Bev Mazur
The Raging Grannies want young people to know rights can go away.
For more than a decade, a group of women has come together to advocate for progressive causes and to protest policy gone bad. Members dress in long skirts, aprons and floppy hats, a whimsical and unapologetic shout-out that they are not youngsters.
“Our old age is part of our costume for our street theater,” says Marie Martini, a member of the Madison chapter of the Raging Grannies. The Madison group has been singing at protests since a 2003 rally against the Iraq War and was particularly active during the 2011 protests against Gov. Scott Walker.
The group has just released a new book of personal essays, Listen to Your Grandmothers, which was compiled by Martini. A book party is slated for May 7, 2 p.m., at the Madison Central Library (“Grandma’s cookies and milk” will be served).
The 22 short memoirs span nearly nine decades. “I thought the stories needed to be preserved,” says Martini. “I thought they’d be inspirational, especially now, to people who are so worried about what is happening in our state, country and world.”
It’s a message for young and old alike, adds Martini. “Elders will be able to say, ‘These old ladies are doing it. Maybe there’s a place for me in what’s happening in this world.’” And younger audiences, says Martini, need to know they cannot be complacent. “Things can change if you don’t pay attention and you don’t move forward.”
Deborah Lofgren, the group’s conductor, underscores that lesson when she writes about getting an illegal abortion in 1971. “I had to fly to New York and have an abortion in a basement in the Bronx. I didn’t speak Spanish and the man there didn’t speak English. It angers and frightens me that current laws in so many states have made women’s health care and choices so dangerous again. It’s a story I share with many young women because they have no idea what it was like before Roe v. Wade [the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion]. When I was a teenager, it was illegal for a doctor to prescribe birth control unless you were married.”
Martini, who taught high school for 34 years and now teaches part time at Madison College, finds many students are “totally oblivious” about current political attacks on reproductive health rights and other liberties. “I am pretty shocked at how ambivalent younger people are about their rights and their quality of life and the protections for that quality of life,” she says. “They take it for granted that it will always be there, and it certainly hasn’t always been there.”
“Everything we fought for in the ’60s is in jeopardy right now,” she adds.
Not all of the stories in the collection are about politics and protests. There are also poignant stories about family and coming of age. Gerrie Martini, mother of Marie, writes about scraping by during the Great Depression. “My earliest memories are of potato soup, homemade bread (we kids always wanted store-bought bread), my grandparents bringing us milk, butter, meat, vegetables and berries from their farm. Many people were not so lucky.”
And Bonnie Block, born in 1941 and raised on a dairy farm in Dodge County, recalls how bullying “by the clique of ‘townies,’ who saw themselves as a cut above us farm kids who were bused to school,” turned her into a fighter for justice. “I think it was precisely these experiences that developed my penchant for siding with the underdog and speaking up when I see anyone being treated unfairly.”
