I Share a Little Women's History

03/17/23 • 3 min

"By Accident: A Memoir of Letting Go" by Joanne Greene is available for pre-order from your online favorite book sellers. Release date June 20,2023
Learn more at joanne-greene.com
In this Story...I Share a Little Women's History
I couldn’t throw out, okay or recycle, the pink “While You Were Out” slip that showed I’d missed a phone call from Gloria Steinam. It was 1976 and I was producing a weekly feminist show for Berekeley’s KRE Radio called “Women Making Waves.” You get the double meaning, right? Airwaves? And “making waves’, like making trouble?
Gloria was one of my heroes, a feminist role model of the highest order, and Ms. Magazine, of which Gloria was co-founder the year I graduated from high school, was something between a manual and a bible for me.
In 1977, I went to Houston for the National Women’s Conference because a group of Lesbian Separatists raised the money for my roundtrip flight. Listeners to my radio show, they thought the only way they’d get the truth about what happened was to send their own reporter. Alice, the station manager, said yes because it wasn’t going to cost her anything. It didn’t occur to me how big a deal it was that a woman was running the radio station.
I met Margo, a fellow journalist. in the elevator of the Houston Convention Center, on my way to pick up press credentials. “Where are you staying?” she asked in a lilting southern accent. When I shrugged, she said, “It’s settled. You’ll stay in our guest room! And I’ll drive you to and from the conference each day.” Southern hospitality is really something.
There were so many women, from every state, every ethnicity, and every walk of life, all there to claim their rights. For the right to an abortion, to love whom they want, for decent childcare. rape crisis centers. shelters for battered women. Rights for prostitutes who consciously chose their profession. The organization, based in S.F., was called COYOTE, an acronym for “Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics.” And then there was conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly with her bullhorn, trying to keep women out of the military, out of the board room, and send all of them, all of us, back into the kitchen. Four former First Ladies spoke, and I washed my hands in the Ladies’ Room right next to feminist icon Kate Millet.
I recorded everything – the plenary sessions, the conversations happening in the hallways, interviews with the most fascinating women I could find – and somehow, with the help of the radio station’s production director, I turned it into a one-hour documentary called “Women on the Move”, the title of the conference.
I assumed that the Equal Rights Amendment was a slam dunk, that there would be National Women’s Conferences every few years. That this was just the beginning of normalizing rape crisis centers, that battered women shelters would spring up in cities across the country. What never entered my mind in 1977 was that Roe v. Wade could be overturned by the Supreme Court, and that women in nearly half of our nation would, once again, be forced to choose between risking their lives or taking an unwanted pregnancy to term. Of course, I also couldn’t have imagined that the Supreme Court would legalize same-sex marriage in all fifty states. It’s a good thing I’m not a betting woman. Happy Women’s History Month.

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A Brief Family History with Meat

"By Accident: A Memoir of Letting Go" by Joanne Greene is available for pre-order from your online favorite book sellers. Release date June 20,2023
Learn more at joanne-greene.com
In this Story....I Share A Brief Family History with Meat
My mother didn’t trust the meat that supermarkets sold. She once said that McDonald’s couldn’t be serving beef because they were only charging fifteen cents per hamburger. She only bought meat from Lipsky’s, the kosher meat market on Beacon Street in Brookline, delivered to our door once a month. The order would include lamb chops and London Broil, hamburger meat for her layered mashed potato meatloaf, a three or four-pound brisket, perhaps some calf’s liver and a container of chicken livers, all of it which would be placed in the freezer, in the basement next to the washing machine and dryer, wrapped in white butcher paper, scotch-taped on the side. My mother’s father had been a kosher butcher who ran one of three kosher butcher shops in Providence, Rhode Island in the early part of the twentieth century. The other two shops were run by my grandfather’s brothers. Back in Russia, they couldn’t all make a living. But in the new world, there was enough demand for kosher meat to support all three Mittleman families.
The meats my mother prepared and lovingly served to us never varied. Brisket was the holiday special – always marinated in a mixture of cider vinegar, ketchup, a packet of Lipton onion soup mix, and brown sugar, slowly roasted for 5 hours at 300 degrees. Did anyone love it? Not really. But it tasted like Rosh Hashanah and Passover and the idea of bucking tradition hadn’t crossed anyone’s mind.
Chopped liver was one of three possible Friday night appetizers, along with jarred gefilte fish and homemade chicken soup. The liver, served with celery sticks, was supposed to be a treat. I’m not sure we ever mentioned that no kid in recorded history has ever liked liver, in any form. Most suppers at our house began with an iceberg lettuce salad, sprinkled with a few pieces of peeled cucumber, carrot, and tomato, drizzled with Wishbone Italian, home-made Thousand Island (mayo mixed with ketchup) or Milani’s 1890 French salad dressing. Chicken, made in numerous ways, depending upon the recipes that her sisters Dora and Faye had recently shared, was a Friday night necessity. I could have sworn it was a commandment: thou shalt eat chicken on Friday nights. Kind of like the way Catholics ate fish on Fridays. Was that why the school lunch on Fridays was always fish sticks with tartar sauce? God must have wanted it that way. Fish for the Catholics; chicken for the Jews.
The chicken Mom made could be drowning in orange juice and canned pineapple pieces or rolled in egg and crushed corn flakes. Generally baked, it would occasionally be broiled, but never fried.
“Who needs the fat and the calories?” she’d say. No one responded. When Mom made chicken soup – with noodles if it wasn’t Passover and kneidlach (matzah balls in Yiddish) if it was – there was always a plastic container of boiled chicken in the frig, which Dad, and only Dad, ate. Have you ever smelled a container of boiled chicken?
What would my parents, much less the grandfather who died before I was born, say if they knew that I’d given up meat altogether? “How can you give up meat when our ancestors worked so hard to be able to buy it?” Of course I’d have answers – about the hormones in meat today, the adverse health effects of a meat-based diet, the impact of the beef industry on climate change and, of course, my attachment to animals of all kinds. But the greater answer might have something to do with my openness to new ideas, my respect for but not total adherence to tradition, and the global nature of today’s world which has opened the door to cuisines of all varieties. Rarely do I repeat a recipe because the NY Times is always showering me with new ones. Foods from faraway lands using ancient ingredients like farro and bulger, beans of all kinds, and the best of what grows right here in California throughout the year. The truth is, Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish cooking, about which I knew nothing growing up, has always had it heads and tails over Ashkenazi food. Wait, did I really just reference heads and tails when talking about food that I like to eat? First, I give up meat. Next, meat idioms.