We know she married at fifteen and gave birth to a daughter within a year. Her husband died shortly after this, and she married again, divorcing the second husband before she was thirty. Leaving her daughter with her parents, she moved to New York in 1921 to study art at Cooper Union.
 
Around the time of her graduation, she was selected to attend a summer art program outside of Paris with a hundred other young American women. When it was discovered that she was African American, her application was refused by the French. A scandal ensued, but the decision was not revoked.

This same year, Savage married Robert Lincoln Poston, an associate of Marcus Garvey, the charismatic Jamaican radical who had founded the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Harlem in 1916. Garvey also founded the Black Star Line, a shipping and passenger line, and promoted the dream of using these Black-owned ships to return African Americans to their ancestral lands. Poston had been sent with a delegation to secure lands in Liberia for these settlements, but sadly, he died of pneumonia on his return voyage, just one year after marrying Savage. She was a significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance and sculpted busts of both W.E.B. Dubois and Marcus Garvey. Savage was one of the first artists in any genre to consistently work with black physiognomy.

In 1929 and 1931, Savage won fellowships to study in France. She also won a Carnegie fellowship for eight months of travel in Europe. Returning during the Depression, she founded the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts in Harlem, and five years later she was appointed the first director of the Harlem Community Art Center. She took a two-year leave-of-absence to work on a commissioned sculpture for the 1939 World’s Fair. This sculpture, The Harp, received much press, but was ultimately destroyed at the end of the fair. Savage found that during her leave-of-absence, she had been replaced at her job. She attempted to found another art center and a small gallery, but after a series of frustrations, she retired to the town of Saugerties in the Catskill Mountains of New York. About twenty years later, she returned to New York, to live with her daughter.
 
So that’s what we know through biography. There is another encyclopedia of knowledge encoded in Realization.
 
Unable to find anything Savage wrote or narrated about the piece, I am going to share my subjective response.

First, it appears to be about enslavement. The title, in my understanding, refers to the moment when the last shreds of denial, distraction, or wishful thinking are stripped away, and these two are confronted with the absolute horror and helplessness of their situation. Because of the placement of the woman’s arms, it appears that her shirt or the top of her dress has been intentionally stripped away, and that she is attempting to protect herself.
 
The male could be either her son or her partner. In either case, he is posed in a position suggestive of a frightened child. This is a radical choice on the part of Savage.
 
Unquestionably, Savage was familiar with the sculpture The Greek Slave, by American sculptor Hiram Power. Completed in 1844, it went on to become one of the best-known and critically acclaimed artworks of the nineteenth century. Unlike Savage, Powers’ words about his creation have been preserved:

In fact, the victim appears to be calm and complacent, and I suspect that the great popularity of the sculpture had more to do with its pornographic implications than with an abolitionist sentiment.
 
Without any knowledge of Savage's grandparents, one could reasonably conclude that, if they were in Florida in the mid-1860’s, they were most probably enslaved on a plantation. Savage’s work reflects a perspective that, in my eyes, is uniquely female and, unlike Powers’, deeply identified with the victims of enslavement. It is impossible to “pornographize” Realization. In fact, I find it difficult to imagine that anyone viewing the piece could do anything except empathize with the suffering represented in the figures. Also, it is important to remember that Savage's childhood was that of a captive, forced to endure multiple beatings every week.

Trauma is difficult to depict in art, because trauma is about having to accept the unacceptable. One can depict the adjustment after acceptance (which Powers claimed he was doing), or one can depict the post-traumatic dissociation (The 2000 Yard Stare by war artist Tom Lea, a 1944 portrait of a Marine at the Battle of Peleliu)… but to capture that moment, that fragile and terrifying moment of utter freefall after denial is ripped away and before the mind can split or numb itself… that is the genius of Realization.

Barbara Gittings: Gay Pioneer is a brand-new biography about the lesbian who led the charge for LGBT rights beginning in the late 1950’s, when she organized the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), through the tumultuous 1960’s when she edited DOB’s The Ladder and walked the picket line protesting the US government’s homophobic hiring policies, into the 1970’s where she worked to bring LGBT liberation to the American Library Association and to the American Psychiatric Association. 

The biography is written by Tracy Baim, who is no slacker herself when it comes to LGBT activism . Baim is the publisher and executive editor of Windy City Media Group, which produces Windy City Times, the oldest LGBT newspaper in Chicago—co-founded by Baim in 1985. She has authored, co-authored, or edited books about the LGBT press, about lesbians in the service, about Obama’s relationship to the LGBT community, and about mothers of LGBT kids. In 2014 she was inducted into the Hall of Fames for both the Chicago Headline Club and the National Gay & Lesbian Journalists Association. In other words, Baim, like the subject of her biography, is a lesbian force of nature.

Baim brings her insider’s appreciation of the world of activism to her subject, along with her editor’s ear for a good story—and Gittings’ life was full of those. She also brings her journalist’s eye for photography to the (literally) hundreds of photos that are included in the book, which had initially been conceived as a photo album. Fortunately for us, Gittings’ partner, Kay Lahusen, documented their life, and in doing that, she ended up documenting five decades of a movement.
 
Baim has done so many important things in her writing of this book. Here are just a few:
 
She has written a major lesbian activist back into a history of the LGBT civil rights movement that was at risk of looking like a gay male movement. The erasure of lesbians has now, alas, become a “thing.” Advocate writer and blogger Victoria Brownworth has written about it. Feminist scholar Dr. Bonnie Morris has a book coming out this year titled The Disappearing L. Last year Curve Magazine published a story on “Erasing Our Lesbian Dead,” and AfterEllen posted a reminder to the culture at large that lesbians are gay people, too. So, thank you Tracy Baim, for giving Gittings such a solid, cast-in-cement,  gold-star biography in our LGBT Walk of Fame.

Next, there are the photos. These have been carefully sorted into the different eras of Gittings’ long career, and then meticulously captioned with names, dates, associations. They are truly worth a thousands words. One of the radical steps that Giddings took when she began to edit The Ladder was to feature real faces of real lesbians on the cover. Fortunately, Baim includes several pages of these archival covers, and they speak volumes about the courage of both editor and subjects.
 
This same kind of courage is also evident in the photos of those early marches at the Pentagon and the White House. There was no rainbow flag. It was all gray flannel suits and shirtwaist dresses with sensible shoes. These picketers were dressing for the jobs they were not allowed to hold.
 
In many ways, the book is like a family album. Thumbing through it, some names jump out, like "Sylvia Rivera" or "Vito Russo." So that’s what they looked like…  And other times the faces jump out.. Oh, look, there’s Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon and Karla Jay!

As the pages and eras scroll past, the photos become less crowded, quieter, more domestic. Another side of Gittings emerges. Here she is performing with the Philadelphia Chamber Chorus… and here she is announcing the purchase of a house… and sitting out on the balcony with a cup of coffee. One of my favorites is a photo of her with Lahusen posing on the front steps of Gittings’ mother’s house. Both women are holding stuffed dinosaurs and laughing. Here’s the story: In the 1970’s, a new wave of LGBT activists swept into the movement, and, as new waves are wont to do, they immediately set about eliminating the “old wave." They labeled Gittings and Lahusen “establishment accommodationists”… or just “dinosaurs.” Not fazed in the least, Gittings and her partner rolled with the punches, and began to show up to meetings with stuffed dinosaurs under their arms.

And this brings me to one of the most memorable aspects of this book… the stories. Gittings was a valiant foot soldier, logging her hours at the mimeograph machine and the mailing parties, and logging her miles in the picket lines… but she was also a brilliant, creative strategist with a wicked sense of humor. She knew how to turn her enemy’s homophobia against him. One of the most unforgettable examples was an action she planned at the 1972 American Psychiatric Association annual convention. After years of lobbying, she and her fellow activists were finally allowed to present a panel titled, “Psychiatry: Friend or Foe to Homosexuals?—A Dialogue.” The plan was to put two national, LGBT rights activists,  Gittings and Frank Kameny,  on the panel with two heterosexual, but sympathetic psychiatrists. It was Gittings’ partner who noted that something was missing: Where was the gay or lesbian psychiatrist? The simplest answer was “in the closet.” Being professionally out at that time could actually put one at risk of losing their license.
 
But once Gittings had a vision for an action, she was unstoppable. She located a psychiatrist willing to appear in disguise—and what a disguise! He wore a tuxedo three sizes too large and a huge, full-head, rubber mask of Richard Nixon. His appearance was grotesque, and so was the reality to which he was responding. The panel was an overwhelming success, no small influence on the removal of homosexuality the following year from the APA clinical roster of mental diseases.

Barbara Gittings: Gay Pioneer is filled with stories, often in Gittings’ own words, as Baim has incorporated excerpts from interviews as well as Gittings’ writings. The stories of her childhood, and especially of her long and rocky road to acceptance of her “difference” make for wonderful reading. It always inspires me when I discover that these super women who changed the world had to wrestle with the same demons that plague us lesser mortals.
 
Gittings is family, and her personal photo album is part of our heritage, too. Her journey, like that of a first generation immigrant, is embedded in our second-, third-, and fourth-generation lesbian DNA. Her traumas are in our bone marrow, and her victories are the legacies on which we build.

Thank you, Tracy Baim, for this meticulously researched, sparkling biography of Barbara Gittings!

Barbara Gittings: Gay Pioneer is available in both a black-and-white-photo edition and a color-photo edition! 

This twenty-seven page book was first published in 1990. In an era before the Internet, it still “went viral”— at least in lesbian and feminist communities in the US. How did that happen?
 
First, there is the author herself: Amoja Three Rivers—teacher, healer, craftswomon, elder, lesbian, force of nature.  Here is what she said about herself on her Facebook page:

I am an american-born African, Choctaw, Tsalagi, Ojibway Jew. I live in a magical 3-room rainforest with Schmuely, chatul katan sheli (my little cat). I love exploring the interesting sounds my mouth & throat can produce--like overtones, African yodels, melodic growls & throat singing. I'm into Judaism, buddhism, quantum physics, linguistics, speculative fiction, microbiology & history, especially Indigenous & African. Also, for brain-play, into dismantling social constructs like--time, space, race, money, boundaries & hierarchies. I LOVE music & dance of the Roma, the middle east, Africa, flamenco & salsa. I am one of the thousands of spiritual & cultural offspring of Michfest. And I need to know where to buy some med.-large realistic rubber(y) lizards & snakes. I'm serious. See rainforest ref. above.--Amoja Three Rivers

Three Rivers (or, alternate spelling “ThreeRivers”) traveled around the country, offering herstory presentations at festivals, conferences and colleges. With Blanche Jackson, she founded Market Wimmin, a cultural crafts and merchandising business, and the Accessible African Herstory Project. She also co-founded Maat Dompim Womyn of Color Land Project. And, of course, wherever she went she sold copies.
 
Second, there is the book itself: Cultural Etiquette: A Guide for the Well-Intentioned. The book is a miracle of user-friendliness… starting with the title, “Cultural Etiquette.” It cut right through the bullshit of the day. White liberals, for fear of saying the wrong thing, often self-censored, forfeiting valuable opportunities for establishing dynamic alliances with people of color. Meanwhile, this silence was being filled by aggressive rhetoric from conservative, mainstream racists who were attempting—and who still attempt—to frame cultural competency as a pandering to “political correctness.”
 
Three Rivers radically shifted that polarized paradigm with the title of the book. Etiquette is defined as a code of polite behavior. She was telling us that saying the wrong thing need not be a permanent moral indictment after all, but  that it might just be a question of etiquette:

"Racism and the racial stereotypes it spawns are so subtly interwoven into the fabric of Western society that very often, even those with the best of intentions will display bad cultural manners. This does not necessarily mean one is a bad person. Sometimes people just don't know any better."--Amoja Three Rivers
 
It was possible for a person to be well-intentioned and ignorant, and that if one needed to go out and acquire the etiquette, this was no cause for shame or defensiveness. Furthermore, in addressing her book to the “well-intentioned,” she was assuming the best about us. Personally, I found that reassuring.  
 
The book is brief. Again, user-friendly. For some, it was an invitation, piquing curiosity and offering a key to and language for further discovery. Others would use it as a kind of travelers’ guide to other cultures. We could carry it with us, refer to it, read it in its entirety in just a couple of hours.

 PROLOGUE
 
As a child, I collected Classic Illustrated Comics, and every time there would be a new release, I would pester my mother to buy it for me. I remember the day in 1967 when the comic book adaptation of  “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” appeared on the drugstore shelf.  As usual, I asked my mother to buy the latest comic. When she saw the title, she suddenly became very frightened and, lowering her voice, she explained that it was a story that was very popular in the North, but that it was hated in the South. Born in Connecticut, my mother had fallen in love with a Southern sailor on leave in New York, married him, and moved to Virginia after the war.  Pegged as a Yankee, she had initially been viewed with suspicion and snubbed socially. Apparently, my mother was afraid that someone might see her now, twenty years later, buying a children’s comic book, and that this could destroy her hard-won acceptance into Richmond society.
 
Fast-forward nearly forty years. The university theatre department in the city where I live is in an uproar. There had been a public reading of the dramatic adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a collaboration between a drama lit class and a pop culture class. Some of the students felt that they had been compromised, because they had not been adequately informed about the historical context and controversy of the work before agreeing to participate.
 
I saw that reading… and here, as a playwright and an activist, is my reaction: 

Preaching to the choir is not a bad choice for a playwright. In fact, it can be a radical act if one is writing for a marginalized community who rarely see representations of themselves or their lives in the mainstream.
 
But what if a playwright wants to preach beyond the choir, to write a play for an audience that may actually be hostile to the message or paradigm being presented?
 
To answer that question, I am going to look at a play that is more than a hundred and fifty years old and still requires a trigger warning: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, based on the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe and adapted by George L. Aiken.
 
Yes, I know that this play is considered the fountainhead of toxic stereotypes of African Americans that have poisoned the well of American drama and continue to seep into plays and films. I know that these stereotypes are so prevalent and so pernicious that the titular character’s name has become synonymous with “an epithet for a person who is slavish and excessively subservient to perceived authority figures, particularly a black person who behaves in a subservient manner to white people; or any person perceived to be complicit in the oppression of their own group.”

But, as a dramatist who attempts to effect social change, I cannot ignore the fact that this abolitionist play was being performed somewhere every single night, continuously, from 1852 until 1933-- by both African American and white theatres.  As a dramatist, I cannot ignore the fact that it was seen by three million people, ten times the number of the book’s first-year sales. Most of all, I can’t ignore that President Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator,” is supposed to have said, upon meeting Stowe, “Is this the little woman who made the great war?”

Apocryphal or not, the play Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with its forty-two translations and four-generation track record, put the subject of abolition at the heart of the popular culture of its day.
 
Here is the irony: The very same dramaturgical strategies that enabled the play, back in the day, to preach so effectively beyond the choir are the reason why the play is vilified today.
 
African American writer and activist Toni Cade Bambara wrote, “The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.” She did not say that the job of the writer was to make sure that whatever strategies she employed in this work would remain revolutionary two hundred years later.
 
Stowe and Aikins managed to make sabotage, destruction of property, escape, armed resistance, and passive resistance irresistible to a population that would be the targets of these actions. They made revolution irresistible.
 
How?

Let’s break it down by the categories:
 
1) Escaping. This is the least confrontational response, and therefore the one least threatening to white audiences. Stowe maximized this potential for identification by having her escapees legally married and light-skinned enough to pass. In other words, these characters would look like her audience. The couple has an infant son, and the family is threatened with forcible separation at a slave auction. The wife will be forced to submit to repeated rapes. Something we may forget today is that, up until the twentieth century, white audiences banned any representation of serious love between dark-skinned characters—just as they rejected the presence of Black actors in classical dramas. The denial of romantic or family ties was an ideology critical to the logistics of the slave auctions. This romantic, committed relationship at the heart of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was revolutionary in 1852. Stowe got away with it, only because she scripted it for light-skinned actors.
 
There is an adage in theatre that there is no right or wrong; there is only "boring" or "compelling." Aikins put Eliza’s flight across the semi-frozen Ohio River on the stage. With her pursuers and their dogs close behind, the distraught mother clutches her infant to her breast as she leaps to freedom from one chunk of ice to the next. Irresistible.

2) Sabotage and destruction of property. This was going to be a tough sell for anyone with servants—not just the enslavers. Clearly Stowe was going to need a different strategy than the one she used for escape. Audiences will not identify with the perpetrator of these actions, but they may be compelled to laugh with her. Stowe created a comedic character that today is considered one of the noxious stereotypes: Topsy.
 
Topsy is a wild child. She is paired with a racist, “Miss Grundy,” white, spinster stereotype. Her scenes are comprised of stock vaudevillian turns, where the working-class, down-to-earth stock character puts one over on their prissy and clueless, supposed “betters.” Topsy lies, cheats, steals, and intentionally destroys property… and audiences roar with delight every time she does. She gets an ovation for her standard defense: “I’m wicked, I guess.”
 
Topsy can be seen as a white fantasy of the unchristian savage, untamed and untameable, justifying the harsh abuse of enslavers. Both book and play, however,  derail that interpretation by making explicit that Topsy was sold away from her parents as an infant, “raised by a speculator, with lots of others.” If Topsy has no loyalties except to herself, it is her enslavers who are to blame. Audiences are not allowed to forget that she has intentionally been deprived of any intellectual or moral instruction, and subjected to emotional, physical, and mostly likely sexual abuse.

3) Armed resistance. Southerners, even non-enslavers, lived in terror of uprisings by captives. It was going to take more than skin shades or vaudeville to sell this to a national audience. In the book, Stowe resolves the issue by having the escaping husband push one of his pursuers off a cliff and then, with his wife’s urging, take the man for medical treatment to a Quaker settlement. Aikins must have realized that, if he built the scene effectively, the errand-of-mercy turnaround would give his audiences dramaturgical whiplash. Wisely, he departed from Stowe’s text.
 
Aikins pairs the escaping husband up with Phineas Fletcher, a white, working-class man who has recently converted to Quakerism in order to please his Quaker fiancée. Phineas is in the tradition of Shakespeare’s “rude mechanicals,” and his struggle to follow the pacifist teachings of the Quakers is a source of ongoing mirth for the audience.  In the course of aiding George’s escape, the two men set up an ambush for their pursuers. George shoots one of his enemies, but audiences never know if the wound is fatal, because Phineas wrestles the man off the edge of a cliff. The killing is scripted as a moment of high comedy, because Phineas, mindful of his new religion, remembers to call out, “Friend, thee is not wanted here!” even as he heaves his enemy off the brink. White audiences roar their approbation.
 
What Aikins did was brilliant: The escaping captive shoots his enslaver, and does it onstage. The coup de grâce, however,  is delivered by a white man sworn to a life of non-violence. The audience can choose where to put their focus. It doesn’t hurt that the scene, set in a mountain pass, is staged like a Western melodrama.

4) Civil disobedience. This actually posed a greater threat to the enslavers than armed resistance, as Gandhi and King would have understood. Civil disobedience goes to the root of oppression, challenging the legitimacy of white supremacist doctrine and entitlement, and because of this, it would be the toughest sell of all.
 
Civil disobedience is no laughing matter, and so Stowe and Aikins turned to pathos. And hence the genesis of one of the most hated stereotypes in American drama: Uncle Tom.
 
Stowe and Eakins took pains to depict Tom as an enslaved man whose conversion to Christian ideals of loyalty, forgiveness, and meekness is absolute. His enslaver boasts that he can send Tom on errands to free states and count on him to return.  Tom appears to be the ultimate white fantasy of an utterly subservient person of color.
 
But what people forget today is that, for all his over-the-top deference and humility, Tom is murdered for defying orders in the name of  loyalty to a higher law. His first act of civil disobedience is refusing an order to whip an enslaved woman who is resisting the sexual advances of her enslaver. As a result, Tom is tortured. His second act is refusing to betray the escape plans of another enslaved woman who is faced with being sold away from her child. This time Tom is murdered. White notions of chivalry and Christian morality are pitted against audience members’ identification with being law-abiding citizens. When they approve of Tom’s defiance, they are assured that his disobedience is not motivated by self-interest or even disrespect. They are assured of this by the extravagant lengths to which Stowe went in characterizing Tom as a living saint.

The stereotype of Uncle Tom that has come down to us is a corruption of the original trope. Tom gave up his life to stand in solidarity with enslaved women of color whose oppressions were specific to their sex. 
 
The horrific sexual violation of African American women is the engine that drives the play. From Eliza’s flight to Topsy’s wildness to the actions that precipitate Tom’s murder, the book and play portray rape and women’s subsequent lack of ownership of their children as the great evils underlying the institution of enslavement. Too often the abuse of African American women has been entered as an historical footnote to the Black Freedom Movement, if entered at all.

2011 saw the publication of  Danielle L. McGuire’s book, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. For the first time, there was a history book that wrote this violation back into the record. Few know that long before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, she was engaged in advocating for social justice for black women who were the victims of sexual violence at the hands of white men. The previously unwritten history of the Montgomery Bus Boycott is a story of horrendous, ongoing sexual harassment and assault of Black women in these public conveyances.
 
Was this focus on women a passion of Stowe’s, a plea for historical accuracy, or a strategic device for recruiting audience outrage?
 
As a playwright, I come away from a study of this play with a different perspective on it, with a better idea of what it takes to preach beyond the choir, and the sobering realization that this preaching must engage with stereotypes and caricatures borne of my audience’s prejudice--in the risky hope of transforming them. This appears to be the price of making revolution irresistible.

​“How could a mother NOT know that her child was being sexually abused in the home?”
 
I’ve asked that. But it was never a real question. I was always sure I knew the answer: “She couldn’t.” In other words, guilty.  Because any mother who was so indifferent or oblivious to the signs and syndromes of her victimized children and/or the inevitable trail of clues from the perpetrating partner should be found guilty of criminal negligence… right?   And then, of course, if the mom did know… well, lock her up as an accomplice.
 
When I asked that question, what I was really saying was, “How could my mother not have known?” As a child, I was a bundle of behaviors, from food refusal to self-mutilation. My father had a disgusting collection of pornography, which included torture pornography. He was compulsively adulterous, even taking a date to an office party when my mother (his wife) was in the hospital giving birth. He was violent, forcing sex on her immediately after an episiotomy. He was cruel to animals and a bully to children. I was completely terrified of him. How could she not have known?

​Self-righteousness is the pendulum swing to the far side of shame. Both emotions carry sweeping indictments. With shame it’s a personal indictment. With self-righteousness, someone else is guilty. Both engage black-and-white thinking. Both have a tendency to flash-freeze an experience and prevent growth or movement forward. Both are motivated by a desire to protect. In the case of shame, the desire to protect the perpetrator(s) has become internalized. This brainwashing has been part of the perpetration.  In the case of self-righteousness, we are protecting ourselves from blame.
 
For the first three decades of my life, I experienced a great deal of shame and confusion… from the trauma, but also from the complex PTSD that pervaded my young adult years. It was a great relief when I became politically aware of the oppression of women, because it enabled my swing over to self-righteousness. Still stuck, still rigid, but at least not at fault anymore. My new mantra became:  “How could a mother not know that her child was being sexually abused.”
 
So, here comes this book that takes my question more literally than I ever did. A History of a Pedophile’s Wife is a page-turner memoir by Canadian feminist Eleanor Cowan, describing the toxic landscape of her family life in the twentieth century, surrounded by secrets and patriarchal theology and institutions. Reading Cowan’s book, the question in my own mind began to morph into “How could my mother have known?” 

​My own mother would never admit the truth about her first husband or about my experience. At one time, when I was asking her about the nature of the pornography collection, she became uncharacteristically emotional and said, “You don’t what you’re asking me to do! You don’t know what you’re asking me to open the door on!”
 
Following Cowan’s journey, I had many occasions for remembering those words. The perpetration I experienced was probably the tip of an iceberg. My mother, a lifelong practicing alcoholic, had protected her marriage in so many arenas, hiding her drinking, hiding his philandering, standing by him in political scandals, making up excuses for her bruises, rationalizing the chronic emotional abuse …  I really have no idea what was behind that door she was so afraid to open. And I have no idea what that avalanche of truth might do to her. She knew the answer to both when she begged me to drop the subject.
 
The author of A History of a Pedophile’s Wife  has the courage my mother lacked. She does open the door, and there is an avalanche. And she shares it in compelling detail. 

 New question: “Why are some mothers able to open that door, while others cannot?” One of the answers is “support.” Cowan’s journey led out of the 1950’s into the explosion of feminist consciousness characterized by the  1960’s and the 1970’s. Women were telling the truth, naming the real perpetrators instead of policing each other. Social services were being provided for battered women and rape victims. Birth control happened. Divorce began to lose its stigma. Health care providers began to break their silence. Mandatory reporting became law.
 
Cowan found something else: a group called Parents of Sexually Abused Children. The attrition rate was very high, but those who stayed learned how to shatter the silence about family secrets. In this group, the author lost her shame, found her voice, took ownership of her experience, became accountable to her children… and shared the story.
 
My own mother went to her grave with her secrets, and the best I could do was to manage a diffident wave “good-bye” across the enormous gulf of denial that separated us. No closure, I thought. But actually I did get closure, and I got it from A History of a Pedophile’s Wife. I saw the parallel universe, the alternate reality, and I think that has healed me a little.
 
So, with that, I recommend this memoir to survivors, to mothers who failed to protect, to providers working with trauma patients, and to survivors of religious abuse… especially those whose trauma was perpetrated or enabled by Catholic teachings and institutions. Also a great read for anyone who appreciates a courageous and dramatic memoir!