Transcription of Interview 1
| Personal Narrative |
| Interview Transcription: |
| Interview 1 |
| Interview 2 |
Questions:
Can you tell me about your childhood?
Was anyone in your family involved in social change work?
Could you tell me a little bit about how your family responded to your social change work?
How have your children reacted to your social change work?
Can you tell me what made you decide to come to Hollins and what life was like here?
What else can you tell me about your time at Hollins?
Do you feel that your work as a teacher ever helped contribute to your activism?
How do define activism, what does the term mean to you specifically?
Can you tell me about your social change, activist work after you left teaching then?
Are you still working do you still feel there’s a movement you’re working with?
What made you decide to take part in this project?
BEGIN RECORDING
Kiki Lynskey: Okay its March, 12th, and we finally got the voice recorder to work (laughs) and I’m here with Mildred Emory Persinger and-a I’m going to do the first qua- the first interview with you, So the first question on our list is What is your full name?
Mildred Emory Persinger: Mildred. Emory. Persinger.
/K: Laughs./
M: If you want to start from the day I was born its Mildred Tillman Emory Persinger. There was somebody at Hollins who called herself Tillman, /background noise/ which was really her middle name, so I didn’t use my middle name I though that was enough Tillmans for one campus.
K: Um, can you tell me about your childhood?
M: (pause) I’m trying to think of something unusual. But, I could say I grew up to be, the girl with the pearls. They were talking about pearls last night and we know that that’s a stereotype, so here I was uh, born in Roanoke, um, my parents were from my father was from eastern shore of Maryland my mother was from North Carolina eastern North Carolina and we, used to visit *back and forth motion of hands* those places to see our grandparents and, the thing I could say about my parents was, despite the fact that they were both southerners I never heard a single word that you could consider racist, /noise/ it was a normal childhood.
We We moved from, um, Atlanta Georgia where my father uh was working, to New York to make we moved not to New York City but to Long Island when he was transferred to New York by his company and I grew up in a a very restricted town called Garden City. In those days before the civil rights laws were passed um you could tell, the real estate agents not to sell to any property to Jews or blacks, or Asians so so you had a WASPy community that didn’t teach you much Except the kind of people you were surrounded with and when, we moved back to Salem, Virginia near Hollins, I-was-quite-amazed it was culture shock to find out the people who were my parents’ friends were poor or not so poor or uh, actually all the same color except for the wonderful people who worked for us but it was a totally different community of all kinds of people instead of these WASPs.
K: Was anyone in your family involved in social change work?
M: My mother was a volunteer when we lived in Garden City in the school uh but I can’t say that was social change. Uh My father was a uh very tolerant and a wonderful man who uh, if he who if he had time which he didn’t he probably would have, oh, I know what he did here’s what he did he, went went to to to the county jail to read with them and-a bring them outside information and magazines and the things that they thought would make their lives easier and that I would say was, sort of social change.
K: I know your hu-husband’s here today but could you tell me a little bit about how your family responded to your social change work?
M: Oh, well my husband -K: obviously he facilitated- he made it all possible because he never required me to get a job to help support the family so I was able to get wonderful jobs because I didn’t have to be paid. (long pause) /giggles/ In fact he said he didn’t have to do it because I was doing enough for two people. /Laughter/ I I invited him to say something but he declined /laughter/
K: can we- how have your children reacted to your social change work?
M: Can you say that again?
K: How have your children reacted to your social change work?
M: Well they considered it quite normal. Um, our daughter um-a joined the uh, voters to work with them on changing laws and she became the-a she declined to be president because she knew she wouldn’t be able to do the thing she liked best she edited the newsletter so she could put in the type of thing she hoped that they would act on and she attended a convention in New York one year and I went with her and it happened that we were both working *pointing on table with a back-and-forth motion* on the same topic which was disarmament the most hopeless goal in the world and she is a very rigorous kind of education for us we had to really understand all the treaties insisted what the United States was doing to keep his promise which he never kept to cut down on its nuclear arsenal and uh, we really, um uh I had no idea that she was doing it cause she just did it until we until she came to the convention and we both went to the same workshop.
Richard Persinger: now I’d like to tell a story. It took place on the meeting of the league of voters in New York. When Mildred was out there uh she and her friends developed a resolution uh, and somebody said “Louise you should introduce it because you seem to understand it better than the rest of us” and she said I should because Mildred Persinger is my mother
/laughter/
M: I wouldn’t have told that story. /more laughter/ but it might help.
K: So you have, you’ve the, you’ve only the one daughter do you have-
M: Unfortunately she died
K: Oh
M: When she, for reasons unknown *cage-like hand on table* because they have no idea what causes it she had multiple sclerosis which is a deterioration of nerves and it was about 15 years when she was able to function fairly normally. But she was failing gradually went down hill and she died when
R. P.: 3 or 4 years ago.
M: And-a Yeah we set up a little memorial for her, for the physics department. And-a and her mother-in-law together because her mother-in-law was the head of the physics department since she was here because she married the son of her major professor which is one of the great stories of how you get a husband at Hollins /laughter/
K: Would you, would you share the story with the video recorder?
M: Oh, sure. Do you want me to into more detail?
K: If you like.
R. P.: It was quite exciting because Charles Montgomery who was the son of Dorothy Montgomery who was the head in those days of the physics department who had at that time had just received his P.H.D. from CalTech and he came to Hollins uh, right after that from California and they needed someone to teach a certain part of the physics um, courses and he, with his fresh P.H.D. was highly qualified and Louise happened to be in his class. And she said she didn’t dare ask him a question because she would get a 55 minute answer /laughter/ and she felt like he had a lot to learn /laughter/ but! It happened she said that every time there was performance in the Little Theatre where there were tickets she would discover that her seat was right next to his and then when the Physics Department would have a party or some kind of a celebration she would always be sent with him to buy the food so, she reported this to me and I thought ah, her major professor has an idea about her son’s future but she’s not telling /laughter/ but when I accused Dorothy of throwing them together she denied it. It was all his idea.
K: well that’s a won/laugh/derful story.
M: Well, I always say when these 17-year-olds think they have to go to a coed school to get a husband I always say well of course the first thing an education should do for you is not to produce your husband right away and the second thing is that our daughter found her husband on a, single sex campus.
K: Can you tell me what made you decide to come to Hollins and what life was like here?
M: Oh I was already admitted or I was offered a scholarship at Mt Holyoake and an alumna um, of Hollins lived in our town in Garden City, Long Island. She was determined that I was going to go to Hollins. And so she had the New York alumnae association offer me a scholarship And so I had to choose between Hollins and Mt. Holyoake and since we had already lived in this area I knew how beautiful it was and how beautiful campus was even though Mt. Holyoake was a beautiful campus too, but I really wanted to get back to the Blue Ridge Mountains and so I said, thanks but no thanks to Mt. Holyoake
K: Um, can you, what else can you tell me about your time at Hollins?
M: Well, it was a very exciting time because, the college the year we entered had just become a public institution, in contrast to the family business that the Cocke family had established course they didn’t establish it as a business Charles Lewis Cocke really wanted women educated and uh, when Dick’s um, grandmother was at Hollins in 1863 during the Civil War she stayed until 1865 um, she wrote in a letter that she had her professor for mathematics was Dr. Cocke or president Cocke or whatever she called him and I realized he was serious if he was offered higher mathematics to these young women um, anyway, (pause) what was the question? /laughter/
K: I was just asking about Hollins when you-
M: Oh, it was very exciting time because the college had just been transferred to a board of directors from the family and of course some of the family was on the board but um that meant that they had to be accredited by the Eastern State’s *circling hand movement* accreditation group whatever it’s name is now and they had to have a faculty that had certain standards and a lot of the faculty had been members of the Cocke family who happened to have good degrees but they wanted um an independent group some so they employed, a number of new faculty members with – wonderful education credentials and these people had been accustomed to- weell!
K: and Allie appears. We got it to work!
M: but that’s alright just lay that down. (to Allie) But what a wonderful achievement so they um. She was asking about Hollins when, when, when I was there all those hundred years ago. Well, it was 1935 to 1939 and they had new faculty who were um rather uh determined to make this college from a family institution family-run to a really topnotch school and they put a lot of wonderful ideas into our heads that we might not have had. And so we were a little bit we considered ourselves*clucks tongue* a little bit of a revolutionary group and we, were, pretty, contemptuous of some of the old traditions which is a normal way to behave in college. And uh we decided that May Day was the absolute bottom up where you elected a May Queen on the basis of her looks and so we decided that we need to put some uh teeth into May Day and make it academic rather than purely um, uh a beauty contest. So, I had the idea of the people who put May Day on in those days were Freya which partly gave Freya a bad name because their big job was putting on May Day. /laugh/ So and also we didn’t have Phi Beta Kappa then so in order to be in Freya you had to have top, grades. And-a so that made a problem because some of the people you really wanted were not very good students they were wonderful people but not good students anyway! Um, we tired to get the English Department, *taps table* the um, Art Department, *taps table* the music people all the departments *taps table* of the college to cooperate on May Day and put on, I decided the most suitable thing to put on was um an imitation of an English masque. Where they had all those um animals and a funny structures and so on a Shakespearian type of event and we really pulled it off but the main thing we accomplished, some people told me it was the first time, that all these departments had co-operated on any project and you could say interdisciplinary effort *tap table* was worth whatever we put into it because it brought them together and they got the idea that they could work together, in future this was some kind of accomplishment um, (sniffs)
K: So after Hollins you didn’t go to grad school at all, did you?
M: Yes I went to Brynmawr *holds table* (K: Oh yes) which is also a women’s college and Brynmawr could call itself a university like Hollins but they chose not to because they actually grant a P.H.D. in a number of fields. um, so that every, the professors from the very beginning of Brynmawr which is not as old as Hollins but pretty old place, um every professor in those days was qualified to work with P.H.D. students and to offer um, various, programs that you really need to go through supervise final doctorate thesis and structural thesis and so on so that um, it really was a very rigorous institution. Somebody yesterday asked me if I was a bluestocking and I didn’t know what that meant except that the joke about the Brynmawr students was that they were all bluestockings *makes a gesture suggesting a line* because Brynmawr didn’t care what kind of a, aa an all round student you were they wanted somebody who was very *leans over and gestures to Allie* very good in a certain field so that they could have a bunch of stars which they did and-a and we had some very funny looking girls there. um, but at Hollins at that time they were all the ones with the pearls, the beauty queens, gorgeous gorgeous people and Hollins now looks more like the regular population /laughter/ but *makes “safe” gesture* I used to think do we do these good looking women apply to Hollins because they were the way they were or did Hollins just choose on the basis of looks? /laughter/ I never could decided that but very few um, odd looking characters at Hollins in those days and the Hollins students got the reputation for being really really attractive and the guys all wanted to date-it gave them a certain prestige to date Hollins students, it was um old fashioned /laugh/
M: Well actually you’re (pause) the YWCA didn’t do the kind of program that they did at Randolph-Macon *touch her glasses then swings her hand in front of herself* because at Randolph-Macon they had a they had what they call a secretary for the YWCA in other words she was an employed professional for that campus and it turned out because she was there. the YWCA ran the campus all the social activities all the various clubs and so on because she was available to support them and help them and, Hollins didn’t do that because we didn’t have-a paid professional and so it was just a little bit more of a money raising for good works but not the kind of program they were doing at Randolph Macon and on many other *says to Allie* campuses. on the big universities they had a lot of professional YWCA people working with the young women but uh it was Hollins that got me into the YWCA I would never, it would have never occurred to me because one of the faculty had previously been on the YWCA the national *taps table* YWCA staff and she wrote a letter to them, to the national board saying that we were coming to New York and once we were married and when we got into our apartment in New York I had a letter in my mailbox inviting me to be on the ‘race relations’ committee. And that was the beginning of my, interest. I told somebody that my first assignment was to write, a paper on peonage in Louisiana. And here I was right out of graduate school I’d been teaching down at Auburn University um for a year only and and but I didn’t really have a very clear idea of what peonage was I knew it was sort of semi slavery so I went to the public library and I took my long yellow sheets and I took notes and I wrote this paper on the, and the main thrust was that um, these workers in the turpentine groves were so, in debt due to the fact that the gang bosses who had recruited them um, required them to buy all their food at the company store, very over priced they could never catch up they were always having to work to pay their bills at the company store and so it held *wide gesture* them there in virtual captivity in order to be able catch up which they could never do. So I wrote *taps table* this paper 3 or 4 pages um, about 5 years ago *holds up one finger* I went to a YWCA event where I met the person who had been my staff director on this race relations committee her name was, ho, never mind, um, she, opened her purse when she saw me and she handed me those yellow pages of my original report /laugh/ that I had written in 1942 she kept it all these years when she moved when she, she she became president of the YWCA but she moved to um, sh, um, Illinois when she left her office that was one of the things she took! /laugh/ why she kept it I don’t know, but I have it my first um uh um out of college out of college so they asked *drag pencil and tap on table* you to do things you couldn’t do always they asked you to do things you never had any experience doing so you learned and I stayed on the board for 20 years on the National Board and mostly I was doing um, public policy and so I had to give testimony in congress and write articles and make speeches and push an agenda and the agenda was mostly Civil Rights and we got a lot done because we had 2 and ½ million members who most of whom voted so they listened and in those days you really didn’t have to have money to be listened *jab finger on table* to in Washington you had to have votes and we used our votes.
K: Um, Can you tell me about, uh about your je-uh you only worked that one year as a teacher-
M: I actually worked two years
K: Oh, Two years-
M: The first one was more or less a disaster. (K: oh ho) When I gradu- when I was at Hollins I took an education course just one and that qualified me to teach in Virginia. (K: oooh) But yu you know education courses I think are incidental I think you really have to know something and when I went to the South View School to teach the seventh grade in Roanoke County and South View *point over shoulder* is just down the road it’s down Peter’s Creek Road from here um, I was appalled at how docile the children were you know this is junior high school and they’re supposed to be um, questioning and, and-a disagreeing
R: If they did then they would be suspended
M: -And I thought These kids are just sitting here believing *hit table* what I’m telling them /K: laughs/ they just not raising any issues at all so I was trying to make them more independent *holds up one finger* I wanted independent thinkers /laughter/ in my class well, I over did it. /laughter/ they were totally out of control what these kids did was we put on I was teaching them uh, a little bit of Shakespeare in the 7th grade if you can imagine and so we decided to put on a little bit of a Shakespearian play and the uh, the costumes for the last May Day thing that we did at Hollins this was the year after going to Hollins the year I graduated the costumes were Shakespearean costumes because we were doing that period in English History so we came over here and I borrowed the costumes *pulls at shirt* and the girls got into these marvelous things with the tall hats with the scarf *pulls on top of imaginary hat* hanging down the back in the style, uh of the Elizabethan uh clothes and uh we had some boys just the way Shakespeare did who were really girls in their doublet and hose and there we were all dressed for the middle age- for the a renaissance and-a a they loved it naturally they had a wonderful time but it was very hard to get them quiet *waves hand* to get them to do the work them had to do to know what they were doing and uh well, we also had uh, another project the school was brand new and the principle wouldn’t let anybody go out because, the um, grass had not been planted and the school was surrounded by red clay and when it rained it would you know, pull off your shoes or your boots because it was so viscous so we were stuck in our classroom all day so I decided we should have a little out door education and we would go over to Carven Cove /laughter/ and so we got this you know this was a field day- field trip *makes a circle gesture* so we got a school bus to take us to Carven Cove and I instructed them very carefully before we went under no circumstances were they to get in the boats until I arrived well naturally when I got there they were all in the boats. That kinda thing. That’s the kind of teacher I was. Not very good but uh, but I was very popular /laughter/
K: um, do you feel that your work as a teacher ever helped contribute to your activism?
M: What contributed was my feeling that things needed to be changed that things weren’t going so well to-a and-a oh I know um when I went to Alabama to teach I was teaching philosophy and ethics and I and I was in the graduate school in Brynmawr *scratches her face* where they expected everybody would work for the P.H.D. and one day my prof- my major profess- no the ethics we- no um the professor of Aesthetics he was the head of the department and he said you know there are no jobs for women in philosophy and you really should change your field and I think he just really wanted to get rid *hand upright* of me cause aesthetics was not my field I would say political philosophy was my field and so um, before I could even um, finish the first year of Brynmawr I got a job be because a down in Alabama they were recruiting for this type of teacher because they wanted the students to begin to think about their religion there was tremendous interest in um, what you might call evangelical Christianity and they would have mass meetings at lunch time in the gym where they would really get excited and sing *makes a long hand gesture* and carry on and the dean of women students felt that these students were just accepting this blindly without *tap table* thinking it through and she wanted somebody to teach philosophy, and ethics which I did but my main, goal, in ethics, was, race relations and by the time the kids went home for Christmas they were I’d really gotten them to fix their heads as far as racial integrations was concerned but then after they came back from Christmas vacation we had to do it all over again so that did help with what was your question
M: Well, uh
K: Do you consider yourself an --
M: No, you know it’s a buzz word we’re talking all the time about “activists” when actually uh if you have a strong belief, in, uh a uh the need to change an institution *turns toward Allie* of society such as education, or um, well, primarily education in those days it was totally dominated by one sex except the teachers happened to be of the other sex /laugh/ but the decision makers were mostly men in 1975 I read that 98 percent I think somewhere way up in the upper 90s of the superintendents of schools were male. So the consumers were half female, the consumers of education, the practitioners of education were mostly women and yet the institution of education, was, developed by the other sex so you know these were things we had to start thinking about. And that’s activism if you do anything about it but if you just deplore it of course you’re not active.
K: So you don’t, do you consider yourself an activist then?
M: Well I just think it’s kind of (pause) I consider myself a change agent. /laugh/
K: I’ll make sure-
M: I hope I’m a change agent-I have been a change agent I’m less less active now cause I do everything more slowly I seem to be able to think of only one thing at a time instead of keeping five balls in the air at once which is what you have to do if you are really gonna to get anywhere
K: Can you tell me about your social change, activist work after you left teaching then?
M: It was all due to Hollins suggesting me for this very activist organization at the time it was really commented and yesterday I told a story about how we didn’t think of ourselves as women with no power because we had the votes and we didn’t realize we had to really be there *taps table* where the decisions were made to get any real change but we could put pressure on on the policy makers because we had the votes but we found out, that we weren’t very powerful when we went to the War Department which is now the Pentagon and I told this story yesterday um, when they when we told them we were interested in the desegregation of the armed forces that they should mix up the troops and not have these black units *moves her right hand away from her body* because we considered it um in those years um a very very poor public policy unjust injust injustice and-a they told us in effect without using the same words: to go home and mind our own business. So that clued us in that we had to have some women *counts on her fingers* in the defense department and that they thought that this kind of important public policy was not our business (pause) *turns to Allie* the reason I’m not talking to you is because I have to talk to this /laughter/
K: I don’t think you noticed because I haven’t told you but I’m making notes on what you are doing with your hands as you speak so I can include this later.
M: Well you’re very through.
M: Well, as I explained yesterday it took the Civil Rights movement where we learned from our mentor Dorothy Height that, what we had to be concerned about was the institutions of society if we wanted to make change rather than relations between individuals that it that- and what she finally taught us and we finally got it through our heads was that an institution that was developed by one group of people, in this case white males, upper class white males it is not necessarily meeting the needs of the rest of the population and that was a very important thing for us to learn. So we set about changing institutions and that lead us to understand which we hadn’t before that the institutions of society had-been-developed in this country had been developed by men. uh, education being the prime example and so, uh, we have to get, go about getting more women into the decision making part, of that institution and that was what sent us into the so called women’s movement and then when we wel- I I at that time was at the United Nations representing the World YWCA so we had the whole world to work on and because we now have national YWCAs in 120 in 120 some countries it is the whole world, as almost and so the idea was that to, get, those affiliates to join, the movement, and, now, there is because of the United Nations to hang all these countries’, interests and movements on you know you have a structure around which they can coalesce there is an international women’s movement and hopefully and you can see it it’s happening there more women running things than ever before /laugh/ the um, most recent triumph, was that the women, banded together and got the security council, which is really a male province to, pass a resolution binding governments because they voted for it to put women into peace keeping operations women in peace building programs and women in disarmament and and all those military things that women had been excluded from so that’s real progress. we’ll see- they monitor it every year the women’s the women who put this over are giving the security council a run for it’s money because they they get a meeting of the security council going every single year: how’re you doing? Are you implementing, this resolution it’s known as holding the feet to the fire /laugh/
K: so (pause) so you worked with the civil rights movement and you worked with the disarmament movement and you worked with the women’s movement so what, are you still working do you still feel there’s a movement you’re working with?
M: Oh yeah, I’m still working on the same issues because things move so slowly the it took twenty years working on population issues to get women to be important to fertility rates /laugh/ the in the beginning the people the decision makers didn’t understand that women really had something to do with the tremendous rise in the population in the number of people in the world and uh we had to teach them that,: educated women had fewer children; women who had jobs had fewer children; women who were important in their communities had fewer children because they learned that motherhood was not their only goal in life (pause)
K: Um, we’ve talked about your work and why you’ve engaged in it and um what inspired you and why it was meaningful so I-I’m going to ask you now what made you decide to take part in this project?
M: I didn’t know what I was getting into /laughter/
K: oh, come-on
M: Well, you did
K: I did of course
M: and-a *to Allie* Allie did and I, but my main interest in being here, is to be able to hear what you people have to say and I’m really enjoyed it. All the time I’ve been here I’ve been able to listen to students because, (pause) you know, generations change and you wanna know what the new thinking is.
K: But why particularly the-a oral history project of professor Costa’s?
M: What particularly?
K: What particularly influenced you to um tell professor Costa that you would enjoy working with a student to um get your life story written?
M: Well, more interaction. I really like to be where students are because, this bunch has the most marvelous the people who choose to attended this, symposium I call it *to Allie* are the ones who are really really interested in what’s going on in the world and if you don’t, take an interest you get things like the Iraq war you’ve got to find out now what’s really happening (pause)
K: So we’ve gotten your childhood, your f talk we’ve talked about your family and we’ve talked about your education and your job and your activism and so, I think we’re done for this morning
M: Well that’s wonderful
K: So you can go take a break and I’m going to come at you with more specific questions this afternoon
M: Well,let’s see now, it’s now 11-
R. P.: 11:20
M: So-
END RECORDING
(These are summaries of things Mildred told me about after I turned the recorder off)
Allie asked: Do you ever find the need to invent new institutions?
Mildred replied that the UN was a “club of nations” that was “cumbersome” and used “weasel wording” to get out of any agreements they made. She also said that the “sweep of history hasn’t swept much.”
Kiki asked: How many times had she resigned?
Mildred replied twice. Once over conduit and seven years later over more things.