‘Done being QUIET’
Women stepping into activism in their 60s
MINNEAPOLIS — There were women in trees, women on tiptoe atop ledges, all trying to peer over the hundreds of thousands of heads in pink hats filling Washington’s National Mall for the Women’s March in January. In all of her 69 years, Judy Seguin never had been part of anything like this.
Seguin had driven from Nowthen, Minn., with her daughter, teenage granddaughter and friends, saying yes with a newfound impulsiveness.
“It was a defining experience for me,” she said quietly. “The solidarity, the permission to be who you are.”
Across the dining room table, Susan Dergantz listened, nodding. She didn’t go to Washington, but she also finds herself stepping out of her comfort zone, calling congressional representatives, writing postcards, reading legislation.
“With all that’s going on this year, I decided it was time to become involved,” said Dergantz, 67, of Anoka, Minn. “I thought that making phone calls, trying to attend town hall meetings, would, I don’t know, make me feel less helpless.”
Seguin and Dergantz are afloat in a rather unexpected pool of activism. It’s a pool of older women who’ve raised kids, held jobs, gone to church, kept life going behind the scenes. Now, somewhat to their surprise, many feel energized by issues affecting women and social justice.
“We really are issues-oriented,” Seguin said. “It’s not necessarily about who’s in the White House. I see what may be coming, and I don’t like the plans from our Legislature or Congress or president. They aren’t listening. Government happens at the lowest level. I think people forget that. “So we’re done. We’re done being quiet.” Dergantz and Seguin are part of a grass-roots movement of activist older women. Maureen McHugh, a professor of psychology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania who’s written extensively on women’s issues, said their visibility is a testament to how much women’s lives have changed in the past several decades.
“There is a larger group of educated, previously employed women — who might also have organizational skills around protest — than there ever has been in our whole history,” McHugh said.
“Some of issues they’re mobilizing about now really are the same old issues, which is discouraging. But at the same time, we understand them.” Yet Seguin isn’t keen about being considered a rebel. “I don’t really like that term ‘activist’ when I feel like a grandma,” she said. “I’m a grandma who is taking action.”
Getting her voice back
Seguin and Dergantz met 10 years ago at their church, the First Congregational United Church of Christ in Anoka, which Dergantz calls “a beautiful pocket of liberalism.”
“It’s not that I’m especially religious,” she added, “but it gave me the permission to be the person I am inside, to be more, to do more.”
The two women clicked, partly given their backgrounds. As Dergantz said, “I feel like I’ve known Judy my whole life.”
Seguin worked for 31 years with Hennepin County as a human services supervisor in public assistance. Dergantz taught middle school students in St. Francis for 35 years, and still exudes a wry even-keeledness. She volunteers at the Anoka Metro Regional Treatment Center, an elementary school and a local homeless shelter.
They’re each attuned to needs of the young and the less fortunate.
‘Always women who’ve helped’
Seguin once was young and less fortunate. She married at 18 after graduating from Robbinsdale High School, but her husband abused her physically and emotionally. “My only sunshine in the eight years we were married were my two kids,” she said. She’s not sure how things would have ended. All she knows is that a woman — “and it’s always been women who’ve helped me” — told her that she saw what was going on, and that she was there for her.
That was incentive enough for Seguin to file for divorce. She returned to school, but needed public assistance until she could get a job.
“That’s how I could pay the rent, or get clothes for the kids,” she said. “I was lucky enough to have parents to help, but many do not.”
Eventually, she met Dean Seguin. They’ve been married for 39 years, “and my life has been pretty darn good.”
Then, last year, her ex-husband died and she realized how his influence had subconsciously lurked over the years, “how I’d always felt a little afraid.” His death, she said, “gave me my voice back.”
Dergantz touched her friend’s hand and exhaled. She’s heard this story. This time, though, she decided to share her own story.
“OK, I don’t know if you have ever heard this,” Dergantz began, and then told how she had been sexually assaulted during her first summer as a schoolteacher, how it’s taken her 40 years to come to terms with that violence, how she gained 100 pounds “trying to make myself undesirable as a piece of meat,” how she lost that weight and — like Seguin — found her voice.
“I’d been taking care of other people all my life and now am taking care of myself,” she said. “I think I’m just starting to give myself permission, period.”
Seguin touched her friend’s hand and exhaled.