Rear-View Reflections on Radical Change (eBook)

DECADE I: 1970 - 1979

Young Adulthood: Age 18 - 27

Radicalization’s Origins and A Feminist Wave

On many car mirrors, it states, “Images in the mirror appear further away than they are.” This is also true when considering the impact of past traumas upon a person’s psychological well-being.

A tsunami of revolutionary trends overwhelmed American social and political life between my middle school and senior years in high school. They immersed me like floodwaters in challenges to my conservative Catholic childhood. Between 1963 and 1970, my personal life and that of all teenagers was backdropped by moving images of assassinations, brutal assaults against Black American civil rights activists, horrific scenes from the Vietnam War, and ominous warnings about environmental disasters – all broadcast live into our living rooms on daily TV newscasts.

I was a serious, pensive child who read newspapers and watched news and public affairs programming with nearly as much religious fervor as I had displayed towards the Stations of the Cross. With only occasional comic relief embedded in my persona, the tragic events that surrounded the 1960s initiated a radicalization in me that was further cemented by a coming-of-age trauma. Detailed in my 2013 memoir, Unearthing the Ghosts: A Mystery Memoir, the story is summarized in the first essay in this section titled “The Research Psychiatrist’s Subject.”

The essay and memoir describe the extremely questionable treatment that Dr. Anthony A. Sainz delivered to me when I was 17. While doing research to reveal who Dr. Anthony A. Sainz really was, I discovered the following brief bio from Psychiatric Quarterly, January 1957:

Anthony Sainz, M.D. Dr. Sainz is head of the pharmacological research unit at Marcy (N.Y.) State Hospital. He has been active in the work of developing and evaluating phenotropic (sic) drugs for the last six years and is the author of scientific papers on this and other subjects. Born in Havana in 1915, he was graduated from the University of Havana Medical School in 1941. In Cuba, he did research for the Ministry of Public Health, for the Finlay Institute for Research of Havana, and the University of Havana Medical School.

That background may seem impressive. Sainz did medical research during the first regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, from 1941-44. However, my research also uncovered that in the U.S., this Dr. Anthony A. Sainz had advocated lobotomy for the mentally ill while practicing in Iowa during the 1950s, and that he had done extensive pharmaceutical experimentation on patients without their consent, using LSD, a variety of sedatives, and new “anti-psychotic” drugs pushed by the pharmaceutical industry.

Around 1972, Sainz disappeared from New York State after a court case in Iowa determined that he had committed a medically unethical offense against a man named Ernest Triplette. Sainz had given Triplette a drug “cocktail” of sedatives and LSD, and while the man was heavily medicated, the doctor led him to confess to the murder of a child. Because this maltreatment was hidden during Triplette’s trial, Triplette was convicted and served 17 years in state prison. Subsequent evidence suggested that someone else had committed the child murder; furthermore, it was likely that the real murderer had killed at least one other child.

Triplette was released in 1972, after his pro bono attorneys gained access to his psychiatric medical records and successfully sued, as detailed in the book Benefit of Law: The Murder Case of Ernest Triplette. The central role that Sainz played in ordering the drugs given to Triplette is covered in pages 99-105 of that book. During the 17 years Triplette spent in prison, Sainz was allowed to continue his questionable pharmaceutical experiments on hundreds of patients with impunity.

In my case, I spent three weeks in early 1970 committed by Sainz, with my parents’ permission, to the psychiatric ward of a Utica, New York Catholic hospital. I was 17 years old and in the middle of my senior year in high school. After my release from the hospital, I remained on a powerful anti-psychotic drug even though I was not psychotic. I was told to see Sainz weekly in his Rome, New York office, where he often attempted to hypnotize me.

Rome was the hometown of Griffiss Air Force Base, a major military installation during the Vietnam War and one of Rome, NY’s largest employers when I lived there between 1964 and 1970. Many of my high school classmates were the children of military professionals. Our school encouraged debate about moral issues. During some of those debates, I expressed strong opposition to the war. I did not believe that the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam conflict met St. Augustine’s “Just War” standard that was professed by the Catholic Church and my Catholic school. Some of my friends from military families agreed with me, but many did not.

Before encountering Dr. Sainz, I had begun exploring the philosophies of Western existentialists and mystics and religions of the Far East, such as Zen Buddhism and Hinduism. Since I was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, many among my family and friends, and the priests and nuns who taught me viewed concepts such as Ying/Yang and animism as heresy or apostasy. But these ideas expanded my world view, encouraging me to accept life on earth with all its contradictions, complexities, and cultures.

I turned 18 on my college campus in October 1970. By July 1, 1971, the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave me the right to vote. So, the first time I was able to vote for U.S. President was November 1972, when I voted for the Democratic, anti-war candidate George McGovern and against the incumbent, Republican Richard Nixon. Despite growing opposition to the Vietnam War and the new youth vote, Nixon won in a landslide, and my candidate garnered less than 38% of the vote. This defeat and Nixon’s later resignation under threat of impeachment solidified my view that more fundamental action outside the electoral system was necessary to foster real change.

I had embraced the civil rights, integrationist movement led by Martin Luther King in the 1960s, and I sympathized with Black Americans who rioted after his assassination in 1968. I appreciated the voice of Malcolm X but, as a young white woman, I realized that the Black Power movement excluded me from direct participation in an ideology steeped in Black self-sufficiency. “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” first published in 1970, had opened my eyes and those of many others to the slaughter and betrayal of Native Americans throughout the history of white Western European exploration and settlement of the United States. It did not require a great intellectual leap to see connections between the struggles of Blacks, indigenous peoples, and the Vietnamese against brutality, exploitation, and violence of a white supremacist ideology disguised as law and order, civilization, or democracy.

I could sympathize with the revolutionary fervor of marginalized groups. But the next rights movement was directly relevant to me. The feminist wave of the early to mid-1970s touched my core with the understanding, “The personal is political.” In small, organized “consciousness-raising” groups on campus, open to women only, we shared personal stories about rape, incest, harassment, and other forms of abuse and discrimination. We learned documented women’s history from mimeographed or photocopied pages and booklets about or by great women from the past. We discovered that we did not have equal rights to property, credit, or our own names. We discovered our own bodies and body parts that had been shielded under sheets by male gynecologists in an era when female doctors were nearly impossible to find.

At that time, “women’s studies” programs were just emerging at colleges and universities. It is difficult to underestimate the explosive impact that these programs and organizing efforts had over time on public policy and our own personal lives as women. Launched most visibly by educated white women, the feminist movement also arose among Black and Latina women, both straight and lesbian. “R.E.S.P.E.C.T.” sung by Black diva Aretha Franklin may have delivered a powerful message both to Black men and white America, but almost any woman felt that demand deep in her gut.

I took a course titled History of Science and Sexuality from a British professor named Elizabeth Fee in 1971 at the University at Binghamton, New York. A paper I wrote during that course responded to an essay written by the nineteenth century British journalist Walter Bagehot, who concluded, “We have, therefore, in fine, full ground for maintaining that the ‘woman’s-rights’ movement’ is an attempt to rear, by a process of ‘unnatural selection,’ a race of monstrosities—hostile alike to men, to normal women, to human society, and to the future development of our race.” Bagehot’s “science” stated that women’s smaller brains signal their inferiority to men. I argued in my response that it is faulty logic to assume that smaller means inferior, because scientific evidence proves that smaller tools are often more efficient. I also challenged his illogical tautology that women who fight for equality are not “real” women.

Feminist networking and...