Adrienne Germain

Interviewed by Rebecca Sharpless
June 19­­–20, September 25, 2003
New York, New York

Sharpless

Today is the nineteenth of June, 2003. My name is Rebecca Sharpless and this is the first oral history interview with Adrienne Germain. The interview is taking place in her office in New York City, as part of the Population Pioneers Project. Okay, Adrienne, thank you so much for giving me this time today. I’m really very grateful to you.

Germain

Well, I’m happy to do it.

Sharpless

What I’d like to do—I’m a historian, and historians always believe in context. So what I want to do is start at the beginning and ask you—tell me a little bit about yourself in your growing up years.

Germain

I was born in San Francisco. We moved around quite often when I was small. My father was a hospital administrator and when I was about—oh dear, I don’t know—I think six or seven, I guess, he was hospitalized with cancer, which in those days was treated like a communicable disease. It was a very stigmatized situation. Anyway, he recovered from it but then left my twin sister, my mother, and me in San Francisco and moved to the East Coast to look for a new job, which he ultimately he found. So we moved from the West Coast to the East Coast and moved several times again after elementary school and then after high school.

So, we have a very small family. My parents were only children and their parents died young. I knew only two of my grandparents and not well. And then I have a twin sister. And this is a family who has no background in international travel of any kind. My mother became a psychiatric social worker. She went back to university after my father’s cancer and ultimately finished her Ph.D. at Columbia and was a pathbreaker in her field.

Sharpless

What’s her name?

Germain

Carol Germain.

Sharpless

And your father’s name?

Germain

William. And my mother faced—I mention this because it becomes relevant to my own history—she faced enormous resistance and opposition from her professional community from the time of her dissertation forward, but mostly after she became a professor at Columbia. So for years she was very deeply opposed because what she tried to do in the psychiatric end of social work was to bring in what was, in those days, as I recall, a very popular [approach]—not popular, but a new—what do they call it? there’s a term for it, but it was looking into the biology of human life and how human beings as organisms respond to their environment.

And in the crudest sense psychiatric social work was only and always focused on the individual and did not give much weight to the broader social environment in which the individual developed. Of course weight was given to the parents, but otherwise having this broader social context was not acceptable. Ultimately she made a breakthrough really and was highly acclaimed and her books were translated ultimately into something like forty-four languages and they’re still being used as textbooks and et cetera. But this was a very tiny family and very resource restricted.

Sharpless

How old were you when your mother was doing her Ph.D.?

Germain

I was—well, it would coincide—well, it came shortly after my father’s cancer. She started when we were in New Jersey, when I was in the sixth grade, so I guess twelve. And she commuted to New York and my father commuted from New Jersey to New Rochelle, so we never saw them. We were the original latchkey children, sort of. And then it went in stages because she also had to work. Then we moved to Baltimore. My father took a new job and my mother worked and did her immediate—after she had finished her Ph.D., her fist teaching [job was] at the University of Maryland. And I was in high school at this little town outside Baltimore, and then went to Wellesley, and my whole life changed totally.

Sharpless

What happened?

Germain

Well, first of all I left this very tight cocoon and in particular my twin sister.

Sharpless

She didn’t go to Wellesley?

Germain

No, she went to Smith, which she shouldn’t have done as it turns out because she hated the girls high school we’d been in, and to go to a women’s college was foolish. And it turns out, I understood many years later, she did that because she couldn’t bear being very far from me, but I didn’t understand at the time.

So anyway, I went to Wellesley and a whole new world was opened up—you know, a vast diversity of people, total autonomy and independence, and I just flourished. I loved it. And it was the famous class of ’69, Hillary Clinton’s class. And we were the last class, I would say, that was primarily educated in the old way of Wellesley, which was the expectation that, Yes, some of us would become professionals but all of us would marry and be upstanding community leaders and good wives. So you were given this very fine educational opportunity, but yet that was sort of the sense of life one had looking forward. And it was a time when they hadn’t yet or they were just barely beginning to start cross registration with Harvard and MIT. So, it was really an ivory tower par excellence.

Meanwhile, the Vietnam War was raging around us. Poverty was totally out of control. Some of us did things like tutor disadvantaged children in Roxbury, which is Boston’s Harlem, with no training and no tutelage. You know, looking back on those days, I was so—even though my family had had no resources I had lived in sort of a cocoon. Anyway, so, as I said, I loved the independence.

Sharpless

To what extent would you say you had a social conscience when you went to Wellesley?

Germain

Well, I grew up having a social conscience because both of my parents were in social work, so to speak. My father was a hospital administrator and my mother a social worker, and in fact we were brought up with a very strong ethic of doing good to others. And when I was younger, in fact, until I got to Wellesley, I had always thought I wanted to become a doctor. And then on reflection, as I thought about it, I realized that I didn’t want to hold a life-and-death decision over someone else, that I really would not want to be in that position.

So I majored in sociology. It was the time when Mr. Moynihan released his very controversial study of the black family and there was a broader set of work on urban development going on, which was all very new. And then Marshall McLuhan—The Medium is the Message sort of dominated in some ways the sociology that I learned. When it came to your junior year, if you were at the honors level, which I was, you could elect to do a thesis through—well, the normal way to do was the summer between your junior and senior year, but I had the opportunity through friends of friends to consider going to Peru. There was a household survey going on there being conducted by the University of Michigan and these friends of friends had a connection there. And I just thought that would be an interesting thing to do rather than library research. And Lima, as a city, was very much in the center of debates in sociology over patterns of urban growth. And so, I decided I would do my thesis about Lima, but have the possibility of working with these University of Michigan people.

So anyway, I figured out that if I left at spring break, I could actually stay all the way through till Christmas, so six months, and manage that. So I went out and I earned all the money and I made all the arrangements and I presented this as a neat package to my parents and said, “Isn’t this wonderful?” And they were horrified. It was really—my balloon was completely popped. I was devastated. I thought that they would think that this was wonderful. And that followed me for the rest of my years, in a sense that while they were always supportive and they were proud of my professional work, they just couldn’t understand why anybody would leave this country and go and do work with poor people, and so on, outside one’s own country. So—

Sharpless

What do you think the attraction to the Peruvian situation was for you?

Germain

Well, part of it, as I said, is happenstance. There was no planning about this. In fact I haven’t planned my life in any way and I didn’t have ambition in that sense. And as I say, I was taking urban sociology courses and Lima came up and there were certain—it’s hard for me to remember now. But there must have been at least crude versions of aerial maps in the study of urban sociology. We didn’t have satellite photos in those days, of course—I’m talking ’68. And I don’t know, there was something very intriguing about it and I didn’t have any other options that I could think of, except doing something in the library, which I could’ve done but wasn’t—I just thought, Well, why not?

Well, I didn’t speak any Spanish. I’d earned the money but not enough to live on my own. So, I took a room with a low-income family that turned out—

Sharpless

So you did go?

Germain

Oh, yeah, I went—the first time ever all by myself. Uh-huh. In those days you had to change planes in Miami, and while I was in the airport the news came on that Martin Luther King had been assassinated.

Sharpless

And this was April of ’68.

Germain

Uh-huh, and I nearly turned around and went back. It was devastating. It was just awful. And in those days, and certainly in my own life, you just didn’t just pick up the long-distance phone and call anybody. So I just sort of sat in the airport and thought about this and decided that I would go ahead anyway. And then when I arrived in Lima, of course, I didn’t speak the language and I had never been outside. I had no idea what was going on. And there was some sort of health check at the airport. I wouldn’t remember now. Maybe they had a cholera outbreak or something. But it was a huge, long, enormous screening and the air travel, the two flights, had taken a lot of time anyway, so all I remember is being terrified and very bewildered.

And I somehow—I guess the people from Michigan had arranged for me to stay some place a couple of nights, and then, I don’t remember how, I found this family to live with. And it was not too bad a commute to the Bureau of Statistics, which is where the Michigan project was. But it turns out that it was a very violent family and I ended up barricading my door every night. And to this day I can’t eat papaya because all I was served—had for breakfast was this sort of mashed up papaya. There were really some very bizarre things. Anyway, there was no bus route but there were these collectivos, they’re called, which are battered old cars and five or six people cram into them and you get off where you’re going to get off. And of course I made many wrong turns to begin with, but it was fun.

So anyway, all this was hugely challenging, but what I spent most of my time doing was that I’d go out with the Michigan people as they interviewed, and a lot of the interviews were in the slums of Lima, the barriadas, but then a whole lot of it was in smaller towns and also rural villages around the country. So I traversed the entire country.

Sharpless

What were you doing since you didn’t speak Spanish?

Germain

I just tagged along and I listened and I have, as it turns it out, not a bad ear. Of course, the Michigan people were very nice to me and they didn’t mind translating and maybe in a way it was better that I didn’t know the language because I have a tendency to ask a lot of questions, and so on. But what happened in this situation was observing so much. It was very, very intense. So all the senses were—never having been in any circumstance like this— were all stimulated and sometimes assaulted. And I took some time to climb to the top of Machu Picchu and to go to the Amazon, although some of the interviews were in the Amazon also, and had some unbelievable adventures.

But the point of all this was that—and I wrote a thesis in the end and it turned out that the household data were very interesting from that point of view, partly because the project included mapping of the barriadas in Lima. So, really there was a lot that I could use, with their permission, to write up this thesis. And it was fascinating, because it—

Sharpless

I’m sorry, what was the title of the thesis and what was the name of the project?

Germain

You know, I can’t remember, but it has to do with spatial patterns of growth. And the core theory at that time—I’m trying to remember now, because I did something like this when I did my master’s work and I just push it out of my brain. I have too much in my head. But as I remember, the core theory about urban growth in the late ’60s was that it developed in concentric circles from a rich core, and that the pattern that they theoretically expected to see—most of these studies were about cities in U.S., Canada, and Europe, but they expected to see the farther out you went, the poorer the population got. That was, as I recall, the theory.

And that wasn’t how Lima was developing at all, [in] concentric circles, and furthermore, the core declined very rapidly as the wealthy or middle-class people began to move out to less populated places where they could have gardens, and et cetera. And then it didn’t go in circles. It went in wedges. Lima is in a very particular sort of ecological location and that makes part of it very appealing and most of the setting very unappealing, actually. So, it was nothing groundbreaking, but I did end up critiquing these main theories of urban growth, and that was fun.

Sharpless

It strikes me [that] this is amazingly sophisticated for a twenty-year-old.

Germain

Well, I never think about things that way, actually. But this will probably come up later in the interviews because people say that, but I don’t see it that way. I just sort of feel like, Well, if I can do it, anybody can do it. You know, it gets me into trouble. But what turned out to be the case, which I didn’t realize then until I went to graduate school—I went back to Wellesley to complete my senior year. I decided at that time, as many of my friends also did, to marry the day after my graduation. And meanwhile, I had received and really not understood the value of it or anything else, but it becomes significant later. I hadn’t applied for it—because you didn’t apply for it—I had applied to go to a Ph.D. program at the University of California at Berkeley in sociology, and when they sent me the acceptance letter, they also sent me a five-year career fellowship, fully paid, with a living stipend, which is unheard of, funded by the Ford Foundation. And I had no idea who the Ford Foundation was. And I said, “Oh, well, thank you very much. This will help a lot.” Because my husband didn’t have a job and the idea was we both wanted to be in California. And so we went back.

Sharpless

Was he also going to graduate school?

Germain

No, he had finished a master’s in business administration at Harvard and he, we thought, could get a job in San Francisco, which is where we wanted to be. And we didn’t really have resources. His family was in San Mateo, so we moved in with his parents in essence, which was a disaster. And I was commuting every day from San Mateo to Berkeley and then coming home at night and needing to buy all the groceries, cook all the meals, and iron the shirts, et cetera. This was really interesting.

Sharpless

This was 1969?

Germain

Uh-huh. And it didn’t go well at all, and I finally insisted that we leave and rent an apartment, which we found in San Francisco. And then just after doing that, he got a job offer in New York, and he came home and told me this and said that he accepted it. And something just cracked—I mean, not even consulting me. I was not a feminist—that’s another point about all this—not a conscious, not an understanding feminist. But it just was completely unfair and inappropriate. Here I was with a five-year scholarship and well started and really loving Berkeley and so on. But I thought I would go because having been raised the way I was I couldn’t even think divorce. So I dropped out at Thanksgiving and I took a job at Macy’s because—

Sharpless

And this was the Thanksgiving of your first semester?

Germain

Uh-huh. And I took a job in Macy’s because my husband turns out not to have been a generous person and I wanted to be able to buy Christmas presents, and so I took this job at Macy’s to earn money to buy Christmas presents.

Sharpless

And you’d been married six months at this point?

Germain

Yeah, not even, as of November. And we were supposed to leave—I can’t remember if it was Christmas Day or New Year’s Day, one of the two, and everything was packed up and all that sort of stuff and we moved to a hotel the last night, I guess. Well, there wasn’t much to pack up. I mean we had very few things anyway.

And we got up very early the next morning to take the flight, and the alarm went off and I just realized, I’m not going. And he threw a fit, needless to say. Fortunately, my sister, by that time, had actually moved to Oakland, and she had a very close childhood friend in the hills above Berkeley whose parents were still there, and the father was a minister. And I just didn’t know what to do. I had no idea what to do. So I called her and asked her to come get me. And what she did was she arranged with this friend’s parents that I could stay with them until I could sort out something to do.

Sharpless

Did he—

Germain

And he left.

Sharpless

He went on the airplane and went.

Germain

Uh-huh, with no—I mean, just total umbrage and outrage. No sympathy, no nothing. I mean, how I married this man, I don’t know, but it’s life experience. So it turns out that Sidney’s father, this friend’s parents, not only was a minister but that he had been, since our childhood, developed church-based housing for students, just across the street from campus. It was for undergraduates, but he arranged for me to have a space in a three-person room there. And it was run as a commune in the Berkeley days, with a common kitchen and all this sort of stuff. Well, being a private person and being, despite the condition of my office, a neatnik, this was really tough. But I said okay.

And I went to Neil Smelzer, who was a very prominent sociologist who had been my professor for several months, and I explained to him what had happened. And he was just wonderful. He said, “Well, we really have to reinstate your fellowship and we’ll do that and so just carry on.” And I said, “Well, okay.” So I did that. And in that period then, I was taking a sociology course from a man who was doing path-breaking work in those days of research methodologies—has to do with participant observation and qualitative analysis. And for that course a major—

Sharpless

What was his name?

Germain

Well, you know, I’d have to go and look at it in my records. I just can’t remember his name. It might come to me. And I think he’s still there. I’m not sure. But anyway, that course required a major research project. And my friends, when they hear this story, they just think it’s totally out of character. And in a way, I guess, it’s out of my public persona, but it’s deeply imbedded in my character, because what I decided to do was sort of like going to Peru.

Every morning and every evening and all during the day—these were the days of the Hare Krishna groups, and they do all their chanting and begging on the street, and so on, and their temple and house was right behind this housing that I was now in. So I heard them all the time and I became very curious about them because I just couldn’t understand how clearly white, middle-class, young people my age and a little bit older could display themselves publicly this way. In other words, I couldn’t figure this out at all and I was very intrigued. So, what I did was to decide I would study them.

Now, the only book at that time that had been written on people who choose to lead—what’s the word I’m looking for? today we’d call it an alternative lifestyle, but, you know, whatever—was—the theory that existed at that time, and I think it was actually the title of the book that was written, “[A Theory of] Conversion to a Deviant Perspective” [Lorne Dawson, Cults in Context: Readings in the Study of New Religious Movements, Chapter 8]. And it analyzed members of very strict religious sects in the Midwest and it had a whole theory about how and why people joined such sects and then what happened to them after they did. And so, what I was going to do was to test this theory with the Hare Krishna.

And as earlier with the urban sociology concepts, it turns out that the Hare Krishna didn’t fit this model in a very clear number of ways. And so, the paper that I ended up writing was then modification of the theory on the basis of the patterns of behavior among the members of this temple. And what was telling about it was the methodology, the participant observation, was such that I attended the temple at all times—day and night, weekends, whenever I could as far as my classes allowed—and I told them from the onset that I was doing a paper for a course and I was interested and were they willing to receive me and they were.

I finally ended the study earlier than I had wanted to because it was obvious that it was becoming more and more distressing to them that I wasn’t joining them—you know, months of attendance and so on. They just had this conviction that anybody who came that regularly and participated and so on would be converted to their world view. And that coincided with a time when they lost several members. So it was really a very difficult time for this group of people and I didn’t want to exacerbate it, but I had also learned enough to be able to write a paper for this course. And people are amazed that I’d do something like that.

Anyway, then it was getting to be June and I still hadn’t resolved anything with my husband and I still couldn’t think about divorce and what I decided to do was to drop out again and go back and try the marriage again, to New York. So I started applying for jobs and the demography part of the sociology department was one of the leading demography centers in the States at the time and I studied with two of the leading people who had an enormous impact on my life, Judith Blake and Kingsley Davis. And ultimately they married, but at the moment I think they weren’t married.

What also happened at Berkeley that had a profound impact was that I got caught up in the Kent State Cambodia Crisis of the spring of ’70, and for the first time in my life was really deeply engaged in mass movement political campaigning. I did door-to-door work for Ron Dellums. I was taking a public health course that meant that I was advising young girls in a blue-collar public health clinic who came in because they had or feared that they had unwanted pregnancies. And I did a lot of training in crowd control because I don’t believe in violence and you may remember that after Kent State the violence was greatest on the Berkeley campus, short of Kent State itself. We had National Guard and state troopers and armed riot gear and the whole business.

And to this day I have trouble A, with crowds, and B, with armed riot police. So, I was the one who learned how to deal with mace, because it wasn’t tear gas, it was mace. And I lived right on the main street, Bancroft, that comes down from International House and that’s where a lot of the clashes between the students and military took place.

Sharpless

Right there by the gate in Sproul Hall.

Germain

Uh-huh, just up the block toward International House. So we all learned to carry wet washcloths, but we also learned techniques for crowd control and all. And I sort of got a political education in a hurry, in the sense that I was very idealistic. But when the students started throwing stones and becoming violent, that was when I thought, That isn’t my way. Plus—

Sharpless

Let me turn—

Tape 1, side 1, ends; side 2 begins.

Germain

Well, the sociology department, along with the psych department, was the most radical in its antiwar stance. And the sociology students, including the graduate students, many of them, demanded that the university agree that everyone should be given blanket pass grades so that they could go out and do their political work. And I was horrified by this. I thought, That is really outrageous. Because here I am doing all this protesting and stuff, going door to door for Ron Dellums and counseling kids in this clinic and doing my coursework and that’s fine, but you don’t get a blanket pass grade. I mean, that was—and Neil Smelzer was a leader on the faculty side saying that, Look, I’ll make every accommodation possible. We’ll meet in my home, we’ll do whatever you want, but no blanket passes. And I really respected him for that.

Kingsley Davis and Judith Blake, on the other hand, didn’t give into the blanket pass but instead of being all accommodating, they insisted, despite the student threats, that their courses be held on campus until the day that Judith Blake waltzed into the class late—a big lecture hall. She’s wearing her mink coat. She’s just come across from San Francisco or something. She always had nail polish and the whole number—in Berkeley, imagine. And she sort of drapes this mink coat across a chair and walks to the podium and says, “Well, right, our subject for today is”—and at that moment the students—this was a pit-type lecture hall going from—the top level of it was just above ground level, an old building right in that open area beyond the gate.

And just at that moment all hell broke loose between the National Guard and the students outside in Sproul Plaza. And lots and lots of rocks were thrown and the police were throwing mace and all that was coming into our lecture hall. And Judith just stood there and kept lecturing. It was unbelievable, truly. And finally when we were all coughing and chocking, we sort of rose and left the hall and she stayed there. It was really—it was just so characteristic, anyway.

So I finished the nine months and all and applied to several places in New York to try to find a job, thinking that I’d try to make the marriage work and maybe some day I would come back and complete the degree or whatever. I set up interviews with the Ford Foundation—which again, I had sort of not registered or forgotten that my fellowship was paid by the Ford Foundation—and the Population Council, largely because of its name, and maybe Planned Parenthood. I actually don’t remember.

That was a terribly hot, sweltering summer in New York where we had what were called heat inversions, because of the pollution. And I arrived and my husband had just then taken a consultant assignment up in the back and beyond in rural Massachusetts and he expected me to go, which I did, and to stay in this dreadful motel day in and day out all day by myself while he was doing his consultant work. Anyway—and so from there I had to travel down to have these interviews, which I insisted on doing. He didn’t want me to do it, but I insisted.

Sharpless

He wanted you to be a stay-at-home wife?

Germain

Well, it seems that that’s what he did. And, you know, I didn’t know enough in those days to actually put that in front of him. Because I—my assumption had always been that I could use my intellect and do useful work. I mean, it wasn’t like I ever thought about being a stay-at-home person. You know, not that I had a plan in mind, but it was just in my nature, I guess. I don’t know.

But the reason I mentioned the heat is that I, of course, I didn’t have any money and he was so stingy. So I come in on public transport, and I don’t know, I somehow find my way to the Ford Foundation. We have a heat inversion and I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the building, but in those days it was fairly new and it was a full block and two sides of it are building and the other two sides are glass walls that encase an internal garden and it’s a glass roof, and it won all kinds of awards and so on, and it’s eleven stories high and heavily, heavily air conditioned. Those were the days before any notion of conservation existed. Can you imagine air conditioning a twelve-story atrium? But I walked into the air conditioning and I passed out.

So, needless to say, the interview didn’t go very well. And the one thing that I remember about it was that a man who later became quite important was interviewing me and he looked at me and he said, “Well, now, I really don’t think that we can even consider you for this job because you’re married.” I said, “Oh?” He said, “Well, yeah. You’ll just work with us for a year or two and then you’ll go and have babies.” I said, “Oh?”—not knowing any better.

Sharpless

It probably wasn’t even illegal then to say that.

Germain

It wasn’t illegal. So, you know, that I remember. And the other thing I remember was a question which I’ve used again and again many times in my life, which was, he said to me, “If you had two million dollars to spend in the population field, how would you spend it?” which, of course, is something I didn’t even think about because I didn’t really know who the Ford Foundation was or what they did in the world or anything else.

But the interview at the Population Council went better, and John Ross, who was a leading person in the family planning program evaluation arena, hired me as—I don’t remember what I was called—a research associate maybe, or something. And I was so thrilled with myself. My husband was horrified—told me I couldn’t accept the job because they were going to pay me nine thousand dollars and we’d end up paying more tax or something. Well, that and a few other things pushed me over the edge and I decided, Okay, this isn’t going to work.

So, my family was totally against a divorce, but I thought, Okay, so I went to the yellow pages, and I want to tell you I went through the most horrific experience. In those days, divorce lawyers—the law in New York was very strict. You either had to prove adultery with photographs or witnesses or you had to prove physical harm, and neither of those were the case. And I finally called up some social welfare agency—to this day I can’t remember what it was—not that I was eligible, but I said to the woman on the phone, I said, “I’m absolutely desperate. I’ve been to four of these people and it’s clear that”—I mean, I couldn’t say these words in those days, but these guys were the worst of the sleazebag types. I mean, I just knew I was physically—possibly in danger. And in the most dreadful offices. It was just so awful.

And I said, “This is what I’ve been through and can’t you please recommend—you must recommend for some of your clients,” or something. Said, “Oh, we can’t do that. It’s against our policy.” I said, “Please, I prevail on you just as an individual. I promise you, I just need to be referred to somebody who won’t hurt me.” So she gave me the name of somebody who wasn’t as bad as the others and I managed to get through it, but I basically went to Mexico and was one of the last people to get a legally recognized divorce in Mexico. And to this day I don’t remember the trip, making it or what happened or coming back.

But then I found a small basement studio on the East Side and took that and the job and paid more than half my salary for the rent, but it was a place that, although it was on a street at the basement level, it was in a townhouse and I felt safe with the family there. So I walked to work every day. I just did things that were free in the city. There were a lot of things like that in those days. And I had such a limited budget to buy food because so much of money was going into rent, but I managed.

And they were doing two things at the Pop Council in those days. One was something called the postpartum program. Somebody had the idea—I wish I could remember their names now, but there were two leading family planning men who’d come up with this idea that the postpartum period, immediately after a woman gave birth, was a very good time to approach women about contraception. So they had this worldwide, multi-country study. I think it was probably AID-funded, so Rei Ravenholt might or might not refer to it—called the postpartum program. And it was all staffed by men.

There were only two other women in the Population Council in professional positions when I arrived. And then John Ross was beginning the first of what became annual, and later on maybe every two years, but very regular analysis of national family planning programs. Many of them had started—well, ’52, India was first and then there were others. Thailand, there was Taiwan, and they gradually became more and more. But they started really in the ’60s.

Sharpless

So these would be programs of countries outside the United States who had national programs?

Germain

National meaning governmental. And most of them were in Asia, with large populations and high rates of population growth and areas where demographers had focused on. And so, I was basically a research assistant for John Ross’s family planning program evaluations, which just collected mountains of all different kind of data. And these were the days before computers, except I guess in the military and fancy science labs, because I can still remember the day that the Population Council’s first computer arrived—this huge machine the size of this room.

Anyway, I’m trying to remember now when this happened, but basically what struck me about all this—and again, it hit my sense of fairness and justice, somehow—these colleagues of mine there, the men in the Population Council and their writings, never referred to women as real people. They referred to contraceptive acceptors or users or postpartum cases. You know, it began to grate on my nerves after a while, because even when I was studying with Judith Blake and Kinsley Davis, I kept having these imagines of the women in Peru and what their lives were like.

And then after a while another serious injustice came to my view, which was, in those days contraceptives weren’t as good as they are now, and they still aren’t very good. And basically we were asking women to have fewer children using imperfect methods of contraception and I thought that we should provide abortion services or somehow support abortion services for those women whose contraceptives failed.

Sharpless

Do you mean Pop Council or women?

Germain

Yeah, we the field, we anyone. This was pre Roe v. Wade, of course. But I just—law doesn’t matter that much to me. From my point of view, how could we morally ask women to take the risk of using contraception, of having fewer children, when clearly their life circumstances demanded that they have as many children that they could bear and not enable a woman who had an unwanted pregnancy to end it? I mean, to me this was just inconceivable, so I started getting into debates, including a famous one with the president of the Population Council, whose name was Barney Berelson. And this is, I guess, toward the end of 1970.

And John Ross, at the same time, was very concerned and had been urging me—it was at the end of 1970, yeah—saying, “Look, Adrienne, you nearly finished your master’s degree and at the minimum you need to do that. Basically, you should go back and get a Ph.D., but if you’re not going to do that”—there was no way I could do that. I mean, I could hardly support myself, let alone—and, of course, the second time around I really did lose the fellowship. They said, The Council will pay if you go back to Berkeley to complete the master’s degree. And I said, “Oh, well, that’s nice. Great.”

So I think it must have been in the fall of ’71. And I went back, and it turned out that either they had changed the requirements or I hadn’t had good advice earlier, but there were a whole lot of required courses in sociology that I needed to complete. So I worked like a dog to meet all those requirements and I lived in International House. Neil Smelzer was still there and he somehow helped me arrange that. I don’t remember how many credits I took, but some enormous number, and whatever. But I completed it and I got it done and then I came back to the Council and—

Sharpless

Did you have to do any kind of project for it?

Germain

No, not that I recall. Those were the days—what you did were these course papers. So the research papers—I had met a number of the—certainly the research requirements and the papers and the statistical work, as I remember it, but there were certain core courses in sociology that I think I somehow hadn’t done. And they were exams and papers. There wasn’t a thesis in those days. So I came back to New York and into the same job and thought I was getting more and more frustrated because I just felt like there are all these men in the corridors and Jackie Forrest had been hired just before I left for Berkeley and she is now the director or vice president of research at the Alan Guttmacher Institute. She came in at the same time. Also John hired a Dutch demographer called Jerry Von Ginegan, and Jackie and he stayed on quite a while at the Council. I lost track of Jerry, but Jackie I followed because we became friends and she’s been at AGI ever since.

What happened, though, was I was getting more and more concerned that I just didn’t feel that the Council was paying any attention to what women’s lives were like and that the injustice, the unfairness of putting all the risk on them, not only of contraceptive side effects but of having fewer children than their partners wanted, was just not being addressed—and it needed to be. Plus, there was the continuing abortion question. And I was getting restless enough that I was thinking, Well, I’ll leave the program division, as it was called in those days, and move over to the research division, when I had a call from Bud Harkavy, who was the head of the population program at Ford Foundation, and said that he was recruiting for an assistant program officer and would I be interested.

And as I’ve already said, I had no idea who the Ford Foundation was or anything else, but, you know, I thought, Well, why not talk to him, since I’m not comfortable here. So that’s the irony of this is that the man who had first interviewed me and asked me these questions about marriage and all this was still there. His name was—oh, I can remember one of the others who was also still [there]—[it] was Ozzie Simmons.

Sharpless

You can fill it in when we get to the transcript.

Germain

Yeah, well, try to come up with these names because they’ve been there quite a while. They were younger than Bud Harkavy. Bud Harkavy was still young in those days, but of course considerably older than I was. And this is, I guess, early in ’72 and he was interested enough that he had me interview these others who had no memory that I had interviewed previously, the year and half before, or whatever it was. But I got a call back a week later or something saying that he had two leading candidates and I was one of them, and the only way he could really think to make a decision about them being very different was to ask us each to write a five-page memo on Barney Berelson’s latest article, which was called “Beyond Family Planning,” which in those days was a path-breaking article.

Sharpless

Was he asking you to critique your current boss’s work?

Germain

Yeah, but what he didn’t know, and what I said to him was, “Well, actually, Bud, I have”—I guess I probably called him Dr. Harkavy in those days rather than Bud. But anyway, I said to him, “Well, I’ve just written”—and I think I still have a copy somewhere—“I’ve just written”—what I think I remember now as a twelve-page memo to Barney about what’s wrong with this article. And I said, “I’d be happy to give you a five-page version, but do you want to read the twelve-page version?” He said, “Oh, yeah, sure. You don’t need to rewrite it.” So I sent it over and he hired me.

Well, in the meantime, while he was reading this article, I thought I’d better find out about the Ford Foundation. And I can’t remember who I asked. It must have been colleagues in the Pop Council because I had come to New York with no friends and no community and given the way I was living my life I didn’t have outside friends. And I was hired. I think, as I recall, it was nine thousand dollars, which even then was barely livable. And so, I mean, I just didn’t have friends. I don’t know how I found it out, but before he called me back, what I found out was that Ford Foundation under Bud Harkavy, together with John Rockefeller III, who figures later in this story, had created the Population Council and that Bud Harkavy was responsible for putting Barney Berelson into the presidency, because Barney had been doing work with the Ford Foundation. But I had no idea. And when I found this out I thought, Well, I guess that finishes that.

But ultimately he called me back and said he’d like to offer me a job. And I was thrilled and I said, “Well, but, you know, Bud, why do you want to”—or, “Dr. Harkavy, why do you want to do that? I just found out”—“Oh,” he said, “you know, I’ve got a large staff. I can afford to have one iconoclast.” I said, “Oh, well, that’s great. Yeah, so I’ll come.” And I said, “By the way, I never asked you, why did you call me?” And he said, “Well, I asked the heads of all the population study centers for suggestions and Judith Blake and Kingsley Davis said you were the best student they’d ever had and why didn’t I track you down.” I didn’t know that’s how Judith and Kingsley felt about me, but okay.

So then I went over to Ford and they hired me, as I recall, at twelve thousand dollars a year, which still I was barely able to live on but it was better. Then, to shorten the story a bit, I went in October of ’72, and they were on a biannual budget cycle and just starting to write papers that would go to the vice president, I think it was [in] like December, January, and then the April or June board meeting would consider the revisions. And I had been hired to make the grants to the U.S. University of Population Studies Centers, which itself was an irony, because here I was, whatever age I was, twenty-three—no, ’72, twenty-five—and I had Sidney Goldstein in my office, my windowless closet-size office, at the Ford Foundation negotiating hundreds of thousands of dollars for his study center at Brown University with this kid. It seemed very peculiar to me.

But anyway, the budget exercise—Bud said, well, he didn’t really know what to do with me. And since I hadn’t had enough experience there yet, he said, “Listen,” he said, “I know you wrote this thing about Barney Berelson’s ‘Beyond Family Planning,’ and you clearly didn’t like it and you had some new ideas in there, so why don’t you write a memo about what the Ford Foundation could do about whatever you think are the most important things.”

So I wrote a memo that basically said—I had three months and I looked into all the international division programs and there was only one other woman in the whole division. It was Elinor Barber. And they had eighteen country-based offices around the world. They had no women staff. They never had had. So I looked into—they were funding massive programs in population control, agriculture, irrigation, some urban and community development, higher education. And the only, only activity, at all, that I could unearth that had anything directly to do with women was funding for home economics departments. That and family planning, that was it.

So I wrote a memo which basically said, Guess what? And it was this same message: if you want women to have fewer children—even Judith Blake and Kingsley Davis will tell you that women have good reasons to have large families, and if you want them to change that, then you have to give them some options, which includes employment, includes education, et cetera. Well, the vice president, who was David Bell, a quite remarkable man who had been, like many others at the Ford Foundation, in and out of government, he was the head of OMB under—would it have been Kennedy? Anyway, he had had a very high level in government and McGeorge Bundy was the president of the foundation in those days.

And Bud sent this memo up with the rest of the budget papers and Bell asked to see me and he said, “I find this very interesting. I’m not sure that you’re right and if we’re going to do anything about it. The only person who can figure out how to do it is you.” So he said, “I’m going to basically change your job.” And I became what was called a project specialist and there were only two others at that time, and they worked—I still sat in the population office and they were my immediate colleagues, but the project specialists reported to Dave Bell. There were two others, very senior men. One was Lowell Hardin, who was the senior advisor in agriculture, and the other was Ed Edwards, who was the senior advisor in education.

And so it became my job to figure out how I was going to persuade in particular the country-based offices of the Ford Foundation to support women. And I had a great time.

Sharpless

Let me change the tape.

Tape 1 ends; tape 2, side1, begins.

Sharpless

This is the second tape with Adrienne Germain on June 19th. We’re talking about your time at the Ford Foundation, but I wanted to back up. You described going to Peru by yourself, leaving your husband against the will of your family, doing various other things. Where do you think this inner courage that you have comes from? That’s a hard question, I know.

Germain

It is a hard question.

Sharpless

But you strike me as a very, very brave person.

Germain

Well, bloody-minded maybe. (laughter) You know, in a way I don’t—I actually don’t know. I only learned much later in my life about some of the dysfunctional dynamics of my family that mean that really, what I described as leaving home to go to college—and that was really my first time away from this very tight little unit and freeing myself from what had actually been a really desperately heavy burden of a disabled twin, which I hadn’t understood ever—just was so liberating. I mean it just opened my life.

Sharpless

I’m sorry. In what way was she disabled?

Germain

Well, it turns out at that time it hadn’t developed into a full-blown situation, but she had been what you call a blue baby, a breath holder when we were small. And she was so violent toward me that my parents didn’t have resources—they actually had to get two separate playpens, and she was consistently that way. But my parents demanded that I take care of her and that I accept all of this and just do everything I could to keep her calm and happy and not disturb things.

Sharpless

You were the responsible party.

Germain

Yes, and everything that hurt her and upset her and that she didn’t like and whatever, whatever was always my fault and that carried on really for many years of my life. But going to Wellesley, there was a freedom from that. She went to Smith and she hated it and that was also all my fault and I carried that through college, and so on. And then when she followed me to California and landed up in Oakland, even though I was separating from my husband, there was more of that. When I moved back to New York within three or four months, I guess, she came back to New York. But I didn’t see that pattern, really, until years later. So I think that’s one thing.

Maybe the other thing might have been that my mother had enormous courage. As I mentioned, my father’s cancer was of the eye and it was removed and it seems that it was highly stigmatized and he basically just disappeared. And she carried on supporting us for three years, went back to work, never having thought that would—she worked before they married. And then when he finally turned up again and we moved east she still was very afraid that he would die. People didn’t understand about cancer. You know, really it was very little knowledge and she always believed that if she didn’t talk about it, it wouldn’t exist.

So I lived in this family that denied lots of things. It denied my sister’s problems. It never acknowledged that my father had cancer. But I was asked to sort of uphold everything. And my mother realized that if something happened to my father—she had finished a B.A. at UC Berkeley actually, many years before, but she realized without a degree, if something happened to my father, since they were both having to work as it was, that she wouldn’t be able to sustain us.

Both of them had very high emphasis on education and I always did very well. And one of the difficulties with my sister is that she did well enough but not outstanding, and I did well because I worked very hard. I’m not one of these kids that just breezes through. But also, I read a lot because I was very, very shy and with my sister being as aggressive as she was but also hyper-energetic and she had lots of friends and so on, I just sort of withdrew. And reading was my salvation. And, who knows, maybe I just developed that sense of autonomy. I mean, books have been written about this phenomenon I’ve learned in later years, but basically my family created one reality or asserted a reality that actually wasn’t true and I knew it wasn’t true, and I would go out into the world knowing it wasn’t true but that I had to present it to the world as being true. And yet I could see my own reality. So the strain of balancing those two—I gather now people study these things—but anyway, it was enormous. And then when I went away, of course, I didn’t have to deal with the untrue reality that was being presented and I guess that just took a whole load off.

And plus, the day I arrived I formed ten enormously close friendships. There were ten of us in that first dormitory class at Wellesley who just fell in with each other and we went all the way through the four years together—even in the way that dormitory assignments went. We decided to go to the most distant, least sought-after dorm our sophomore year, to apply for that so that we could go as a group. That’s how tight we were. And for years we’ve stayed together and every so often we communicate. The communication has gotten less, but I was so empowered by having all these wonderful friends and just sort of took off like a shot.

Then of course the faculty was wonderful and the whole program at Wellesley was just great and I had not only a fabulous education but a personal growth. Although I do say that if I hadn’t gone to Berkeley, I would have ended up being a very different person and I don’t know that I ever would have become politicized. Who knows? Who’s to say? But the fact that Berkeley coincided with the Kent State Cambodia Crisis and I really had to come to terms with profound issues like what does it mean if students demand a blanket pass? And what kinds of choices does one make? Do you continue going to classes when most of the kids are saying that that’s breaking the bond of solidarity—you know, vis-à-vis the protests against the war or whatever. There were very profound sorts of—at least for me—profound challenges about how one lives one’s life.

And even the divorce—in a way it was a good thing my parents didn’t offer any help, moral support or otherwise, because I had to do it myself. I had to solve this problem and I did and I think I came out a stronger person because of that. So I don’t know. Maybe I just sort of built it step by step, the courage part.

I think the other is just knowing that I wanted to do something useful with my life. That energy was always there. When I was a kid I did volunteer work in the hospitals where my father worked. And when I first came to New York, during the Pop Council days, that job was really pretty much nine to five, more or less. So I volunteered four days a week at Belleview in the emergency wards where—this is before the renovation there—we had to have police escorts to go through the tunnels to take psychiatric cases. There were rats running in the corridors. They were grossly understaffed and I’d have to move whole beds on my own. I can remember running through corridors to get blood for transfusions in the infant intensive care units. I mean, it was like a hellhole out of Dickens. You know, it was unbelievable. But I loved that work. I felt so engaged, and so I always, one way or another, was orientated toward doing useful work.

Sharpless

Say more about the women that you observed in Peru.

Germain

Well, there were a lot of things that I observed. First of all, when we asked age, because we always did, I was just stunned by how much younger they were than they looked. These were women who had aged far before their time. Very often, in many of the communities, we would see very few men and when you asked, well, where are they, they’d often either migrated, if we were outside Lima, for work, or they just disappeared. And it also came out a lot of these women were battered. A lot of them were faced with what we these days now would call marital rape—I mean, really heavy-duty stuff. All these kids who were very, very sick, with runny noses and the terrible, deep chest coughs and protruding bellies. Peru was—in many ways, Peru still is—its main parts of its population exceedingly poor, and that was even more true back then. They had a lot of political problems.

And, of course, the other thing that I experienced—and, of course, I had done this tutoring in Roxbury during Wellesley—but the Spanish colonial imposition in Peru was among the most violent and the most destructive of indigenous culture. And I became very, very interested in the Incan civilizations and heritage and in the indigenous communities, of which there are many. And most of them are outside of Lima. It has changed a lot today, but still in those days, the indigenous populations were still concentrated in mountain towns and in the agricultural valleys along the coast and, of course, in the Amazon, which is a whole different tradition.

And what impressed me enormously was, though, for all of these women, living in these various circumstances, how strong they were. I mean, they there were going through the tortures of the damned as far as I could tell. And they weren’t getting any family planning, that’s for sure. I mean, it was very strict Roman Catholic country. What options did they have? They had no health care for themselves and almost none for their kids, and that was just not fair. They were doing whatever they could to earn what little income they had.

And they talked about—that’s where I first learned about what do men do with their wages. Well, they buy cigarettes, they drink, unless it’s a Muslim country like Bangladesh, where they take tea instead of alcohol, and then they beat up their wives and their kids. And so I was very, very profoundly affected by that. And I can still visualize the women. I see them very clearly. I have sort of a visual memory very often. If I can’t remember names, I’ll remember faces. And those images have stayed with me all these years.

Sharpless

You mentioned that the family you stayed with was violent.

Germain

Yeah. And there I really was young and I had no idea what to do about it. It had been very hard to find this place to stay and for whatever reasons, I didn’t talk to the Michigan people about it. I just thought I had to tough it out. And the room I stayed in was—

Sharpless

You wouldn’t break the confidence.

Germain

I guess. So I stayed in a little room that was hardly big enough for a single bed, and then you don’t have closets in many of these houses but a wardrobe, and that was it. And it faced on the street, the back gate, and it was the head of the stairs, before the bedrooms for the family. And it was one single shared bath. And this guy would come home very late and bang on this outside gate under my window and so on, to be let in, et cetera, and then there’d be all kinds of noise and screams and this, that, and the other—not every night, but often.

And fairly soon after I arrived and I wasn’t yet wary, I left my room to use the bathroom and I ran into this guy in the corridor and he had nothing on except his shorts, and I was just horrified because I had only dealt with his wife. And he made some comment to me, which of course I didn’t understand in Spanish, whatever it was. But whatever the tone was, it just made me really afraid. So I just sort of pushed passed him and I locked the door in the bathroom and my own room didn’t have a lock so I took the chair, which was there, and put it under the door, wedged it under the door every night. And finally this woman threw him out and then the banging on the gates was almost every night because he would come and insist to be let in and she didn’t let him in.

Sharpless

How many children?

Germain

Three—and young. Then after she threw him out, of course, my rent, whatever I was paying, which couldn’t have been much, was important to her and I felt loyalty to her. And in that sense we couldn’t communicate much because of my language problems, but she always talked to me over this dreadful mushed-up papaya that was my breakfast. You know, she’d jabber along and I’d get parts of it. (laughs) So it was another one of those personal developmental experiences, I guess.

Sharpless

But when you saw women being treated in the aggregate instead of seeing—you would see those faces.

Germain

Yes, and their children, and the girls. Because, of course, we also were asking all kinds of questions about the education, schooling, children in school. It was always the boys who were in school, especially in the rural areas, not the girls. And, of course, the girls were there and you could see them helping their mothers at very young ages, which, of course, that was my first exposure. Now, after all these years of experience, I know that that’s the way things are in the world, but at the time I didn’t know any of that. So it had a very profound effect.

So when I wrote this budget memo and the vice president said, “Okay, go for it,” there was nobody to give me any sort of guidance or what have you. So I undertook self-education. I mean, in the Ford Foundation one thing is for sure. Of course, these days you’d be inundated with electronic information, but in those days it was paper information and it was just mountains of it. So I could just absorb it like a sponge and anything I wanted to have I could order, or whatever. Anybody I wanted to see I could go talk to, because—

Sharpless

Did they give you any kind of time frame?

Germain

Well, I’m trying to remember, now. There’s a later time frame that I remember. I don’t think they did, and it was okay because soon enough—I mean, for a while, until they recruited another staff person, which actually is an interesting part of the story, I continued to handle the university studies grants. And the Ford and Rockefeller foundations had a joint research fellowship at that time—program. I can’t remember—probably at least a quarter of a million dollars a year in research awards based on applications submitted. We’d call it an RFP [request for proposal] these days but—and so, I was responsible on the Ford end and Mary [M.] Kritz was responsible on the Rockefeller end. Mary Kritz is another name that you’ve probably come across. And I’m trying to remember, what else did I do. In other words, I still had population work that I did. I don’t remember that there was a particular time frame.

Sharpless

They just said, basically, Go and do this.

Germain

Yeah, but they didn’t give me a budget to do it. Of course, at that time I didn’t realize how hair-raising it would be to persuade people who did have budgets to spend money on things I thought were important. But I was young and energetic and I said, “Okay, that’s good.” And maybe that’s, again, something that had an enormous impact on how I’ve now done my professional work and how we designed the Coalition, because the whole point is to get people with more money and power to support these issues in their own work, rather than to do something separate, or to do it for them. And that’s carried through from these very beginnings.

So I spent—first of all, I decided what I could tell, and what I remembered from Peru, certainly, was that the economic issues were the most staggering for women. And I didn’t know that subject at all. And I decided, because Ford was so heavily invested in agriculture development, agriculture extension programs, all kinds of hands-on-type training, credit, all that sort of stuff. They also were inventing higher-yielding rices and all that sort of stuff in research centers around the world. But the part I was interested in was the extension services and the credit programs.

And lo and behold, of course, when I looked into it, there were no extension services for women. What they did in agriculture had no technical input. Very often what they were doing was the food processing, what’s called secondary-crop production, so not the rice and the wheat but the vegetables and the lentils and so on. They almost always have, whenever it’s feasible, if they’re not landless, a vegetable patch right by the house. They have chickens, they have all kinds of stuff, but there was no ag extension for them, or credit to enable them to do this work better.

And, of course, the home economics people, all they cared about was, you know, giving them the eight categories of food in a day when these women didn’t have money to pay for two categories of food, let alone meat on the table. I mean, please. It was so awful. And I made a critique of the home economics colleges that nearly blew the lid off everybody, because people have been very comfortable for a long time funding these colleges and I decided to investigate and really look at the curriculum. Then I came back and I said, “Hey, this has no relevance—zero. And stop blaming women for their malnourished kids. It’s poverty that’s doing this. And if the men didn’t spend so much money on cigarettes and tea or alcohol maybe things would be a little better.”

But this was in the days before any research had been done to document—which is now documented, and we helped fund some of that from the Ford Foundation—but when a woman has income at the family level, she does allocate most of it for her children and the basic survival of the household, whereas the expenditure surveys with men clearly document the leisure time, the cigarettes, the alcohol, the clothes, et cetera, unnecessary clothes, like western-style shirts or whatever. But in those days we didn’t have that, so a lot of what I initiated at the beginning was research on household expenditure, on time allocation in the household.

Then I got into a whole new strain of economics that was developing at the time under Paul Schultz, in Chicago, the Nobel laureate, there. I went out to see him. I talked to him. I worked with his son—T. Paul Schultz is at Yale—on something called the new household economics, which wasn’t home economics, but it was micro-level economics that was really ground-breaking at its time, and helping many development economists understand how households make decisions and blah, blah.

There was only one problem. These models all assume that households have one decision maker, which even at the most depressed level, women are not entirely out of household decision making. So what I was challenging them to do—and this went into a whole line of work for quite a period of time, and coming from the Ford Foundation in those days it had that kind of weight, even if I was twenty-six years old—I said, “You know, these models are useless, if you recognize the reality that unless it’s a female head of household, every household has two decision makers, not one.” And we struggled over that for years. And finally they told me, Look, Adrienne, if we were to add a second decision maker into our model, the equations would run off the paper. We can’t do it. I said, “Okay, you can’t do it, so think of an alternative, because the reality is that household decisions are a negotiation.” They said, But, oh, yes, the household is maximizing their outcome—meaning that they assume that all members have the same motivations and the same desired outcomes and goals. Well, of course I knew from an empirical way that very often the household was the worst discriminator against women in the countries that I knew about, and that in fact all household members benefit and welfare was not maximized. The male household members’ welfare was maximized and that’s what I was trying to get these guys to look into.

Well, at that time a wonderful man named Abe Weisblat was at another institution founded by John Rockefeller III called the Agricultural Development Council, which no longer exists. Abe was in charge of their very enormous fellowship and training program. We met through a mutual friend. And Abe, who was much older than I was—maybe he was late fifties, sixty, at the time that I was twenty-six or something, and he was very intrigued by what I had to say. So he decided that all of his agriculture economist friends should take me seriously.

And literally, I traveled with Abe across Asia, mostly India and the Philippines, Pakistan, parts of Latin America—not Africa. And he introduced me, for example, to Raj Krishna, who is one of the greatest development economists who ever lived. In those days he was younger, too. And through the Agricultural Development Council and with the name of the Ford Foundation we convened a series of meetings with people as high up as Raj Krishna, who was the head of the planning commission at the time, which is a big deal in India, and many other senior economists. Sam Hsei was the head of the Asian Development Bank. All these people that Abe knew very well—a Stanford economist—oh gosh, what was his name? very prominent, trained all of the Indonesian economists who then in the decades since have run Indonesia, Wally Falcon, and was very big in the agriculture field. Took me out to Stanford, you know, he just supported me all the way. Somehow Abe knew that there was something to this. And Abe spent his life anyway investing in younger people. He was a remarkable man, remarkable.

Anyhow, so we then generated—we, the Ford Foundation, but mostly I was doing the work—a whole series of seminars, publications, you name it, having to do with gender differentials and rural wage rates. Gender differentials in agriculture labor patterns—who produces what?—and these time-allocation studies, which at that time were vital for the development of micro-level economic modeling, and so on. And none of it took into account any gender differentials. None of this ongoing work at that period was gender sensitive. So we created quite a body of work and I think we influenced some people’s minds, but it went very slowly.

And at one meeting [with] Raj Krishna, we were in Hyderabad, India—I will never forget it, very beautiful outside the city, and it was sunrise. I love sunrise in the subcontinent. I was having my tea sitting out on a rock and he was going for his morning walk and we got to talking and I expressed my frustration. We’ve been through two days with all these ag economists who just really were not—we weren’t getting anywhere. And I still face that kind of chicken/egg problem. You know, the skeptics and the opponents put the burden of proof on us: If you demand gender analysis, they say, well, prove to us that it’s important enough to invest the money and the time to do it. Well, we can’t do it until the people who control the surveys decide to ask women the same questions they’re asking men and generate the data. I mean, so you’re in a Catch 22 situation all the time.

Well, so Raj Krishna comes up to me that morning and I express my frustration and he says, “Listen, Adrienne, we’re getting somewhere. It’s better than when we started and we are making progress here. But I, of all people, am going to tell you that there’s going to come a point where you can only go so far with the intellectual and empirical, evidence-based work. And you need to do that and it’s great that you’re doing it. But basically women are going to have to mobilize. You’re just going to have to take to the streets.” And this is from India’s top economist, who I think had extraordinary vision and understanding at that time about the enormous resistance to gender equality in any of its guises. And this was probably about 1970—would have been about ’76.

I skipped over other parts of the history which actually are important. We could go back to them. But I’ve never forgotten that. You know, there are certain quotes, certain people along the way in my life, many of them men, and from the mainstream, who had enormous insight but also really decided, even if they didn’t fully understand or even if they didn’t see the truth as I saw it, somehow they felt that there was something there.

Sharpless

Well, what about—oh, my tape’s about to run out.

Tape 2, side 1, ends; side 2 begins.

You were talking about other things that had happened before 1976 and I was going to ask, what about—and I don’t know if this was where you going to head or not—what was going on with you and feminism and the women’s movement?

Germain

Yeah, well, what happened in that is I still hadn’t read anything in terms of feminist literature. I was never in any consciousness-raising groups. I had no idea, no even realization that feminism was out there. It never occurred to me. So the key things that happened along the way were that first—and I had come to Ford in October of ’72. Just about a year later, and after the vice president had asked me to do this work, Bud Harkavy hired another staff person, a young man about my age whose one difference from me when I was hired was that he had a Ph.D. in hand, I think probably from Princeton. And just because I’ve always been an observer—maybe that’s why I liked sociology—sometimes I think I should have been an anthropologist and maybe that’s why I was caught up in this participant-observation methodology or whatever—but without thinking about it, I observed his socialization into this office. And it was so entirely different from what I had experienced. And that was the like the first sort of light bulb in an ideological—or political, maybe, is a better word, in a political sense, that I realize that I had been treated differently.

All these years I saw the oppression of all the women that I’ve been talking about, but I didn’t ever feel like I’d ever experienced discrimination, and discrimination wasn’t really what I was interested in. It was rather the terrible poverty and the injustice that these women faced, the violence and so on, but I hadn’t conceptualized it as discrimination or whatever. Well, I mean, it was just so dramatic that I noticed and I had my own things to do, so I didn’t get angry about it or anything, but it just was interesting to me.

Then along about that same time I met Joan Dunlop, who’s a very important figure in all this. In 1973, she had been secretary of the Ford Foundation. She came from England. She had her own very independent life history. She’s thirteen years older than I am and she had worked for a wonderful man at the Ford Foundation called Paul Ylvisaker, who died when he was—he was an education specialist. But she, Joan, went to work for John Rockefeller III to manage his population philanthropy, his own individual philanthropy. And he was a remarkable man, but he brought Joan in, having established the Population Council in 1952, and shared his board for all those years, having been introduced by his father to some of the same kinds of scenes perhaps that I had seen. But what he took away from those scenes was masses of people living in too little space on too little land in deep poverty. He didn’t see any gender element to it.

So he had established the Pop Council and was a leader, really, along with the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller, in supporting people like Paul Ehrlich and others who said, The world is going to hell in a hand basket: if we don’t control population growth, nothing else matters. That was the mentality. Well, J.D.R was a remarkable man. He hired Joan and he said to her, “Joan, there is something wrong with this field and I don’t know what it is, but your first job is to find out.”

So if you work for John Rockefeller, like being at the Ford Foundation, you could meet anybody. So Joan started out on this search and she went to all the obvious people in the population field and she came back to John Rockefeller and said to him, basically, “My conclusion is that a very small number of men control all the money and the ideas in this field. They have a stranglehold on it and there is really no innovation. And I don’t know what the innovation should be,” she said, “but whatever you think is wrong, Mr. Rockefeller, probably lies in that fact.” So he said, “Well, okay. That’s interesting.”

And so, her next step then was to try to find iconoclasts. She didn’t put it that way, but she went to Susan Berresford, who was a program officer in the domestic program at Ford in those days, and they had known each other in city government. Joan had been in the [New York City mayor John] Lindsey administration and worked with him in the Port Authority—I don’t know, whatever. So she and Susan knew each other. And Susan was sort of buried under Mike Svirdorf in the domestic urban poverty program. He gave her a budget every year and she spent quite a bit of it on women, but never made any noise. I didn’t really know her.

So Joan made her case to Susan and said, you know, “I have got to find people with different ideas here. Do you have any suggestions?” And Susan is sort of like the Kingsley Davis–Judith Blake situation. Somehow Susan had noticed my work. I have no idea when, how, why, but she said to Joan, “Well, there’s a very interesting young women in Bud Harkavy’s office. Why don’t you talk to her?” So I get this call from Joan Dunlop and she invites me out to dinner. And again I was so naive and inexperienced—really, truly. I had no idea what was going on—sort of like Bud Harkavy calling me out of the blue—and I was sort of nervous and anxious. We went to a Chinese restaurant near her house on Third Avenue and Seventy-third Street. And I guess it was sort of like this interview. I don’t know, we must have talked for four hours, and neither one of us is a night person. And by the end of the conversation she said, “Well,” she said, “That’s it.” So she went back to Mr. Rockefeller and told him, “Okay, I’ve figured out what’s wrong with this field. It’s racist and sexist. And there’s this really interesting young woman who I’ve learned this from and that’s what you need to go after.”

Well, Mr. Rockefeller, to give him credit—because unlike the sort of rapacious image that attaches to the so-called robber baron families and so on, Mr. Rockefeller was an extraordinary man, deeply humane. And actually his population interest had been in response to the terrible poverty of people that he saw. He was very concerned about people’s wellbeing and welfare. It wasn’t population control so the rich could have a nicer life. There are those around, but that wasn’t Mr. Rockefeller. So he had always been engaged in that arena and in the agricultural development arena to produce food for all these people because he really cared what people’s lives were like.

So basically, what he did was set Joan loose. And, of course, Joan upset a whole lot of people when she came out with that message, because J.D.R was a very powerful figure in the field at the time, and if he hadn’t been killed in a car accident in ’78, I think we might have actually made a lot of change a lot earlier in the field. Because the next thing that happened was—this was ’73 when Joan and I met and at first, she started—one thing [about] John Rockefeller was that he had invested in a U.S. commission on population growth and the U.S. future, and this I think must have been in the Carter years—my history is terrible, but anyway, the early ’70s. And he had chaired the commission. It was a presidential commission. But the presidents changed and I think just about at that moment—I know what the outcome was [but] I can’t remember when the changes happened—but basically the new president either downgraded the commission itself or refused to receive its report, I can’t remember which. Because the commission basically concluded that really the major population program in the world was in the United States and it had to do with A, with the consumption patterns—that we were consuming so many, many, many more times than a child born in Nepal or whatever. And this ran directly counter to the Paul Ehrlich population-bomb kind of idea, with the neo-Malthusian-type ides that were driving the field.

And I forgot to mention that during all this political stuff at Berkeley, another thing that I got engaged in was zero population growth. Paul Ehrlich had published his book in ’69. He had activists on all the campuses. I was recruited to the speaker’s bureau—being this terribly shy person, I don’t know how they saw it but somehow they did. I did all kinds of strategy sessions, sitting on the couch in his house. I can’t believe this now, looking back on this. And I now know that all the speaking that I did to community groups and high schools and all that, the people who were on the platform with me were what we now call Right to Life people, anti-abortion types. But in those days you didn’t have those labels. And the reason I got involved was that I learned while I was at Berkeley that the only money that was available in the international arena that might assist in any way the women in Peru was the so-called population money. So that much I was beginning to learn about the reality of the world, because there were all these national family planning programs. And if they weren’t existing yet, then the U.S. government was pushing them. And so, I thought, Well, okay, zero population growth—if we can persuade people that population is important, then Congress will give more money for the women in Peru or India or wherever else.

So going back then to the story, once Mr. Rockefeller had accepted Joan’s analysis that the field was racist and sexist, Joan then had to figure out what to do. And this is mid ’73. And at the same time, she was busy matchmaking because she decided that this young golden-haired “boy” who had staffed the U.S. population commission for Mr. Rockefeller should meet me. And there’s a reason for this story. She introduces the two of us and I totally, totally—infatuation right off the bat. Just, you know, bingo. So we continued—actually, he was not trained in demography or sociology but the three of us would have dinner all the time and we’d gossip about the field and we’d brainstorm and all this.

And then suddenly what comes on to the radar screen, must have been late ’73, is Mr. Rockefeller was asked by the UN to make a speech at the 1974 World Population Conference in Bucharest, which was the first really world conference. There had been a meeting in Teheran, Iran, in 1968, which actually Mr. Rockefeller had attended, I think. But it wasn’t a global conference and it was not a UN undertaking. So Joan has the responsibility to write the speech along with Mr. Rockefeller’s speech writer. And so, the three of us—the man who became my second husband, Steve Salyer, Joan, and I—wrote the speech. Well, Joan’s not the intellect or the writer. I wrote the speech. And then she and Steve worked with Mr. Rockefeller. But in order to write the speech we had many meetings with Mr. Rockefeller.

In those days the Rainbow Room was still his, and you’d go and you’d have this lunch at the top of that tower, in the Rainbow Room of all places—Manhattan at your feet. And who was I? Nobody. Anyway, so we went through I don’t know how many drafts of the speech and how many conversations, and the fact of the matter is, the accusations came later, but as we worked this through and I talked with him about the women in Peru and asked him to remember what he had seen in all of his travels and all these kinds of things and told him about the Population Council, and et cetera, we basically framed a speech, which I hopefully still have around—we do have it somewhere—which today would look exceedingly tame. But those words coming out of Mr. Rockefeller’s mouth in Bucharest in 1974 were world-shaking, in terms of the population world.

People have gone to their graves angry, and one of them was Barney Berelson. He, first of all, was very annoyed that Mr. Rockefeller didn’t ask him to write the speech, and then when he found out that Joan and these two little upstarts, Steve Salyer and Adrienne Germain, were writing the speech, he was beside himself. And he went to Mr. Rockefeller and complained. And Mr. Rockefeller just said, “Barney, these are the ides that I’m interested—and what I want to do.” So, he’s a very graceful, gracious man. Barney was rather short, energized, round, argumentative person. And Mr. Rockefeller was very tall and very elegant. I don’t know. I wasn’t there, but I can just imagine, really. And so, there was not for those days a lot of press coverage in Bucharest, and so and so forth. Not too long after that, well, immediately after the speech, the man who had created and who still at that time headed the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which still exists—his name was Fred Jaffe. They were mostly on the domestic side in those days, but nonetheless they had a world view and they were funded by Ford and Rockefeller and all that.

And his second deputy, who took over later on, Jeannie Rosoff—they asked me to sit with them and talk for a while and they proceeded to shred me. They just went on at length about how misguided this speech was, how it would destroy the field, it would destroy all the motivation they had built up in the Congress over the years to fund population work. It would just set back the field who knows how many years.

Sharpless

Why did they think that?

Germain

The speech basically said the message that I set out earlier, which, of course, had been empirically demonstrated in Judith Blake and Kingsley Davis’s research, but what I had seen in Peru in 1968, which is, if you’re going to ask women to have fewer children, when everything in their lives dictates that for their own safety and their own survival they need to have as many children as the man wants, then you really have to give women options. And at the bare minimum this speech said, you need to be sure that girls can get education and that women can get employment. It was a fairly simple, in my view, very reality-centered perspective. It wasn’t about abortion. It wasn’t about all of the concerns that we developed later, very soon later, about the abysmal quality of family planning service delivery, the abuses that were happening in these national family planning programs. It wasn’t about any of that stuff. It was just making the simple point that you can’t just give contraceptives to women. You’ve got to give them some options in their lives.

That was revolutionary at that moment, and the reason they were so angry about it was that, I think, that the field up until then, in terms of those who were delivering, helping design these national programs and delivering contraceptive services, their only engagement in the research side had been the program evaluation. Are we handing out enough pills? Can we make some calculations that show that this many women are using pills for so long and that means X number of points off the birth rate? I mean, that was the pure demographic view of things.

And the postpartum program that had seemed to me so wrong somehow, when I went to the Council to begin with, I then had begun to understand why it was so wrong, because any woman who was giving birth—first of all, most births aren’t occurring in facilities because the women are too poor and the facilities are too hostile and in any case even if they’re there, [they’re of such] poor quality that women go there to die, basically. I knew that from Peru.

So I was trying to imagine, Who were these postpartum women? Well, the only ones who get there are the ones who have had a really terrible time—obstructed labor, whatever. And the wealthy ones weren’t the subject of these family planning programs. The wealthy ones who were delivering in private clinics or hospitals, they weren’t part of the postpartum program. Postpartum was public health system. And they’d just been through the whole, very often for them, trauma of birth. This is not necessarily your joyous, chosen moment. They need to breast feed.

Nothing was known at that time about hormonal contraception and breast milk but there were suspicions that you shouldn’t breastfeed and be on hormonal contraception. IUDs were so crude at the time that what turned out later on, as I recall it, was that some of these very high failure rates of IUDs were because they were expelled after being inserted immediately postpartum. Well, I mean, anybody with any common sense knowing what birth is about would think, you know, the IUD probably isn’t appropriate. It just didn’t seem like to me that the woman postpartum, having delivered in an institution, was really a major focus or should be a major focus. What maybe they should try to do would be to ensure that she came back for one-month and three-month checkups and at the three-month checkup or maybe even one-month you could talk to her and say, Look, if you don’t want to conceive again soon, then don’t count on amenorrhea to protect you. We can give you condoms. We can give you whatever if you’re still breastfeeding.

So I wasn’t against talking with women postpartum, but the day after they deliver? I mean, what—ahhh. Anyway, so I think Fred and Jeannie were so angry and, of course, they weren’t going to express their anger to— not directly, anyway—to Mr. Rockefeller. They didn’t explain their anger to me very well. So I can’t really tell you why they were angry. What I can only hypothesize is that the field, as of that time, had designed these very narrow, what we call vertical family planning service delivery programs, that as much as possible tried to avoid the health system, that didn’t deal with absolutely any other aspect of women’s lives—no child health, no pregnancy care, nothing. They were just straightforward delivery of family planning. And, you know, Rei Ravenholt went so far as—have you heard the story about the blue lady pills?

Sharpless

No.

Germain

Okay, well, these early packets of pills: Rei Ravenholt came up with the idea of packaging them for Pakistan in a white envelope that had the silhouette in blue of a woman’s face on it. So that’s how it came to be called blue lady. And he was such a fanatic. He used to joke—I don’t think they ever did this, but he used to say, “Women in Pakistan are so backward and they’re not using contraception. You know, what we really ought to do is just fly airplanes low over the country and drop them from planes.” This was the kind of thinking that went on in those days.

So all I can figure about their rage—and Barney was enraged, also. I mean, he was angry because he had been cut out of the speech, but he was also angry because what he really wanted was these incentive schemes. His article about beyond family planning was primarily focused on developing various kinds of schemes to motivate women to use contraception. Use it for so long and you don’t have a pregnancy within two years or something then you get, I don’t know, a bank account or you get something. Or if you come and get an IUD, we’ll pay you thirty dollars—these various kind of schemes, which, as you know, I mentioned I was very critical of.

But the mentality there I think was such that when I basically said that part and parcel of population programs should be girl’s education and women’s employment. And I think to them that meant taking money away from population, meaning these vertical contraceptive services, and putting it in something else.

Sharpless

Okay, we need to stop for you to go to your next appointment. Is there anything quick that you want to say before you head to the subway? Or we can pick it up exactly here in the morning?

Germain

I don’t think so. And where we can pick it up in the morning just be easier to help to get restarted is with the UN conference that followed Bucharest, which was the 1975 First World Conference on Women in Mexico City.

Sharpless