When Gloria Feldt was growing up in an isolated small town in central Texas, little did she dream that one day she would head one of the largest, most controversial healthcare organizations in the country.
Looking back, it seems that everything in her life pointed her that way.
The elegant 54-year-old woman who was named president of the planned Parenthood Federation of North America last month does not fit the profile of someone who was married at 15 and had three children – all unplanned – by the time she was 20. But she did.
Her own history as a Jewish woman and as a teen-age mother has imbued her with a deep and abiding empathy and a drive to move her community toward her vision of a world in which every child is a wanted child raised in an atmosphere of security and love.
After 18 years as executive director of Planned Parenthood of Central and Northern Arizona, Feldt will assume duties as national head in June.
Under her guidance, the local affiliate has blossomed. Its annual has grown seven-fold, from $1.2 million to $8.5 million.
The number of health centers it operates has mushroomed to 17, from three. Found raising has increased 20 times.
Now one of the largest chapters in the country, the affiliate provides reproductive health care and education, including gynecological exams, disease screenings, sterilization and birth control, to 125,000 Arizonans.
“I always had the sense of being different,” says Feldt of her upbringing in the central Texas town of Temple. Except for a chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women to which her mother and grandmother belonged, “there were no Jewish organizations, no synagogues, nothing.”
Her parents drove her 30-40 miles each way to attend religious school.
When she was 8, her family moved to Stamford, Texas, which she says was “a really small town, not far from where `The Last Picture Show’ was set and not too unlike” the town in the movie.
Although her Jewishness made her feel different, she was well-liked by her peers and voted “sophomore favorite” by her high school class.
But she then made a move that her mother found “absolutely devastating.”
Feldt ran off – at 15 – to marry a man four years her elder. At 16, she became a mother for the first time.
“In large part, it was because people just did that,” she said. “But part of it was the difficulty of being an adolescent who was different from other kids. I just wanted to be normal, like everybody else and that was the most everybody- else -kind-of-thing I could think of.”
By the time she was 20, she had three children. Daughters Tammy Bosse, now 38; and Linda Bosse-Singh, 36; live in Phoenix. Son David Bosse, 34, lives in Houston.
Although today Feldt deals professionally with the perils of children having children, she says – and her children confirm – that she was able to cope with its challenges.
“There was always an unwritten thing in our family. We would go to college; we would accomplish something in our lives,” says Tammy Bosse.
“So she would try to get us to the theater, to music lessons, dance lessons. She wanted to make sure we were exposed to things you couldn’t find in west Texas.”
After her third child was born, Feldt entered the University of Texas of the Permian Basin to earn a teaching degree.
She also became involved in the ongoing civil rights struggle in the early 1960s.
But with three small children, she could not participate in protest marches, though her devotion to the cause ran deep.
Renewed studies in Judaism in her 20s explained the draw.
“I understood where it came from after I began studying Judaism: why I had this strong interest, this compulsion to be involved in something that would further social justice,” she recalls.
Her early involvement was about race, but it led to her first understanding of the need for extending equality to women
The progression, she say, was “natural. I realized that women needed to be included in the picture as well.”
Her introduction to Planned Parenthood came through colleagues.
One fellow teacher, a Catholic priest, sat on the board of the Planned Parenthood affiliate in Odessa, Texas – despite the Catholic Church’s prohibition on birth control.
“He cased to say “I can’t tell these people to have a baby every year when they can’t feed them, can’t clothe them,'” she recalls.
She became director of the Odessa affiliate in 1974, and four years later moved to head the Phoenix office.
“I came at it from the perspective of civil rights and as someone who understood early childbearing and its consequences,” she says.
“After I started working, I really began to understand it from the perspective of women’s health.”
Feldt has guided her staff through the sometimes frightening attention Planned Parenthood garners for its leadership role in teaching and preserving reproductive freedom.
Although nationally abortion services comprise only 10 percent of the medical care Planned Parenthood provides, the organization – and Feldt – are lightening rods for the roiling controversy surrounding the issue.
Protesters – sometimes confrontational, sometimes not – are common sights at the office in downtown Phoenix. Staffers are routinely harassed or heckled by protesters.
“She diffuses that intensity,” says Tina Sheinbein, a longtime Phoenix Jewish communal activist who joined the local affiliate of Planned Parenthood as government relations coordinator last year.
“She has an ability to laugh both at herself and at life. Given her circumstances, a sense of humor gets you a whole lot further.”
Feldt recently ran into Jim Skelley, a former Arizona state legislator whose anti-choice views sometimes translated into ad hominem attacks on her.
When he came face to face with Feldt, he apologized profusely for “anything he might have done to offend her in the past,” she says.
Feldt recalls that among his more charming habits was referring to Planned Parenthood as “the evil empire” and extending this reference to her as well.
Without missing a beat, Feldt smiled and replied, “We miss you. You raised more money for Planned Parenthood than any other legislator ever has.”
Trying to preserve reproductive choice and encourage family planning in Arizona has been a “great training ground” for the national scene, says Feldt.
While polls show that the majority of Arizonans are pro-choice, anti-choice forces are particularly strong here.
Not only have Feldt and her staff been targeted.
She says that supporters – someone who writes a pro-choice letter to the editor, for instance – “can look forward to getting nasty calls and letters. There’s a total of civility. It’s a tough state from that perspective.”
In fact, Tom Wagner, executive director of Arizona Right to Life, said in an interview he had “nothing printable” to say about Feldt’s new appointment.
The Arizona State Legislature in the current session began what Feldt calls a “piecemeal attack” by passing a law that prevents teen-agers from obtaining an abortion without a parent’s consent.
Arizonans can expect the attack to continue in the next legislative session, she predicts, with “informed consent” laws, waiting periods and other measures designed to, ultimately, ban abortions.
“We have horrible public policy. Fewer than 15 percent of schools have any kind of sex education,” she says. “Half of all teens under 18 are sexually active but the social climate here is not at all supportive of young people having the services and information they need to be responsible. That’s the biggest problem.”
The scene here reflects Congress’ future, she says. Recalling Thomas Jefferson’s admonition that “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” Feldt says the pro-choice movement let its gaurd down during the 1994 elections.
Those elected – for whom reproductive choice and family planning were not issues during the campaign – are “doing everything to eliminate American family planning,” she says.
They are also chipping away at reproductive choice: Medicaid no longer pays for abortions in the case of rape or incest and medical insurance for federal employees no longer covers the procedure.
How will she respond to these challenges as Planned Parenthood president?
“Our biggest organizational and political challenge is to create a new agenda of our own,” she says. “We’ve spent too much time responding to the agenda of others.”
For Feldt, “Planned Parenthood is more than a set of services and advocacy activities.”
She says the organization is “is a vision about a world where women can have an equal place with men, where children can be planned and wanted, and families can be strengthened as a result.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
