At the height of the Vietnam War protests, twenty-eight-year-old Judith Nies and her husband lived a seemingly idyllic life. Both were building their respective careers in Washington—Nies as the speechwriter and chief staffer to a core group of antiwar congressmen, her husband as a Treasury department economist. They lived in the carriage house of the famed Marjorie Merriweather Post estate. But when her husband brought home a list of questions from an FBI file with Judith's name on the front, Nies soon realized that her life was about to take a radical turn. Shocked to find herself the focus of an FBI investigation into her political activities, Nies began to reevaluate her role as grateful employee and dutiful wife. In The Girl I Left Behind, she chronicles the experiences of those women who, like herself, reinvented their lives in the midst of a wildly shifting social and political landscape.

In a fresh, candid look at the 1960s, Nies pairs illuminating descriptions of feminist leaders, women's liberation protests, and other pivotal social developments with the story of her own transformation into a staunch activist and writer. From exposing institutionalized sexism on Capitol Hill in her first published article to orchestrating the removal of a separate "Ladies Gallery" on the House floor to taking leadership of the Women in Fellowships Committee, Nies discusses her own efforts to enlarge women's choices and to change the workplace—and how the repercussions of those efforts in the sixties can still be felt today.

A heartfelt memoir and piercing social commentary, The Girl I Left Behind recounts one woman's courageous journey toward independence and equality. It also evaluates the consequences of the feminist movement on the same women who made it happen—and on the daughters born in their wake.

Chapter One...

"They Want You to Answer Some Questions"

Fall 1970

My marriage was almost ordinary. Sex, money, in-laws—we had the usual problems, my husband and I. But in one respect my marriage was, I think, unusual.

"Holcomb and Southern called me into their office this afternoon," Mac told me one evening while we were discussing the events of the day in the way that married couples do. "And they opened an FBI file this thick." Here he raised the flat of his hand some five inches above the kitchen table.

"Who are Southern and Holcomb?" I asked.

Mac explained that they were security agents at the Treasury Department.

"Whatever did you do," I asked, "that would cause the FBI to compile such a thick dossier on you?" My husband was an economist. He worked in the Treasury Department in a special trade group in the secretary's office. His father was a New York banker, and he came from a tidy, conventional family where dinners were always preceded by two ritual cocktails—the second of which was called a dividend—and conversation rarely ranged beyond travel, real estate, and Wall Street. Mac was fairly conventional himself, neither altruistic nor excessively patriotic. Politically, he usually played the pragmatist to my assigned role as ideologue. We had met in Italy in 1965 when we were both in graduate school.

"Oh, no," my husband said. "You don't understand. The file was on you." That "you" hung ticking in the air between us. Me? I felt a shiver of distress, as though I were in a rowboat on a calm river and my nervous system had suddenly registered the quickening of deep, treacherous currents.

Our kitchen was colorful and cozy, filled with bright colors and big splashy flowers. I had painted one wall a vibrant cherry red and hung a large stretcher covered with a vivid Marimekko fabric from Finland. Another wall was covered with political artwork that I had collected: a poster from Eugene McCarthy's legendary presidential campaign of 1968, signed by the artist, Peter Max; a poster for the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, which used the word environmental for the first time; a satirical cartoon of Vice President Spiro Agnew's celebrated tongue twisters. ("Nattering nabobs of negativism" was my favorite.) Agnew was Richard Nixon's vice president, and technically, President Nixon was my husband's employer, although he had started working in the government when Democrat Lyndon Johnson was still president. The men of the Nixon administration were not known for possessing a sense of humor.

From our kitchen window, I looked out over acres of woods. To be truthful, our living situation was unusual. We occupied the carriage house of the old Post estate on Macomb Street in northwest Washington, D.C. Tregaron, as the place was called, was a once magnificent property that had belonged to Marjorie Merriweather Post, who in the 1940s and early '50s had been America's richest woman and Washington's defining hostess. The property embraced twenty-two acres abutting Rock Creek Park and was a Washington landmark. When a colleague of mine from Capitol Hill left for New York to work in the legal department at CBS, he had passed the Tregaron apartment on to us. After a decade of neglect, the buildings had tilting porches and missing shutters, the land was overgrown with kudzu, and the underbrush was occasionally punctuated with marble statuary that had toppled to the ground. To this day, the estate remains a remnant of the original District of Columbia—the ungraded Maryland farmland that a Revolutionary War general and a Georgetown lawyer sold to the infant government for a new federal capital that geographically might bridge the divide between North and South. (The previous two

Judith Nies has worked as a journalist, teacher, historian, researcher, and speechwriter, and is the author of several books, including Nine Women: Portraits from the American Radical Tradition. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, Ms., the Harvard Review, and other publications. She teaches writing at Massachusetts College of Art and is a member of PEN America. Nies lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.