How the End of Roe v. Wade Convinced Me to Share My Feminist Memoir

How the end of Roe v. Wade convinced me to share my feminist memoir

Fran Abrams

I Rode the Second Wave: A Feminist Memoir is a memoir in poetry of my life growing up during the second wave of feminism. The second wave, begun in the 1960s, focused on equal opportunities, equal jobs, and equal pay. 

I was born in 1944 and lived through those years. I went to school in the ’50s, took home economics in junior high, and was expected to become a homemaker. Except, in my family, we were expected to go to college and “make something of ourselves.” After doing just that during times when it was not typical for women to do so, I spent 41 years in professional jobs.

I had been casually thinking about writing about my experiences in response to various people telling me I had led an interesting life and I should write about it. I never took them seriously.

Then in 2017, looking for a creative outlet, I started learning how to write poetry and found I enjoyed it immensely. In June 2019, I attended a poetry retreat organized by one of my poetry instructors. Have you ever had an occasion when your mouth spoke words your brain didn’t know you were going to say? 

At the beginning of the retreat, the instructor went around the room and asked the participants to share their big goal, not how many poems they wanted to write that weekend, but the big picture of what they were working on. The answers the other women gave were inspiring and when it was my turn, I answered without my brain knowing what I was going to say: I want to write a memoir of my life in the context of the women’s movement. And, of course, as soon as I said it, my brain said, “Oh, yeah. That’s it.” 

I did some research and found that there is no book out there like this that tells the story of a life lived through the second wave. There are, of course, history books about the women’s movement, but none tell a personal story that reflects this period in history.

Poetry offered me the tools to tell my story. I spent the retreat weekend outlining, recalling significant events to include in the book, and writing a few poems. I kept working on it for close to a year with my instructor as my critic and coach until it was in shape to be submitted to a publisher. 

I Rode the Second Wave is a memoir, not an autobiography. It does not try to convey every moment of my life. As a memoir, it has a story line and a viewpoint. I wrote many more poems than are included in the final version. For example, I left out an entire chapter about my early childhood when it became clear that it was not relevant to the story arc. Instead, I wrote an introductory poem, titled “Dear Reader,” that begins “I want to tell you (unless you too were there), what life was like in the years before women revolted.” 

The working title of the book was “A Life in Context.”  I included poems that are personal to my life and poems that set the scene to show what was going on in this country during those years. I wrote a poem titled “I Rode the Second Wave of Feminism” that originally was the introductory poem but then realized it belonged at the end. And then, I decided that title also belonged to the book. Hence the book’s title is taken from that poem.

I had second thoughts about the personal information that is shared in this book. All the names have been changed, except for mine, to assure the privacy of others who are mentioned here. Nineteen submissions of the manuscript were declined. Then, Atmosphere Press accepted the manuscript, and I got cold feet and I declined them. I was not sure I wanted to share all this.

Then Roe v. Wade was overturned in June of 2022. And, fortunately, Atmosphere Press came back to me in August and said — Are you sure you won’t go ahead? And I said, “Yes, it’s time.” 

I want this book out in the world to make the point that we can’t go back. Once you’ve read about what everyday life was like for a woman growing up when I did—or if you too are that woman—then you understand the importance of the message in this memoir. And if you are a younger woman, I hope it helps you understand that the good old days were not good for women. There are men out there who would be perfectly happy to see all women as housewives, not people with careers, and sadly, many of those men are running for public office or already have been elected.

So that’s how I decided to share my story. I realized we’re at a crossroads in this country, and I feel strongly that we can’t go back. My story tells how I went forward. I wrote it because it needed to be told and I could find no books that said what I wanted to say. 

I hope this book speaks to women of all ages—those who were there and those who followed. I trust it will serve as a reminder to women today that opportunities are open to them that were not always open to women. And that more work must be done to keep feminism and equality alive.

—

Fran Abrams lives in Rockville, MD. She holds an undergraduate degree in art and architecture and a master’s degree in urban planning. For 41 years, she worked in government and nonprofit agencies in Montgomery County, MD, where her work included a substantial amount of writing, such as legislation, regulations, guidelines, and reports.

In addition to her day job, she began working in 2000 as a visual artist. After retiring in 2010, she devoted much of her time to her art. In 2016, she wrote a lengthy proposal in support of Foundry Gallery, a nonprofit art gallery in Washington, DC, where she exhibited her work. After completing that project, she realized how much she missed expressing herself in words.

After deciding she wanted to write in a form that was completely different from her past work, Fran attended a poetry reading early in 2017, and began taking poetry writing classes at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD. In September 2017, she traveled to Italy with her first writing instructor and a group of women poets for a poetry retreat that reinforced her commitment to writing poems. She is delighted to be introducing her first book of poems at the age of 78.

Fran’s poems have been published online and in print in Cathexis-Northwest Press, The American Journal of Poetry, MacQueen’s Quinterly Literary Magazine, The Raven’s Perch, Gargoyle 74, and many others. Her poems appear in more than a dozen anthologies, including the 2021 collection titled This is What America Looks Like from Washington Writers Publishing House (WWPH). In 2019, she was a juried poet at Houston (TX) Poetry Fest and a featured reader at DiVerse Gaithersburg (MD) Poetry Reading. In December 2021, she won the WWPH Winter Poetry Prize for her poem titled “Waiting for Snow.” In July 2022, her poem “Arranging Words” was a finalist in the 2022 Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry. Her first chapbook, “The Poet Who Loves Pythagoras,” is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

To learn more about Fran’s poetry, please visit franabramspoetry.com.

I RODE THE SECOND WAVE: A FEMINIST MEMOIR

I Rode the Second Wave: A Feminist Memoir is an autobiographical story told in poetry through the eyes of a woman whose life paralleled the second wave of feminism, a movement that began in the 1960’s and focused on equal opportunities and equal pay for women.

The second wave changed the expectations of women from the homemakers of the 1950’s to career women. The author was a freshman in college in 1962 determined to enter the workforce in a professional position. After completing her graduate degree in 1969, she was rebuffed in job interviews by men who assumed she would leave her job soon after she married and had children. She accepted a job in an office where she was the only professional woman. She married in 1970, had her first child in 1976 and her second in 1984. She worked for 41 years, retiring in 2010.

Placing her story in the context of women’s marches and feminist goals, the author tells how she grew up in a world that expected women to become homemakers and how she combined her desire for a professional career with marriage and motherhood at a time when mothers with careers were just starting to be accepted in our culture.

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