The Girls from Ames (15 page)

Kelly wished the other girls would understand why she longed for more heroines—or more heroes who weren’t just old white presidents. She wondered why there weren’t more female authors or African-American scientists to learn about. Her teacher didn’t understand her complaints. She took the criticism in Kelly’s essay personally and gave her barely a passing grade on it.

In the generation that followed, of course, the achievements of contemporary women and minorities would be celebrated in every grade school and middle school. But in the 1970s, the choices were often very male and very white. Kelly was the first of the girls to rail against that.

 

 

L
ike Kelly, residents of Ames also struggled to define a new kind of hero. Few blacks lived there when the girls were growing up, yet some in town felt that the racial issues inflaming the outside world needed to be addressed in Ames, too. And so there was a movement, argued about for decades, to rename Iowa State’s football stadium Jack Trice Stadium.

Trice, the son of a man born into slavery, was the school’s first African-American student athlete. On October 6, 1923, he played in his second varsity football game, against the University of Minnesota. On one early play, Trice’s collarbone was broken but he stayed in the game. On another play, he was thrown on his back and trampled by several Minnesota players. Trice died two days later of internal bleeding, and many in Ames believed he had been targeted because of his race. More than four thousand people attended his funeral. Just before Trice was buried, a note was found in his suit pocket. He’d written it in his hotel room the night before his last game, while his teammates were at a whites-only hotel elsewhere in Minneapolis. “The honor of my race, family and self are at stake,” he wrote. “Everyone is expecting me to do big things. I will! My whole body and soul are to be thrown recklessly about on the field tomorrow. Every time the ball is snapped, I will be trying to do more than my part . . .”

For decades in Ames, Trice was celebrated in some circles as a courageous man who had given his life for the community. Still, plenty of people knew nothing about him. By adulthood, Trice’s story certainly appealed to Kelly’s civil rights instincts. Remember, she was the girl who couldn’t stop thinking about the prospect of kissing her African-American classmate in that basement make-out party.

The efforts to name the stadium after Trice began when the girls were ten years old, with some people arguing that he was too minor a figure to be honored so majestically. Others, including several of the girls’ parents, said Trice’s story needed to be told and retold to the children of Ames. Finally, in 1997, Cyclone Stadium was renamed Jack Trice Stadium, and a statue of Trice reading his famous note was placed at the entrance.

To Kelly, it’s a victory of sorts that young people in Ames, girls and boys, are now taught the details of Trice’s life, and that on football Saturdays, tens of thousands of people pass that fifteen-foot-tall statue bearing his likeness.

In that same spirit, Kelly would always tell the other girls how important she felt it was to find and celebrate feminist heroes. She does not hide the fact that she had an abortion when she was twenty years old. (“I’m not ashamed to talk about it,” she says. “I feel grateful to live during a time when women have access to safe, legal abortions. I vote for candidates who defend a woman’s right to have that access.”) She had her abortion while attending the University of Iowa in Iowa City; the father was her boyfriend.

As Kelly and her boyfriend nervously drove up to the Emma Goldman Clinic on January 22, 1983, they saw a mob of protesters on the sidewalk out front, many of them waving angry signs and shouting anti-abortion chants to those entering the building. “Oh my God!” Kelly thought to herself. “Is this what women have to go through if we make the decision to have an abortion? We have to walk through a line of protesters? We have to be jeered and go through this gauntlet? Is this what women who get abortions have to endure?”

What she didn’t know until after she arrived at the clinic was that this day in 1983 was the tenth anniversary of the
Roe v. Wade
Supreme Court decision. Without realizing it, Kelly had picked a red-letter moment to terminate her pregnancy. And she had chosen a clinic that happened to be a historic site in the struggles over abortion. That’s what had led the protesters to come there.

The clinic was named after Emma Goldman, a nurse and self-described anarchist who lived from 1869 to 1940. In her nursing career, Goldman had witnessed the ways in which unplanned pregnancies devastated poor communities. As a lecturer, she challenged the social mores of her time by speaking bluntly about birth control methods. She advocated for family planning and for teaching parents how birth control could help them space out their children’s births. The Iowa clinic said it was named after Goldman “in recognition of her challenging spirit.” It opened just eight months after the
Roe v. Wade
decision. It was Iowa’s first outpatient abortion clinic, and it also billed itself as the first women-owned health center in the Midwest.

Kelly would learn all of this later, and as a feminist, she would consider it fitting that she happened to choose that clinic on that day.

Her memories of that day are both vivid and hazy.

Once inside the clinic, she was surprised to see a familiar face—one of her college professors, also there for an abortion. The professor, a woman in her early thirties, told Kelly a story. She said that she and her husband had been trying to get pregnant and were successful. But she had recently gotten an immunization required of students and faculty at the university. She had just learned that the immunization could lead to birth defects. “It’s a very tough decision,” the professor said, “but I’ve opted to have an abortion.” The woman was grateful that she had this choice available to her; a decade earlier, she’d have had to continue the risky pregnancy.

Kelly had admired this professor as a very smart woman and thought about how she must have played out this decision in her head, weighing the pros and cons. Kelly never learned whether the woman went on to have children.

As they waited for their procedures, the professor asked Kelly if she also was there because of the immunization issue. Kelly told her no, that she and her boyfriend had decided they were too young to start a family, that they wanted to finish getting their education. In fact, Kelly recalls sitting at the clinic and being worried about the procedure, but also being concerned about missing classes that day. What homework would she miss? In her head she was still a student—still a kid herself. Even though she loved babies, even though she just knew she’d be a good parent, motherhood needed to wait. And she was mature enough to know that as someone just out of her teens, she might not be mature enough to handle all the potential issues she’d face trying to raise a child.

Kelly talked to her parents about her decision. Having been very young parents themselves, they knew how hard it was. “Their feedback made a difference in how having the abortion affected me,” Kelly says now. “I was OK with it, probably because it wasn’t a dark secret. My parents said I shouldn’t get married. They didn’t want me having a child so young. They didn’t want me caught in the same situation they’d found themselves in. They told me to finish college. They knew I wanted to be a career person.” Kelly had weighed input from family and friends, and made a difficult decision that was right for her.

These days, when Kelly thinks about the abortion, she is not regretful. She says she focuses on the fact that she would not have her current three children if that child had been born. “I’d have been this young mother with a child. Maybe I would have had another child a few years later. I might have been overwhelmed by it all, and that would be it. And I love my three children so much. I am so pleased to have my children. So I focus on that. The abortion made it possible for me to have the three of them.”

Kelly has always been able to place her life, and describe it well, in the context of her times. She recognizes that she and the other Ames girls, as the youngest of the baby boomers, reaped the benefits of huge changes that were already under way by the time they hit their formative years. “We are a generation who, through progressive legislation, had opportunities women before us didn’t have,” she wrote in one email to the girls. “We are the generation that had access to birth control. My parents didn’t.”

Researchers say that groups of friends such as the Ames girls—those born in the last sixty years or so—often have a greater appreciation of the possibilities of friendships than their mothers and grandmothers did, and a much more powerful bond than most men. The reason: They reached maturity in the era when feminism was blooming. So they naturally assumed that they could build sisterly bonds with friends that would feel vital and important, mirroring or contributing to the changes in society. Their mothers and grandmothers all had close, loving friends, of course, but those older women didn’t have the revolution of feminism to give their connections purpose and worth.

Kelly is vocal in telling the other Ames girls that women a half generation or so ahead of them “paved the way for us.” The least she can do, she says, is not be ashamed to talk about having an abortion. The other girls admire her willingness to speak out, even if they can’t be as forthright themselves.

 

 

H
ere at this reunion, Kelly doesn’t talk all that much about her decision to leave her husband, or the contentious battle that resulted in her ex’s house being the primary residence of her sons, ages fifteen and fourteen, and her daughter, twelve. She was unable to convince her ex to agree to shared physical custody, and the person who conducted the child study took into account the children’s input; they said they wanted to remain with their father. The kids later told Kelly they made that decision for two reasons. First, they were angry with her for breaking up the family and moving out of the house. Second, they didn’t want to hurt or disappoint their already distraught father by not remaining with him. At the time, Karla had tried to help Kelly retain custody by writing a letter to add to the child study file, explaining Kelly’s great strengths as a mother. Kelly appreciated the gesture, but it wasn’t enough to sway the decision.

Kelly tries not to burden the other girls with details of her child-custody issues. She came close to declaring bankruptcy because of divorce expenses, and spent time feeling humiliated, depressed and ashamed that she was not spending more time with her kids than the custody study allowed.

At the previous reunion, at Diana’s house, Kelly spent many hours talking about the end of her marriage and the issues that followed. The girls listened and weighed in. But this time, with the marriage finally legally finished, Kelly is quieter about it. Were she even to introduce the topic, she says, “everything will come out. They know me so well. They can pull stuff from inside me, and I might not want to go there. They go deep fast.”

In one recent email to the girls, Kelly wrote that she was seeing a kind and caring man, only she didn’t find certain things about him attractive. She made a joke about him, and a couple of the girls wrote back disapprovingly. “They said that joking like that showed that I had issues,” Kelly says. “They were analyzing me, and maybe they were right. I was with him, but I knew I wouldn’t fall in love with him because I wasn’t physically attracted to him.”

Kelly isn’t always up for the psychoanalyzing practiced by her fellow Ames girls. These days, she has been hanging out with a female friend she hasn’t known very long. “She’s a woman who was never married, has no kids, and doesn’t ask a lot of questions. Right now, I like that,” she says.

As for the Ames girls, they’ve come to a realization about Kelly. At one point, when she’s not around, they talk about it. “It’s an interesting thing about Kelly,” says Karen. “She’s always been the rebel. First she was a rebel against her parents. And she still talks like she’s a rebel now, acting like a young single person with wild dating stories.

“But here’s the thing. Years ago, we would have expected Kelly to be the one who took off for California. We figured she’d end up working in Hollywood or writing for some big magazine. But truth is, she chose a traditional life, didn’t she? She got married young. She had kids right away. She’s teaching school in a small town in Minnesota. Except for Sally, she’s the one, out of all of us, who remains closest to Ames. Look how close she’s living to the Iowa border. Think about that.”

The girls find it interesting that when they were young, Kelly was the one always battling with her parents. If the girls had to name who had the most tumultuous relationship with her parents in high school, it likely would be Kelly. But as an adult, she has become extremely close to them, especially since divorcing her husband.

“Actions speak louder than words,” says Cathy. “In my case, I had to go outside my comfort zone and move far away to find myself. I don’t think Kelly has taken the hard look at who she is and who she can be. She has so much to offer—and she has to realize that.”

Everything Cathy is saying she has already told Kelly directly, and she confides in the others that the result has led to some cooled interactions with Kelly. They’re a bit more formal around each other, more guarded. “But I’m really acting out of love for her,” Cathy says. “I’d like to see her meet a man who challenges her on every level—emotionally, physically, sexually. Someone who can step up to the plate for her. But before she can meet a guy like that, she has to step up to the plate herself.”