Conversations with Two Founding Members of the Feminist Teacher Editorial Collective

Interview with Paula M. Krebs, original member of the Feminist Teacher Collective

tk:

Paula, we were interested in memories of the very beginning of Feminist Teacher, since none of us on the current collective were there at the very beginning—and especially memories of Sue [Lafky]. We want to make sure as much of Sue’s part of the story as possible gets into this.

pk:

Sue was a huge part of the beginning of the journal. I had met her when working at the [Bloomington] Herald-Telephone [newspaper]. And she was teaching in the school of journalism in Ernie Pyle Hall at Indiana University. So when we got the idea of the journal together, we were trying to figure out how we could put it together because this was before access to computers. We had to put it together physically, and so Sue because she worked at the Herald-Telephone said, “Look, I’ll get the type printed out at the HT and then we can mock up and make the pages ourselves. So she would go in at night to the HT. We would get the articles, and she would feed them—these were the days when you would make newspapers by feeding 8½ x 11 typewritten pages into a typesetting machine and it would spit out the type in columns. So you would tell it how wide to set the columns, and it would spit out type on the kind of film, type-setting film, that we bought.

tk:

Yeah, I remember that shiny paper, and you would run it through the waxing machine and then use what looked like Popsicle sticks to stick it onto the blue line paper.

pk:

Yeah, that’s what we did. We bought a waxer, and Sue would go in at night to the HT after hours and sweet talk the folks in the back shop and they would spit it out for us in type. So that was great that she would do that because that was what enabled us to put this sucker together. Then you came on board relatively early, almost as early as Gail, and we did that for how long?

tk:

It seemed like a couple years after I joined.

pk:

It was at least a couple years where we mocked up the pages. We figured out how long the articles were going to be and we mocked up the pages like you did with the newspaper in those days—just blocked out how long you thought an article would take, where you wanted the photo to go, and likewise Sue would get the photos made into halftones at the photos made into halftones at the HT. All that’s really expensive. We could never have done this on our own. When we started this, we had no money. This was what was so funny about it. We had this great idea, but we had no money to put it together. So we sold subscriptions before we had a product. I mean we went around and advertised, and we got money from our friends. People bought subscriptions to this thing before it existed, and that money enabled us to print the issues. We would go issue by issue, with money from subscriptions to pay for it. And if we didn’t have enough money to print the issue, we’d have to sell more subscriptions.

tk:

So before computers and email and all that, how did you get the subscribers?

pk:

Mostly we went to NWSA. We made up brochures. I don’t know if you remember; were you around for the first brochures?

tk:

No [chuckling], but I’ve heard about them—with the apple right?

pk:

[chuckling] Yes! We cut the apple in half and we Xeroxed it as our symbol and everyone said it was too obscene. Which hadn’t occurred to us, wasn’t why we did it. We thought an apple, teachers. But people said it was too obscene and we couldn’t use...