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MARTHA BOESING: When I set out to write this play, I wanted to do a one-woman play, but it wasn't going to be about the '70s. And I was working with Carolyn Geltzer, who's considerably younger than me and did not live through this era. I mean, she remembers it as a child, but she wasn't in it like I was. And she kept saying, talk about that time. Tell me about these women, Kate Millett, and Susan Griffin, and Ti-Grace. And I don't know these women. We watched films of them and she was just, wow, I didn't know anything about this was going on like this.

And I found myself pausing over it as if it wasn't very important that I had spent my life doing this. And I realized suddenly that what had happened was that I had internalized the backlash and questioned how important that movement was.

INTERVIEWER: Martha Boesing had done.

MARTHA BOESING: I know. It was amazing. And so then as I began recalling. And then I went around and I interviewed about 40 women from that time who had been there and said, talk about your life. And women who had different experiences than I did, and some who had the same and just said, talk about it. And I began to realize that the erasure that's been going on about that movement had in some way affected all of us. So then I really wanted to do this as a gift to us as well as an educational piece for the young ones coming along. I wanted to validate our lives and talk about how important this work had been and the tremendous work we had all done and--

INTERVIEWER: Well, tell us a little bit more about These Are My Sisters. You've said that you've gone out, and you interviewed 40 women. And you've created out of those interviews, five characters.

MARTHA BOESING: Five fictionalized characters who part autobiographical, part their stories, part invented. I mean, they're all mixtures. They all have a little bit of me in them, but a lot of other people's lives. Well, I wanted to-- I started with ten-- 12, I think, and gradually, I cut them back. They are all white women. And I had in my original work had two women of color, which seemed really important. But gradually I began to cut them out because they just weren't as much my experience.

It's really true that the whole issue around multiculturalism and diversity and entering in the theater world, although we talked about it a lot. And we encouraged women of color to join us. We really didn't start doing that until the middle of the early '80s when we got on it. And we started having workshops in racism, and we really got on the whole thing and started really turning the company into a multicultural company. But my experience in the center of it was really pretty much white. And a lot, well, mixture of middle and working class actually.

And we had a real class awareness, much as the rumor is we didn't, we did. But anyway, so I got it down to five white women. And the women are Jane, who's an old time hippie who comes out of the '60s and moves into the movement through relationship. She finally falls in love with a woman and moves into the relationship that way. I mean, into the movement that way. And then Shah, who's a suburban housewife goes to a CR group-- consciousness raising group, and finally moves over to become-- leaves her husband to start the first battered women's shelter and stays with that, taking care of women who are fleeing from abuse.

And Rhea, who is a strange little mousy character. I'm not quite sure where she came from, actually, who begins studying the old Aboriginal cultures of Europe and the old goddess cultures and writes a book about it, and actually becomes the most famous one of the lot. Ironically, she's a very shy-- she stutters and--

INTERVIEWER: The researcher.

MARTHA BOESING: Yeah. She stutters and she-- but she's a wonderful character. I really like her. And she was very surprised that she's become a very famous person through all the study of the goddess rituals and the goddess stories. And then Naomi, who's a real revolutionary and scholar. She works at the University and is a Marxist and a socialist feminist and adamantly allies herself with people's revolutions throughout the history of the world. She is a Jewish woman who grew up in Brooklyn and went to Brooklyn College.

And then Perry, who's an old time bar dyke and had gone through the whole business of being arrested. If women were caught dancing with each other, they were arrested and so forth in the old bars. I mean, it was really a horrible time of oppression. And came out in the '70s and started the Lesbian Resource Center, and now is a person who's head of wilderness treks, and takes women out into the wilderness.

INTERVIEWER: That is a diverse bunch.

MARTHA BOESING: So it's a diverse bunch. And my hope, the first half is they each give a monologue about what leads them into the movement. And the second half, I bring them all-- bring all the five chairs together and let them have a conversation with each other. They're all my age looking back and--

INTERVIEWER: And they're all you.

MARTHA BOESING: They're all me in some ways, yes. Oh, yeah. I play them all. Yes. Yeah. I play them all.

INTERVIEWER: Oh, that would be hard to have a conversation with yourself.

MARTHA BOESING: Well, it's fun.

INTERVIEWER: Five times over.

MARTHA BOESING: The hard thing is to remember that it really is a conversation, it's not a monologue.

INTERVIEWER: So are these women then in-- the play is set in current day. And these women are looking back.

MARTHA BOESING: Looking back. Yeah, absolutely. And some of them, talking about their lives now. Jane, the Hippie has a daughter named Samantha, who is a radical feminist now and is always putting her mother on the spot about those wimpy women in the '70s who were also woo woo and wussy as she says. Jane says, it just makes me feel so passé.

INTERVIEWER: Well, I've heard that actually there are a lot of daughters of feminists who are much more conservative than their mothers.

MARTHA BOESING: Well, I've heard that, but that's not true of me or my friends. Which is interesting. Martha Roth is a good friend of mine and her daughters are good, strong, radical feminists. And my three children are pretty radical feminists.

INTERVIEWER: Back in the '70s, feminists got the reputation of being angry. And there seems to be more humor in feminism today than there used to be. Do you think that's so?

MARTHA BOESING: Any movement that is visible at the moment is always seen as angry and tough and strident and didactic and all those words we hate. But in fact, we had a lot of good laughs at the foot of the mountain. We had a lot of good laughs in our place. I don't think that's true. I think we always had a good sense of humor. We had a lot of fun. I mean, we were a fun-loving group. We danced and sang and told jokes and had a good time.

So I think that when a movement is in your face, it looks so serious and adamant. And then when a movement backs up a little, it looks like it's lightened up. And then the lightning up looks like it has a little more humor in it. And in that sense, that's probably true, that when you're really fighting for something, you are taking yourself pretty seriously. I mean, we were taking ourselves seriously at Honeywell when we were trying to get Honeywell not to build the cluster bomb. But we also told jokes and had a good time. So it's hard to know about the humor issue.

INTERVIEWER: Did you ever think that you'd be 60 years old and still the radical feminist? Did you ever wonder if this is just a phase of your life?

MARTHA BOESING: I didn't ever think I'd be 60 years old. I mean, aging is very strange. Because my biological clock says I'm 60. And I can feel it in my body often. I feel creaks in my knees and aches in my neck and shoulders. But I get tired early at night, I want to go to bed. I'd rather go to bed than to party. I know I'm really getting old. But I don't even know what 60 means. I mean, aging is such a strange thing because we mark it biologically, but emotionally it changes. It shifts from day to day. I feel like a little child sometimes.

I just came from my sister's burial the day before yesterday up in Andover, Massachusetts. And I was with some of her relatives and some of my family. And I felt like I was just a little kid again. I just felt like a kid. And I didn't relate to myself as a 60-year-old having to hold myself together or something. I just realized I have these feelings that are related to my family of origin, that are related to that experience, and I was right in them.

It wasn't just that I was remembering them. I was right in them again for a moment. So I was about 12 at that service. And then I gathered myself up and got to about 35 for lunch. So it just depends, doesn't it? I mean, aging is funny. I think we ought to have a different way of-- when we start looking at the gender spectrum, we'll start looking at the age spectrum, then also and notice that there are a lot of 45-year-olds who are about 70 and 65-year-olds who are about 20.

INTERVIEWER: So, yes. Well, do you still have a lot of your friends who were with you back in the '70s in the feminist movement that have retained that attitude, those feelings--

MARTHA BOESING: About feminism?

INTERVIEWER: Feminism.

MARTHA BOESING: Yes, I would say that all of my radical feminist friends are still radical feminists. I think that the word-- I mean, there is a way you get mellower as you get older and wiser, and you begin to see what that really means to be a feminist. I mean, a feminist really is someone who believes in an egalitarian culture where there is not an oppression of one group of people over another. It's certainly not anti-male. I don't think it ever was anti-male.

Although in the '70s it was important for us to have a time with ourselves, to be with ourselves. What would that be like? What would a theater run by and created by women be like? How would it differ? We all came out of theaters that were run by men. How would that change things? And I think that we really needed to have that time. And I don't feel that now. I enjoy working with men and do work with men often. Although I still look at myself as a radical feminist, that word has a little bit more softness around it, just in terms of how I feel inside. But not in terms of my politics. They're pretty much the same.

I see how things change and move and come back, and I'm not as worried about the backlash as some people I know. And I think it's because it just seems obvious to me that that's how we do it. Two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back. And I see changes that will never go back. My daughters will never think that they have to have a man around in order to find out who they are. I really believe that. That I could not be whole, I needed to find the other piece of the jigsaw puzzle to make myself whole, which meant I needed to find a man. I don't have children who believe that. And none of their friends believe it. I don't think they feel that they have to have a man. That's very different. And it's not anti-male. It's just saying, young women are whole.

INTERVIEWER: Well, that's a major legacy then.

MARTHA BOESING: Major.