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Personal histories as they relate to feminist practice HH: Welcome to all of you and thank you for coming! Even though we all know each other at least a little, I suggest we start by sharing our own personal history in the area of women's practice. In order to provide a model and to be as embarrassed as everybody else, I'll go first. My background in these issues probably starts with growing up poor to a single mother and going to an elite college, Swarthmore, where there were a lot of new Left activities: civil rights, antiwar, Students for a Democratic Society. I didn't get involved in the women's movement until 1969 when I went to graduate school in economics at Yale. New Haven Women's Liberation was meeting in town, not on campus, and it was very much a socialist feminist group. It was an incredibly exciting time for me because everything was new and growing overnight-women's liberation and the mimeographed articles that would come down to us from Boston or up from New York, the birth of the Union for Radical Political Economics and the rebirth of Marxism on campus, the birth of women's studies-all in a strong atmosphere of activism. The conjunction of all this helped me understand that what I was learning in school could actually be useful to women. A heady feeling. After graduate school I taught for a couple of years at the New School for Social Research but soon moved into the public policy world. I worked at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for two years and the National Academy of Sciences for eight years, writing about discrimination and comparable worth, among other issues. Then in 1987, I founded IWPR. That is all I am going to say by way of introduction. Which way do you want to go, left or right? Let's go left. EB: Why not? The rest of the country is going the other way. NH: Exactly. CB: The roots of my activism are in Social Gospel Methodism. In the sixties, I went to Duke University in North Carolina where I became immersed in the Civil Rights movement. This was a transformation of what my missionary-oriented Methodist roots had meant up to that time. I was studying history but decided not to pursue graduate work because I 918 SIGNS Summer 1996 THEORY AND PRACTICE INTERVIEW Hartmann et al.