Lehigh Valley feminists waged campaign in schools, prison

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One of Mary Larkin’s prized possessions is a beat-up, old, wooden cutting board in the shape of a mushroom, but you can’t tell by looking at it that it is the product of a revolution.

It was made by Larkin’s daughter Debbie, who was one of the first girls to take shop in Parkland schools after the district relented in the mid-1970s to allow them to forgo home economics and do woodworking instead.

The episode was one of the many battles — big and small — that women such as Larkin fought during the heyday of the women’s rights movement in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.

Larkin, 82, of Allentown, Judith Ruhe Diehl, 87, of South Whitehall Township, and Jan Forse, 85, also of South Whitehall, talked about those struggles in the run-up to this month’s celebration of National Women’s History Month.

They were active in the movement in the Lehigh Valley and are donating their buttons, posters, photos and documents from that era to Lehigh University’s Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies program. The university is planning to preserve the material for future generations.

“It’s important to have that history,” said Jackie Krasas, a Lehigh associate professor of sociology and anthropology and director of the women studies program. “It’s the day-in, day-out, very hard work on the ground that often doesn’t get recorded as history.”

Krasas said the program still has to figure out how best to archive and use the seven or so boxes of material in the collection.

Though they started out as homemakers living conventional lives of marriage and motherhood, Diehl, Forse and Larkin became part of a social revolution that would spread like a wave across the country. They raised eyebrows in middle-class communities, where their attempts to change social mores met with resistance. But in the end, the women’s movement overturned many of the barriers that had kept women out of some clubs, colleges and professions.

Diehl, Forse and Larkin look back on those days as among the defining moments of their lives.

The three women are hoping that by talking about the movement, others who were active locally will consider contributing their own photos, documents and memorabilia to the Lehigh University collection.

“The young girls now have no idea what it was like,” Larkin said. “And the only way they’re going to know is if these things are preserved.”

Mrs. John Smith

Standards did change, but slowly. It wasn’t until the 1980s, for example, that The Morning Call’s obituaries stopped listing a married woman by her husband’s name — Mrs. John Smith — rather than her actual name.

It took a Supreme Court order for newspapers to stop segregating help-wanted ads. For decades, those ads were divided by gender: Traditional women’s jobs such as hairdressers, secretaries and nurses would be listed under Female Help Wanted, while positions in traditionally male fields were under Male Help Wanted. The practice stopped after a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling against the Pittsburgh Press.

Movements are often recounted in court cases and events on a grand scale, and indeed Diehl, Forse and Larkin marched on Washington for the unsuccessful Equal Rights Amendment, and Forse and Larkin attended landmark National Organization for Women conferences. But they also performed the less glamorous nuts and bolts of activism.

Diehl was one of the first female Lehigh County commissioners and the board’s first chairwoman. She was active in everything from women’s prison reform to working with the Evangelical Lutheran Church’s Northeastern Pennsylvania Synod on the changing roles for women in the church. Larkin and Forse, whose last name at the time was Leander, worked on issues ranging from parity in school activities such as intramurals to programs for survivors of domestic violence and for displaced homemakers.

For Diehl, activism was in her DNA: Her mother was a suffragist.

Larkin, as a young mother, read Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking book, “The Feminine Mystique,” and identified with it immediately.

“That was my awakening,” she said.

Forse said she was a feminist in kindergarten.

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