Girl Talk

Today Nicki Richesin , the editor of The May Queen, interviews contributor Jennifer Baumgardner and we get to listen in...

Jennifer is the coauthor, with Amy Richards, of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism,  Grassroots: A Field Guide to Feminist Activism, creator of the I Had an Abortion project and producer the film Speak Out: I Had an Abortion.  Her next book, Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics, from FSG is due out in February.

NICKI: In TMQ, you write about deciding to have a child after years of working as a pro-choice/ abortions rights activist. Ultimately, how much did your experience as an activist affect your decision to have a child?

JENNIFER: I think that I always wanted to have a baby. In fact, I was a really committed babysitter from the age of 8 until 22. But getting pregnant after having broken up with the person who provided the sperm—or, rather, knowing it was okay to have the baby—was a direct result of being an activist for reproductive rights. Having the right to do it without it being some huge statement and making me a social pariah is a result of the feminist movement, obviously. I have read histories of pre-Roe women who got pregnant out of wedlock and the wrenching stories of them being coerced to give the child up for adoption because being a single mother was unheard of—I didn’t have to deal with any of that scorn.

Being pregnant influenced my view of abortion, though—or it continued the evolution of thought. I was giving a talk about abortion one day at Barnard College when I was about 5 months pregnant and I said “baby” when referring to the thing that is in one’s uterus when one is pregnant.  A speaker who was going to make remarks after me corrected me and said “fetus—you said baby, but it’s fetus.” At first I was extremely embarrassed for the gaffe, but later I realized that I did think of it as a baby—and I know lots of pregnant women who are going to have an abortion who also think of it as a baby. I think being pregnant made me more confident about using my own language and not imposing pro-choice speak on people.

NICKI: I'm curious what sort of feedback you've received about your story in TMQ? And also from your ex?

JENNIFER: You obviously got the book to lots of people in the magazine industry, because I heard from my friends who are editors and got a couple bites from magazines I haven’t written for before, too. One of my closest friends read it and said, “I didn’t know that was how you got pregnant with Skuli,” referring to my impromptu New Years Eve celebration with my ex. Most people have shown interest in the fact that G. and I seem to co-parent pretty easily together.

I don’t think my ex read the whole thing, and I don’t really encourage him to read things that I have written, but he asked me at one point if I imply in the piece that he isn’t the father. I have no idea where he got that, but it reflects in its way how I think I’m saying something and he hears something else that is radically different. This characterized our relationship when we were dating.

NICKI: Do you have a particular favorite among the essays in the book?

JENNIFER: Well, Meghan Daum and Jennifer Weiner are two of my favorite writers (and I was with them in another anthology last year—Sex and Sensibility—so I feel like I know them even though I don’t) but I think my favorite piece in the May Queen is Sara Woster’s. She’s such a good visual artist that it bums me out she’s also a wonderful and funny writer. She’s probably bad at cooking or has problems with the IRS….

NICKI: How do you like living in Williamsburg (in Brooklyn)?

JENNIFER: I like it. Having come from Fargo, I’ve been terrified to leave Manhattan and the 212 area code (today: Brooklyn, tomorrow: suburban Minneapolis and soon right back where I started…) But, I had a chance to buy an apartment and doing that has made me feel so happy and like I will be a good provider for my son that it makes up for my sadness having to say that I no longer live in the city. Williamsburg has a lot to recommend it, though, and you can still walk to Manhattan—right over the bridge and you’re on the glamorous lower east side.

NICKI: Growing up in Fargo, you've spoken of your mother and her friends as feminists and described feminism as "being in the water" so to speak. Do you think given your background, becoming a feminist was a conscious decision then?

  JENNIFER: While I certainly think I have actively sought out relationships with feminists and pushed myself to understand the history and philosophies of feminism, it was pretty natural in a core way. Superficially I think my family of origin is pretty conventional: Dad was the breadwinner, mom stayed home with the three daughters. But we were always told that we could be whatever we wanted and there was an ongoing conversation about sexism that was part of the dinner-table patter. I was born into a certain comfort with feminism, but it was pretty subtle. It’s not like my mother was Ti-Grace Atkinson.

NICKI: How has your relationship with your mother changed since you had your son Skuli? And with your colleague Amy Richards?

JENNIFER: When I was pregnant with Skuli my mother was my biggest confidante. She was clearly so excited about having a grandchild and she never seemed irritated by my phone calls—I wanted to go over every bodily change and she’d tell me what she felt when she was pregnant with me. She flew out to NYC when I moved apartments mid-pregnancy and helped me paint Skuli’s room. Since Skuli arrived, it’s been less bucolic—I think because my expectations were that she’d be my nanny and she wants to be a grandma. She and my dad have taken care of him alone several times, though, while I am out of town on reporting trips and Skuli has adorable names for them now, etc.

With Amy: We travel at least 90 days out of the year together but she had already had a baby, so we knew we could handle the addition of an infant to our lives. Some of my confidence that I could tour with Skuli no doubt came from the year I had touring with her son (now 3). It is hard when we have two kids on a plane for 5 hours (and Amy has a new baby now), but I’m thrilled we are doing it together—it makes it more fun. I’m scared to go on book tour alone (with Skuli) next year when my first book sans Amy comes out.

NICKI: What was it like working at Ms. Magazine as one if their youngest editors?

JENNIFER: I used to say that Ms. Magazine was the dysfunctional family I never had. On the one hand: I LOVED it there. The editors—Marcia Gillespie, Barbara Findlen, Gloria Jacobs, Julie Felner—were like rock stars to me, and it was an incredible first job. We were paid to discuss our lives and feminism. I had Andrea Dworkin’s telephone number. There was no dress-code. Kathleen Hanna would visit the office. I got to interview Ani Di Franco. I met two out of two of my serious girlfriends through Ms.

On the other hand, I grew to resent some of the culture there—it was disorganized. Younger takes on feminism were invisible unless they mirrored how the magazine had always talked about feminism. Younger women were tokenized. We had a terrible owner who reneged on debts and we didn’t really stand up for ourselves or our writers in an effective way. I now realize that it would have been really bad for me to stay there longer than the five years I did. In order to appreciate the ad-free feminist bi-monthly world, I had to have some experience in the mainstream publishing world.

NICKI: What did you learn from working with Gloria Steinem? Would you say she has had a big impact on your life?

JENNIFER: I haven’t worked that much with Gloria, because she wasn’t an every day presence at the magazine, but I feel close to her and her impact on my life is considerable. For instance, she helped me get the money together to do the I Had an Abortion project and film. She hosted Amy and me at her home while we wrote Manifesta and acted as a human fact-checking resource. She’s given me really awesome hand-me-downs like a knee length red leather skirt that snaps off and becomes a mini. She’s very savvy politically and I have definitely taken a page from how she runs her career—she has her hands in so many things and runs in so many diverse circles. I think the thing she taught me most was that no event is too small. She travels constantly and it’s why she is so in touch with younger women. Not that I am famous and have to deal with this, but I am also very influenced by how she handles fame. She wants to be a real person and she is very kind and un-neurotic for someone who will most likely be on a postage stamp some day.

NICKI: For other single mothers co-parenting out there, how have you negotiated sharing parenting responsibility with your ex? Any tips?

JENNIFER: The one piece of advice I’d give is live close to each other if you are co-parenting. The main reason I moved to Williamsburg is because G., Skuli’s father, lives there. When we had to commute on the L train for drop-offs and pick-ups each day, we were both so much more stressed out. G. is a teacher and picks Skuli up at about 3 PM each day which, theoretically gives me 4 to 6 hours to work until Skuli comes back. He tends to sleep at my house during the week and his daddy’s on the weekend, but no exclusively. The nice part about two homes is that G has to be and gets to be as much of an expert on diapering, clothing, and baby food as I do—because he does it alone 30 to 40 percent of the time. We try to do I.F. (Illegitimate Family) activities around 2 times a week—from dinner together to a park date to the zoo, and they are usually fun for all of us.

NICKI: Which books are on your nightstand at the moment?

JENNIFER: On my nightstand for reading right now is the Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad, Maureen Dowd's Are Men Necessary?, and the screenplay of The Hours by David Hare (and the most recent copy of The New Yorker).

NICKI: You and Gillian Aldrich produced a documentary called "Speak Out: I Had an Abortion." How do you feel about the response you've gotten so far?

JENNIFER: I feel great about it. We haven’t really done anything to distribute it and yet it’s been screened in 40 cities and dozens of copies have sold to university libraries.

NICKI: How did the women featured in the film react to the finished product? And what sort of response have they had?

JENNIFER: They were all really proud to be part of it. It’s sad though, because there were so many great stories that we didn’t use.

NICKI: You also designed an "I had an abortion" T-shirt that stirred up quite a bit of controversy. In the end, were you satisfied with the feedback you received and did you feel that you accomplished your goal of creating a discussion and personalizing this still taboo subject?   

JENNIFER: I learned a lot from making that shirt—and there was no single response to it. Some people clearly wanted to own it because their abortion had been a really significant experience and one they didn’t feel was visible, but they would never have worn it in public. Others were daring and unequivocal about having had an abortion. Still others thought the t-shirts meant that women bragging about something that was actually pretty sad. I do think the t-shirt—as controversial as it was-- added to the conversation about a taboo subject—and I think people’s discomfort with the shirts reveals even pro-choice peoples discomfort with abortion.

The project was a big journey for me, wherein I really tried to face my own limitations about abortion and squeeze out any received wisdom I was carting around, pro-choice or otherwise. During that time I saw the products of two abortions and it was illuminating. I had thought there would be no identifiably human parts, but there were. It didn’t make me less pro- legal abortion, but made me less likely to use the term “tissue” to describe the contents of the uterus.

NICKI: What's in the works for you now?

JENNIFER: I have a book called Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics coming out from FSG  February 14, 2007, and I’ll be on tour for that. I am also writing a book that grew out of the I Had An Abortion project. I’m doing that with the photographer Tara Todras Whitehill. That should be out in May or June of 2007 and the publisher is Akashic Books. Amy Richards and I still travel quite a bit lecturing on feminism at universities and still own our speaker’s bureau—Soapbox, Inc.: Speakers Who Speak Out . We might do a documentary on feminism for the university market. And I’m still writing for magazines like The Nation, Glamour, and Jane. Oh—and I wrote the introduction for the Feminist Classic (a series I created for FSG) Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, by Alix Kates Shulman. That comes out in March.

You can attend readings for The May Queen at Cody’s Books in San Francisco on July 26 and Book Passage in Corte Madera on September 14. For more details, visit  The May Queen.