Eunice “Tootsie” Holland Interview

Interviewee: Eunice :Tootsie” Holland
Interviewer: Samantha Schiess
Location: Remote interview (Columbia, SC and Columbia, SC)
Date: September 29, 2020
Accession #: ELEC 010
Length of Recording:

Summary

Eunice “Tootsie” B. Holland was born in Conway, South Carolina in December 1931 and grew up primarily in the Conway-Myrtle Beach area. Eunice “Tootsie” Holland’s grandmother worked extensively in the field of medicine in rural South Carolina. Tootsie’s delineation of her grandmother’s experiences offers great insight into the role of women in medicine during this time period. Eunice “Tootsie” Holland served as the vice president and later the president of the Columbia, South Carolina chapter of the National Organization of Women (NOW). In this interview, we discussed the trials and tribulations she overcame on her quest for women’s rights, the importance of the Equal Rights Amendment, and what it was like growing up on the front lines of the women’s right movement. We discussed her involvement and viewpoints on the upcoming election; her major areas of concern included racial inequality, voters’ rights, and the status of Roe v. Wade. The interview concludes with a final piece of advice from Eunice “Tootsie” Holland to all future voters.

Keywords

Recording

Transcript

Samantha Schiess: This is an oral history interview for the 2020 Election: Sharing Stories of Civic Engagement Oral History project, part of coursework for SCHC 326, documenting the perspective and experiences of those who are engaged in some way with the 2020 election. This is Samantha Schiess, the date is September 29, 2020, and today I’m interviewing Eunice “Tootsie” Holland remotely. I’m in Columbia, South Carolina, and Tootsie is also in Columbia, South Carolina. Would you start by giving me your full name including your maiden name and spelling it?

Eunice “Tootsie” Holland: I will. It’s Eunice. E-U-N-I-C-E. And my nickname is Tootsie. T-O-O-T-S-I-E. My middle name is Baker. B-A-K-E-R. As Southern women tended to name their daughters their names, maiden names. And my last name was Davis. D-A-V-I-S. And I married a Holland. H-O-L-L-A-N-D.

SS: Alright, and where and when were you born?

EH: I was born in Conway, South Carolina, December 27, 1931.

SS: Is that where you grew up?

EH: No, my father moved, we moved first when I, from when I was a baby until I was about ten. We moved to Myrtle Beach, which is only ten miles away from Conway, but he was an auto-mechanic and he moved a lot. During the war we moved to, well just before the war, they were making a dam down in near Charleston in a little town called Moncks Corner and so we moved there. My father worked for that and then when the war came he worked for the navy yard in Charleston, and so I finished high school in Berkeley which is in Moncks Corner.

SS: And what was the community like at that time?

EH: Well, it was not very big, of course, and it was a very small town. We had just a few stores, and we had our mandatory Jewish department store as I found later on all southern, well at least in South Carolina, have at least one Jewish-run store. And there at the high school, most of the students came in on a bus, because Berkeley County is pretty big and includes places like Summerville and so forth. It was a fairly, I think my graduating class had close to 200 people, so that’s small in that area. The town itself had one, as far as I remember, one um sheriff, and a deputy or two, and hardly any problems arose. During the war, they did a little bit more, because people were actually illegally selling sugar to make whiskey (laughter), which is what it’s kind of well-known for.

SS: Would you tell me a little more about your parents and your grandparents?

EH: I wanted to tell you about my grandmother. I- Actually, she died before I was born, so I never got to meet her but I’ve been told by my mother’s sisters and so forth that she was- that I was somewhat like her. She was known as a healer. She was the wife of a Baptist minister, and it’s kind of interesting all of her children, all eight of them, were Methodist. And, actually, when he died, she buried him in the Methodist graveyard outside of Conway at a place called Homewood.

SS: What were their names?

EH: What?

SS: What were their names?

EH: Oh, I’m sorry! My mother’s people were named, wait a minute. I’ll tell you, I’m a little bad with names so give me a minute. My grandmother, she was Scottish and her name was Mary Ella Wilson before she married and her husband’s name was, you know it’s escaping me what his name was. It’ll come to me in a little bit just keep that blank right now, and I’ll think of it later. What was his name? I know that’s her name. What else?

SS: Your mother and your father’s names as well.

EH: Okay, my father was Sidney Alva [Davis], like in Thomas Alva that did…

SS: How do you spell Sidney Alva?

AH: S-I-D-N-E-Y and it’s A-L-V-A, and his last name was Davis. D-A-V-I-S.

SS: Alright, and your mother?

EH: My mother was Eunice Winford. W-I-N-F-O-R-D. Baker. And then Davis.

SS: And do you remember your grandfather’s?

EH: Not yet (laughter).

SS: Not yet, alright that’s fine.

EH: Let’s see, where was I?

SS: You were telling me your grandfather was buried at the Methodist-

EH: Yes! He was a Baptist minister, but she buried him in the Methodist cemetery, and all of the people, all of my mother’s sisters and brothers and my mother were Methodist. He was an itinerant minister, and he moved around a lot on Sundays especially he was in various different places, so she ran everything. She was known as a healer. She birthed children, a midwife, and my mother said that her favorite thing was that when she set a leg, the person wouldn’t even limp and that was a big compliment for her. Then, the other thing she did was they lived in a community that was about 300 miles around, did not have but one doctor. She grew a lot of herbs and her cousin was a physician, the only one in the area, and he would- they would discuss the herbs and what they would do and so forth. And she also during the flu epidemic [1918] when a lot of people died, my mother was a small child at the time, but she went with her mother, my grandmother, she went with her when she took care of the patients, which was the only person who would, and even washed the dead people before they got to be buried and none of her family ever got the flu, none of them. All plus the preacher even, and we find that every once in a while in that lineage of people, they don’t get the flu.

SS: Wow, that’s lucky. (laughter) That’s very lucky.

EH: But I do take the flu shot now, but I’ve never had it, no.

SS: What were some of the family traditions that you all had?

EH: Oh, my. My mother remembered a poem that she had learned when she was eight years old. She went to- they had a one-room schoolhouse, and her older brother, he decided that when she was four that she could go to school. For one thing, the kids were looking out for her, so she did. And she memorized, way back then, a long poem. Turkey and so forth, it was for a Thanksgiving thing. And she could recite that to her dying day actually the whole thing from start to finish. And she knew a lot of songs, because her father, being a preacher, wanted her to play the piano for him with the hymns and so forth so she did that. She played piano until she died actually, and none of us can do anything, but she could also play a violin and, um, she wanted to be a nurse. And because her mother, I think, was such a good healer that she wanted to be a nurse, but her father would not let her be a nurse because he said he did not want her around some strange men and taking care of them. He didn’t want her to do that. She was always, her entire life, she did not forgive him for that, because she really wanted to be a nurse. Now, she also, her older sister had given her a book- a nursing book- to go to nursing school. They all thought she was, but he wouldn’t let her. But any way, she had that book all of her life, and whatever we had, she looked up in that book and we took whatever it is she gave us. We had no choice- (laughter) none.

SS: Who do you think in your life had the biggest influence or impact on you?

EH: I know. This one is kind of easy. My older sister was 13 years older than me, and she was, sort of thought that I should obey her, even when we got grown and so forth. We’d have big fights because she’d say, “Here’s what you’re going to do.” “No, I don’t want to.” “Yeah, you will.” (laughter) etcetera. Anyway, she influenced me a lot because she would always take me, I remember because I was very small, she would take me to drug store. Now, the drug store at that time was where you could get a coke, and they had a juke box, and you could even dance. So, after school every day, she would want to go to the drug store and she was supposed to be taking care of me. And, so it worked out that she would take me and we would go to the drug store, so I enjoyed that. But also, she was very bright. I’ve had people in Conway, some of my cousins and so forth which I have a bunch of, that have told me over the years “That must be the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life. She could easily be a big star.” And they did not have a Miss South Carolina at the time. And so, she was Miss Azalea Queen, came down and had the Citadel boys to escort them around. That was very exciting for her. And she also did, I remember this because I was dragged along, but she cut the ribbon for a horse-racing in Myrtle Beach, she cut the ribbon with the mayor and all of that crap, yeah.

SS: Can you tell me more about your connection with the Equal Rights Amendment?

KM: Oh, god no. (laughter) You want to do that? Or do you want to go in order, by time order I mean. The first thing I did in the women’s movement.

SS: Sure, let’s do that then.

EH: In 1972, February, the two women here in Columbia started a NOW chapter, ran an ad in the paper, and several of us went, and I was elected vice president. At the time, I was working as a manager of something called Dot Girls, and they sent a person from New York to get me to resign, because they had seen my picture in the paper as a NOW person, seriously. And, the way they got me to do it, I did resign, because the way they got me to do it was the woman told me that “I am not going to fire you,” because she knew I’d sue if she did. And she says, “But I will fire the-” Her name was Ethel and she worked- she answered the phone and that kind of thing. And I knew she was- had a small baby, and her husband had been killed in an accident and so she needed the job. So, I said, “Give me the paper. I’ll sign it.” I left, and ever since I’ve been sorry I didn’t go ahead and sue the whole blooming batch of them. But at the time I just went home to something else.

And, what we did here, the NOW group in Columbia, South Carolina, first thing, we had a call from somebody who had been raped. And we said, “Oh, goodness. There’s nothing like a rape crisis center or anything, so we called National NOW and they said, “We have a nice little booklet, tells you 1-2-3-4 what you need to do to set up a rape crisis center.” So, we got the booklet, we had to go and see. First of all, we had to change the law. The law was antiquated. Rape was, the definition was the penetration of a vagina by a penis of at least one inch. That was the official thing. It left men and boys out of course and objects of any kind, whatever. It was ridiculous. So we got the law changed to something more similar to the one that Minnesota had. It was stages of rape; if you’re dead one stage or if you’re just beat up, another, whatever. It had stages and that worked out. Also, they took the death penalty off. Think about that. Six months after somebody is raped. She’s sitting in a chair in a courtroom, maybe crying, maybe not. They see nothing wrong with her, and they’re going to kill this guy? No, that didn’t work, so we took that off. The main thing that we did was we sent out some letters to the gynecologists in Columbia, and we got two back, both of them women, who said that they would testify in a rape case etcetera, the other one did not. We looked into who did the rape exams, because we knew there were some. We found out there was a retired physician, who worked from nine until five, weekdays. And if you got raped at 12 midnight, that was too bad because you’d have to wait until he got there the next. And it had to be not on a weekend. So, the upshot was all of that was that we went and asked questions, and they gave us a list of questions to ask him, which we did. And we, the last question we asked was, “How do you tell bruises on a black woman?” And he said, “Get your little pencils out, and write this down, because I want you to remember this and you won’t if you don’t.” We said, “Okay.” And he said, “You can’t rape a black woman. They are too oversexed to start with.” This was the man that was in charge of rape exams for Richland County and Lexington County, and it cost you at the time 50 bucks to pay for the rape exam. Now, you think we- Well, we left there. Two of us. There were four of us that went. There were two of us that were crying and there were two of us that were cussing. We got rid of him. We talked to some other gynecologists. We just went in, we made an appointment and sat down and said, “Look, this is the situation.” We went to the hospital and worked on getting that. We made out a protocol, and we went to the police and talked to them. You’d be surprised how we left there almost as traumatized as we were with the examiner. And anyway, we talked to them, gave them some literature that National had to for that purpose, what police should be doing, etcetera. We sent a letter to the University. The administration of the University does not do a rape exam. That is a felony crime, and it’s only done by detectives, so we made some changes there also. Anyway, that was one thing we did.

We also found out that there was no place to take children if they were being abused in their home- no place. So, we got busy- and I won’t go into the details of how we did that, because it’s kind of- but we did get that done also, and it’s still in operation. We did a battered wives hiding place. We were so naïve. Oh, my. The first woman who came, and she was battered. Oh, Lord. She had a broken arm and teeth out and stuff like that. And we went and took her to the hospital and so forth. When she got out, she went home with one of the members, not me, another one, and her husband showed up with a shotgun. And we said, “Oh, well that does not work well, does it? We better not do that again.” (laughter) So, we started hunting around for some people that would help to put together some place, and they still have it- Sister Care they call it now. And I save all my, if I go some place and have makeup and stuff like that, I take it over and give it to them. But we did, we set that up. Not me by myself, but there were others. At that point, I was president of NOW rather than vice president of the Columbia chapter, and we went down, and the first speech I’d ever given in my entire life, and I had no idea how to do it, of course. My husband got a coke crate that you can stand on and carries it and puts it behind the podium thing so I can look over it. And we had 102 people join NOW, because we were setting up a NOW. And I also had a woman come up and tell me what a man-hater I was, and my husband is sitting behind me. And after she got the through the tirade, I said, “This is my husband.” (laughing) She said, “Wow. You’re married?” I said, “Of course! I’ve been married for about- I think about fifteen years then.” Anyway, it’s been a ride.

Now, another woman who was in Now, she was very interested in Radio and TV, and so National NOW sent us down another booklet. You know, 1-2-3-4-5. (laughing) And being naïve we said, “Oh, hey, we’ll do that.” So, we went and checked all of the stations in Columbia- radio and TV. And we found that there were two women in the whole city on TV, and they had their own program, and they paid for it- the cost of it, wrote it, all of that. And one of them I think I remember was making $40 a week and did the whole thing including on the air. Anyway, we found there were no black people at all- none. Especially announcements so we did a big thing and we got the league involved also, and there was business and professional women involved in it. Also, we checked who was making what where. That’s open. Anybody can do it. Anybody can check some of the people who are under federal rules and so forth, which all of the radio and TV has because the airways belong to the people. They rent, they do not buy. We came up with reasons for their- to hold up their license. They could not believe us. We had a big press conference and said, “This is who we are. We are NOW, and we’re going to be here, and you better watch out. If you’re breaking laws, we’ll catch you.” (laughing) Naïve. Anyway, they had to settle with us, and they did, and ever since, there’s been more men- more black men and more women, and I’ve noticed black women on as announcers and so forth. Every once in a while I find someplace and the press comes in, and I say, “Hey, tell me you thank me.” (laughing) “Because I got you that job.” Yeah, they told us cameras were so big that women couldn’t carry them around and another guy told me his wife says a woman announcer would sound like gossip. And I said, “Oh, your wife hires for the station, does she?” No, of course not. Anyway, that was fun. Also, we found that the schools here and in Lexington were paying men $500 more a year than women teaching the same class, you know. We turned so many people into the justice department, because they were breaking the law. And the law was almost ten years old. And, I bet they finally sent a guy down and he spent a week here going down our list and he said [to them], “Hey, you’re going to go to jail.”

We had- I remember- a dime store. You don’t even know what a dime store is. I worked in one when I was young. Anyway, a woman called us and she said, “Didn’t I read that it’s not right to fire you if you’re pregnant?” I said, “Yes, you did.” And she says, “Well, I just got fired, because I’m pregnant.” I said, “Well, we’ll look into it.” So, we made an appointment, went and sat down with the little manager. One of the things I did, well say was, “You don’t want to have your boss fire you, because you have not read the law. So, let me tell you what the law says. You cannot do this.” Sometimes, they’d say, “Well that’s a bunch of bull.” And I’d say, “Well that’s all fine and dandy.” And that’s what this guy said, “I don’t want her out there all blowed up” and so forth. And I said, “Well, call your boss in Atlanta and make sure, because I’d hate to see you lose your job over something.” (heavy sigh) He says, “Well, alright I will.” He called, and I could hear, “Yes, Sir. Oh, yes, sir. Yes, sir.” And he hangs up and he says, “I don’t know why she thought I was firing her.” And she was there and she said, “I wasn’t- You were- I wasn’t!… (inaudible). I swear. Now, that was part of when we first started off. I’m going to go into Mabel. When we first started off, the other thing was the ads in the paper. Male only, Female only. And that was obviously against the law. When we went and told the newspaper man that he was breaking the law, he cursed us out. I mean, ugly cursing out. “Get out of my office,” he said. “Okay, we’ll talk to you later. And actually, we’ll have someone from Washington come talk to you.” So, anyhow, the next thing we see is the paper comes out with a big ad saying, “We are going to computers and to do that we have to drop the male only and female only.” So, that changed immediately. Anyway, we were sitting in the, um. We were having a little meeting, and at the meeting Vick Aslinger comes in and she says, “They’re having an anti-ERA talk in Charleston. We got to go. At the Charleston library. We got to go!” And so we took off. Three cars of us went to Charleston. We get to Charleston. Mary Harriett- you don’t mind these names that I’m remembering, do you?

SS: No, I’m taking them all down!

EH: Mary Harriett, who started the NOW chapter, she was an army nurse in World War II, and she went first, speaking. And when she came back, she sat down right beside me, and she says, “This little old lady in the front row is nodding her head to everything I’m saying!” I said, “Really?” She says, “Yeah.” So, when I got up, I checked. She was right! She was old, she was probably my age now, about 80. 85 to 90, I forget, honestly. But yes she was nodding her head and so forth. When I got through, got back and sat down and I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. She was so happy looking. Mary said, “Let’s make sure we meet her.” And so we did. And we took her home as a matter of fact. She had come on the bus by herself to go to the library to speak for the Equal Rights Movement. Now, that was Mabel Pollitzer. Like I said, she was in her late 80s by that time and when we walked out, she was already by the door waiting for us. I can go on forever, sweetie.

SS: No, this is perfect. This is exactly what I want to hear.

EH: Okay! She was standing at the door and she says, “Where did you come from, you wonderful people?” And we went back and forth and when we got back to her house, she fixed us all a drink of some kind, which I don’t remember, but she showed us a pile of papers over there in the corner of the room. It was the dining room. And she pulled a picture out and showed us. It was Anita, her sister, who was at that time, head of the National Women’s Party, and Alice Paul, Dr. Alice Paul, over Susan B. Anthony’s grave. And that picture, I’m pretty sure, is in the library in Charleston, because that’s what she said she was going to do with those papers when she died, was put them in that library, because she is the person, Mabel Pollitzer, who started the first public library in this country. And, she was a school teacher, never married, but she taught sex education in high school way back then, first person to ever do it. And when I was doing the Equal Rights Amendment, she would call me and she had gotten somewhat deaf. Anyway, she would call me and she would say, “Don’t talk, just listen.” Then she would tell me something. “Did you know Nixon was for the Equal Rights Amendment?” “Yes, ma’am, I knew that.” “Use it, use it, use it.” I’d say, “I am.” (laughing) But, she was a fantastic person. She told me things. Do you want to hear that? Things that she did?

SS: Well, just given your history with all the Equal Rights movement and everything, I was hoping you could tell me what the most pressing right in women’s equality is, especially in this election.

EH: Oh, in this election. Well, the Equal Rights Amendment. I guarantee you it is. And Ruth Bader Ginsburg would guarantee it too. See, what Roe v. Wade is not an amendment. Anita was one of the people who got the right to vote. And it was not Susan B. Anthony. I mean, she was trying, but they were like mean does. Be nice. And Dr. Paul went to England and studied under Pankhurst, who was “Burn the building down. Open their eyes. Let them know that you’re there.” Do like John Lewis says, “A good trouble.” And that’s what they did. Mabel was telling me she had sat on the steps- had chained herself to the state house in Washington. She said men would come and pour water over their skirts so it looked like they peed on themselves. She said, “We didn’t care.” And she told me, and here I am telling you what she told me, and this was before women’s right to vote, and it was a constitutional amendment. They had to have it. It had come out of the House and the Senate, but it needed to be signed by the president. And it was Woodrow Wilson. Anita, somehow or another, got him to sign it, and so, he did, and then it went out to the states and rapidly got amended- I mean, not amended, it got ratified. Now, the Equal Rights Amendment, Dr. Paul said, she was still alive of course, she wrote it, I guess you know that. She said, “This is not going to be easy. Don’t take the time in the middle, because it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to take a while. This is a whole change in attitude, culture, and everything.” And Ruth Bader Ginsburg would say the same thing. It’s a big change, but Ruth, the one time I got to meet and talk with her, she said one of the things that it has to be as an amendment. They can’t take it away. Where it sits, with the right to privacy, they can move it anytime, and they will and they are. That’s something that young women like you need to look into. Now, the – What else? Where do you want me to go now?

SS: I was hoping after we talked about that- What do you think, just in general, what do you think- What is your biggest voting point in this election? What do you think?

EH: This particular election?

SS: Yes, ma’am.

EH: Okay. I have a lot of problems understanding the far right. I know they’re racist. I have no problem with that part of it, because I know they are. But why do women- like for instance, my mother had an abortion I think in her early fifties and the reason was that her blood pressure was out of sight. We, right now as we speak, this country has an enormously high maternal death rate, and there’s no excuse for it except that women are not getting care. I mean, a woman, I think high blood pressure is one of the things that is killing them, but also I’ve read a couple of things by people who said the nurses and the doctors and so forth watched my sister bleed to death in the hospital internally. They’re not giving them as good of care as they should have and we can add to that that black woman are enormously more likely to have something happen during that. Also, poor people. They can’t go without- they close the clinics, what are they going to do? Get pregnant, because they can’t buy contraceptives? Can’t have an abortion, so what do they do? When we got Roe v. Wade, all of us were shocked, but we had already set up here in Columbia a group who took women who couldn’t afford to go to the hospital and pay. I don’t know anybody, trust me, who had any problem getting an abortion if they wanted it if they had the money, way back then when it was illegal. I knew people that did. Not only one, but maybe two. Anyway, if you didn’t have the money, if you had high blood pressure, you wouldn’t even know that you had it, and all of a sudden you go to the emergency room and you die. And that’s happening now, and they go in and they take away Roe v. Wade, they take that and I think they will. Don’t you? I do. I think they will. This is one of the things that is high on their list to do. And it is as, I don’t know how else to say it, it has nothing to do with pro-life. If they were actually pro-life people, they wouldn’t want all these people dying. And when they die, the fetus dies too. That whole thing is crazy, and I think it has some sort of a degree of punishment. Pence, our lovely vice president, when he was governor of whatever the hell he was in Indiana, he made a statement that women shouldn’t be allowed- did you hear the word allowed? I heard it well- women shouldn’t be allowed to use birth control. It made them promiscuous. He said that. I heard it. Now, where am I?

SS: We were talking about the biggest issue of the 2020 election this year.

EH: That’s one. Everyone should be worried about it. Actually, as I say, I see nothing that it has to do about actual caring for children or anything, because once they’re born, they’re done with them. And not only that, every one of these guys in these crazy anti-woman laws, most of them have paid for lots of abortions for their mistresses. And those people, those people they know that their person, whomever, will be able to get an abortion whenever they want to because they have. We set up for people who didn’t have the money to have it. New York and California were getting abortions, and legally and so forth, and we coughed up enough to put them on a plane and back or the train, some went on the train, or in desperation we have actually driven to New York with them, several of them at the time when we did something like that. And Vicky set up with the president of the university when she was in law school- I need to tell you about her. You probably need to interview her. Anyway, that’s one of the issues that I have. I am also concerned about gay marriage. They are opposed to that. Oh, yes. It’s against bible. That’s one of their issues. I know some of these people and I can tell you that they do, they mean it. They will if they have any- Now, my personal opinion is Trump doesn’t give a damn one way or another because he’s going to do what he wants to do and has enough money to make sure that that happens. And if anything, he knows more about an abortion. How many has he paid for already? I don’t know, dear. He probably doesn’t even remember himself. Anyway, that like I say, that is only directed to people, black and white, brown, whatever, that don’t have the money. That’s exactly what that is. Why are they so against poor people? They don’t want to give them welfare even if a child is hungry? No. No. It makes no sense to me. So, what?

SS: We’re coming up on our limit, but I’ve got one last question for you. If you could offer any advice to the voters of today and tomorrow, what would that advice be?

EH: That advice would be go and vote. Make sure your ideas are heard. Call your representative. Actually, the best thing that you could possibly do is handwrite a letter to whomever is your representative and probably a lot of people don’t even know they have a representative, because they’ve never seen him or heard of him or whatever, and I use the term him advisably, because that’s what most of them are. The Senate that we have now is incredibly bad. That needs to be changed or we need- and you need to give them some lip. Put it in writing. Tell them who are and what you believe and that you’re not going to vote for them if they don’t shape up a little better, okay.

SS: Thank you so much. That was so fascinating.

EH: The Supreme Court too, write letters to the Supreme Court members. Tell them how you feel about Roe v. Wade for example. But there’s others that they’re after too. Gay marriage, also the voters’ rights. Yeah, there’s a bunch of them in there that they can actually put them out. They can’t go after an amendment. That’s why we want the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment. That’s why it’s so important. Okay.

SS: Alright, well I’m going to go ahead and stop the recording now.