Dorothy Canning Miller – On Jasper Johns

"In the late 1950s, there was a group show at Castelli’s, and there was a little tiny painting of an American flag. I said to Leo, “Who did that?” He said, “Oh, he’s wonderful, that’s Jasper Johns.” Some time later Castelli gave Johns his first one-man show. I remember it was a Saturday morning, it was opening day but it was raining. Alfred Barr got there before I did because he lived uptown. He called me and said, “How fast can you get here?” I said, “Twenty minutes if I take a taxi.” When I got there he was alone in the gallery. The great variety of Jasper’s works was impressive. There were the numbers, the letters, the targets, all sorts of things. Leo Castelli was very considerate. He left us alone to discuss which ones the museum should buy. We knew we should buy several, the only way to get the range of the work. They were very inexpensive. After much discussion we decided on four that we should bring before our Collections Committee. We could not give any assurance that they would be bought, but we called Leo out and said, “These are the ones we’d like to have. Will you send them over?” He said, “Fine, would you like to meet the artist?” And poor Jasper had been sitting in a little inner room no bigger than a closet hearing everything we’d said for an hour."

— Dorothy Canning Miller, in Particular Passions: Talks With Women Who Shaped Our Times.

Louise Nevelson - Herstory.

"What I see about humanity makes me a pessimist. But in my work I’m an optimist. Look at humanity, look at what’s happening on this earth. I think anyone who takes the attitude that they can do something that will change the world is very naive. For instance, I’ve taught art. I’ll say to my students, “Well, what do you want?” “I want perfection,” they say. I say, “Well, who in the hell do you think you are that you can demand perfection?” It’s nonexistent anyway. Words like ruthless and sacrifice are kind of false judgments. You don’t do it that way. When you have labor pains, you don’t say, Could I have done it this way or that way? You go into labor. Those words belong to what we call three dimensions. I didn’t think like that. Living the way I did... see, I broke all the traditions. If I wanted a lover, I had a lover. I didn’t have to get married again. So I had courage to live as I understood it. I thought that art was more important than other things. I work for myself. It was only because I had so little confidence in the world that I wanted to build my own world, not the world, my world."

— Louise Nevelson, in Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Shaped The World.

The oral biography of Louise Nevelson, whose work and vision elevated sculpture to its current place of prominence in the arts. Available at Apple and Amazon.

Julia Child - On Cooking

"You don’t spring into good cooking naked. You have to have some training. You have to learn how to eat. It’s like looking at a painting: If you don’t have any kind of background, you don’t really know what you’re looking at. The French have training from their families, they grow up with an appreciation of food, that it is an art, that it is worth considering carefully and looking at. I had to learn, and both cooking and taste developed simultaneously for me."

- Julia Child, in Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Shaped Our Times.

Enjoy Julia Child's oral interview from the late 1970s - one of 42 oral interviews in Particular Passions. This chapter is available with our compliments for a limited time, at this link.

Betty Friedan - The Femine Mystique

"Today I see the same contradiction, in a way, between what almost becomes 'the feminine mystique' if we get locked into the reaction, the sexual politics of the women’s movement and the reality of women’s lives, including my own. Don’t forget that my own agony that led me to write The Feminine Mystique had to do with the mistaken choice: either/or. When I see us heading toward it again, when I see us denying the basic needs of women that do have to do with love and men and children, it denies a part of me, it denies a part of my personhood and what I am as a woman. I will not deny all that I am."

- Betty Friedan, in Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Shaped Our Times.

The oral biography of Betty Friedan, who fueled the women’s liberation movement that continues to work toward equal rights for women around the globe. Available for $0.99 at Apple and Amazon.

Betty Friedan — Beyond the Feminine Mystique

Betty-Friedan

"The goal of the next stage has got to be to make equality livable and workable. That means that there has to be a restructuring of institutions. Not the abolition of the home and the family. That is not what this means. But there’s got to be a restructuring of the home and the family because it’s not any longer based on the woman as the subservient, unequal housewife. Both in the couple are earning, both should have options to take leaves, or go to part-time schedules, when children are little so the woman is no longer the automatic, unpaid server in the home. But the home is still there and needs to be taken care of. Now that means not only a whole new approach to parenting, but new kinds of designs of houses, apartments, communities, new services, new appliances, a restructuring of work; because work in all the professions, all the hours of internships and residencies, is structured in terms of men and men’s lives at a time when they had wives to take care of all the concrete details of life.

What we need are a whole set of options in child care, not just government funding, but preschool, after-school, in the home, funded or sponsored by unions, by industries, for profit, not for profit. Combinations of public funding, private funding, tax incentives for business to have child-care programs, tax credit for each child, whatever plans would enable one parent to stay home for a few years to concentrate on the child and be compensated for that financially, or having it to spend on child care, or take tax credit for it, plus a sliding scale with ability to pay.

We’re not going to get the restructuring, the flexitime and all the rest, in terms of women alone. We don’t have the power to get it. You’ll have men with new demands for it, too. Men in their young years are going to be expected increasingly to share the parenting and the family responsibility. You’re beginning to see men rebel, the quieter value revolution. They’ll say, “I’m not going to live in terms of the rat race alone. I’m not going to live in terms of a definition of masculinity that makes me suppress my feelings and defines me as just an instrument, as a breadwinner, and makes me have strokes and heart attacks at age forty-five.” You’re seeing evidence of this all over the place. So you find that young men, and older men, too, have some interest in flextime where they won’t be defined solely by the linear job career. This change coincides with changes in technology and those brought about by the energy crisis.

The changes that men are going to make are less simple because they won’t come from anger. They don’t have the same simple reason for anger that the women did. But if we don’t move on to the second stage, we could get aborted just like the first wave of feminism. I don’t think that the women’s movement as such is going to be the main vehicle for the next stage of change. It may be, of necessity, still too much locked into the first agenda which isn’t complete yet. We have to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed. But there are also too many women who’ve taken leadership in the women’s movement who are still in a phase of reaction. It makes them uneasy when I talk about the family." Betty Friedan - Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Shaped Our Times.

The oral biography of Betty Friedan, who fueled the women’s liberation movement that continues to work toward equal rights for women around the globe. Available for .99 at Apple and Amazon.

Dorothy Canning Miller – On New York

"I used to get offered directorships or other good jobs in other cities, but I never considered them because I knew the only place where I wanted to be was New York. Here’s where it’s cooking. There’s no other place like it. I wouldn’t live anywhere else. People say, “Don’t you want to retire to your little country house?” I say, “Oh, I’m not leaving New York, good God, no, I wouldn’t dream of it.”

- Dorothy Canning Miller, in 'Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Shaped Our Times.'

The oral biography of Dorothy Canning Miller, who as a curator of seminal exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art championed cutting-edge artists, available at itunes and Amazon, for $0.99.

Dorothy Canning Miller – On Investing in Art

"I have done a good deal in helping private collectors to buy art and I have been fortunate in that they have all bought because they love art. Once in a while someone has called me on the telephone to say, ‘‘I’d like to buy something that’s going to be eight times as valuable.” I say, “Well, I’m not interested. I only buy things myself because I’m crazy about them and I advise other people to do the same. If it becomes more valuable, that’s just good luck.” I don’t help anybody who says he wants to buy for investment purposes, I don’t like that as a reason for buying."

Dorothy Canning Miller, from 'Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Shaped Our Times', The oral biography of Dorothy Canning Miller, who as a curator of seminal exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art championed cutting-edge artists, available at itunes and Amazon, for $0.99.

Addie Wyatt - On The Labor Movement

"When I think about what I’ve contributed to the organized labor movement and what I have received in return, I can only conclude that it has been a profitable venture. I’ve contributed so little and received so much. I think this is basically true for most workers. I’d be the first to say that the unions have not really achieved all that I thought they ought to achieve. This is understandable — though you have to define who and what the union is. We’re the union. It is an imperfect institution because it is made up and led by people like us, who are imperfect but seeking to perfect ourselves and seeking to perfect our movement. Imperfect as it is, it’s the best that we have as working people, therefore it’s up to us to strengthen it and to make it as effective and as responsive as possible to our needs. We’ve got more work to do to completely bridge the gap between the promise of equality and the fulfillment of that promise because it’s the only way to win for ourselves the fuller and better life we all seek. I’m a part of that movement and I hope to remain a part of it."

- Addie Wyatt, from 'Particular Passions: Talks With Women Who Shaped Our Times.'

Tatyana Grosman – On founding ULAE

"When my husband had his first heart attack in 1955, I knew I had to make a living. I remember one night, it was about two o’clock in the morning, and I was thinking, What shall I do? I hadn’t learned anything, I had no craft. So I said to myself, I have to start something. Probably it will be something I will do for the rest of my life, so it has to be worthwhile for me. I would like to contribute something. Whatever I start, I have to put in it everything, all my life experience, all that I love, and all that I am interested in. I decided I would like to publish. I would like to combine words and images and only words and images that I like."

Tatyana Grosman - Particular Passions: Talks With Women Who Changed Our Times. The oral biography of Tatyana Grosman, who founded a unique publishing house that elevated print making to a fine art, and nurtured the careers of artists who became giants of twentieth-century art.

Enjoy this complimentary chapter from the book, 'Particular Passions: Talks With Women Who Shaped our Times.'

Ellen Stewart — On Harold Pinter

"I was wiping off our coffee bar that we had made out of old shoeshine stands and he comes down and says, “I say there. Who is and where is this Mama woman?” And I said, “Who wants to know?” He says, ‘‘I’m Harold Pinter and I want you to give her a message that if she dares to put on my play in this little hole tomorrow, that she is no longer going to exist,” or something like that, because he had been told by his friends that our little theater was illegal and if he reported it, we would be closed immediately. How dare I put on his play in this little hole! He was Harold Pinter.

He raged and raged until finally I said, “Well, Mr. Pinter, I’m the Mama woman. I love your plays and I had planned to do all of them.” He stood there with his mouth open. Then this lady—not the one with the tweeds, she never said a word but the one with the mink shrug—pushed him aside and said, “I am Mr. Pinter’s agent. I hereby tell you, if you do this piece...” And then he tried to interrupt, and she told him to shut up. Then he stepped in front of her and told her, “No one tells me to shut up!” And he said, “Mama woman, you do this play as long as you want to, and until it gets a commercial production, it’s your play, from this time on. You do it as much as you want.”

She screamed at him, “You can’t do that!” and he said, “I most certainly can and furthermore I’m going to come to see it. When does it open?” He didn’t come to see it because he got a cable to return to England immediately and he really did leave. It wasn’t an excuse or something.

Years later, in 1967, when we were playing in England at the West End, we didn’t fare so well but we did get a West End production of Paul Foster’s Tom Paine, and there were interviews and all that. Pinter was at a party where they were talking about these American off-off-Broadway people who had come to London and how we caused quite a stir with our ways. “Well,” he says, “that’s quite all right. I’m a La Mama playwright also.” So he told it, I didn’t, and the papers talked about it."  

Ellen Stewart, from 'Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Shaped Our Times.'

PARTICULARPASSIONS recounts the rich oral histories of pioneering women of the twentieth century from the arts and sciences, athletics and law, mathematics and politics.

We share their journeys as they pursue successful paths with intelligence and determination, changing the world for the millions of women and men who were inspired by them. 

These stories will captivate, educate, and inspire you.

Particular Passions is available at Apple and Amazon.