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Today I Am An Orphan.

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A hijacked Supreme Court inches ever closer to destroying the bodily autonomy of women in this country...and my Mom died at 9:25 this morning.

Dr. Virginia Loftus "Ginny" Senders died on Thursday, December 2, at the Center For Extended Care in Amherst, MA.
Ginny Senders was born Virginia Ruth Loftus in 1923, in Bronxville, NY.  Over the course of her long and active life she traveled widely in pursuit of justice, beauty, and the empowerment of women.
Mom was 98.  The last six years of her life were spent in the shadows of Lewy-Body Dementia; gradually her ability to connect thoughts and ideas faded.  The tone of her voice and the flow of her discourse sounded as they always had: intellectual, witty, cadenced — and it was only when you attended to the words themselves that you’d realize there was no longer sense behind them.

She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1943, and completed her PhD in Psychology at Harvard just four years later, at 24.  
Harvard was called Radcliffe then; Mom’s Harvard degree was a retroactive renaming.  There were not a lot of women PhDs in any field in 1947, let alone 24-year-olds. 
She was a licensed pilot, a crack rifle shot, a committed social activist, and an avid amateur painter whose travels around the world were documented in dozens of paintings and sketches.
Her parents were political and social conservatives; Grandma’s ancestry went back to the Mayflower.  They were baffled by her intellectual and scientific curiosity, her love of riflery (family legend has it that when she told her mother, “I love the smell of powder,”Grandma thought she meant face powder and expressed relief that her rambunctious daughter was finally learning to be feminine), her outspoken liberalism, and her choice of husband.
She married John Senders of Cambridge, MA, in 1945.  They lived in Cambridge before moving to Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Ginny joined the faculty of Antioch College.  

She and my father were newlyweds when she got pregnant. 

In 2006 she told the story to a reporter from the Hampshire Daily Gazette:
 

"Before I got married, I went to see a gynecologist, at my mother's behest, about getting fitted for a diaphragm. This was in 1945. This doctor, as far as I can remember, never told me to use a spermicide with the diaphragm. I instantly, but instantly, got pregnant. I was at Harvard, in a Ph.D. program in experimental psychology. My husband was carrying a full-time job and also going to school at Harvard. So he was no more eager to have a baby than I was.  My reaction was utter despair. My husband and I talked it over. I was so naive that I didn't know that I couldn't just go to a doctor and have it taken care of, in the same way that you'd have an appendix removed. So the first thing I had to do was digest that piece of information. I was surprised to find that the law had something to say.

“I was ready to do anything. We talked about methods of self-induction, which didn't seem reasonable. I had done some work in a mental hospital for a physician, so I called him to see if he would help, and he wouldn't. I think it must have been a friend who gave us the suggestion of going to a psychiatrist to get the foundation to get a therapeutic abortion. I don't think we would have thought of it ourselves. (At that time, therapeutic abortion was permissible, if, for example, it could be shown that the pregnancy posed a grave threat to the physical or mental health of the woman.)

“Then I started the rounds of the psychiatrists and that was eye-opening, and a very unpleasant experience. I can remember the interviews as being humiliating and degrading.  One, in particular. He wanted to pick up information about sex and how some people had it - and it was all irrelevant because he'd made up his mind anyway. Then there was another one who was willing to help me arrange to have the baby and then give it up to somebody who would pay me for it. I didn't care for that.

“We went ahead and made an appointment with a back-alley type abortionist in Boston. A friend must have given me the name. He was said to be the safest of these dangerous people.  But before the date came, we went to see another psychiatrist, a distinguished doctor who came from a family of physicians. He sat us both down and asked us a lot of questions about our lives, our plans. He got to know us. And then he said,'I wouldn't do this if we hadn't talked at length. But I'll write you a letter. I'll have to say some things that are perhaps stretching the truth about how seriously ill you are.' He wrote a letter that would go to a hospital committee.

“I made an appointment with an OB who didn't want to do it, letter or no letter. It was finally done at Mount Auburn Hospital (in Boston) and everything was done properly. I didn't have to tell anybody in the psychology department about it. So that was that, and my husband and I went on…

“Of course, there were many times when I would think, now it would have been such-and-such an age. And that would have been very nice - except that I wouldn't have been the same person, either, doing what I was doing. Did I ever rue the day? No.”

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Over the next several years, the couple moved often. Unusually for the times (hell, even now!) my parents had an alternating-priorities agreement: home base would be determined by her job, then his job, then hers, then his, etc. 

In 1956, it was Dad’s turn.  They were driving through Indiana in their VW bug when Mom, 6 ½ months pregnant, went into unexpected labor.
(from the same interview)

“...the baby was hydrocephalic. It delivered by the breech, up to the shoulders, and stopped. It was horrifying. I remember the doctor saying, ‘I'm going to have to destroy the baby's skull in order to deliver’. This is what is called now a partial-birth abortion. (A federal ban on partial-birth abortion, passed by congress in 2003, was declared unconstitutional in 2004 because it contained no provision for allowing the procedure to protect the health of the mother).
"This fetus was 6 1/2 months along. We had hoped for it, wanted it. It was sad, devastating, the end of a long trail of having lost four previous pregnancies to miscarriage. 

But if the doctor had said,‘I can't kill this baby’- my mind boggles. If the baby had lived, chances are very good I wouldn't have. My husband would have had to put the baby in an institution, probably one of the hospitals for the retarded. Do you think that would have been a good solution?”

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They took time off for her to recover, then resumed their trip — to Fairbanks, Alaska, where Dad had a one-year appointment as a research scientist for the Air Force.  Mom used the time in Alaska to paint and write a book.

LakeLabargeAlaska1957.jpg
This is the marge of Lake LaBarge, the setting of one of Mom’s favorite poems.  She took this photograph in 1957.

JWSAlaskaHighway1957.jpg
Mom & Dad and two dogs drove the Alaska highway  back to the “lower 48” in 1957.

Her book, "Measurement and Statistics"(Oxford University Press) was published in 1958, at which time she and Dad had settled in Minneapolis, MN, where she taught psychology at the University of Minnesota.
She noticed that many women in her classes were trying to balance parenting responsibilities with their academic aspirations, which led to her co-founding the "Minnesota Plan," the first-ever continuing-education program for women.  Imagine an academic system that was built around the needs of women: child-care, flexible scheduling, and institutional support!
Midway through this work, she had me and my brother.  We owe our lives to the fact that our mother had an abortion.  (Please Donate To Planned Parenthood)
The success of the Minnesota Plan led to her becoming a consultant to President Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women between 1962-1964.  

Then it was Dad’s turn to pick location, and they moved to Lincoln, MA, where Dad worked as a scientific consultant, in 1968 doing research on driver distraction that eventually became a global industry standard and earned him an Ig-Nobel Prize. 
Meanwhile, Mom taught psych at Simmons College and was a Research Fellow at MacLean Hospital, eventually establishing a private therapeutic practice which she maintained for twenty years.  They raised me and my brother as the turbulent 1960s swirled around them.
In 1976 my parents were divorced, and Mom took up the final position of her academic career at Framingham State College in Massachusetts.  Her courses in Humanistic Psychology were transformational experiences for many of her students.

After retiring from teaching in 1984, she threw herself into social justice work.  Deeply opposed to Reagan's policies in Central America, she traveled to Nicaragua several times with Witness For Peace, working in opposition to the US-supported “contras.”  On one such visit she actually broke a leg in the middle of a war zone. 
Her activism was not limited to Central America.  She protested often and vigorously on behalf of women’s bodily autonomy — the right to choose was no mere abstraction to Mom.  She was very active in the New England Clamshell Alliance, protesting nuclear power plants in Seabrook, NH.  And she was a fierce opponent of George W. Bush’s obscene warmongering.
She was arrested often for civil disobedience; her friends joked that she should have a bumper sticker saying, "I'd Rather Be In Jail." 

She moved to Shutesbury, MA, in 1985, and In 2001 relocated to an assisted-living facility in nearby Amherst.  She participated avidly in the Amherst Learning-in-Retirement Program, teaching and taking courses in many subjects until 2015.   A great lover of poetry, she had memorized hundreds of lines and enjoyed sharing verses.  She and my wife used to trade poems endlessly; they bonded over English literature.

She adored Obama and thought he would be one of history’s greatest presidents.  Her horror at Donald Trump’s rise to power coincided with her profound cognitive deterioration, which allowed only intermittent glimpses of her prodigious intellect and playful personality..

I remember a remarkable incident during those years.  I was visiting her in the care facility and she looked up at me and said, “You know, there are quite a few black people here.  And I’m proud to say I don’t treat them differently at all.”  And then she stopped short, suddenly hearing what she was saying, and seemed to shake herself from the inside. 

Lucidity returned, the curtains lifted.

She said, “Wait. Treating black people like human beings is just ordinary decency.  Why should I act like it’s something special, something to be proud of? That’s the kind of thing my mother would say!”   Watching her rise above her dementia for a few seconds  — and using that time to interrogate her own reflexive racism — was a remarkable lesson.


Mom was not an easy person by any means.  We had more than our share of tussles.  And she could not sing in tune to save her life.

But if there’s anyone in my life who taught me the ethical necessity of activism, it was she.  A feminist before the word was known, a pioneering and fearless intellectual, an artist, a world-traveler — her example laid a foundation for my own life as an activist.


My mom was “something special,” to be sure. 

But she would be the first to assert that there are millions of women in the world who are just as smart, just as well-equipped...but who never got the chance to be “something special,” because of the heavy weight of societal expectations and a patriarchal power structure. 

Mom recognized her privilege and understood it as carrying an obligation to greater social responsibility. 

“For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.”  That’s Luke 12:48, and Mom would agree...but she’d want to change that “him” to a “her,” just on general principles.


Do I need to ask again? 

My mom can’t go raise hell outside the Supreme Court anymore, but we can.

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