Rebel Mother

by Peter Andreas

  One of the black-and-white pictures my mother pasted in my baby album is of our entire family—my mother, father, and two older brothers—gathered together on a lawn, me in the middle propped up on my father’s knee, everyone posing for the camera. My father and mother are both beaming—he at the camera and she at the infant me—proud of the family they created. The caption under the photo, in my mother’s neat, easy-flowing cursive handwriting, reads, “This picture, which was taken on May 30, 1966 (Mother and Daddy’s 15th wedding anniversary), was sent to many family friends and illustrates the joy that reigned in Peter’s family when he was a baby.” I wonder if she knew then how fleeting it would be.

  Family photo, May 30, 1966

  As happy a surprise as I might have been, I was nonetheless inconvenient. My arrival coincided with my mother’s attempt to move beyond being a housewife, so she and my father hired a nanny, Mrs. Ruffie, to help take care of me during the day. My mother was preoccupied with her new life as a part-time professor (at Wayne State and at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor) and a part-time activist—which to her were the same thing. As the civil rights, women’s rights, and antiwar movements were exploding across the country, with college campuses at the epicenter, my mother saw her job in the classroom as a way to mobilize students to join the cause and clamor for social justice. I went to my first antiwar demonstration before I was eating solid foods. At age three, I rode a “flower power” tricycle sporting a peace sign in a parade.

  My mother’s passion for political activism in the mid-sixties found its first outlet in a campaign against the war toys in her sons’ toy box. It was the perfect cause for a mother with pacifist Mennonite roots; G.I. Joe never met a more formidable adversary. In my mother’s view, war toys—an evil marriage of American militarism and consumer capitalism—were part of the Pentagon’s pro-war propaganda machine targeting impressionable children. She fired off letters to all the major toy companies, berating them for contributing to the “war mania” her sons were exposed to. She gave them a long list of toys they could be making instead of plastic guns and soldiers. She pleaded, how about “fire-fighting and forest ranger sets?” She even offered her help: “I promise to work actively to promote the sale of such new toys if you will openly declare a policy of responsible action in eliminating war toys from your inventory.” They replied that their military toys were simply a response to consumer demand; that the toys promoted patriotism and offered a healthy outlet for children’s hostilities.

  My mother proudly called me the “flower-power trike rider”

  My mother was undeterred. She wrote letters to the newspapers and organized petitions, going door-to-door in our neighborhood, collecting hundreds of signatures to pressure area stores to stop carrying war toys. A local drugstore and a supermarket reluctantly agreed to replace their war toys on display with shovels, buckets, garden tools, and other toy kits and games. My mother’s crusade was written up in a front-page story in the Detroit Free Press, with the headline “One Mother Opens Fire on War Toys for Kids.” Meanwhile, my older brothers, tired of simple toys like the wooden building blocks our father had made for them, sneaked away to play with toy soldiers at their friends’ houses.

  But by the end of the decade, though she’d lost none of her strident moral righteousness, my mother stopped preaching pacifism and began embracing the anger that she felt was essential for radical change. As was true for so many activists at the time, the escalating war in Vietnam became the turning point in my mother’s sympathies. She and my pacifist father both marched against Washington’s military involvement in Vietnam, but unlike my father, my mother began to root for the other side—Ho Chi Minh and the Vietcong, whom she viewed as heroic anti-imperialists defiantly fending off foreign military aggression. As she came to see it, how could anyone expect them to defend themselves by simply sitting on their hands? Privileged Western observers far from the villages being carpet bombed by U.S. warplanes, she argued, were in no position to tell the North Vietnamese to simply lay down their arms. But as my father insistently kept trying to remind my mother, their Mennonite upbringing told them to be against all wars, all violence, and not take sides. A rift was growing between my parents.

  Another fault line in their marriage was the idea of monogamy, which my mother came to see as a source of male oppression that perpetuated a patriarchal society. When my mother confessed to my father that she’d had a fling with a man from California named Burt while attending a War Resisters League meeting in Golden, Colorado, he angrily demanded Burt’s California address. Over the next several months, he kept sending Burt letters demanding not only that he apologize to our family, but that he cease having affairs with anyone:

  I am increasingly disturbed by the realization that you were able to behave in such an irresponsible fashion with my wife last September in Golden, Colorado. You were aware of the fact that she was a married woman with three fine boys, and I believe that you owe her family an apology. It will make it possible for me to establish a finer relationship with Carol if I know that you will be more careful in the future of such involvements with others.

  When my father didn’t get a reply, he sent another letter: “Please refer to my letter to you regarding your relations with my wife in Golden, Colorado, last September. You may not appreciate the great anxiety you have created in this family. Carol comes from a very fine home with high moral standards. I likewise come from a fine and stable home where the kind of behavior you exhibit is unheard of.” He concluded, “I expect to hear from you soon.”

  The reply my father eventually received was not what he had asked for:

  Dear Mr. Andreas,

  Yes, I was aware of the fact that Carol was a married woman with children, and I can understand and maybe even feel some of the anxiety that our relationship created there. But Carol is also an adult human being, capable of approaching the world as an individual and of evoking a response as an individual.

  I cannot make a Satan out of myself for you. That would be both dishonest to myself and terribly insulting to Carol. I don’t use people lightly. And while my morality is different than yours it is a morality, and quite a strict one. It is based on a response to the individual in the situation and on their worth as autonomous human beings, rather than on static rules.

  Finally, I can’t make any promises about my future involvement with others. This is so, first, because, as I said, I don’t approach people with a set of static rules. More importantly, though, I can’t make any such promise because the request for it doesn’t make any sense. When you ask that, you are saying that the relationship between A and B (you and Carol) is dependent on C’s (Burt’s) pledge of future conduct with D, E, and F (unknown, unmet other). The relationship between you and Carol depends only on you and Carol. The attempt to create a Satan to serve as a parking place for your unresolved questions is doomed to failure.

  You and your family have my sincere best wishes for the new year.

  Burt’s response left my father feeling even more indignant. His hardwired 1950s sensibilities were banging up against the loosening morals of the 1960s. Peace never really returned to the family after that affair. From then on, my parents argued in their bedroom late at night in angry, hushed voices. My mother arranged for them to see a marriage counselor, but after going once my father refused to go again.

  Meanwhile, my mother had become a full-blown political activist in a city consumed by activism. Detroit was in flames. The July 1967 riots left fires burning around Lafayette Park, where we lived, and the governor sent in National Guard troop carriers to major intersections nearby. President Johnson deployed army troops. Forty-three people died, over one thousand were injured, more than seven thousand arrested, and over two thousand buildings destroyed. Yet, in the midst of this chaos, my mother cheerfully sent a letter to family and friends, urging them to visit: “This year there should be an added incentive to visit the city that leads the nation in promoting rebellion among its alienated mino
rities.”

  To show her solidarity and join the cause, she became a member of People Against Racism, which worked in tandem with the Black Panthers and the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement. As a coordinator of the Detroit Committee to End the War Now, she helped organize massive antiwar demonstrations and started hanging out with Maoists, Trotskyists, members of the Communist Party USA, and black nationalists of the Republic of New Africa. My mother became a spokesperson for the Union of Radical Sociologists at American Sociological Association meetings, and was a founder of the journal The Insurgent Sociologist, meant to provide a voice and publishing outlet for left-wing activist sociologists.

  My mother also led the way in uniting disparate feminist groups in the Michigan Women’s Liberation Coalition. Male reporters were banned from the press conference announcing the coalition, which itself became the lead story in the press coverage. “Feminist Groups Oust Newsmen; Form Council” ran the headline in the Detroit Free Press; “Feminist Meeting Clears Out Men” reported the Detroit News. It was a calculated move; my mother told the Free Press, “We felt we had to make this point to them, that part of the oppression of women stems from the fact that the media is largely controlled by men.” The Detroit News quoted her as saying that the ban would continue “until we’re satisfied enough women have been hired in radio and television.” Male camera operators, however, were allowed into the press conference “just this one time,” she said. Of course, they had to let them in: otherwise, with no women camera operators present, there would be no media coverage of the press conference.

  In the wake of all of this, the classroom was simply another opportunity for my mother to engage in political organizing and her vague but lofty-sounding “consciousness raising.” She taught a course at the University of Michigan on the Sociology of Sex, and it inspired her to write a book, Sex and Caste in America. The book was a manifesto of sorts for women’s liberation, in which she declared that the nuclear family should be abolished: “The family maintains the economic structures that thrive on sexism (as well as on racism and imperialism).” I was much too young to understand at the time, but I can only imagine how my father, the straitlaced, traditional American family man, felt about her declaration.

  During this time, my mother’s appearance changed radically along with her politics. She disposed of the heels, mascara, and hair spray that had defined her look as a 1950s housewife, and later, as a prim and proper young professional. She stopped putting her hair up or curling it, and instead let it hang straight down. Razors were out, unshaved legs and armpits were in. Pants replaced dresses. She tossed out all her bras, and would not put one on again for years. She avoided curling irons and makeup for the rest of her life. Her favorite pair of shoes, brown leather Pakistani sandals with thin straps, soon were pretty much all that remained from her old shoe collection. Cool and casual replaced proper and conventional. There was only one thing left for my mother to do to complete her transformation and leave the last remnants of her housewife identity behind.

  My mother and father in June 1969, the month they separated

  Separation

  BY THE TIME my parents were racing to each be the first to kidnap me from preschool that June day in 1969—the same day my mother left my father—their life goals were catapulting in wildly opposite directions. My father wanted to move to the suburbs, provide a stable home, and save money for the kids’ college trust funds and for a comfortable and secure retirement like a good, responsible family man does. Other than having Mennonite pacifist values, the last thing in the world my ultra-pragmatic father wanted was to be seen as a rebel or a troublemaker. He spent more of his time preoccupied with the minutiae of pensions and health benefits in contracts (the UAW had hired him for his technical knowledge in this area rather than for any background or interest in labor organizing) and navigating his daily commute to his downtown office than thinking about how the system was rigged by the rich to exploit the poor. But my mother had come to believe that the evils of the system had to be destroyed by any means necessary—which meant people like my father, who wanted to work within the system, were themselves part of the problem, not the solution. She thought they pacified workers by softening capitalism’s sharper edges. She didn’t want a conformist raising her children; her boys were going to be radicals.

  For a year and a half before the divorce hearing, we all lived in limbo. I was four years old at the start of it. Much to my father’s relief, the judge gave him temporary custody of me; my two older brothers insisted on living with my mother, and so they all moved to a two-bedroom rental near Lafayette Park. Back and forth my brothers and I went, in what our parents called a “trading arrangement”: I would go stay with our mother for the weekend while my brothers went to stay with our father. The only constant in my life was the indisputable fact that my father and mother were always angry with each other.

  When I was at my mother’s, my father would call to check that there were no “other men” around. “I wouldn’t want little Peter exposed to that.”

  “Oh, Carl, for once, try to be human, not male,” my mother would yell, slamming the receiver down. When my father called back, my mother would let it ring and ring. When I’d ask her why she wasn’t answering the phone, her casual answer would be that “it’s just your father harassing us again.” She’d then yank the cord from the wall.

  My mother was both impulsive and stubborn; once she decided to leave my father, there was no going back. My father nevertheless persisted in believing she’d return to the fold. He held out hope, even after she sent him a sharply worded letter explaining, “I have no intention of becoming a wife again, although I am secure in the knowledge that I can be a good mother.”

  Yet, in complete denial, my father busily continued to oversee the building of a modern four-bedroom suburban home near my mother’s first tenure-track job at Oakland University, outside of Detroit. Construction on the two-level house was not complete when my mother picked up and left. But he kept at it, convinced that a bigger and better roof over our heads might somehow keep us all together and magically transform us back into the happy family from that long-ago photo. Months after she moved out, he wrote my mother: “I would like to remind you that I am willing and able to support our family in our home and that I have no intention of terminating our long and faithful, at least on my part, relationship.” He added a PS: “Let me know if I can assist you with your 1969 income tax return.”

  My mother could not be coaxed back, but my father would not give up. He was offended by my mother’s divorce petition and vowed to fight it; said he didn’t believe in divorce. “There hasn’t been a divorce in our family in five hundred years,” he snarled. In 1969, the state of Michigan still didn’t have no-fault divorce laws, which meant that accepting my mother’s divorce petition would imply that he had been culpable for the problems in the marriage. My father was a proud man, and in many ways just as stubborn and self-righteous as my mother. “I’ll appeal this case all the way to the Supreme Court if I have to,” he insisted to anyone who would listen. He was convinced that he had done everything right as a husband and father and that my mother was fully to blame for her own unhappiness.

  My father took out his frustrations on my mother’s parents: “With an attitude such as Carol’s, she will not be compatible with any sane male (one who has some standards and wants to make a suitable home for his family).” He went on: “Carol wishes to engage in pleasurable activities, including sex, with others. She does not want to be committed to any one or any thing. She wants to be free to pursue whatever she, at the moment, wants to pursue.” My father complained that he had been left home to take care of the boys “while Carol was engaging in mutually pleasurable activities on a mountain side with a hippie by the name of Burt. Also, she is having a ball of a time now that she is not confined to the care of a preschooler. She is a real ‘swinger’ (we used to use the term tramp). The only question is, where does all this leave my three sons whom I would l
ike to see grow up to be solid citizens and good and faithful husbands.”

  I’m sure my mother’s activities must have been unsettling for her parents, but they were not about to turn against their own daughter and take my father’s side. Though my mother had long distanced herself from her Kansas Mennonite roots, through it all she and her parents were careful to maintain a respectful and even supportive relationship, and they weren’t going to jeopardize that now.

  My father also sought sympathy and validation by writing a more politely worded letter to the minister at the Bethel College Mennonite Church back in Kansas:

  Carol has separated herself altogether from the church and her ties with her family are nebulous. She has been greatly influenced by her readings in sociology and by her teaching associates. Her concepts of love, marriage, morality, responsibility, freedom, have all taken on new meanings. Our definitions of these terms are “old fashioned” and should be discarded. She has an entirely new set of standards which she claims are more compatible with our modern society.

  My outraged father then went public with his complaints, sending a letter to the editor that was published in the Detroit News in May 1970:

  To the editor,

  After sharing 18 years of baby-sitting, making beds, washing dishes and other household chores, my liberated wife now wants a divorce. She has been given equal opportunity to attend school and obtain three university degrees since marriage and currently is a full-time university professor, earning as much as I. She wants our three children, our home, and half my salary! When will men obtain equal rights in our divorce courts?