until
’30, but it was somewhere 2:00in that period.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And when I lived here, when we lived as Springdale, Daddy took my
brother, two of my brothers and me to, all the way down to St. Matthews to Holy Trinity School for our elementary, the beginning of our elementary schooling. And then when we moved to the country, we went to Mt. Mercy School, which was, it was attached to St. Aloysius Church, but it was run by the Sisters of Mercy. And so, I was able to complete the fourth to the eighth grade at Mt. Mercy.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: Then I went to public high school at LaGrange.
FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And, which is now Oldham County High.
FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And I had an excellent education there. At the end of that time, then—
3:00FOSL: I was leaning over you to just look at that red light.FREIBERT: Where is the red light? [“PING” SOUND AND RUSTLING SOUNDS] FOSL: Okay. Sorry.
FREIBERT: That’s okay. So, at the end of my high school, I guess a fortunate
thing happened. The sis-, [COUGHS] excuse me, the sisters, Dominican sisters, out in Springfield offered for the one time only a scholarship to that high school, to, from, from the high school, LaGrange, to their college and I got it.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And so my parents realized it was great to get a scholarship, but what
good would that do you if you had to pay all that board at their college. So, we couldn’t afford to send me off to college when they’d have to pay so much. So, they investigated 4:00here in Louisville and decided that they could afford to pay the tuition at, at Ursuline College here and I could live with my grandmother. So, I, that’s what I did.FOSL: Uh-huh.
FREIBERT: And I came to Ursuline College for one year. At that time, I worked
part-time to help the sister who moderated the newspaper for the college.FOSL: Uh-huh.
FREIBERT: And at the end of the year, she wanted me to be the editor the next
year. And being a little country girl who had no confidence in herself, I said, “I can’t do that.” So, I dropped out of college, and that was a terrible thing to do. It taught me a lesson that has probably changed my whole life.FOSL: Hm.
FREIBERT: Because it taught me that from being afraid to do that one—try it, at
least try it—that it took me ten years later to get a bachelor’s degree— FOSL: Right.FREIBERT: Whereas
5:00I could have gotten it in relatively comfortable circumstances if I had just gone— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: Straight ahead. But maybe I needed to have that lesson. And it
probably has influenced my life a great deal.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: So, the next year, I went to business school. I still lived with my
grandmother. Went to business school here in Louisville at Spencerian Business School. And after less than a year, even before I finished my course, the school got me a job as the secretary to the president at the Commercial Lithographing Company. And I worked there for two and a half years. Now, if you want to ask me questions, 6:00if I get off the track— FOSL: Okay.FREIBERT: But I’m trying to sort of follow— FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: What your questions ask. And if I do get off the track, you just pull
me back.FOSL: So, your account—tell me about the change from the business school to Spalding.
FREIBERT: Oh. Oh, well, that was, that’s a long story. So, the, okay, when I
worked at, at Commercial, I knew—in fact, all my life, you ask a question somewhere there about what were your early career— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: Goals. Well, when I was little, I thought I wanted to be a newspaper
reporter. I wanted to be an actress. I wanted to be a nurse. But deep down, I knew that someday I was going to be a religious.FOSL: Uh-huh.
FREIBERT: And, and so, after I worked two and a half years, I felt I knew about
the world and I’d been around, you know. I’d lived out in the country, but I came back and forth every day to Louisville— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: For my job. And I met a lot of different kinds of people and got
involved in many things. And so, I was ready then to enter the religious life.FOSL: Hm.
FREIBERT: And I just thought that, I knew that I never did want to get married.
That was really a conviction from early childhood that I didn’t really want to be married.FOSL: Hm.
FREIBERT: Because my parents were,
7:00they were wonderful people, but they were strict. They expected you to do absolutely the right thing at all times and be kind of perfect. And I know that’s an ideal that many parents have for their children.FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: But it’s very difficult on the child sometimes to have to live up to
that perfection. And I knew I would be just like my mother. I would want everybody to be perfect and I didn’t think that was a good thing. So I thought I’d be better off being—I, I thought a nurse, at that time. That was my goal when I entered the Sisters of Charity because they had lots of hospitals.FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: And I felt that would be a great thing for me to do. I could be a
nurse and help people 8:00and my whole life would be very useful. Of course, when I entered the community, I already had a kind of profession that I could be a secretary.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: So instead of going to school immediately at Nazareth, they put me to
work as the secretary to the secretary general of the congregation.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And so, instead of going to classes, I would go up and work.
FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: At least, that was the plan. And so, I thought, well, here I am, stuck
back in the same kind of thing. But I didn’t mind, you know. I’d already had those classes that the others were taking, so that was fine. At the, towards the end of my novicia, 9:00we were taught to teach singing. There was a word method—and this is something you can research sometime—there was a woman who had a special way of teaching music, teaching singing, and it’s very, very effective.FOSL: Hm.
FREIBERT: And our community did that as a specialty. So, when I was sent out on
a mission, my first teaching assignment, I was sent to St. Cecilia’s School, which is down in the Portland area, here in Louisville.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And I started out teaching in the fourth grade and I taught that for
two years. Well, we had a music supervisor, and she came around to supervise. She was always looking for people to direct choirs. So after teaching the fourth grade for two years, and I suppose being pretty successful, I was changed to the seventh grade, and then put in charge of the girls’ choir. And— FOSL: What year? What about—about what year?FREIBERT: What year? Nineteen-forty-seven I went to St. Cecilia’s. I entered the
community in 1945, went to St. Cecilia’s in 1947, 10:00and s-, I was there for four years. So, I went to, I taught the seventh grade one year and took the same class to the eighth grade the next year. At the end of that time, I was sent to a larger, people would say a more prominent school: Holy Name School, which is out on South Third, out by the racetrack. And there I taught the seventh grade the first year and the other five years I taught the eighth grade and had the girls’ choir the whole time. And in parts of the year, I would combine the girls’ and boys’ choirs and we’d have a big celebration.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: The students there were very, very bright and they’d had this word
method for singing for eight years. So by the time you got them in the eighth grade—or in the seventh and eighth grade—they 11:00were so good. They could pick up a piece of music and in two or three parts and sing it without any problem.FOSL: Um-hm. Hm.
FREIBERT: It was just amazing. And I thought I was really good because, you
know, I, at that time, I didn’t realize that if they had not had all that training, I could never have done those things.FOSL: Hm.
FREIBERT: My students sang on the radio and on television and, and with the
Louisville Orchestra. They did all kinds of things, but it had nothing do with me. It had a lot to do with all the years of preparation that they’d had.FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.
FREIBERT: So, I taught there for six years then I was moved to Presentation
Academy and—now all of this time when 12:00I was teaching in the grade school, I was going to school on Saturday getting one course a semester and then a couple of courses in the summer time.FOSL: Uh-huh.
FREIBERT: So you see, it took me ten years to finish that degree after I’d had
one full year already in 1940-41.FOSL: And so that was at Spalding you were taking these weekend classes?
FREIBERT: That, it was, right, I took the—uh-huh. Because I was at Ursuline only
the one year, and then the rest of my undergraduate was at Spalding. But at that time, it was not called Spalding. It was called Nazareth College.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And so, I don’t know what year it changed to Spalding.
FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.
FREIBERT: But, anyway.
FOSL: And was it co-educational?
FREIBERT: Not then. Back in the early—see, both Ur-, Ursuline was totally a
female school.FOSL: Uh-huh.
FREIBERT: Urs-, Nazareth College was for women only, the time that I was there.
FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: Up to for-, ’57. It was still a women’s college.
FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: Then later on, it became co-ed. But I, while, while I was teaching at,
my last year at Holy Name, then I was changed to Presentation Academy. And when I taught at Presentation—I 13:00was only there for three years—but again, I got a career shift. All that music that I had done before was gone down the drain and I thought my life had ended.FOSL: Huh.
FREIBERT: The excitement of my life had ended because I wouldn’t be doing music
any more. There, because they had a wonderful music teacher, Sister Mary Ruth, who just did amazing things with the Presettes and—I mean, they became kind of, they were famous too. But I was assigned to, like, be the, the moderator for the school paper. And the very first year that I did that—I didn’t do that in my first year, I think. My second year there I took over the school paper, 14:00and the second and third year that I was at Pres. And the very first year, we won the state best high school newspaper award.FOSL: Uh-huh.
FREIBERT: And that was just a good experience. But it got me, it helped me to
get over that loss— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: Of the music, you know. So it, it gave me a little extra cushion, like.
FOSL: Um-hm. And then, what sent you into, like, post-graduate education?
FREIBERT: Well, when I, when I was at Pres, immediately after finishing my
undergraduate work—incidentally, I started out as a math major on my own— FOSL: Okay.FREIBERT: My own choice, but the sisters asked me to change to English because
we had so many sisters who were good in math and had, you know, started careers in math, so would I mind changing to English because we didn’t have many people in literature. So— FOSL: That’s a surprising thing.FREIBERT: Well— FOSL: You would think the opposite almost.
FREIBERT: Well, it happened, it happened because the dean
15:00at Spalding, at Nazareth College at the time, the dean was an English professor. She’d gotten her degree at Fordham and came back as dean, but she also kept her hand in there by teaching one class. And I was in her class the very first year— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: That she, that I started going back. So, she asked me if I would mind
changing, and I said “No,” because the reason I took a math major was you could always finish your math in a minute and then you had lots of time and I could spend that reading. And I always did that when I was a math major.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: I read novels all the time and, and so I, I didn’t mind at all except
that once you become an English major you never have time to do anything because you never catch up. 16:00FOSL: Right.FREIBERT: But I, while I was, when I was at Pres, then in the summertimes, I
would be sent to St., I was sent to St. Louis University to get a masters degree in English.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And I continued there to be interested in British literature because
that’s what I’d always had as an emphasis in. So, that’s what I did. Took me six years, six summers to get my master’s degree. And while I was there, I was really lucky. I met Walter Ong, who at that time was a really important figure 17:00in American letters and he took me, he was my mentor for the master’s paper.FOSL: Huh.
FREIBERT: And so then, when I finished at St. Louis, I was changed to Spalding.
They moved me just— FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.FREIBERT: It was just, just like a walk across the yard.
FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And I started teaching at Spalding. And I was there from ’60 un-, from
’62 until ’65. That doesn’t seem right. It was from ’60 to ’65. I must have been at Spalding. And then, in ’65, I was—well, there’s a long story here that I’m not going to go into because it’s just too long, how I got to Wisconsin.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: But, I went to, I was able to choose where I wanted to go. By then,
the church had changed enough so that I was able to choose what school I wanted to go to. And I applied to three northern schools, Wisconsin-Mad-, at Madison; and University of Minnesota; and University of Michigan. 18:00FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: And so then, when I got accepted at those three places, I chose
Madison out of the group.FOSL: Good choice.
FREIBERT: Yeah, it was an excellent choice because there, I became radicalized
and that changed my whole life and that sort of made me a feminist.FOSL: So, now, tell me about that.
FREIBERT: Okay, the feminist time—you asked the good question, I think: who were
the women that, that affected your life, life in a feminist way? My mother was very much of a feminist. She didn’t call it that, but she was very much aware of how the world treats women.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And she talked, since I was the only girl, she talked to me a lot
about that. And then my grandmothers, both of them had been—my father’s mother was a nurse over in Germany before she ever came to this country. As a teenager, she was already a nurse. And then my mother’s grandmother was a, owned property over here on what now is called, it used to be called Billygoat Hill, over on the Brownsboro Road, toward that area.FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And she owned a good bit of property that she’d inherited. And she
used to go round and rent, 19:00you know, rent the property, and my mom would go with her on Saturdays to collect the rent. So there was that business element there that made them very much aware that a woman is freer the more money she has: her own money.FOSL: Um-hm. Right.
FREIBERT: Her own money. And so my mother worked before she was married. She was
a seamstress. And she was a very good seamstress. And so, there was that element of independence, I think, that was really impressed on me when I was very young.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And when I was in high school at LaGrange—you asked the question,
“Were there any things you could do, you were a girl?” Well, in our high school, boys were elected to everything. They were elected president of the class. Everything they were elected to. And they never did anything. The girls always had to pick up the slack and do everything that was needed to be done. So, I was not elected the editor of the newspaper, but I was elected managing editor. Somebody said that meant I managed the editor, 20:00which is what actually happened. So I got into that feminist way of thinking— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: That I could do things and when I went to Wisconsin, that reinforced
that. And too, a number of the teachers that I’d had along the way. In high school, I had excellent women teachers, especially one in my first year of high school. She was just so—Verna, Verna Ratcliffe, who kept up with me through all the years. She was just a very strong, powerful woman.FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And she didn’t marry until she was in her fifties, I think.
FOSL: Huh. That’s interesting.
FREIBERT: Yeah. She was very interesting. And then in college, I had, of course,
21:00the sisters and philosophy teachers and English teachers tend to be very—even if they don’t know they are, they tend to be very supportive of women— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: I think more than maybe some of the other disciplines. But anyway, I
had very strong, good teachers. And some of the sisters and also one laywoman, Louise Canapel was very influential in moving me toward—she would never have claimed to be a feminist, but she was.FOSL: Right. Right.
FREIBERT: And so, then when I went to Wisconsin, it was just at the time of the
mid-’60s when all the radicalization was going on there. I lived through three, three strikes: a rent strike; and a, 22:00a war s-, strike against war; and a strike against—I can’t remember now, but there were three different big strikes while I was there.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: We had bombing on campus. Just a lot of upheaval. But that’s where the
feminist movement really got a big boost in the academic world. Because here were the women writing the speeches— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: Making the coffee and cookies and the guys were out on the Bascom Hill
with the bullhorns directing the demonstrations. And you didn’t have to be brilliant to see what was going on. So that’s where the women’s movement got a good boost. And—although I didn’t know her at the time—Josephine Donovan was there. Now, she is one of the people who probably—I said, you know, my mother made a big difference in my life—Josephine Donovan made the biggest difference. So, I have to go back just a little bit. When 23:00I went to, when I was working at Wisconsin and came back to Spalding, while I was in Wisconsin, I worked, I went there to work with John Ing on Wallace Stevens. But he had a heart attack the first year and I had to find another mentor.FOSL: Hm.
FREIBERT: So I took a seminar from Merton Seals who was the big Melville
scholar. And I changed from—when I went there I went to get a degree in American literature. I’d had all the British; I didn’t want any more.FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: And so, I was looking around for a mentor that I could work with
because it wasn’t always easy at Wisconsin— FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.FREIBERT: Back in those days, even,
24:00for women. So I took the class from Merton Seals. I liked his manner of teaching, and so I ended up being a Melville scholar.FOSL: Hm.
FREIBERT: Which to many people seems ironic until you learn a lot about
Melville. The more you learn, the more you see that he understood women’s problems really well.FOSL: Hm.
FREIBERT: Because he himself recognized that he had mistreated his wife in their
whole life. Everything centered on him. She and the children were neglected. He realized that, but only after, afterward. When I came back from Madison—I think I’m not skipping anything. I came back from Madison. I taught at Spalding for two more years. And wh-, at that time, I became involved in radical issues. There were demonstrations of various kinds. Louisville was always a few years behind the national scene— FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.FREIBERT: And so, our demonstrations here seemed to be a bit behind the
national. And so, I did some work with various political kinds of things. Rent strike here in Louisville, various kinds of things. And the officials at Spalding liked my teaching, but they really didn’t like my radical— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: They felt I was leading the students in the wrong direction. I was
giving them 25:00a bad example and so on and so on. So, and when I would go into meetings, I had a lot of con-, I guess, I wasn’t critical in a bad way, but I would point out things that we ought to be doing that we are not doing.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And, like getting more scholarships for African-American students.
Doing things like that that should have been done a long time ago. They were not being done and so— FOSL: Could I interrupt and ask you— FREIBERT: Sure, sure.FOSL: A question I probably should know? Was, was Spalding co-educational?
FREIBERT: By this time.
FOSL: By that time. Okay.
FREIBERT: Yeah. Yeah. I think. I’m not really sure that it was. I think maybe
it—I think maybe by the time I came back it was. But I’m not really sure of that.FOSL: Did you come back in 1970 or did you come back before then?
FREIBERT: I came back in 1969.
FOSL: Sixty-nine.
FREIBERT: I finished my—well, I finished my classes and then I
26:00did my dissertation. And, and I traveled in the—I was lucky. At Wisconsin they gave me money to travel to do my research for the dissertation.FOSL: Uh-huh.
FREIBERT: I got to go to New York and, and Boston, and it was just wonderful.
They were very generous in giving me support for that. So it was ’69 when I came back here. I was just polishing up my dissertation because I actually didn’t finish until ’70. I finished— FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm. I saw that.FREIBERT: In May ’70. So, ’70, ’69-’70 and ’70-’71, I taught at Spalding. At the
end of that time, I asked for a sabbatical because I’d been teaching there five, seven years.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: Five and two. Okay. And at the end of that time, they said, “No,
you’ve, you’ve only been back two years with your degree. We won’t give you a sabbatical.” And 27:00I said, “Well, if I can’t have a sabbatical, I’m just going to take a leave on my own.” And I was up for, for, well, tenure.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And they said, “No tenure. If you leave now,”—now this was a
community—this was owned by my community— FOSL: Um-hm. Right.FREIBERT: At that time. It is not now. Spalding is an independent entity. But at
that time, it was owned by my community. But the dean and the president said, you know, this is it. Of course, the personnel committee said it too, but they were saying it with help from outside. So, I said, “Well, I will take my chances.” And to make a long story short, I was lucky. I, there was an opening for one year at U of L and so, having learned that lesson back in my youth, I took the chance. 28:00FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: And I went there for a year. The end of the year, they asked me to
stay another year. And at the end of that time, they asked me to stay another year, and I said, “No.” FOSL: Hm.FREIBERT: I said, “Either you put me on a tenure track or I’m going to look for
a job.” And they said, “Well, we don’t have a tenure track.” So I started applying for a job elsewhere. And the first interview I got was from SUNY in New York.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And when I told the chair of the department that I had gotten an offer
to come—not, it wasn’t an offer for a job, it was an interview.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: I told him that one day, and the next day they found a tenure track
position. I mean, it was just like a miracle. So, by that time, you see, I was becoming really interested in taking risks and willing to do that kind of thing.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And I had met a lot of students from U of L, because they, by this time,
29:00the metroversity— FOSL: Uh-huh.FREIBERT: Had been organized and we had students coming to Spalding from U of L
and from Bellarmine and from— FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.FREIBERT: You know, IU Southeast and so on. So the metroversity really exposed
me to students from other schools. And some of them were saying to me, “Why don’t you come and teach at our school?” you know. And so that’s how I got to U of L. And when I got to U of L, I realized that this was a whole different world. I could teach and be political and nobody cared.FOSL: Um-hm. Hm.
FREIBERT: The women’s movement, here in Louisville, is, as I said, behind the
time, but it was getting moving. And I list on this paper only a few of the things that I was involved with and people that influenced me in the women’s movement. People 30:00like Bea Johnson.FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: And I think I mentioned to you before, she was the woman who realized
that she could not sign the application for her son to get his, to take his driver’s test. And so she lobbied at Frankfort until that law was changed. It used to be— FOSL: Oh, you mean the father had to sign his— FREIBERT: The father had to sign.FOSL: I didn’t know that.
FREIBERT: Yeah. The father had to sign the application. And so Bea Johnson got
that changed with help from some of the legislators. People like Thelma Stovall, 31:00Susie Post. I’ve got a great newspaper here that was put out back in those days. Now this is, well, this is a little bit later, ’80. But these people listed in this article many of them are the people that, like Susie Post says, “I went to undergraduate school, got married and started having babies. Back then, that was what you organized your life around.” And then there are quotations from people like Bea Johnson, she’s here: “I swallowed a lot when I was a girl, all that romance stuff in the movies about how getting a man will solve everything and make you completely happy.” These were the kinds of women that were around in those days.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: Eleanor Self, who’s,
32:00I always think of as, she’s still a young person, but she was active back in those days. And then a quote from me. So this newspaper called Main Street, it was not per se a feminist— FOSL: Uh-huh.FREIBERT: Magazine, or newspaper, but it was really.
FOSL: Huh.
FREIBERT: I mean, it was just, a man and woman, I think, ran it together. But
the underlying tenor in Louisville at this time was really very feminist. And how I really got, I guess I should move to how I really got involved in the feminist movement in Louisville and then the feminist movement nationally because both things sort of went together and they also really centered on my being at the university.FOSL: Uh-huh. [INTERRUPTION—END OF SIDE A] FREIBERT: If I had not been there,
33:00I don't know that I would have gotten involved so quickly. Locally, though, in I guess, with--two things. Being on the campus and speaking out in my classes, I couldn't keep from observing, in the course of discussions, what I was seeing about the society, and I started somewhere back here to talk about Josephine Donovan---. --I don't want to lose that. When I first went to U of L in--must have been in '71 or '72. Josephine Donovan, who is now a well-known feminist critic, she was teaching at University of Kentucky, and 34:00one weekend, she came down to Louisville and gave a workshop for the ACLU. There were many workshops being given, the ACLU back in those days, that's back when Susie Post was--.FOSL: Right. Right, yeah.
FREIBERT: --You know, really strong, and they did wonderful things, like
educating, educating people. They had all kinds of workshops that day, but I chose to go to the one on teaching women's--women in literature. And Josie just made it so interesting. Now she was talking about--mainly about British writers, but [it] didn't matter. I got the point, and I came home and made a syllabus for a course in women in literature, mainly starting back with the Greeks, coming up women in literature, not women writers, but--. 35:00--The way women were portrayed in literature, and I came, home made up that syllabus. Starting with plays, through Shakespeare up to modern times, and took it in on Monday, and two of my male colleagues helped me get that through three curriculum committees. You had to go through the department, the college, and the university curriculum committee, or the--no, it was the department, the Humanities Division, and the college. You had to go through three hoops, I remember, and so the next semester, I taught 'Women in Literature' for the first time. It was the first women's studies course taught at UofL---.FOSL: Right. Right.
FREIBERT: --And that brought me in touch with people out in the community. I've
joined now, and according to this article that I discovered this morning 36:00now, and a lot of other organizations that I had almost forgotten that I ever belonged to, but it said, the National Organization for Women, the Women's Political Caucus, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Reproductive Freedom League and the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, and Catholics for Free Choice. Those were all the organizations that I belonged to. Well, here in Louisville, the NOW was very, very active at that time, and the Women's Political Conference--.FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: --Was very active.
FOSL: So, you had, had you been involved in the founding of that, or you came in---.
FREIBERT No---no.
FOSL: --Just a little bit later.
FREIBERT: --No, I was not---it was going but you see, I had been in a more
conservative setting at Spalding I--.FOSL: Sure.
FREIBERT: --Was not involved in that. So, not until I came to UofL, did I get
involved with NOW. And NOW had very good consciousness raising, that was one of your questions. Consciousness raising groups, and that's one of the first places that I was had--had it called to my attention, that our language is so sexist and the power 37:00of the language. Now, that was a good thing for a person in academia, where we think we know a lot, and here are these lay women, in the general society, pointing out things to us that we should have been teaching our students. So, I latched on to that, just the way I saw the women in literature as being a wonderful opportunity to educate both women and men, and the language thing, and just began really concentrating on that, as I taught. Now, I was only teaching one women's course.FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: But everything else I taught began to be affected by my awareness of
the language thing, especially. And the more aware you become of the maleness of our language, the more you become aware of the sexist nature of the society. 38:00And so, the two just work together to make me into a really strong feminist and somebody who could speak out. Because I didn't have anything to lose. I knew that the university believed in freedom of speech, and so, I never had any fear that I would be reprimanded or put down or whatever because of speaking out for women's issue--on women's issues. And the same thing, strangely enough, with my religious community.FOSL: Really.
FREIBERT: You know, if I had gotten fired, if I had gotten fired at UofL for any
reason, I'd still have a life. You know, being a religious gives you a great deal of freedom to stand up for what you believe in, and---.FOSL: But can I stop you there and just ask you one thing about the abortion
rights question. Did you encounter 39:00a lot of opposition in your religious communities---.FREIBERT: Well--.
FOSL: ---And how do you--how did that transformation in your values come around?
FREIBERT: Well, that---gradually, as I listened to the women talking in the
consciousness raising groups and--and listened to the other women, I mean, all these women in Louisville were, they were so aware of women's rights. And so, I just sat down and thought about it, and knew where I stood, and fortunately or unfortunately, in 1978 I think Diane April interviewed me, and there was a newspaper account in---the Louisville Times one Saturday night, and that was back in 1976. Okay.FOSL: Can I look at that?
FREIBERT: Yeah, the title
40:00is really interesting. I think it says, 'Lucy Freiberg-'--what is the rest of it.FOSL: 'A nun, her vow are her habit.'
FREIBERT: Habit. Okay. Now that article was not about me and about--I mean, it
was about me, but it was not about my stand on a woman's right to choose, but the only thing that people read--that some people read in that article--that was on a Saturday night. The only thing they read was that I belong to NOW and to the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, which is now called the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. They have a new name, but it's the same organization. That's all they saw, by the next day, I had gotten a call from my religious community saying that there were sisters who wanted me to be put out of the order 41:00because I believed in a woman's right to choose. Well, I had been going around and giving talks, and nobody you know, had challenged me that much. I talked at various small NOW meetings around in the various counties and at different kinds of groups. Women's groups, and I had openly expressed my belief that a woman should have free choice, and belonging to the Catholics for Free Choice, all of those things I did, but it never became big and public.FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: Until this article appeared, and that one thing set people off. The
next week, I got all kinds of hate mail, and I still have the packet of hate mail, from people all over the state--.FOSL: I bet.
FREIBERT --Actually, and the sisters in my community who wanted to put
42:00me out, but I had a very intelligent provincial, here in Louisville. She had been a dean, Sister Margaret Maria Coon, had been a dean at our college in the country. And she said to me, "look, I want you to get a letter to the editor in the [Louisville] Courier Journal--or--" it was the Times, then "as soon as you can, and just say that what you said in that article represents your own ideas and does not represent the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth." So, because Diane was a good friend, and I could take the letter down to her, it got in Tuesday's paper, I'm just going to let that--.FOSL: Oh, okay.
FREIBERT: Unless that will, I can stop it. I can---.
FOSL: Here, I'll just pause this. Talking
43:00about the letter that had gotten you (??) FREIBERT: Oh, okay. So, the letter just---it had, I think, only two sentences. It said that it was my own idea and did not represent that of the Sisters of Charity, that's all it said, maybe just one sentence and--but I still continued to get this hate mail, mainly from Right to Life people.FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: Anybody who signed the letter got an answer from me and a very nice,
but firm letter back. A number of our sisters wrote to me and supported the--you know, wrote great letters of support, and they said, you know, things like, you know, "we--we admire your work," and da, da, da, you know, and--"we 44:00know that whatever you said was not derogatory toward the community," and so on. So, there were supporting people, as well as--.FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: --People who were trying to put me out. And of course, the people at
Nazareth, who were in control of our community, the authorities, they did nothing. They just did nothing. The archbishop at that time, which is not our current Archbishop, but McDonough, was the bishop. He appointed a Father Bill Butler. I think Bill, I'm going to say the wrong name, but anyway, he appointed a priest to answer any questions. And when people called the Chancery, they were just given this person to talk to. And he, I don't know what he told them, but it doesn't matter. They--gradually, that hate mail stopped arriving, but wherever I would go 45:00to a meeting of any kind, there would be hecklers outside, for at least a year or two after this, yeah.FOSL: And these were all pretty much other Catholics?
FREIBERT: Other Catholics, yeah, but people that belonged to the--Right to Life.
FOSL: And just for the record, that newspaper article, it was in 1976.
FREIBERT: '76, right. Now, right---shortly after that, I think in '77, we were,
here in Kentucky, getting ready for the---the meeting in Houston---.FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: --The International Women's year. And preparatory for that, people
were asked to go down to Lexington for a weekend, where there was this huge meeting, and we were going to elect delegates to go to the Houston convention. Well, 46:00I was not a political person in that sense, that I would have been one of the people chosen for that slate.FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: There were 26 people, I think, chosen for the slate, and people were
just sort of thought, well, you know, everybody on the slate will get elected, and that's the way it will be. Well, I was asked to give a talk at that meeting, on the history of women. Now, I was not a historian, but I had talked so much by this time, about women and women's rights and so on, that I could give a pretty good talk. And Lily Alice Akers, who is one of the pioneers really in---on women's political issues, certainly here in Louisville. She had taken her whole class down to the conference, and 47:00they got a bus and went down and stayed for the two or three days that we were going to be there. And so anyway, all these kids, because they knew me, they all came to my talk, and as well as the other people did. And so, when the voting was tallied, I was one of the people that was elected. It bumped somebody off, and I've always been sorry that somebody got bumped off that slate, but Mary Srini (??), who is a feminist therapist, she and I were elected. We were the only two who had not been on the original slate, but did get elected to go to Houston, and that was like another whole big change in my life. Because--.FOSL: That experience of Houston--.
FREIBERT: --That experience--
FOSL: --Or being elected?
FREIBERT: Well--.
FOSL: The experience in Houston.
FREIBERT: ---Both, I guess, seeing how women can rally to help each other. You
know--- [tape cuts off] 48:00FOSL: Okay.FREIBERT: So, if---it taught me that one person's power is really--can be really
great. Because if she had not taken those students, I may not have been elected to go.FOSL: Right--right.
FREIBERT: And so, it did--that did make a big difference. And then going to
Houston was another whole--introduced me to a whole different dimension of what it means to be a feminist and what it means to be political. Because all of the issues were, they were discussed by people of national prominence, and you heard the best in each field, you know. And then, one of our own Kentuckians was a keynote 49:00speaker, Allie Hickson and I had met Allie down at--well, she had been the first English, I think she was the first English PhD at UofL.FOSL: Oh, I didn't know that.
FREIBERT: So, from there and her teaching over here at [Louisville] Collegiate,
I had known her, and then to go down to Houston and hear her be one of the main speakers. I mean, that was really, really impressive, to me. And so, that weekend, I met all of these political women here in Louisville, both Democrats and Republicans. Mainly, they were Democrats, but there were a few Republicans mixed in the group, and to meet them and get to know them better was really important. Now I had already gotten to know people like Doris Schneider (??). Because she was one of the people that helped me 50:00to be able to articulate my support of a woman's right to choose. There were people there that I don't know--they were they were just on every different phase of a woman's need for understanding what her rights are and----and how to live them out in her life. I did--that group of people, it was just--I could never, ever imagine anything more affirming for a person who was a feminist, and to know that all those people lived in our state.FOSL: Right--right.
FREIBERT: And then to see them on an equal basis with these national figures,
that really was important. 51:00Now, that was a sort of political side of my feminism. The academic side was another whole thing. When I taught that first women's studies course, then people in other disciplines began to teach classes in their disciplines.FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: And gradually, the students began to make connections, and they were
saying things like, "we need to have our own organization." And so, they started FOCAL which is Feminists on Campus at UofL, and the people like Kathy Ford, who now works that the Legal Aid. She's been working there for years. She was just the dynamo, amazing. What she--she and her peers were able to do on campus, and when they decided 52:00that they wanted a Women's Studies program.FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: They did it themselves. They brought in Betty Friedan, for a lecture
at UofL, and that night, they got 600 signatures, just that one night. 600 signatures from people out in the community who came to hear that lecture, and then we took it to the dean to get the thing moving, and within a short time, we had a Women's Studies program. And Sydney's, I'm sure that Sydney Schultz's article goes into all of that, because she, she was one of the early people in the organizing. I think she became the first, the first director of the women--of women's studies and so and there were all these people already teaching the courses. And what was important about that was that the departments 53:00were supporting that. Because they were drawn, these classes were drawing good student numbers, and the departments didn't mind. They loved it when--when faculty would come up with these courses that would draw large numbers. And so, the Women's Studies program got off to a really good start. Now, it has just moved on and on, and the outgrowth of that, for me, was that I became involved in the women's movement nationally, in terms of the National Women's Studies Association.FOSL: Right, I knew you were part of that (??).
FREIBERT: Now, that--I was one of the--and it all goes back again to this
woman's right to choose. I forgot exactly what year it was, but one year, when I was running the 20th century literature conference. It was probably in the early 70s 54:00or mid-70s, one of the national--the president of the Modern Language Association was Florence Howe. When the next year, Florence was going out of office, and so, we needed a speaker for the 20th century lit. I suggested getting Florence Howe, who was just coming off being president of that. I said, "that'll be a biggie for us," you know. So, sure enough, we agreed, Florence agreed to come, and I was assigned to be her chauffeur. So, I---as we drove around from--and went from place to place, we talked a lot, and she found out that I was a sister, and she found out that I would--was for women's right to choose. And so, some months later, I got a call from her late in the night. I was already in bed, and she said, "would you come and be a commentator 55:00at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, on this issue?" And of course, I was flattered, because that's one of the biggest--.FOSL: Sure.
FREIBERT: Organization--most prestigious women's organizations, at that time---.
FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: -- Certainly and so, I said, "yes." Well, as it turned out, I had to
do a lot of study, because you couldn't go to that conference and just wing it. So, I started reading this book by John Noonan called Contraception, and it was presenting the church's views on contraception from the earliest years.FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: And it, of course, contained a number of instances where the church
was not concerned at all that people had abortions, because of the--the social conditions of the times and so on. Anyway, 56:00the fellow that--whose paper--one of the people on the panel did not complete his paper on time, and so Florence called me, or the panel chair called me and said, "we've got two of the papers to send you, but the third one has not been written, and it's gonna, you know, unbalance our panel a little bit. If you don't want to do it, we can call it off." I said, "no, I'll write his paper, because I've been reading this book [laughter]," on that topic. So, I could--.Catherine Fosl Right.
FREIBERT --You know, understand it. And I said, "I'd be glad to write that
paper, and then I'll critique the three, you know, the three papers together." And so, I did that. Well, that blew people away. When they came to the--of course, when they came to the panel, they didn't know I was a sister. Because I just used my--. --Academic title, but 57:00in the course of the conversation, it came out that I was a sister, and at that whole conference. It was just like a big buzz that, how could you, you know, take this stand, but the other two people on the panel were also sisters, and they were also--and they were from the east, and they were also very supportive of a woman's right to choose. So, that panel kind of made a mark in that, in that area, and at that same--.FOSL: Right. What year was this, do you remember?
FREIBERT: This, I think it was in--.
FOSL: Is it on here?
FREIBERT: I'll have to look up. I'll look it up and tell you.
FOSL: Okay.
FREIBERT: Because I simply do not remember.
FOSL: It's not that critical. I'm just--.
FREIBERT: No.
FOSL: --Curious.
FREIBERT: Well, I think it was about this, '75, it was around the '75, '76, '77
time. It was when--that's when everything was just--.FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: --Really very intense. Anyway, Florence Howe was--and some of her colleagues
58:00were using the that particular meeting of the Berks[hire] Conference to organize the National Women's Studies. So, it had to be before '77. It must have been in '76. So, I went to--she invited me to come to their meeting. And it was a small group, Rosa Green, and just--there were not more than maybe a dozen people, Elaine Rubens (??) and people like that. And they asked me, well, they divided up the country, and each one would say, I'll take whatever. And so, they asked me if I would organize the north, what they called [the] North Central Region. Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia, and so they said, "will you go home." You know, each one [of us] was assigned, go home, organize--your region. Get people to come to our founding convention, 59:00which would be in San Francisco, and that would be in January of '77, and we'll have scholarships for students and community women. See, academics could if they would go and give a paper, they--their--FOSL: Right. Right.
FREIBERT: --Universities would pay for it--.
FOSL: Yeah.
FREIBERT --But we needed to have some way to fund these people who were
students, or community people. So, what they did was they charged the people on the west coast a very high registration fee, and it graduated across the country. By the time you got to this--this part of the country, your registration fee was nothing, you know. And then they used that extra money to pay the way of the students and the community women. It was a great feminist--. Yeah. --Way of organizing a conference, and they still do that to some extent--great extent. So, we, 60:00I got--one of our students from UofL applied and received a grant to pay her way, and I went, from UofL, and people went from UofK, and all--not every college in Kentucky--.FOSL: Sure.
FREIBERT: --Was represented, but a good number of colleges here were
represented, and so, we met in San Francisco and drew up our bylaws, constitution and bylaws, and the organization was off to a great start. Then, each year, they have it in a different part of the country.FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: Going from west to east to back to the west, so that people keep up
their membership, and it has become a very important organization. I think women's studies would be, not nearly be as far advanced as it is today, if it had not been for that organization. Because it gave us a prestige, 61:00it gave us a base, and the one--the pape--the talk that I gave, was why we need a journal or some kind of publication, and as a result of that, down the road, I was asked at various points to be on the---first on the coordinating committee for the whole organization and do the first brochure for them. And then moved on to the journal board. And I've served on two journal boards over the period of how many years, and now I'm an emerita professor---I just an--emerita editorial board person. I just resigned from that last year, because I believe we need to get more younger people coming on, and some of us old people need to get--move out the way. So, that opened up a whole world to me, and it gave me an influence 62:00with people all over this country. Because I've just met so many people, and people still call me. They write to me for recommendations. They---FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: --Write for ideas. It's just like, still I can't, even though I've
been out of academia since '93, every week--.FOSL: I'll have to go and find that (??).
FREIBERT: --At least, I get some kind of request like that. And so, the academic
side of my career has kept pace with the political, more political side. Now what I'm not covering, I realize is who were some of the people that I knew. Well, some of them I've mentioned, I've already mentioned, Bea Johnson. Who worked on the voting, I mean, the application for for her son's drivers test, and Thelma Stovall, who of course became 63:00very important in, in pol-, in Kentucky politics and nationally recognized because of her position of, as governor— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: For at least a time, at a crucial time. And then Susie Post with the
Civil Liberties Union who is now the head of the, of Metropolitan Housing Coalition. Doris Schneider who was with Planned Parenthood and Allie Hixon, of course, who was the ERA, and still is—that’s another big movement, part of the movement that was very highly supported here in Louisville, and, well, throughout Kentucky, I think. Allie got us involved after, immediately after Houston in pushing for the ERA, 64:00even if we didn’t get it.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And she never gives up. She’s still on that track.
FOSL: By us, do you mean, you as one of the twenty-six— FREIBERT: Louisville.
FOSL: Delegates or as Louisvillians— FREIBERT: Not—I mean— FOSL: U of L person?
FREIBERT: I mean, she has pushed women in this city— FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: In this state and nationally— FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: Because she worked with the national, the people who were at the top.
In fact, I think she was probably a co-chair at some point. She has been powerful, really powerful.FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And I think her daughter was one of the people who very early was
writing for these feminist newspapers, like—and I’ve got another one besides this Main Street.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And I’m going to find it and show it to you because it was just really
interesting. I think maybe her daughter is represented 65:00in that.FOSL: What’s her daughter’s name?
FREIBERT: Emmy.
FOSL: Uh-huh.
FREIBERT: Emmy Hixon. And I’m, I’m sure I can find that. Other people who really
were very powerful and influential here, Nelle Horlander becuase of her labor, work with the labor organizations— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: And Diane Carlan. She and I—she’s a nurse—and she and I wrote an
article on women, a woman’s right to choose, at some point. It was not an academic article— FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.FREIBERT: But it was a, related to wo-, women’s health issues.
FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And that gave me an-, opened up a whole other world, because she knew
the health side of it and I knew the philosophical 66:00side of it and we put that together, really was a very influential article published in a national journal.FOSL: What journal was that?
FREIBERT: I have to look it up.
FOSL: I know.
FREIBERT: I’ll give you my vitae.
FOSL: Okay.
FREIBERT: It has all these things on. Lukie Ward, she was so important here in
Louisville. She was politically connected to Mike Ward. She was Mike Ward’s mother. But she was a powerful person, far more powerful than Mike ever was. Lukie was a highly intellectual and religious person. She got, she worked, studied at the Presbyterian Seminary.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And was ready for ordination— FOSL: Hm.
FREIBERT: Then her bishop would not or-, ordain her. That was a sad thing
because she was so good and so powerful. She, well, she was powerful anyway, despite the fact that she didn’t 67:00have the approval— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: You know, the official approval. Lukie was a, an amazing woman. I just
met somebody about two weeks ago at a party, who said, “Oh, I know who you are. You were Lukie’s friend.” And I mean, you know.FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.
FREIBERT: I hadn’t thought of Lukie maybe for a while and it, that just really
moved me.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: To be so identified. And then I’ve already talked about Lilialyce
Akers because she was in sociology at U of L. And then a power-, really powerful woman at U of L was Mary Kate Tackhow who was a historian.FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: And she was, she did it all. She had her family, she got her degree,
she finished it, and she did her book, and she just—and, and she also stood up at U of L for women’s wa-, salaries. 68:00She did that big study— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: On salaries of women and got big raises for a number of people who
would never have gotten them. Beth Wilson, now she’s very young— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: But she’s an extremely resourceful person who works for the ACLU and
she’s been, whenever she needs, you know, a little extra help in lobbying or talking to legislators individually, Beth will call me still.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And I, I’m always glad to, to work with her because she is a very,
very thoughtful person. Donna Morton who just recently left the Planned Parenthood, and I think she has another position that I’ve forgotten what it is. She was at U of L at one point and she was very outspoken 69:00on women’s issues. She’s a minister.FOSL: As a student or as a— FREIBERT: No. She was a law student—well, at one
time she was a law student, and then she finished her law degree— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: And she taught law, she taught women in the law, actually.
FOSL: Oh.
FREIBERT: And then she became the minister at the ecumenical, they have that
ecumenical ministry at U of L.FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And she was there for the Methodists. And then she went on to
Washington and held an office there in the Methodist—I, I don’t know what they called it— FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.FREIBERT: But, like, one of the big Methodist offices there in Washington.
FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: Having to do much with, with women, a woman’s right to choose. Then
Donna Wells who is closely connected with the reproductive freedom group, she, she has been a, a very strong 70:00supporter of me in terms of my stance for women’s rights.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: Londa Crenshaw is a, she’s a musician, but believe me, she is a
dynamo. I—she’s been playing feminist music for ever and ever.FOSL: Hm.
FREIBERT: She and Laura Shine— FOSL: That’s a familiar name to me.
FREIBERT: Laura Shine was really Laura Snyder. She was, when she was in my
class, she was Laura Snyder. But when she’s on performing, she has a, she used to have a, a radio show called Women’s Ways and she’s still on— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: One of the public radio things.
FOSL: Hm.
FREIBERT: But I nearly died when I found out that that was the same person.
FOSL: Huh.
FREIBERT: Because in class, she was so quiet. She wrote wonderful papers, but
she never said anything.FOSL: Hm FREIBERT: And the first time I saw her perform on, li-, live, on a
stage, I nearly fainted right on the spot. 71:00So, all of these people—now, other national people that have influenced me besides Florence Howe, whom I talked about: Mary Daly. Her books— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: Were so important to the whole movement. I think especially to
Catholic women. Her book called The, The Church and the Second Sex followed on Ger-, Simone de Beauvoir’s— FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.FREIBERT: Se-, Second Sex.
FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: Took that notion and said, “Yes, and this is what the church has
done.” She was the one who unearthed all those great quotations— FOSL: Right.FREIBERT: That really make people stop and say, “How could a man of, you know, a
man of God, how could a religious man ever say these horrible things about women?” But they did. Then Barbara White with whom I wrote Hidden Hands. She was, is a great deal younger than I am, but 72:00we have worked together, and she’s had a great deal of influence on me because she was politically inclined from her, I think from her birth. Certainly from her early childhood. We, we studied together at Wisconsin. But see, I knew her but she didn’t know me.FOSL: Uh-huh.
FREIBERT: Because I was still wearing a habit back in Wisconsin days.
FOSL: Hm. Hm.
FREIBERT: And she would never have been caught dead talking to a nun, you know.
FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: But when, when I came back to U of L and we needed a person for one
year, I got the department to hire Barbara— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: Because I knew how smart she was, and then she and I became really
good friends— FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.FREIBERT: And did the book.
FOSL: When did you give up the habit? When you— FREIBERT: Not until I got my
degree at W-, Wisconsin.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: Because my mentor believed that the church was the last bastion of good.
FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And he thought—and his wife, both of them—thought that whenever the
church backed down on anything— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: That that was—they
73:00were not Catholic, but they just saw the church as kind of the last barrier or the last safeguard of morality. And they thought that changing habits and things like that were just dragging the church down— FOSL: Hm.FREIBERT: To the secular level. So I didn’t dare take off my habit. I mean, I
wasn’t that political. I, I wanted to get that degree. I worked too long and too hard.FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: I had to walk through a picket line the day I defended my
dissertation. That was the hardest thing. There were people standing there in that line, shaking their heads at me, “How can you do this?” But I had worked for all those years. I just could not not go in and defend that dissertation.FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.
FREIBERT: So, but it was the, probably the hardest day of my life.
FOSL: Hm.
FREIBERT: Just awful to walk by those people that I had stood with and have them
see me going in to defend that 74:00dissertation. It was hard. And then Pat Gozemba. She’s a wild woman from, at, up in Salem, Salem State College in, State University in Massachusetts.FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm. Hm.
FREIBERT: She’s young, and she calls me her favorite nun because, of course,
because I stood for her. Then, what else have I left out? Oh, the books that I taught.FOSL: Yeah.
FREIBERT: When I taught the first women in literature class, there wasn’t a
great deal of knowledge on the part of students about what are these issues.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: So, I figured that they wouldn’t need just the literature. They needed
some background. So, I used the, Kate Mil-, Kate Millett’s— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: Sexual Politics because she does
75:00critique literary works.FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: And I felt that would help my students to understand how they can
connect the literature with the pol-, political issues— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: And see that it’s, that they’re not two different things.
FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: That they work together. So, I had read, of course, all of Mary Daly’s
works. I think, still think, that Beyond God the Father is probably her most accessible and powerful book.FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.
FREIBERT: The ones since then have been fine, but they, unless you’re really
into the language of feminism, and, and more to the language of her bent.FOSL: Right. Um-hm. Um-hm. I agree.
FREIBERT: It, it, it, those books are really hard. The language is hard. Betty
Friedan, of course, came to U of L so The Feminist Mystique was really easy reading and she was just, 76:00she was so good when she came here. Ann Allen gave a little supper at her house before the lecture. And I was lucky enough to be one of the people invited— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: And got to talk to Betty Friedan. It was very nice. I always
appreciated that, that Ann did that. And then, The Second Sex, of course has been a, a real powerhouse for the feminist movement. And then the second year, the first year both times I taught the women in literature, I used the Sexual Politics as my background book.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: The next year, by the next year, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch
was out, and so I thought this would be, you know, something else because people who got interested in the, the Women, Women in Literature, they would want your syllabus the next— FOSL: Right. Right.FREIBERT: You know, each time because they wanted to add books on. And that was,
that was very supportive. 77:00FOSL: Um-hm. And you’re talking about other faculty members?FREIBERT: I’m talking about students as well.
FOSL: Oh, students.
FREIBERT: Because, see, even that first time that I taught Women in Literature,
I had graduate students in that class— FOSL: Uh-huh.FREIBERT: Who were getting noth-, nothing— FOSL: Right. They just wanted to be
there. I see.FREIBERT: Except the education. They wanted to be there. The class closed in
twenty minutes.FOSL: Hm. Wow.
FREIBERT: I mean, it just, people were waiting. They were itching. You know we
used to have—well, they still do, I think—have to make up your, your syllabus and a des-, course description ahead of time— FOSL: Right.FREIBERT: And you circulate it to all the majors. Well, the class just was
closed— FOSL: Uh-huh.FREIBERT: Before people could even think to get in.
FOSL: Huh. That’s great.
FREIBERT: It was great. And it happened over and over. It wasn’t just a one time thing.
FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: That’s the way it was— FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: From then on. And then I finally stopped teaching that and said, you
know, let other people teach it because there are many ways of teaching Women in Literature.FOSL: Sure.
FREIBERT: You don’t teach it the same way. So I started teaching Finding,
Evaluating and Editing Women’s 78:00Writing which is a, a more research oriented class. And then I taught graduate, purely graduate courses, like Nineteenth Century, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Women Writers.FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And I taught Four Modernist Writers which was also a graduate class
with Zora Neale Hurston.FOSL: What four?
FREIBERT: I taught H.D.—Gertrude Stein— FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And then H.D.
FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: Because they were expatriates.
FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And then Dorothy Parker and Zora Neale Hurston.
FOSL: Hm.
FREIBERT: So I got the color, the expatriate— FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: As opposed to local and that was a wonderful seminar. I taught that
several times and— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: And the interesting thing about Women in Literature was that both men
and women took the class. It was, I, I know that, what Mary Daly is talking about when she said it’s better, women will speak up more 79:00if they’re in class by themselves and don’t have males.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: But I found that the males, people said to me, “Don’t the males in
your class resent what you say?” And I said, “No, because only smart men take my class.” If they’re not smart, they get out first— FOSL: Right.FREIBERT: Or second day.
FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: And I did have that experience. One young man who got in the very
first, not first, I think he got in the second class, the second time I taught the Women in Literature. And he, after three days of arguing with me in class, he left.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: Twenty some years later, he came back and took that class.
FOSL: All right.
FREIBERT: So, the world had changed. His vision had changed.
FOSL: Hm.
FREIBERT: And it was the very last year I was at U of L in ’93. He came back. So
it was from ’73 to ’93. 80:00It was twenty, twenty years. It took him twenty years to get back into that class and he was one of the best ones in the class.FOSL: Huh.
FREIBERT: But that—and I would never have even thought about it, but he came up
and told me.FOSL: Hm.
FREIBERT: He said, “I know you don’t remember me, but—” And he recalled that
early experience.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: He was actually the only man that ever confronted me and said “I’m
leaving this class because—” FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm. Hm.FREIBERT: So, it should have stuck in my mind better than it did, but I had too
many other things to worry about.FOSL: Sure. Well, what about, you, you talked about the books that you’ve taught
and that have influenced you. What about, like, as you were, like, sort of beginning to develop this sexist, this critique of sexist society, before you really became an activist, but in terms of, like, for instance, did you read The Feminine Mystique when it came out?FREIBERT: Yeah.
FOSL: You know, in the early s-, the early— FREIBERT: The earliest days. I read
everything I could get my—well, 81:00you know, it all worked together.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: Like, you’d go to a meeting and somebody’d talk about a book and you’d
have to read it instantly.FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: And I’d, The Feminist Mystique didn’t, I had seen just about
everything in there.FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.
FREIBERT: Had thought about it— FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: Before, because of my mother. And, and the things she used to talk to
me about—see Mama really, she resented the church. She was a very holy person, a very holy person. But she wasn’t exactly a church person.FOSL: Uh-huh.
FREIBERT: She would come home and talk to me. She didn’t talk out in the family
that much, but when I was back with her by myself, being the only girl— FOSL: Right.FREIBERT: She talked to me about the church’s attitude toward a woman, a woman’s
right over her body.FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: My mama had, almost all of her friends were Protestant people— FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And they could use birth control
82:00without any qualms. If she used birth control, then she’d go to confession and confess it, and the priest would rip her up and down, you know— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: For doing that. My dad, I’m sure he went to confession and I’m sure
the priest didn’t, you know, if he told that he used birth control— FOSL: Right. Yeah.FREIBERT: I’m sure he didn’t get laid out in lavender.
FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: But the woman always did. And Mama really, really resented—I’ve seen
her cry over that. Because for her it was, it was during the Depression times. They didn’t have that much money. And she was tired. She was working very hard and to have to carry one more child, you know, or think that she couldn’t have sex.FOSL: Sure. Sure.
FREIBERT: I mean, it’s—I think it’s just so wrong.
FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: For celibate men who, or at least they claim to be celibate men,
83:00to be so hard on women and, and punish them, not punishing the male but punishing the women. And it’s always the woman who gets blamed for everything. So, reading these books, it was just like, a lot of it was saying, “Aha! I always thought that,” you know.FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And, and some of it wasn’t that clear to me. I mean, the complexity of
the whole, the whole male domination. I’m reading right now a book that I just love, and it’s really hard to do anything else because I, I’m dying to finish it. It’s The P-, The Poisonwood Bible.FOSL: Oh, I love that book. Yes, I love that one.
FREIBERT: It is so good because what Kingsolver—I have read other of her
books—but this one is so good 84:00because of the way it unearths these things are so commonsense.FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And the, the one, the point, point of violence—and I’m just about
halfway through the book—but how the violence of the father, and when she calls him “Our Father” and capitalizes that “our”, I just think that is a brilliant stroke of artistry. It really is. “Our Father”—you’d think that was going to be as God has been depicted, a kindly, friendly person.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And then you see the things that “Our Father” forces this family to go
through, and the violence towards his dau—but the way she depicts the violence, I think is, that’s the clever stroke. Where he will lash out and hit somebody, and there’s not any violent 85:00language, or she doesn’t talk about it in violent language, but the bruises appear.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: I mean, sometimes you almost, I almost choke— FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: Reading some of those sentences— FOSL: Yeah, it’s a great book.
FREIBERT: That are so understated.
FOSL: Yeah. I liked that.
FREIBERT: That is just a brilliant book. I’m going to discuss that with two
different groups during Women’s History Month.FOSL: I saw that advertised.
FREIBERT: Yeah.
FOSL: Yeah.
FREIBERT: Yeah, the first one will be down at the— FOSL: [ ] FREIBERT: No,
actually the first one’s going to be at U of L and then the next day I’ll do the one at the—but it didn’t get into the calendar.FOSL: [ ] FREIBERT: But one will be at U of L and the other will be down at the
other campus. So, I do think that book is, it’s, well, she is just a good writer. There’s no question about that. She’s such an unassuming person, too. I just really, really like her so much.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: Some— FOSL: Well, I had, well,
86:00we haven’t gotten through every question, but I think that you’ve given me—I gue-, I guess I do want to ask you a little bit more about your experience in being in consciousness-rai-, in a consciousness-raising group.FREIBERT: Well, I wasn’t actually in that many.
FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: Actually only one, probably.
FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And I believe that out of that, the thing that, everything that came
up seemed to me to be so obvious, the things that women talked about.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: But the one thing—I think I did mention this earlier—the one thing
that really, that I attribute to learning in that group was the language thing. About, you know, ‘chairman’ and how often male, the jobs are labeled 87:00with male labels that prevent people from even remotely thinking of a woman in that slot.FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.
FREIBERT: You talk about the chairman of the board, and you keep talking about
chairman long enough, nobody could ever see a woman in that slot.FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And chairman of the board anymore doesn’t mean just a figurehead who
presides over a monthly meeting, but a chairman of the board in a big corporation is a really powerful figure. Oftentimes, that’s conflated with the CEO.FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.
FREIBERT: I mean, it is a powerful picture.
FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: And if you keep on saying ‘man’ at the end of it, nobody’s ever going
to imagine a woman at the head of the fi-, four hundred or whatever they call them. Fortune— FOSL: Fortune 500.FREIBERT: Five hundred company. And then, I transferred that to the religious
88:00side and began to look—that, that’s what consciousness-raising, that consciousness-raising group did for me was made me aware of the language. And then when I applied that to the church and church language, it just made me very resentful.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: Because, okay, if you have Trinitar-, you use Trinitarian language all
the time, and it’s Father, Son and Spirit. And, well, some people will say, yes, spirit can be feminine and dah, dah, dah. But the dominant figures are—as Alice Walker says, “That,” I think it’s Alice Walker says this about the, oh, yeah, in The Color Purple, she says, Shug talks, or Celie talks to Shug and says, “I can’t get that old white-haired 89:00man off my eyeballs.” FOSL: Right.FREIBERT: That is such a powerful image. But it’s not only off your eyeballs,
it’s out of your ears, out of the, all the crevices in your brain. All of that language, power, imagery. It’s all so strong.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And how do you ever get it out of your head? And I, my students were
the best teachers on that. Once I opened up that idea to them, if I ever came near to making a mistake, they’d nail me. And that was the best teaching— FOSL: Hm. Hm.FREIBERT: For myself that I ever en-, endured, I think. If I would make the
tiniest slip, they’d all, as one, catch me, you know.FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.
FREIBERT: And that has made me obnoxious
90:00to many people: the language thing. Because people say I run it in the ground.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: But I don’t think I’m running it in the ground because I think what
is—we can only think with words. And if those words are so enmeshed with male language, then there is no way we can even think clearly.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: Somebody gave me a book just two years ago that I haven’t really
absorbed totally, but it’s on that. She, this woman went through our whole language— FOSL: Hm.FREIBERT: And studied every word that has a male root.
FOSL: Ah.
FREIBERT: And it’s just, it’s dead-, deadening. I mean, you can’t read it all at
once. You really have to read little bits at a time. I don’t know if you’re— FOSL: Wh-, wh-, wh—no, I’m just checking here because I, I don’t want to take up too much of your time and sometimes these interviews, it’s best to, well, I’ve got a little left, tape left, 91:00on ninety minutes. So I’d like you to just speak to that last question there which is what did the modern Women’s Movement in Louisville, Kentucky accomplish?FREIBERT: Oh.
FOSL: It’s a very big question, I know.
FREIBERT: I don’t know that I can answer that. I think you need people who were
more into the political side of it than I was. People, well, like Mary Lou Marcian who was one of my students once upon a time, Eleanor Jordan who was once upon a time a student, Janice Martin, the judge.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: People like that. They could probably talk about, and click them off,
people like Delores Delahanty. You’ll be talking to her. Those people can do more telling you what we accomplished—but as a movement, I’m not saying the organi-, 92:00any specific organization achieved this— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: But I think that the movement as a whole, especially the Reproductive
Rights Movement really made people aware of the right that a woman has. You know, our, our greatest gift as, as human beings, and Eleanor Jordan pointed this out to me most clearly: our free will is the greatest gift. If, if there is a God, and if God did create us, the greatest gift that we have— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: Is our freedom to make a decision. Free will is so important. It’s
core to being human.FOSL: Right.
FREIBERT: And a woman’s right to choose is a part of that. And that’s
93:00where that right stems from. And I think that that part of the woman’s movement has been the most powerful awareness that we’ve come to in our time.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: I think, Zora, Zora Neale Hurston, in her book, Their Eyes were
Watching God, when she had Janie kill the man she loved to save her own life— FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.FREIBERT: I think that image is most apropos. It teaches, it shows women that
sometimes, to save ourselves, we have to do away with the person we love most. And I think, how many times have women made that choice of having an abortion because they had to do it to save their own self. 94:00FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.FREIBERT: And I think that awareness has been a really important one here in
Kentucky. Maybe it is everywhere.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: But I do think we’ve accomplished the awareness. We haven’t
safeguarded because the current powers that be. Who knows, with the Supreme Court decision, what could happen to that under the new administration nationally and what can happen in our own legislature at any point. I think that that is frightening.FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: But I do think we have raised women’s awareness— FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: On that one issue. And men’s— FOSL: Um-hm.
FREIBERT: On that issue. And the number of men who support a woman’s right to
choose, I think that’s somewhat amazing here in Kentucky, because we’ve had some very strong men who—and I, and one thing that fits right into that 95:00that I’ve needed to say is one of my best accomplishments was to lead the action against the Knights of Columbus here in Louisville when they were lashing out against a woman’s right to choose. And to be able to get my, some of my superiors to write letters to them and to the archbishop and say openly, “We need to respect a woman’s right to choose.” That was a really, was something, was a, one thing that I think I did that was really, really worthwhile.FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm. And when was that? Do you— FREIBERT: I can look it up. I
don’t remember what year. But I would guess it was in the mid-’70s.FOSL: Um-hm. Um-hm.
FREIBERT: Late ’70s. It was, it was shortly after—yeah, it was probably the late
’70s— FOSL: Um-hm.FREIBERT: When that— END
96:00OF INTERVIEW 97:00