I

was born in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1950.  For most of my childhood, my parents, Bill and Lois O’Dea, my younger brother, Jeff, and I lived on West Horne Street. Only four blocks long, West Horne is a block from cliffs overlooking the Missouri River and the state of Nebraska, just on the other side of the river.  This was important.   When tornadoes hopped across Nebraska, the neighborhood kids and I would stand on the cliff and watch the tornadoes.  We believed we were safe.  Actually, we knew we were safe because we knew that tornadoes cannot cross rivers.

I have no recollection of the origins of that myth, but we never saw a tornado cross the Missouri River.

West Horne Street was right out of the iconoclastic family television shows.   I knew every family on my street and most of the families on the intersecting streets.  It was a world where children walked to school, went home for lunch, and returned in the afternoon.   It was so safe that during the summer months, mothers sent their kids outside to play after breakfast and did not want them to return until lunchtime.

I was fourteen years old when I read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which was the most shocking book I had ever read.  I did not know a single woman with whom I felt comfortable talking about the issues Friedan raised.  Friedan’s description of advertising that portrayed women finding deep emotional satisfaction from a clean toilet was my first Aha! Moment.  Before I ever finished reading the book, I believed that I would do my best to create a different life for myself, as did millions of women.

One of my first decisions as a women’s liberationist, that’s what we called ourselves, was that I would not learn to type.  I decided that if I learned to type it would be too easy for me to be trapped in secretarial job.  My mother had other ideas and insisted I take typing in high school.  The lowest grades I received in high school were in typing and gym.  Of course the irony is that I am sitting at my laptop using a qwerty keyboard and writing about American women in politics.

I married in the mid-1970s and had two children.  In many ways my life was traditional; in others, not so much.  After the marriage ended in the mid-2000s, I took back my surname and moved to northern California.  I return to Iowa at least once a year to spend a week with my O’Dea cousins at Lake Okoboji.