Sophia Smith Collection - Population and Reproductive Health Oral History Project

Population and Reproductive Health

Oral History Project

Frances Kissling

Interviewed by Rebecca Sharpless

September 13–14, 2002

Washington, D.C.

Sharpless Today is September the thirteenth, the year 2002. My name is Rebecca Sharpless and this is the first oral history interview with Ms. Frances Kissling. The interview is taking place at Ms. Kissling’s office at Catholics for a Free Choice, 1436 U Street in Washington, D.C. It’s part of the Population Pioneers Project. Okay, I really appreciate your seeing me this Friday afternoon, after a long night of proposal writing, but I think what we’ll do today is just start, as we often do, and tell me your whole name and when and where you were born.

Kissling Okay, well, my whole name is Frances Kissling.

Sharpless Okay.

Kissling I was born in New York City in 1943, but I spent the first four years of my life with my mother and grandparents in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, because my father was in the war. And then when he came back from the war we moved back to Queens, New York, which is pretty much where I grew up.

Sharpless Okay. Tell me a little bit more about your family.

Kissling Well, my mother is, I think, as with many people in this area of work, my mother is the principal parent with whom I had a strong relationship. My mother was an iconoclast, in her own way, from youth. She left Nanticoke, Pennsylvania. She was one of seven—the youngest of seven children—left Nanticoke—Polish Americans—left Nanticoke as soon as she graduated from high school, came to New York, became pregnant with me, and got married, in that order.

I was the first of four children, two by my father, whose name was Thomas Romanski, so I actually grew up Frances Romanski. And then my mother and father divorced when I was about six—between five and six, before I entered first grade—and I had one sister [Sharon] at that point, so there were two Romanski children. And my mother remarried a German Protestant—German ancestry—a German-American protestant named Charles Kissling, and had two more children [Peter William and Kyle Charlene]. And so there were four of us in the family. It was the ’50s, and so eventually what happened when I was, I think, about nine years old [was that] my stepfather adopted the two Romanskis and we all became Kissling, which was much more convenient. All the children went to Catholic school. This was an era in which divorce and remarriage was even less accepted than it is now. And so that’s how I came to be Frances Kissling, as opposed to Frances Romanski.

Sharpless Okay.

Kissling Every once in a while I’d love to go back to being Romanski, which I think is a better name, but it’s too much trouble at a certain point in life to make such big changes. And I grew up in a—my family was working class. I’m the oldest of four. I grew up in Queens and I went to parochial grammar schools and to Catholic high schools—I went to two Catholic high schools. And then after high school I went to St. John’s University, a Catholic college, for one year. Left St. John’s and entered the Sisters of St. Joseph in Brentwood, Long Island. Stayed there for about nine months and left there. I went back to St. John’s for another year and then transferred to the New School for Social Research, which is where I received my bachelor’s degree.

Sharpless Okay, great. Well, let’s back up and fill in some of those things. Tell me about what the Church was like when you were growing up, say, before you started high school.

Kissling Yeah, well, the Church was, of course—the Church was conservative, or at least—I mean at that point I don’t think you even knew or were sensitive to whether it was conservative or liberal or progressive. It was just the Church. There were rules, and nuns wore habits, and school was pretty much sex-segregated—boys were on one floor and girls were on the other floor.

Sharpless But it wasn’t a girls’ school?

Kissling It wasn’t an all-girls grammar school. It was an all-girls high school. You know it’s that process of when do you send—when do you really, really, really need to separate young people? When they go to high school? So they don’t do bad things if they’re in the same school with each other. So that was when it became sex-segregated. But the classes were—in fact, I think the way it went, if I remember correctly, we were boys and girls in the same class till about the fourth or the fifth grade. And then we switched to all-girl classes and all-boy classes, even though we were in the same school. And, you know, pretty much the way you led your life was in an all-girls environment. I mean, I didn’t play with boys. And there was always the playground: the boys were over on one side being rowdy and the girls were being less rowdy on their side—more talking with the girls—the boys were playing and the girls were chit-chatting with each other. There was more of that. For me, it was probably a little bit different than for other kids because my mother was divorced and remarried.

Sharpless When she remarried, she didn’t remarry in the Church?

Kissling No, she didn’t get an annulment, she didn’t remarry in the Church and she didn’t marry a Catholic. And at that point, even a first marriage to a non-Catholic would have been a big deal and there would have been real questions even around that. So I was always aware of the fact that my mother was not—was different. She was not accepted by the Church.

Sharpless What about your siblings who were born of this union then? Did the Church make any discrimination against them?

Kissling No. I think that the notion that children were discriminated against, or the children were bastards or they weren’t legitimate, or all of those kinds of things—I think a lot more is made of that than certainly is the reality of my experience. I mean, there was never any sense of stigma on any of us—although, my mother, because she was the Catholic in the partnership, was stigmatized. She was unable to receive the sacraments. Divorced and remarried Catholics can’t receive the sacraments. My mother wasn’t interested in being a Catholic. I mean, it was like it didn’t matter to her.

Sharpless Why did she send you all to parochial school then?

Kissling Parochial schools are good schools. I mean, again, even in that time during the ’50s, a parochial school education was perceived in the community as a better education, certainly, even though the problems in the ’50s in public schools were chewing gum and rough-housing, not guns and drugs. But I think even within that context the sense was there was a greater discipline within the Catholic schools. My mother was perfectly happy with us receiving a religious education and the values that went with that. They took us to Mass on Sunday. My parents would drive us to Mass on Sunday, but my mother never went to Mass.

Sharpless They would drive you to Mass and drop you off?

Kissling Yes, and then pick us up when it was over. But my mother had no personal interest in participating in the Church. And perhaps the most significant moment in—I was always religious, in the sense that—not in a pious sense, I was never a pious child. I never did much praying. The rosary never appealed to me, but more the conceptual message of Christianity and of Catholicism was of value to me.

Sharpless Okay.

Kissling And I remember, you know, talking frequently with the priest I went to confession to about my mother’s situation. One of the defining moments for me in terms of the work that I do is—many of the defining moments are around my mother and her situation in life. The priest said to me, “Well, why don’t you have your mother come and visit me and maybe I can do something for her?” I was probably in the sixth or seventh grade when this happened. And so I bugged my mother to go see Father Ryan and, “maybe he can do something and it will all be all right.” I don’t think I ever really believed like my mother was going to hell or any of that kind of stuff, because the religious education was not reinforced in the home. And my own experience as a working-class Catholic is that the nuns were, of course, the most liberated women I knew, even though they were traditional. They didn’t have men. They didn’t have to worry about a husband. They didn’t have kids. They were well educated. Many of them were fascinating in their idiosyncrasies as well as in their knowledge and intelligence. So I always liked the nuns, which I think was why—the model for me of the best you could do as a woman, other than get married, was to become a nun. And you know, I think that’s a fairly typical experience of a certain subset of women within Catholicism.

So anyway, my mother went to see Father Ryan. She came home and I said, “Well, what’s the story?” She was a bit sardonic and understated. And she said, “Well, Father Ryan said that if I wanted to be reconciled with the Church I wouldn’t have to leave your stepfather because of economics.” You know, [that would be] very hard in a working-class economy. My mother never went to work until I was seventeen years old. “And so we could stay together, but we had to live as brother and sister.”

This didn’t mean a lot to me at that stage. You know, I now see it in much greater significance. But the sexual aspects of my parents’ life or anyone’s life at the age of twelve were not a high priority in my—or I just didn’t understand them. And she said, “If I did that I could receive the sacraments. I could go to communion,” which is basically what remarried Catholics can’t do. “And I could receive the sacrament of reconciliation, penance, and be forgiven for my sins, et cetera, but I would have to go [in private to the rectory or to parishes where I was not known]—I couldn’t receive communion in the Church with everybody else.”

And this is the basic Catholic shtick to this day, because that would give scandal to other people. Because, of course, other people would not know that my mother was not having sex with my stepfather and so they would not understand how this divorced woman, who is remarried and living with the man she is remarried to—they would assume she is having sex, and they would assume that something was wrong here that she was allowed to receive the sacraments at the Church, or the priests were not obeying the rules of the Church. So she would have to go to the rectory, where the priests live, and receive communion in private. And I was outraged. That part of it I knew was wrong. This was—something is wrong here that somebody has to go to the kitchen door to receive the sacraments, because they can’t handle this notion of scandal.

My mother never complied with this. She did what I asked her [to see the priest], which was gracious of her, but it wasn’t something that appealed to her. And I remember talking to the priest about it and telling him what I thought. And he said, “Well, you know, what do you want me to do? I’m doing the best I can.” He was a youngish, modern priest himself, but modern again within the context of the times and within the strictures of the Roman Catholic Church.

But we never—I mean, my mother was active. It was interesting, because she was one of the mothers who did things for the sisters, because sisters didn’t drive cars at that time. They didn’t go out alone. If Sister had to go to the doctor or she wanted to go shopping or she needed to do something, the mothers in the school would pick them up, drive them where they had to go. So she had somewhat of a relationship with some of the sisters and did those kinds of things with them.

Sharpless You mentioned other defining moments around your mother. What are some more things?

Kissling Well, I think in general, just—not so much around Catholicism, but just—I mean, my mother was a woman who was married, divorced, remarried, divorced. When I was an adult my mother lived with a man she wasn’t married to—in her fifties, you know, late forties and early fifties. She was a person who was very smart, not terribly well educated. She had a high school diploma but no formal education beyond that—hard working, all of those kinds of things.

The other thing that I think is important in terms of the work that I do is that my mother never should have had children. My mother didn’t really want any of us. She was in many ways a very interesting parent, but in other ways, a very distant parent. She wasn’t a toucher. She would’ve been much happier—she would’ve had a much better life if she had not become pregnant with me and continued the pregnancy.

And it’s interesting. I talk about that not very often, for no other reason than I think there is a limit to the extent exposing one’s personal life when you are a political figure makes sense. I mean, it’s always kind of an element of give and take in it. Sometimes I do it and I think it’s useful for people. Other times I think people can’t really understand it in the same way they would understand it in personal context, that there’s too much risk of people interpreting it in the light of the way they see reality, you know [if you do tell your story]. And so you end up with a cheapened personal life, because people say, Ah, you see, that’s why she does this. She did this because her mother was divorced and remarried and she hates the Church. She’s very angry at the Church. That’s what’s going on. Or, She did it because she never had a proper formation. She didn’t really grow up in the right kind of Catholic family. Maybe she hates her mother.

But I remember recently, a couple of years ago, I did a presentation at Boston College, which was sponsored actually by the Evangelical Christian ministry at Boston College—because the Catholic ministry never would have invited me.

Sharpless Right.

Kissling Forget it. And a student came up to me afterwards, one of the evangelical kids, and a woman, and she said, “You really should reflect on the fact that you should be so grateful that your mother had you and she didn’t have an abortion.” I said, “Look, I want to tell you something.” And I said, “My mother never should have had children. She had a miserable life in certain ways because she had children. And I would gladly not have been born for my mother to have had a better life. It would have been okay with me.”

And again, that whole thing—as a fetus, you are nothing, in that sense. You can’t have this reflective sense of your own life. But as the adult you become you can reflect on that and make some decisions. In that sense, it would’ve been okay not to come into [the world]—it would’ve been all right. But if it would’ve been good for my mother, it would’ve been okay.

Sharpless I understand.

Kissling Yeah.

Sharpless How did your mother talk about these things? How old were you for example when you found out that you’d been conceived out of wedlock?

Kissling Hmm. I found out when I wanted to go into the convent, because you have to give your birth certificate in order to go in. And it was, at that point, against the rules, the general rules of the convent, to accept someone who had been conceived out of wedlock.

Sharpless Wow.

Kissling So this was how I discovered it. Here was the birth certificate. Oh—you have to give your parents’ marriage certificate, that’s what it was. You needed the marriage certificate. So it was evident, at the age of nineteen, from the date of the marriage and the date of the birth—I seem to remember my mother and father were married in February 1943, and I was born in June 1943, so she was already pregnant. So we talked about it and she was open about it. And there was a lot of—so there was a whole rigmarole: should I be accepted into the order? Would they make an exception? They decided to make an exception, although it was very clear that they were forced to make the exception. And when I sort of decided to leave—with a little push—they were very glad I was going.

In fact, I remember, my exit interview was interesting. I went up to the attic of the convent—a very large convent. There were about seventy women who entered the order at the same time as I did. And one day the mistress of postulants who was in charge of us said, “Frances, do you want to go home?” And I said, “You know, yeah, I think I do.” And boy, they moved so fast to get me out of there. The next morning somebody came up to my elbow and said, “The Mother Superior would like to see you.” I went up to an attic and there was sort of a little French writing desk in this big, empty attic and Mother is sitting there in her straight-backed chair. And she said, “You know, we never wanted you.” And I went downstairs and I put my [street] clothes on and my mother came and picked me up and I went home. I mean, it was not the biggest deal in the world, but it was very, very, very interesting.

Sharpless Hmm. Well, we need to put your mother’s name into the record.

Kissling Florence Rynkiewicz.

Sharpless Spell it.

Kissling R-y-n-k-i-e-w-i-c-z.

Sharpless Polish?

Kissling It’s Polish. That’s her maiden name and she was Florence Romanski and then Florence Kissling. And she died Florence Kissling. She died very young. She died at the age of fifty-nine.

Sharpless Okay. What else about your mom and those defining moments as you were growing up?

Kissling I think that’s—

Sharpless What were your defining moments in the Church that made you want to continue as a Catholic young person?

Kissling Well, I think—as I said, I think a big piece of it was the extremely positive relationships that I had with nuns in schools. I was very close with any number of them. They were very good.

Sharpless What order were they?

Kissling Sisters of St. Jo[seph]—well, in grammar school—I went to four grammar schools.

Sharpless Why is that?

Kissling We moved a lot. We moved every—

Sharpless All within Queens?

Kissling All within Queens. So there were different orders for each of those. The Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart in the first school. The Sisters of St. Joseph in another school. I think all the other schools may have been Sisters of St. Joseph. And in high school I went to a special high school for gifted—for smart kids. It wasn’t for gifted kids. It was for smart kids. And there were five orders of nuns and each order taught in their area of specialty.

Sharpless How interesting.

Kissling Yeah. So, for example, the Daughters of Wisdom, who are sort of the Sally Field ones with the big bonnets. And this French order taught French. The Dominicans taught math, music, and German. Another order taught—the Josephites—taught English and something else. So you had the pick—

Sharpless That’s really interesting.

Kissling —the cream of the sisterhood, in terms of who the teachers were.

Sharpless Fascinating.

Kissling Yeah.

Sharpless So how did you decide to go to St. John’s?

Kissling Um—

Sharpless And which St. John’s is it?

Kissling Not the good St. John’s, the bad St. John’s. (Sharpless laughs) I went to St. John’s University in Queens.

Sharpless Okay.

Kissling Well, first of all, the first decision—I mean, in my milieu, going to a secular [college meant losing your faith]—at that time in the Church—now we’re up to about—I think I graduated in ’61 from high school.

Sharpless So, right before Vatican II.

Kissling Right before Vatican II, and you didn’t go—and very, very few people went to a non-Catholic college. If you go to a non-Catholic college you are going to lose your faith.

Sharpless What percentage of the young women from your high school went to college?

Kissling Most—I don’t know what the percentage is, but most. This was a, you know—

Sharpless College prep?

Kissling College prep program and most people—it was more unusual not to go than to go.

Sharpless What were you smart young Catholic women going to do after you went to college?

Kissling We were going to become teachers. I don’t think you would’ve found many who were—we’d get married—most would get married. You’d become a teacher. Some would go, of course, into nursing. A few odd people would have stronger ambitions than that. But mostly—again, it’s a working-class—most of my classmates were probably the first—as I was—the first person in their family to go to college. And so the level of expectation, even among very bright women, was not very high in terms of academics.

Sharpless But that was the early ’60s, too.

Kissling Yes. Exactly. I mean I think it’s a combination both of—that’s the way women were, although obviously a good number of women did get graduate degrees and did become professionals. So pretty much that was the expectation. I was only going to go to college for one year, because I was entering the convent.

Sharpless Okay, at what point did you make that decision?

Kissling I made that decision when I was probably in my—during my junior and senior years, my junior year of high school. I was encouraged—everyone—I was always seen as a bit counterculture and so there was a sense that it would be a good idea. All the nuns encouraged me to take an extra year. Go to college for a year before you go into the convent. Get a little more life experience. Be sure this is what you really want.

Sharpless Why do you say you were a bit counterculture, other than the fact that you had a mother who was different?

Kissling I think I was just—I mean, I think those are the hard things in life to figure out, why are you exactly who you are?

Sharpless But why do you say this—

Kissling I was never—I wasn’t tradition bound, and I assume it has a lot to do with family structure. I was less inclined—I was more curious. I mean, I remember I got in trouble in my freshman year in high school, because I did a book report on Maupassant’s [short story “The] Pearl,” which was a risqué book. I shouldn’t have been reading that risqué book and I got yelled at for doing that. Sister would get very red, upset with me. But the nuns were always very encouraging to me. They encouraged me intellectually. So, in that sense, I was always intellectually curious and a little different.

Sharpless What was it about becoming a sister that appealed to you when you were sixteen, seventeen?

Kissling I think that I am also a high achiever, and in the construction of the Catholic Church, being close to God is sort of an entrepreneurial, high-achieving thing to do, you know. We are taught that there are three states in life: the highest state is religious life, the second highest state is the married life, and the third is the single life. You know, if you can’t do one of the first two, then you become a single person for your whole life. And, of course, they’re all good, but there clearly are degrees of better.

Sharpless Hierarchies.

Kissling Hierarchy. And so, you know, I always wanted to be at the top of the hierarchy. I’ve never been interested in being at the bottom of the hierarchy. And if, in my social milieu and setting, the highest is being a nun, then I aspired to the highest that I knew about. So that was the highest. The second thing was, I was always—along with curiosity—I was always a questioning kind of person. And I thought then, as I probably do now, that it’s good for people who are questioning, who are not rigid, who have the kind of life experiences that I had in terms of a family that wasn’t following the Catholic path and the straight way—it’s good for people like that to be part of the structure of the institution. It’s part of the possibility of change. And so, in that sense, it made sense. I think there should be people like me in that.

It’s a similar thing to when I was at the New School: I was never very political in the—I couldn’t tell you if my parents were Democrats or Republicans. Politics was not a topic at home. And so for me, even into college, you know, with the exception of, say, John Kennedy, politics was largely an irrelevancy. The people I knew were more conservative than liberal. And when I was at the New School was my first exposure. I mean I had no idea what I was getting into when I went to the New School for Social Research—none. I only knew that when I was ready to leave St. John’s that this was not where I belonged, that there were two places I considered going: one was Barnard and the other was this place called the New School, which I passed on the subway on my way from Queens to high school in Brooklyn. So let’s check out this New School.

And when I was there some students approached me—I became involved in SDS [Students for a Democratic Society]. I was a member of SDS. My politics changed dramatically, or I got politics that were mine. And I was invited on one of the very early trips to Cuba, while I was still a conservative. And I believed that it would be a good idea for somebody to go on this trip who was a conservative, because nobody was going to believe these commies when they came back from Cuba and said everything was great. Whereas if I went and I thought things were good, I would be a more believable witness for that experience. So that was part of the interest in being in the convent that I could do—

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

Sharpless Okay, so you went to Cuba. That’s part of the impulse that sent you to the convent.

Kissling No, I didn’t go to Cuba. It turned out that I didn’t go, but that was my willingness to go. My accepting of an invitation to go was that I wouldn’t trust what these people had to say. I had to see this for myself, number one, and that I wasn’t predisposed to believe everything I saw—whatever. But I ended up—I mean, I didn’t go, because—this is a very interesting story. I don’t know how much it has to do—but all these things make you who you are. I was accepted to go on the trip. My mother and stepfather were separated by that time, and I told both of them that I was going. And my mother was very supportive. And my stepfather freaked out and he turned me into the FBI. (Sharpless laughs)

And so I went to get my passport. I put my passport application in. And I went back to that building in Rockefeller Plaza with the statue[s] of Prometheus [carrying fire and] Atlas holding up the world—and I went in to pick up my passport. And they said, Well, we don’t have a passport for you. It hasn’t come back. Would you please call this number in Washington? So I went to a phone booth and I called the number. It was the State Department, and a man whom I now know—he died recently—a man named Abba Schwartz picked up the phone and said, “Well, there’s no passport for you, because your father has told us you are going to use your passport to go to Cuba.”

And I lied immediately. (laughs) I said, “No, I’m not going to Cuba.” I said, “Well, first of all, my father is not my legal guardian.” “And therefore your father has told us not to give you a passport, and you’re not twenty-one, and you can’t have one.” And I said, “Well, my father is not my legal guardian. My mother is my legal guardian and I’m sure she has no problem with you giving me a passport whatsoever.” And I said, “And I’m not going to Cuba anyway.” I said, “Look, you give me my passport. And if I go to Cuba, you prosecute me when I come back. But you don’t have a right to withhold my passport.” And he said, “Well, we are. That’s the way it is.”

Sharpless So you didn’t get a passport?

Kissling So I didn’t get a passport for ninety days, because what we did was—I told the people who were organizing the trip—oh, he said, “I’m going to send somebody to talk to you. You go home.” So two FBI agents arrived at my door, Mr. Crow and Mr. Robinson were their names, and they, of course, had gone to St. John’s. And it was like a Catholic-to-Catholic sort of thing. They said, Well, we believe you and we’re going to tell them to give you your passport. But, of course, there was no passport.

And so the people who were organizing the trip sent me first to Leonard Boudin, who was the big lawyer who handled Cuba. And then Leonard sent me to another lawyer who took the case, and we sued the State Department in a case called Kissling vs. Rusk—Dean Rusk was the secretary of state at the time. The government has ninety days from the time you file a case to respond, and on the eighty-ninth day they sent me my passport. But, of course, the trip was over and life changes and you move on to other things, and so—

Sharpless But you had taken on the State Department and won.

Kissling Yeah.

Sharpless Interesting.

Kissling It would’ve been better to win if they really didn’t give me the passport and we took it to court.

Sharpless Right.

Kissling And then there [would have been] a court decision that said you cannot withhold passports, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. So in essence there’s no decision. So it’s not as big a win. It’s a minor win—my willingness to take on structural things, willingness to take on powerful institutions, you know.

Sharpless Yes, yes, absolutely, absolutely. So you went to St. John’s for a year before you entered the convent. What did you study at St. John’s?

Kissling English literature—the same thing I studied at the New School.

Sharpless Okay. So tell me about your nine months in the convent.

Kissling It was very—I mean, again, this was a pre–Vatican II period of time. I wasn’t unhappy. I mean, it wasn’t a disastrous kind of experience.

Sharpless Were you a novice at that point?

Kissling You’re a postulant for one year.

Sharpless Okay.

Kissling Then you’re a novice for two or three years, depending on the community. Then you take one year’s worth of vows and then you take three years’ worth of vows and then you take—postulants don’t take vows. But it was, you know—

Sharpless What does a postulant do?

Kissling We went to school. Well, we went to college. The Sisters of St. Joseph have—I can’t remember the name of it, but they have—they were the nuns at several colleges and so, in a way, the convent became an external unit of the college. And you had a normal university curriculum in the beginning, just as I would have if I continued at St. John’s, until you would decide on an area of specialization, graduate school, and all that sort. But in the beginning you just go to college, you take classes. We had music class, we had drama class, we had English class. I was never much for the sciences, but it was a regular—you get up in the morning—you live in a dormitory, but the dormitory is private in the sense that you have cubicles. It’s a set of cubicles with walls that don’t go all the way up to the ceiling. And so the bell rings at six o’clock in the morning or thereabouts. You get up.

There are some elements of it that are very comforting and communal that I remember. You get up and even though no one is speaking, you’re all doing the same thing at the same time. You’re getting dressed. You hear the sounds of people putting on their clothes, walking to the bathroom, to the showers, whatever. It was totally normal. I mean a lot of the things that you hear about from that era—yes, you took your shower naked. You didn’t have to wear your underwear in order to go into the shower. Most of it was reasonably normal in that context, except that you were wearing long clothes and a veil on your head.

Sharpless What did you wear? What was the habit?

Kissling For postulants, we wore a long black skirt, many, many yards of fabric, as you see the nuns in various habits—a blouse, a black blouse with long sleeves and a simple round neck. You had a lot of underwear. You wore underpants, you wore a corset over the underpants, you wore a slip.

One of the things that was so wonderful about convent clothes was that you had pockets that were separate from your clothes. They were huge pockets like this, and there were two, and they were on a string and you tied them, and so the pockets were right there. And your skirt had a slit in it where the pockets would be and you could carry anything in those pockets—sort of the precursor of the backpack in a way. And they were wonderful, wonderful pockets. And then you wore a veil—we wore a veil without the white part, just a black veil that sat on your head. And it was only when you took your first vows and became a novice that you received the white part and cut your hair. You didn’t shave your hair, but you cut your hair short and then your face was covered to here, but—

Sharpless With the wimple?

Kissling But I never reached that stage. I left before that stage.

Sharpless What did your mother say about you going into the convent?

Kissling “If you want to do it, that’s fine.” That was both—my mother and my father very strongly encouraged me to do what I wanted. I made a lot of decisions on my own: where I went to school, where I went to high school. I was very—both my parents were very positive. You’re smart, you can do what you want—that sort of attitude.

Sharpless Now, this is your biological father?

Kissling No, this is my stepfather. My stepfather, for all intents and purposes, is my father.

Sharpless So Mr. Romanski was not a part of the picture?

Kissling He was not a part of my life at all. At all. I met him once and my mother had no contact with him. I met him once before I went into the convent. I asked my mother, I said, “I’d like to meet this guy who is my biological father.” I’d seen pictures of him in the family album. There were lots of pictures of him. There were lots of pictures with him with my mother. I knew what he looked like. And she said, “Okay, here’s his address and phone number. If you want to see him, call him up.” She had that. He lived in Buffalo. And I called him up and he was very gracious and he said, “Come and visit.” He was remarried, and had a son by his second marriage. Again, working-class life. He was a manager of a parking garage in the Buffalo area. I spent a weekend with him.

He was really very eager to make a connection. He was nervous, of course. Little things like, You see she does things this way—that’s the way I do it. Oh, she likes her steak rare—that’s how I like my steak. It was that reaching out in a very, very nice kind of way. Because I was going into the convent—I’d like to meet this guy before I go into the convent—he took me to every convent and to every religious statue in the city of Buffalo, which I’m sure had no relevance for him whatsoever, but he was being a nice guy. We had a nice weekend. I left. The expectation, because I was going in the convent, was that we would not see each other or be in touch with each other for many, many, many, many years. I felt no connection. I was very happy to meet him. I didn’t dislike him. It was fine, all of this, but it didn’t mean anything to me—I didn’t discover my father. I wasn’t looking to discover my father. I was interested in who this man was who was my biological father, but I wasn’t in need of a father.

My stepfather had been a good influence in my life growing up. He was a sportsman and we were very close. We did a lot of sports together. He played golf, tennis, horseback riding. We had all of those things together. My parents were—I mean, I don’t know why my parents were the way they were. I mean, I think it’s probably more intriguing how they became as liberal in a social sense as they were than it is that I became liberal.

I remember my father—I played hooky with my father one day and we went to a theater in Queens. It was called—I don’t remember what the theater was called, but what was playing—I was in high school—in the first two years of high school, so I was fourteen, fifteen. And we went to see something called the Jewel Box Review, which was a transvestite performance.

Sharpless Okay.

Kissling So that’s what my father took me to see. I played hooky another time and we went to the racetrack. He was an only child, very different from my mother, in that sense, very indulged within his family, not very successful in business. He couldn’t hold it together, kind of thing.

Sharpless And you were how old when they split?

Kissling I must have been sixteen. I think around sixteen, yeah.

Sharpless But you stayed in contact with him?

Kissling I stayed in contact for a while and then, once he turned me into the FBI, that was it—out of my life. Over.

Sharpless I’m sorry. You were going to say something about their split, I think.

Kissling No, I don’t think so.

Sharpless Okay. So you were—

Kissling Oh, he was a deadbeat dad. You know, once they split he disappeared. He didn’t support the family. And that was when my mother had to—so that was a transition for my mother. She had to go to work. She had to go to work to support the family. She went to work as a telephone operator and she worked the night shift from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. in the morning and had a very, very, very hard life.

Sharpless How old were your siblings at that point?

Kissling My nearest sister is five years younger than I, so she was twelve, because I was sixteen, seventeen. She was eleven, twelve. My brother is one year younger than she and my youngest sister is two years younger than that. My youngest sister is, like, eight or nine years younger than I am.

Sharpless So, like twelve, eleven, and nine?

Kissling Yeah.

Sharpless Wow.

Kissling Very hard for them. Very hard for them. I mean, you know, when you look at our lives now—I mean, I was basically out of the house by that time. I was one more year of high school, off to university, off to the convent, out of the convent, back to school, et cetera. So the hardest time, in terms of the family, in terms of my mother being on her own, raising three children in a family where she had never worked before in her life—I didn’t have that experience. My siblings had that experience, but I don’t have it.

Sharpless Did your mother articulate at any point how hard it was being a single mother with children?

Kissling Sure.

Sharpless What did she say?

Kissling It’s very hard. She cried. She suffered. She was tired. She was angry, frustrated, all of those things. She hated my stepfather for not supporting her. She was very clear about that.

Sharpless Is there anything else about the time that you entered into the convent that we need to talk about? Do you want to talk about what the nuns said about sex?

Kissling They didn’t say anything about sex.

Sharpless Nothing.

Kissling We didn’t talk about those things. I mean—I think this is also—

Sharpless Not even health classes?

Kissling I don’t think we had health class.

Sharpless So no diagrams of the uterus or anything?

Kissling No, no, we didn’t have any of that. There was none of that. We had home economics. But I have zero recollection of any real discussion about sexuality. A couple of things I remember—there were no discussions about sexuality but there were codes. There were ways you were supposed to behave. So, for example, in high school if you came to school and your skirt was too short—

Sharpless Did you wear uniforms in high school?

Kissling No. In my high school we didn’t wear uniforms. But, you know, you were supposed to dress in a certain way. Sort of like the dress code of Catholics for a Free Choice now. (Sharpless laughs) And if your skirt was too short the sister took scissors and she took the hem down and you walked around all day with your hem down. If you had makeup on, she took you into the bathroom and you wiped your makeup off. So there were little things like, I think you better go to the ladies’ room and water those tulips—take the makeup off your tulips.

I remember in the eighth grade there was a girl named Joanne Vecchio, who was voluptuous and who had big breasts and the sister believed Joanne was wearing a padded bra and took her out of the classroom into the bathroom and made her take her bra off so Sister could check. She checked the bra, not the breasts. She was not wearing a padded bra, but then they both came back into the classroom very, very, very red faced.

There was no expectation that we would be sexual. There was no reason to talk about sex. You knew what adultery was. You knew what lust was. You knew that you’re not supposed to have sex before marriage. And there was really nothing, nothing, nothing to talk about. I remember nobody in my high school left school, period, so nobody was publicly pregnant. Abortion—this was pre-birth control. But by the time I got to college there was the beginning of the talk about the potential of a change in the Church’s position, but it was still forbidden.

Sharpless No oral contraceptives.

Kissling No. No oral contraceptives. There was, uh, let’s see—abortion, of course, was totally beyond the pale. I don’t even know if I knew what abortion was when I was in high school. It was completely—I knew about sex. My mother was also very forthright in terms of sexual education in the family. I knew where children came from when I was in the third grade, when I was eight years old. I told my classmates where children came from and Sister called my mother and explained to my mother that while she thought it was very good that my mother told me these things—she said, “that was totally appropriate”—that would my mother please tell me not to tell this to other children. It was not other children’s business.

Sharpless What did your mother say?

Kissling She said, “Fine.” And she told me. That’s how I knew. She said, “Look, they don’t want you telling other people this. This is for their parents to tell them. Just stay away from it.” Exactly that kind of way. Just don’t tell them anything, kind of thing. So I knew a lot about sexuality. I was very active in the Girl Scouts as a young girl. And in the Girl Scouts we had sexuality education, very minimal sexuality education, but I remember Kotex pads. Had a movie about menstruation and they showed it at the Girl Scouts. I remember when I got my first period I went to my mother and my mother said, “Oh, I’ve been waiting for this.” And she brought out a little kit that she had for me with a sanitary napkin and a belt and da, da, da, and explained those things. So it was always pretty straightforward in my family.

I never had much—again, I went to an all-girls high school. We had tea dances on Thursday afternoons with our brother high school. I was never very popular. I wasn’t unpopular, you know, but I wasn’t there. I was going to go into the convent so I really didn’t do much dating, although I had some men friends in my freshman year in [college]. And I did some petting when I was a freshman in [college], but I never had sex. And then when I came out of the convent—I’m trying to think of—yes, my sophomore year in college, I had sex for the first time.

Sharpless Okay. How was it that you decided to leave the convent?

Kissling I didn’t believe. I remember having some conversations with other sisters or other postulants, really, about birth control, divorce, and remarriage. And I didn’t believe in these things. Now I remember when I went—part of the idea was that somebody who didn’t believe in these things should be a part of the Church, so that they can be of help to people who have these stories in their lives as well as maybe work to make these things change over time.

But it was not ultimately comfortable. It didn’t ultimately—the idea of being a representative of the institutional Church while disagreeing with these positions did not make sense to me. So I didn’t agree with the teachings of the Church. I had never agreed with the teachings of the Church, but I didn’t think it really mattered until I was placed in a situation where the teachings of the Church were my life. This was my identity and I couldn’t take that identity on. I didn’t belong there. And when I left the convent I stopped going to church. I would say at that point I was no longer an active Catholic. I didn’t particularly consider myself to be a Catholic. I didn’t have any deep reflections on is there a God or isn’t there a God. But it was unimportant to me. It was no longer important to me.

Sharpless So you became areligious at that point?

Kissling Yeah, yeah.

Sharpless How do you go from being—I mean, it seems to me that the progression I would expect is that you would be angry or mad at God or mad at the Church or mad at something.

Kissling Um, not my experience.

Sharpless Yeah, right.

Kissling Not my experience. I mean, there was nothing particularly to be mad at other than, you know, my sense of the idiocy of some of the positions. It was clear to me by that time that my mother—even though I thought she was in terrible straits—she didn’t care. It didn’t seem to hurt her not to be accepted by the Church. Even though that was an injustice, it didn’t seem to be a personally painful thing for her as it is for many people, for some people. You know, I certainly understand now that there are those who suffered because they were separated from the Church. Didn’t bother her.

And when she died, she didn’t reconcile with the Church. When she died—she got lung cancer at fifty-nine years of age. She was a heavy smoker. She was very unhappy that she was dying. She was not reconciled to dying. She did not want to not be here. But she did not have—when the chaplain came to visit her in the hospital she told him she wasn’t interested. He went away. She made no expression. There was never any sense of, I want this kind of burial, or I want that kind of burial. Or, I want to be reconciled with the Church. We didn’t call a priest to bring her the last sacraments, or anything like that. She wasn’t interested. It wasn’t a part of her life.

So again, I think in a certain way—and, as I said, I never was a pious person. I mean, my Catholicism never centered on going to Mass, praying the rosary, et cetera. That was not, for me, what it meant to be a Catholic. I was always more of an intellectual Catholic. I was always more, you know, the kind of person who would read Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, you know, Catholics—and then at the very popular level, now I can’t even stand those people—or Thomas More—that was what Catholicism was about. It was more a philosophy to me than a theology.

Sharpless Okay.

Kissling When I was at St. John’s I was in theology classes and I was one of those people who was always raising my hand and asking questions. The theology professor told me to sit on my hands and stop asking so many questions. And I got a C in theology. I got A’s, mostly A’s and a few B’s, but a C in theology. And when I applied for the New School one of the things they said, Well, we’re taking you because you got a C in theology (Sharpless laughs) and good grades in everything else. There’s something here. There’s something redeemable in this human being.

Sharpless Interesting. Well, why don’t we take a break and then we’ll pick it up at the New School?

Kissling Okay, good.

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

Sharpless All right, this is the second tape with Frances Kissling on September the thirteenth. So, you left the Church areligious at that point.

Kissling Right. And I didn’t feel angry. I mean, I didn’t feel positive, but I didn’t think the Church had done anything terrible to me. In fact, I think I pretty much always felt, and still feel, that the Church played a very important, positive role in who I am. I know that I got a good Catholic education. My teachers cared about me. My education was individualized. My talents were recognized and encouraged. It was a reasonably rich spiritual and intellectual base.

Sharpless Now what were you thinking—

Kissling And they were wrong.

Sharpless Yeah.

Kissling They were wrong. And that’s still sort of how I feel. I mean, I think that I say a lot of times in speeches that I make that the wonderful thing about the Catholic Church, and most religions, is that they ask the big questions. But they have lousy answers. And that’s the reality. But I’m so glad that they’re asking the questions that nobody else will ask.

Sharpless So, thinking vocationally, you thought you were going to be a sister at the convent. What were you going to do at that point?

Kissling Hm. I didn’t really know. And I think that the rest of my life has been—I mean, I think about this a lot, because I think that the fact—there are several things—the fact that I wanted to be a nun and the fact that I lived in a limited milieu, in terms of professional achievement, and that while I was encouraged to be whatever I wanted to be, the things I knew that you could be were very limited—

Sharpless Right.

Kissling —and so I missed a period of formation as a young adult, say, from sixteen to twenty, twenty-one, in which people are thinking about what they want to be. I wasn’t thinking about what I wanted to be. I was going to be a nun. And then I wasn’t going to be a nun. And so I would finish college. But I never really grappled with, What do I want to do? Do I want to go to graduate school, et cetera, et cetera. I always knew that I never wanted to be married. I always knew that. And I’m sure that that has a lot to do with my mother’s marriages. Although I don’t think it’s only my mother’s marriages. I also never wanted children. And so I’m very like my mother, except that I got what she should’ve gotten. It would be another way of putting it.

I talked to her before she died. I took advantage of—I spe