It's 1977 and I feel really good about my body until my mother...

Yesterday, I was with my younger sister's best friend from our childhood.  We have not seen each other in about 25 years and were sitting around her dining room table with her children reminiscing about our childhood growing up as young girls in a sleepy town on Long Island (NY).  She told our husbands a story about me, how at the ever so rebellious age of 17 I refused to wear a bra!  It was 1977 and the boys back then all had afros and I had very long frizzy/curly hair (that I finally convinced my mom to stop ironing!!).  We were wearing hip-hugger bell bottoms and tank tops with no bras!  So the story is that my mom, who had given birth to four girls, one  every two years, was crazy with trying to keep us from the dangers of discovering our sexuality...and one saturday evening as I was just about to pull out of the driveway with a group of friends she came running out of the house screaming "phyllis, get back in here and put a bra on  RIGHT NOW!!!!"  To say that was embarrassing was truly an understatement!  But I managed to get through high school and college without ever really talking to my mother about my body;  getting my period, having sex, guys and girls and how I felt about my body or how she felt about her body in any really meaningful way.  I probably learned everything I knew from my two older sisters, and of course as it turns out, my younger sister Ilene apparently learned ALOT from me.  

Fast forward today...I have three beautiful children - two of whom are girls.  But before having these children I spent many years trying to undo and redo the affects of both misinformation (my dad always said that it was impossible to get pregnant without being married!) and not enough information - or rather the kind of information that I am committed to giving my girls and all girls now.

Early on in my career as a photojournalist I was drawn to stories that had to do with women, feminism and rituals.  I photographed religious ceremonies, coming of age rituals for girls and encouraged each reporter I worked with to consider the female side of the story.  I looked up to famous photographers like Donna Ferrato, who really broke wide open that Domestic Violence was taking place among people of all financial means in the 80's and 90's.  I saw many women and children in homeless shelters who were either hiding from abusive men or were just simply living in poverty with no self-esteem and many children on their hips. I read about and witnessed young girls making a pact to get pregnant because that made them feel good about themselves and their bodies.  They were going to have children to feel needed but also with intentions of raising their children differently than how their mothers were raising them.....how familiar is that?

I fought really hard for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) while in college and pounded the pavement for NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League). There is so much progress to protect but there is still so much we have to do to tend to our girls and their growing and changing bodies.

I love hearing and telling stories.  I look forward to sharing mine, here with you.  Welcome to our girls, their bodies.

Alex Katz/Poster from the Art Exhibit and Sale for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, NOW/NYC 1982

The ERA was first introduced into every Congress between 1923 and 1972, when it was passed and sent to the states for ratification.  The original seven-year time limit in the ERA's proposing clause was extended by Congress to June 30, 1982, but at that deadline, the ERA had been ratified by 35 states, THREE states short of the 38 required to put it into the Constitution.  It has been introduced into every Congress since that time. (http://www.equalrightsamendment.org/)