Clay Latimer

NANCY SHARON COLLINS: [0:00:01] Recording. Good morning.

CLAY LATIMER: Good morning. What did you do? Well, I'll ask you another time. I'd like to know how to do that too.

COLLINS: The recording thing?

LATIMER: Well, I don't even know how to initiate the contact.

COLLINS: Allow me to teach you.

LATIMER: Oh, well you don't have to do it now, tomorrow.

COLLINS: Okay.

LATIMER: During the storm,

COLLINS: Right, give us something to do. Yes storm one or storm two.

LATIMER: Right.

COLLINS: I'm Nancy Sharon Collins. I'm interviewing you and you are who?

LATIMER: Clay Latimer

COLLINS: And I am speaking to you where?

LATIMER: I'm in my apartment in the Mid City, City Park area.

COLLINS: And are you married, single?

LATIMER: I am married and separated.

COLLINS: Married and separated. Okay. And do you have children?

LATIMER: I have a stepson.

COLLINS: Oh, cool.

LATIMER: Who's in his 40s.

COLLINS: Um, I should know this from your biographies. But do you have siblings?

LATIMER: I had a natural half-brother, who was 10 years older than I. But he died at a young age and not a baby age. I mean, he was an adult. But he was my only sibling.

COLLINS: Oh, wow. And your parents passed away when you were fairly young? Correct?

LATIMER: Right. Right. In my teens. Yes.

COLLINS: And then you had an uncle here in New Orleans?

LATIMER: Yes, I came to New Orleans to live with my uncle and his family, his wife and his son who is about 14 months older than I am. I think and he is still my cousin is still alive and lives across the lake. And we keep in touch with each other.

COLLINS: And you moved here from?

LATIMER: Montgomery, Alabama, Heart of Dixie cradle of the Confederacy and also the home of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks.

COLLINS: Um, do you have any specific memories of that time?

LATIMER: Actually, I have lots of memories and I have tried to put some of them into short stories. If you've ever seen the movie with Whoopi Goldberg and Sissy Spacek called The Long Walk Home.

COLLINS: No.

LATIMER: It's pretty historically accurate, I think. And it's about the Montgomery Bus Boycott and when I saw it, I was amazed at how nearly identical to my situation it was. My grandmother had people who worked for her whom she called servants. And her prized servant was the cook. And the cook came every day. And she usually took the cook home after everybody ate lunch. But the cook got there on the bus. And when the bus boycott began, she made sure that the Cook had either a taxi or she would go pick her up so that she didn't have to endanger herself getting... Not because she cared about so much about the cook’s welfare, but she didn't want to lose a good cook. She had this person working for her for over 25 years.

COLLINS: [0:03:48] Did...

LATIMER: And that's sort of the theme of Long Walk Home too.

COLLINS: Wow. Wow. Did you find that odd when you were living in Montgomery? Or was it more of an awakening later?

LATIMER: Later I mean, it. I had some conflict, there were things I didn't understand. And as I tried to write the short stories the conflicts come up in my memory. And if for example, I never understood why my grandmother's cook called me Miss Clay and I called her by her first name, things like that were incongruence to me at the time. I think it's sort of a blessing that I had that cognizance then. I don't and I've never had the opportunity to talk to somebody else who was raised and that's that specifically racist geographical area. To know they also doubted the reality of the adults around them.

COLLINS: So this give me a give me a time. So we have it on record.

LATIMER: Well, the bus, the bus boycott, I think was in 1954 in December of 1954. And I was 10.

COLLINS: Wow and your parents, your memory, there's a wonderful actually, there are three articles that you sent me that are wonderful. The Laine Kaplan-Levenson, one on the ERA that I'll refer to in a minute and then Janet Allured's bio of you in 64 Parishes. And she quotes you or you say that your parents taught you… so that was the gender thing. You can't be put down for your gender. Those are my words, what were your words?

LATIMER: [0:6:01] In very subtle ways, my mother especially. My father wasn't as happy about my wardrobe as or my mother was less unhappy about it than my father was. But I always wore jeans and went barefoot.

COLLINS: I was going ask you.

LATIMER: I was in [laughs] you know until I started junior high, and then I was convinced that I needed to dress differently. But of course, now today, kids get to wear jeans to school. I didn't get to wear jeans to school in the 50s. My father, I told my father, when I was probably around 10 or 11, that I wanted to be a detective when I grew up and again, this is in the 50s. He made me a fingerprint set and gave it to me as a gift and my parents were divorced. So I didn't have constant contact with him. But when he brought it to me and taught me how to take fingerprint my own fingerprints and how to lift fingerprints off of surfaces. So I thought that was kind of affirming for my aspiration to a gender crossing career. And then my mother, I told her one day when I was a little bit older, that I couldn't decide if I wanted to be a lawyer or a writer. And her response to me was, well, Erle Stanley Gardner was both.

COLLINS: Basically, yeah.

LATIME: So I think I did get some affirmations in my home. My grandmother wasn't quite as, as supportive as my parents were I think.

COLLINS: And then once your parents passed away, and you moved into New Orleans with your uncle and family, what was the atmosphere in that home like?

LATIMER: I think that they struggled so much to keep me safe from myself and my own rebellion, irresponsibility, that they weren't really directed in any political way to guide me.

COLLINS: [0:08:29] Why were you a wild child?

LATIMER: I was. Well, I was very rebellious. I mean, clearly now in retrospect, I can say I was very angry, and, very unhappy about the way my life was turning out at age 14, so.

COLLINS: When did... Do you know, do you have a vivid memory of, I'm going to call it the awakening just because I can't think of anything else of social activism that just compelled you to go and do something ?

LATIMER: You know, I went to a Catholic school that was the solution to my rebelliousness.

COLLINS: [Laughs]

LATIMER: And I have to say it was a great plan. And it worked out really well for me, and I adapted really well. Because where I was, and I don't know if it's true of every Catholic school, but this was a Catholic boarding school. I was pretty independent. The consequences were clear for different behaviors, and they were consistent, and they were equally applied. And so, you know, it wasn't personal. If I didn't follow a rule, I got the consequence. And it wasn't about me. It was about the system. But I one time I... one of the freshmen had gotten in trouble, I must have been a junior or a senior then. And one of the younger girls had gotten in trouble doing something. And I asked to speak to the Mother Superior. And I went to the Mother Superior and had a long conversation with her about why she shouldn't throw this kid out.

COLLINS: Wow.

LATIMER: And it was, you know it and I don't remember what my arguments were I know that. I think she I think that girl was being raised by a single father and hadn't and hadn't had much more structure than I had.

COLLINS: Wow.

LATIMER: [0:10:47] But yeah, I thought how audacious of me. To just, I'd like to speak to the Mother Superior, please.

COLLINS: Yes. Excuse me a moment. That's a great story. That's wonderful. Do you think that you knew at that? Well, yeah. If you told your mom, you wanted to be a lawyer or a writer, so you knew you had a notion of what lawyering?

LATIMER: I don't know if I did. I don't know what I knew about law. I knew what about writing because I had already tried to write things. But I don't know that I understood what lawyers did. And I and I don't know if I associated it more closely with law enforcement. Because that was after that was after the detective thing. That was years after. But I think that I think that somewhere I was incorporating some concepts of justice and fairness. That rule should be equally applied. And, you know, crooks who do wrong need to get fingerprinted and put in jail.

COLLINS: So after Catholic school, did you go directly to college? After high school?

LATIMER: I tried to, I went for one semester, and I played the whole semester. And my uncle brought me home and told me I had to go to secretarial school. So I spent a couple of three months at Business College, and then decided that I was going to move across the lake to where the actually where the Catholic school I went to was. And I can't remember the sequence then. But I moved over there into a log cabin on the [defunct?] river and I had I had a sort of a stipend or an allowance for my, for my mother and father's estates. And it was, I mean, it wasn't anything great. And it ran out soon. But I went back to my high school. And the principal then didn't have a secretary and I convinced her that I would be a good secretary, and I helped her. I stayed there for a few months, and then I had an offer to go to, to go teach at a school in Folsom, where the Black... it was, this must have been in 64.

COLLINS: Wow.

LATIMER: [0:14:09] The children in this Catholic community. It was a rural Catholic community, just outside of Folsom, Louisiana. And the children who were in that community were biracial, and they weren't allowed into the white schools because they were biracial. And they weren't accepted socially in the Black schools.

COLLINS: Wow.

LATIMER: So this priest had started at school for them and it was really, it was, it was pretty close to the one-room schoolhouse, it was a three-room schoolhouse, for grades one through six, and I taught third, fourth and fifth grades. And the year I taught I had it was it was 64 because it was the presidential election with Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson. And I decided that... There used to be a newspaper. I can't remember. A children's newspaper and I can't remember the name of it. But it had some information about the presidential election and so I decided, well let's have an election. And we had a little box that we... I mean a big box it was like six feet tall but it was a wooden box with Rod and where we hung our coats and I converted it into a polling booth. And I and we had Election Day... Well, first we had arguments for and against each candidate, and the kids that I mean, these were fourth and fifth graders, mostly fifth graders who participated in this, but they made their arguments for their candidates and someone else kind of understood.

COLLINS: Wow.

LATIMER: The differences, candidates, and I'm proud to say that Johnson won by a resounding margin.

COLLINS: [0:15:19] Because of your students in the coat closet?

LATIMER: No, no, I mean, in my school, he won.

COLLINS: Oh, really.

LATIMER: I didn't mean in reality.

COLLINS: Wow.

LATIMER: But yes, the students overwhelmingly supported Johnson.

COLLINS: Wow, that's really interesting.

LATIMER: All ten of them so.

COLLINS: How did you get from the schoolhouse to law school?

LATIMER: [0:15:56] Oh, you're really challenging me. I don't remember what I did next. I guess I started going to I'm still living in Covington. And I saw I started I had made friends with some people who were going to Southeastern in Hammond.

COLLINS: Uh huh. Yeah.

LATIMER: It was Southeastern Louisiana and so I started going there and I went there for a while. I did much better academically had, since it was my own decision. And I had worked out some things and in my, in my couple of years, trying different jobs. And I went there for a while and then I got tired. When I was 21. I think I got tired of living so secluded across the lake, and decided it was time to move to New Orleans. And I kind of bounced around with different jobs. But I started going to school at night and I started at Tulane’s University College. And I took all of the English and History courses that they offered at night. And then I sort of switched over to Loyola and started taking their history courses. But I took a constitutional law course, first semester of it, and then I took a second semester of it, and decided I wanted to go to law school. And I hadn't finished my bachelor's degree. And this was in 72, I guess. And at that time, they were giving dual... Tulane was giving a dual degree in Law and Social Work. And I had heard that Loyola was giving a dual degree in Law and Accounting. And I had completed majors and both, I completed all the hours, I needed an English for an English major, and I've completed all the hours I needed in history or history major, but I hadn't finished my bachelor's degree requirements. And I decided to just apply, and I applied and they accepted me and I will never know why. And I have kept it a secret for a long time because I didn't want to go back and look and say, What did we do here? What happened? So, that's how I got into law school. But I went at night, I still went at night, I was working with the Corps of Engineers then. And I was operating a teletype machine which, which took very little brain or time, you know, in those days. Nifty little laptops and my teletype was hooked up to a computer in Vicksburg. So I would feed information into the teletype and it would take a couple of hours for the work to be processed and sent back to me. And so all that time I sat and studied and managed to get through law school, I sort of ran out of money in my last semester and had to had to grovel with my uncle for money to get through the last year.

COLLINS: [0:17:45] Was it when you were in law school that you became politically active or after or before?

LATIMER: Oh, no, it was when I was when I was in law school, because that was really a challenge to be to keep up with, with my political stuff and keep studying and making great passable grades. It was in law school that I started working on E.R.A. stuff and same time I met Janet Riley. And she was not like Professor until my senior year, but I knew who she was. And I made a point of knowing who she was and I made a point of talking to her frequently about the [correct?] amendment about community property laws. But no, I had gotten into the... my senior year I got into the Institute of Politics. But before that, I became Oh, that's right. It's the same day I started law school. I joined N.O.W. And I just, you know, I'm plunged into N.O.W.

COLLINS: [0:20:16] I have to interrupt you, because I run into this all the time. What is N.O.W and where?

LATIMER: The National Organization for Women.

COLLINS: Explain it.

LATIMER: It was founded in 1966, by Betty Friedan and other women, who most of them have some affiliation at the time with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in D.C.

COLLINS: Okay.

LATIMER: And based off that there needed to be a bigger movement for equal employment opportunities. And they founded N.O.W. It gets priority in 1972, when I joined was the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. But nobody locally, but that's not true. Not nobody, some of the other women's groups in the community had been working on it, but N.O.W wasn't... Didn't seem to be prioritizing it and I went to their board, and I didn't even know these people who were on the board. I was just a member who had joined like a month or two ago, and I went to the board meeting, and I said, if you all will give me a budget, I will start an E.R.A. Task Force. And the budget. The budget I asked for was $50. And I think the millions that we're spending on E.R.A ratification in these decades now.

COLLINS: But what how much... I'm gonna interrupt you, how much do you think a postage stamp was at that point? It was a couple pennies, probably or nickel.

LATIMER: That's true. But of course, we had to use posters. That's all we had then. So we didn't have the email and stuff. But we did a newsletter. And I also did add it to the newsletter and E.R.A Central had a newsletter. After I got the 50 dollars , I worked with or I didn't work with them, they dragged me in to working to establish an E.R.A coalition. So we set up an E.R.A coalition called E.R.A Central. And E.R.A Central had a newsletter as well. And I always made sure that both of those newsletters when they went out in the mail, that they got sent to the public library. And I went back later, not too long ago when I was doing some research, probably when Janet was working on her book. I went back to look at the newsletters and they didn't have I'm not sure if they had any of the E.R.A Central newsletters at all. They had a few of the N.O.W newsletters and so they still have them. I don't know, you probably can't get to them now. But they were in the Louisiana archives part of the New Orleans library there. Well, what was the question?

COLLINS: I was asking about N.O.W and maybe this would be a perfect time. I'm going to jump forward to earlier this year and the E.R.A amendment. What's going on with the amendment now?

LATIMER: [0:23:40] I have been, I figured that younger women need to deal with it. I've made all of the arguments and I and my arguments didn't win. So I have been focused more on local legislation and local policy. But there isn't a big E.R.A effort here in Louisiana. The American Association of University Women and the League of Women Voters are very active. Now, our coalition in back in 72 or 73. Actually, that's how it started. It was in 1973 when the Louisiana constitution was being rewritten. We started a local coalition asking to have an E.R.A provision put in the Louisiana constitution. God I have to say a really terrible provision that that not only doesn't require equal opportunity, but it sets down the criteria that you can use to discriminate. And the criteria is arbitrary, unreasonable and capricious. There's no criteria, there's no discrimination is permitted on the basis of race and I think religion. Then the next sentence is that there should be no what does it say unreasonable, arbitrary or capricious discrimination based on sex. And then it lists on sex and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Disability is one of the categories that sex falls into. I don't have a copy of the Louisiana constitution.

COLLINS: Sex falls under… no, I mean, disability falls under?

LATIMER: Well, there was a whole list of things they are arbitrary and capricious, reasonable.

COLLINS: [0:25:51] What is the E.R.A amendment?

LATIMER: Equality of rights law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex period.

COLLINS: That was it. That simple?

LATIMER: Well, there was a second paragraph saying that the states would have the right to make laws to support the or to implement.

COLLINS: And the E.R.A was never ratified by its this state of Louisiana. Is that correct?

LATIMER: No, I believe they rejected seven times there were a couple of special sessions during the years that we worked on it when it was brought up twice. So I think it was rejected more times than there had been there were legislative sessions or the address.

COLLINS: So what are you working on now?

LATIMER: Well, now I'm actually working again. Well, not again, I'm working a lot though. But I'm still active in N.O.W and I'm the N.O.W representative to a coalition called the Legislative Agenda for Women. And I have been until recently, and I'm sort of winding down my obligation to another coalition called Louisiana Courts Matter. Which was spearheaded by the National Council of Jewish Women, and nationally, not locally. And locally, they put together a very strong presence. And I was invited to attend a training in Dallas in I don't remember what year when it was when Obama was still in office, and probably early in his first term, about the federal judiciary and the process of appointing judges and what the politics is around all of that. And I got very heavily involved in that and functioned as a co-chair with one of the local people on the National Council of Jewish Women locally, named Ina Davis, who was just a wonderful, wonderful gift to my life that I got to work with someone like that. She's I just like her in every way. She was a great partner. She's a great leader. She's... I can't say enough about how, what a positive experience it is to work with her.

COLLINS: [0:28:36] So the courts, are you talking...

LATIMER: She needs to be in these in these interviews about?

COLLINS: I know her name, and I just wrote it down. Yeah, I know her name from someplace. When all y'all speak of courts, are you talking about? Explain the court system, because it's like the call to jury duty I go to Orleans Parish courts...

LATIMER: We focused on the federal courts, because that the President gets to appoint those judges. Since Trump's been in office, I think people are better educated about how important those positions are and how important those appointments are, and that authority to appoint. I mean, he has he has changed the face of federal, the federal judiciary in a very short time. When Obama was in office, they tried to block most of his appointments. And, and he didn't get to have as great an impact on the federal judiciary as we had hoped. And that was part of the purpose of the of the Louisiana Courts Matter Coalition.

COLLINS: Oh, And then how does that? How does one make change? There's a lot of I feel like a lot of younger people don't know how to be politically active.

LATIMER: It's in the federal judiciary is it's a complicated concept and most of our role in the coalition was to educate, and the President appoints people for the federal judiciary, but the Senate has to confirm them.

COLLINS: Okay.

LATIMER: [0:30:33] And, and so the focus, our focus was on our senators and getting them to and David Vitter was on the Judiciary Committee, which is the first step in the process that the appointment goes to the committee and the committee interviews them and votes up or down. Or, I mean, there are lots of other options that the federal government has missed the process of anything getting done is so complicated. That I'm sure they don't all understand it. It was complicated just for us to understand this antique, the simple process of getting a person to become a federal judge. But Vitter was on the Judiciary Committee, and he was not supportive at all and then the coincidental turn of events. Which I will not refer to as deal. Happened when Vitor chose not to run for his Senate seat again. John Kennedy ran for the Senate seat and he got a position on the Judiciary Committee, and David Vitter's wife got a position on the Eastern District federal court in Louisiana [laughs]. I guess it's all coincidental.

COLLINS: If somebody wants to really be politically active. How do you start that process as a private, individual citizen?

LATIMER: I think we would tell them to join an organization, first of all. Any of the organizations that are members of the Legislative Agenda for Women. And there's another wonderful person named Julie [Traum?] Harris, who has been pretty much heading up that agenda since its inception. However, many years ago, it was. And Julie has been a wonderful teacher for me. I have been following her around for the last five or six years, I think, at the legislature, she knows everybody there. She knows the system. She knows the which committees are the important one. She makes it a study before every legislative session. She studies everybody. The Independent Women's Organization is a political organization that endorses Democratic women for political office. And so that kind of balances out our activism also because we have managed to get in this last election, a good number of women who have come through a training program called EMERGE that was set up a few years ago. And, and so we have, we now have a few more allies than we used to have. But if you belong to an organization, that's part of the coalition and just about every women's organization in the city is. As well as some that that are not just women's organizations. And you commit to doing some lobbying, either at home on your computer or your telephone, or by going to Baton Rouge and meeting directly with your Representative or your Senator. Someone usually Julie will teach you how to do it and teach you what the important things to say are. What the important ways to reach people are. Don't remember what your original question was. But I think that the Legislative Agenda for Women is a great opportunity for people who can come through another member organization and get great leadership and political skills.

COLLINS: So there is a roadmap. There is people have identified a roadmap or a blueprint of how to do this.

LATIMER: I would say Julie has and we have followed her through that.

COLLINS: [0:35:04] Do you feel as it… because when I was reading, when I was researching, Janet Mary Riley and going through those archives, and looking at the time period. I was just because it was out of sheer ignorance, the Finding aids at Tulane and Loyola for the information during the 70s, I guess. How much that huge volume of women's political activism and organizations at that time? Do you feel as if we have as many women actively working to bring agendas forward? Or do you feel like it's less people being active?

LATIMER: You know the New Orleans E.R.A coalition had about 22 organizational members and a lot of their a lot of them were the same organizations on the Association of University Women were members, the League of Women Voters were actually… people from the League of Women Voters were instrumental in creating the coalition. But I think today that we're doing a much better job of, of getting women educated and active in it. And it's, it's a, it's a huge, multi directional effort by the inception of EMERGE, which is an organization that trains provide scholarships to women who want to get elected to public office, trains them. Puts them through a training program, how to campaign and how to serve and in this last election at... when I'm not taking up tape time, I can look for you and tell you who the who the people are serving in the legislature today who came through the EMERGE program. And I think that for elections and political action, I think there are many, many more women, maybe not so many more organizations, many of the same organizations, but many, many more individual women who are active today.

COLLINS: [0:37:32] Oh, wow, that's really cool. Because I look at I have, I don't know if I have any contemporaries, women. But I know a lot of women here in their 40s. And they're involved in community. But I don't know anybody. I don't know any women who are politically active, which I find here or any place

LATIMER: Well there are too many of us who were too old. In the coalition, I think we need to pull in many more younger women, but the women who are getting elected to the legislature are younger.

COLLINS: Oh, that's cool.

LATIMER: That's a good thing.

COLLINS: That's a very good thing. Um, speak for a minute or two, because it's a personal favorite. The head and master law and your work.

LATIMER: That was a long time. That when we started advocating for the Equal Rights Amendment, we pegged the head and master provision as the most offensive to women language and law that we assume that no one would not be offended by that.

[0:39:04] And the headmaster provision says that the husband of the Louisiana is community property state. Which means generally, everything that comes into the marriage, in terms of material things is owned in division by the husband and the wife. In division means you can't just pick a part of a specific part of it. But the value of it is undivided, but 50 percent interest by each spouse. That the community that the husband is the head and master and that's the language in the in the Civil Code is the head and master of the community. And as the head and master, he has the right to sell it, give it away. Dispose of it any way he wants to. Use it in any way he wants to and there were cases where, and without the knowledge or consent of the wife. There were cases where a husband gambled and put up his house as an asset that used to gamble. His wife never knew about it until the foreclosure came. They were eventually they eventually divorced, I don't know if it was related to his gambling or use of money. But she didn't find out about a mortgage on the house until after the worst was filed. And I'm trying to think of other cases where there was misuse, but there was, there was always opportunity with us. The wife was relegated to need to know status, you know, he didn't have to tell her anything he was... And that seemed so blatantly offensive to us that we were sure that it would motivate people who hadn't before supported the Equal Rights Amendment and how shocked we were when we ran into a brick wall of people who thought that was a fine system. And women needed help and I mean, women were telling us, women needed help in managing properties, and that women were best suited for raising children.

COLLINS: How do you account for that sentiment?

LATIMER: [0:41:44] Well, a lot of it is probably tradition a lot. And a lot of it is probably sociological and social differences between the way men and women were raised in this country. This was only 1972 and a lot of women, I think, felt unable to work and support a family. But they didn't have the skills. They didn't go to post high school educational institutions to learn to make money, they, if they went, they went to learn other things that were more related to what our society then was defining as women's duties. And I think a lot of them were afraid. I think a lot of them didn't think they could live a better life. Weren't dependent on whoever the man in their life. I don't, I'm not a sociologist. So that's just a, you know, a wild theory, but I think there was a lot of fear.

COLLINS: There's, oh, I should know her name who opposed the E.R.A.

LATIMER: Phyllis Schlafly.

COLLINS: Yes. Because I have very active imagination. So I kind of build these characters of the feeling that a married woman could have and her relationship to the home. And the husband who brought home the bacon that would oppose the E.R.A. I was just trying to imagine it.

LATIMER: Yeah, she I mean, she is such an anomaly. As I mean, she was a professional woman, and she was doing a professional job and was and was nationally recognized as having the skills to do that job. And a lot of the leaders of the opposition to the E.R.A were that that profile. Lawyers and business women and women who actually were independent and could have been financially independent if they had wanted to be. I think the community property system is a fair system. I think it's important and was important back then, because it recognizes the value of the contribution of a non-working mother wife to the marriage as being equal to the value of the income earning husband. It was just the management issue, that that caused us problems and it was just a management issue that was so offensive to the status of women.

COLLINS: That's really interesting. That's very well put. Yeah, because I think

LATIMER: People would accuse us of wanting to dismantle the community property system. And we had to keep saying, you know, we really we value women, as mothers and housewives that somebody needs to be there to do that. And traditionally, it's been women, and they, you know, the law has seen that their contribution is equal to the contribution of the other partner.

COLLINS: [0:45:29] So you would today, do you self-identify as a Second-wave feminist?

LATIMER: I guess so [laughs] I'm in the book. So I guess I have to be.

COLLINS: I was reading the article.

LATIMER: Of course I do. I mean, I certainly I identify as a feminist.

COLLINS: Feminist yes.

LATIMER: If history has adopted that period is Second-wave. That's where I was.

COLLINS: Do we have a third wave?

LATIMER: If that means that we will see a stronger force than before. Maybe we're building up to it. We'd have to ask Janet that I think.

COLLINS: Okay. Okay. That's a good question for her.

LATIMER: So I have to say that speaking of heroes, Janet Riley is a hero on her own, and people need to read about her and read about how she was treated as a single woman, a professional, an expert and authority. How poorly she was received by the legislature after being charged with the, with the duty to do things for them to be so insulted.

COLLINS: Because she was appointed to do that work.

LATIMER: Right.

COLLINS: Yeah, that was an appointment. Um, and she provided good work. And all she met with was opposition to overtime.

LATIMER: [0:47:19] And actually, her law was not even accepted to be introduced. Her proposal of law was not accepted to be introduced. And she went around the Law Institute and found someone who would introduce it for her.

COLLINS: And he did.

LATIMER: Yes.

COLLINS: Yes but that wasn't [done?]. It was not head and master law was only instituted overturned in 1980, I believe.

LATIMER: It became law in 1980. I'm thinking it might have been passed in the 79 session that didn't become law until 80 and I say that hesitantly because I'm not sure if those dates.

COLLINS: I think it was 79 and then 80. Yeah.

LATIMER: But yeah, she started the campaign at the same time. Well, actually, I'm thinking that Janet Riley knew way before we came along to tell him that there was a problem but as far as I know, I didn't meet her until 72. And I know at that point, she was sparked by the idea of getting rid of the head. So seven years she spent on that.

COLLINS: Do you have other heroes?

LATIMER: [Laughs] I don't have a list of them but as I think back on as we're talking I you know, people come to mind who have been poorly treated and made daring efforts to make change. Usually treated by men in power should say.

COLLINS: Yeah. Did you ever have any desire to move away from here?

LATIMER: [0:49:23] There are lots of other places that I would like to live. I used to go there to visit and I don't have the time anymore. And I don't understand why I'm retired and don't have the time to do that. I'm already packed to evacuate either to the Smoky Mountains or the Ozarks.

COLLINS: Very good.

LATIMER: Depending because this will be my vacation if we get a storm.

COLLINS: I think we can wrap this up. So I could have started this but this interview is auspicious on a couple of levels, we're still in the middle of a pandemic. There are two named storms headed our way. I'm forgetting anything?

LATIMER: I finished reading the paper today. So there may be more.

COLLINS: Does anything come to mind that you'd like to share about your life and your activism?

LATIMER: Well I have tried to keep my private life separate from my activism, and I have some right now I have some public appointments to somebodies. That were made by people who don't care about my private life

COLLINS: Good.

LATIMER: And that's fine. But I don't like to subject them either to any criticism for what their appointments or support of me. But I think that there's been a little attention paid to the importance and the culture of the lesbian community. I think when people talk about what used to just be lesbian gay. Is now such a long list of people that I don't, I don't recognize some of the groups as being as having anything in common with me. But I think people would be shocked to know how many of their children's doctors and teachers and lawyers and caregivers are lesbian women. And to know what a really large lesbian community there is in this country. And I was anticipating that you were going to ask questions about that. And I would invite you to research some things and about that, that community, as a local and as a national community, I think down the road people would be really interested in knowing who we all are.

COLLINS: Can I do another session with you on that?

LATIMER: I was thinking more of a private one where we could talk about some some places to do some research. Do you like the research on trying to talk?

COLLINS: I love research.

LATIMER I have been trying to talk Janet into doing this and she now she wants to do Methodist Women. So I'm not I'm not going to get to see this before I die probably.

COLLINS: I love research and frankly, the few inroads that I've tried to connect with young lesbian women. Cis, I guess. Hasn't I haven't. I have no, two. Young lesbians are very smart. But they relocated. Yes. So um, yes, I would very much like that. Because it's one subject that I have not. I've scratched but not done anything with.

LATIMER: Yeah, I have to say I hardly know any young lesbians. But the old lesbians I know are remarkable people and there's a local community. Okay, actually, there are a couple of different local communities. [Phone rings] That's it.

COLLINS: No, that was my I thought I turned off my phone

LATIMER: Well, why don't we do a zoom? It's not recorded and talk about that.

COLLINS: Okay, that's good. I will unrecord. So thank you very much. I mean, I'll end this. Thank you. I'll talk to you soon and be safe.

LATIMER: Thank you. I'm, I'm honored to be part of this.

COLLINS: Oh, this is great. Thank you so much. Okay, thanks.

LATIMER: Bye. Bye.