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Washington Women’s Heritage Project records, 1900-2000 
University of Washington Libraries Special Collections 
Delphine Bowers 
January 29, 1998 
Cassette 2, Side 2 
 
 
Delphine Bowers  00:01 
--Of my husband's homosexuality and of his pedophilia, that, that he was really attracted to-- is 
that going around? 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  00:10 
Mm-hmm. 
 
Delphine Bowers  00:11 
--really attracted to teenage boys. And that on some level, I believe I knew that, just as I think 
that on some level, in a family where incest is going on, the mother knows that things are not 
quite right between the father and the daughter, for instance, and it's not that they know 
consciously or that they're bad. And I have had to work myself through that and understand that, 
yes, I enabled him in my denial, but no, I wasn't bad, and I didn't really, on a conscious level, 
know it and I didn't egg him on in that way, and it's been very hard.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  00:53 
Was there incest in your family then? 
 
Delphine Bowers  00:55 
No. He wasn't attracted, he was, he, for some reason, was not attracted to-- Well, he wasn't 
attracted to girls, so the girls were safe and I don't think he was attracted to Bill. For one thing, 
there was probably the blood thing, which is, it really keeps a lot at bed. That's why you get so 
many stepfathers incesting and so many women whose boyfriends incest their daughters that, or 
adopted kids are incested, that there, there, there is, on some level, a respect for the, the blood. 
So that was, that denial of sexuality is a theme to my life. And it's really, it's very sad, because I 
really realized that a lot of women that are nice, [inaudible] women, and might have stayed with 
the guy in that situation, because it was hard to think of rearing poor kids by yourself, but they 
would have had affairs. They would have been [inaudible] themselves. They wouldn't have 
denied their own bodies, and I did. But it was a part of the whole thing, the whole thing is part of 
a whole picture of how a lot of women were reared, women my age. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  01:41 
With that denial of, of sexuality? 
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Delphine Bowers  01:43 
Yeah. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  02:21 
And sexual, sex being dirty and--  
 
Delphine Bowers  02:21 
Yeah, and that it was okay to have sex when you're married, and I suppose if you enjoy that sort 
of thing, it's all right to enjoy it, but don't talk about enjoying it, or someone will think that you're 
probably not a very nice person. And this is the, this is the stuff around it. And I'm, I'm blessed to 
have given, been given, at the age of 70, almost, because I wasn't quite 70, an understanding of 
and an acceptance of myself in the denial that I experienced as a young woman growing up in 
that neighborhood. Because some of the women and I have talked about it since, and one of the 
things that was interesting is that there were two women who knew that about Jack who didn't 
say anything to me, neither one of them liked me. And I realized that I can't imagine anything 
more unfriendly than not telling your friend and neighbor about this. But again, one of my 
friends said, "Well, it's a good thing the guys in the neighborhood didn't know about it, they'd 
have killed him." Whoa, that's true, never thought of that.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  02:21 
Where was it? 
 
Delphine Bowers  02:21 
In Lake hills, over in Bellevue, it's a Boeing community. There are a lot of engineer types up 
there, and they wouldn't have put up with that for an instant, that thought that their boys might 
be, be touched inappropriately by this man who was such such a drunk, give me a break. So, they 
never told the men. The men didn't know, and apparently those women who did know didn't 
gossip about it to the other women, but they didn't tell me either. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  04:25 
Why do you think that is? 
 
Delphine Bowers  04:32 
Why they didn't tell me?  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  04:34 
Mm-hmm. 
 
Delphine Bowers  04:35 
Well, one of them said, "Well, it wasn't any of my business to tell you," and the other said, "I 
thought you knew and didn't care." And I think both of the women, looking back at it now, they 
were probably jealous of me. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  04:58 
Why?  
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Delphine Bowers  04:58 
Because I was so much freer than they were in so many ways. I went off and interviewed, and I 
did social research, interviewed all over the town in Seattle. They were the kind of people that 
would say, "You drive across the bridge by yourself? My, my husband would never let me do 
that. You can't be much loved." And Jack really was very good about it. He would say, "I'm 
afraid we're going to find you dead in a ditch someplace. But if this is what you want to do, go 
ahead," because I was working for National Opinion Research Center, which is part of the 
University of Chicago, and doing, looking at big, huge, fascinating studies.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  05:38 
When your kids were young?  
 
Delphine Bowers  05:39 
When my kids were young. And when they got, and then when they finally went-- I think, in the 
mid '70s, I finally, I think, took my first full time job since I tried to be a microbiologist. And I 
was very good at that work, and I loved doing it. And part of it was all because of the the 
openness that had been generated by all of the exposures that I'd had to different people. And this 
was in spite of living in a colonial country, which is pretty interesting.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  06:15 
In the Philippines. 
 
Delphine Bowers  06:15 
Yeah.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  06:16 
Yeah. That is interesting.  
 
Delphine Bowers  06:17 
Because I never, I didn't know anything about Filipinos, I'd never tasted native food, I was not 
allowed to play with Philippine children. So, there was a lot of things that kept me from really 
enjoying learning the things about living in another country and, but it's sort of in spite of that I 
did learn how to connect with people, that was important. I'm beginning to wind down. So ask 
me questions, or let's wind up, [?reduce?]--  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  06:50 
But-- Can we pause the tape just for a second? 
 
Delphine Bowers  06:54 
Yeah. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  06:54 
I, my question to you was, was going back to when you and Jack decided to get married and your 
reason, I wanted to hear your reason why you wanted kids. 
 
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Delphine Bowers  07:12 
Well, let's see. For one thing, it was the time when people were supposed to have lots of 
children. For another thing, it was kind of a bond with my father, who'd enjoyed children so 
much. For another thing, I think that sometimes people have children thinking that they can give 
to them what they never had, and I grew up so isolated and so lonely that I wanted a lot of kids. 
So that's [?what I did?].  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  07:50 
Why do you think Jack wanted kids? 
 
Delphine Bowers  07:59 
I think he believed that he could live on through them, there was some kind of immortality thing. 
I think that he-- [distracted] there's a little bird behind you in there with the [?waters?]. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  08:11 
Oh, a little sparrow.  
 
Delphine Bowers  08:15 
Yeah. [Returns to interview] I think that, I think he probably had visions of being able to mold 
them into the people he wanted them to be. I'm sure there was part of that, and I'm sure that that's 
part of what attracted me to him, because it was familiar. And it was very much against the way I 
believed things, but I wasn't sure that what I believed was right. I wasn't sure that who I was, was 
real. So, I was still trying to be the person that my parents wanted me to be, because I thought to 
be any other way was wrong, and to be me was to be a failure. And I think there's a lot of that-- 
and I don't read much about that, and all of this stuff about being a therapist and stuff. I haven't 
read much about that piece, and I think it's a very, very common one, that you know you're a 
failure because your parents don't approve of you. And I suppose with kids growing up now, 
with all of the television and all of the other influences in their lives that things may be a little bit 
different. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  09:30 
I don't know. 
 
Delphine Bowers  09:31 
I don't know. So that's why I wanted children. I thought that somehow or other, I could 
experience a happy childhood by having children. And I thought also that I could be, make up 
for not ever having had a mother by being a good one. And of course, those are not quite 
[?true?]. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  09:54 
That didn't, didn't work out that way?  
 
Delphine Bowers  09:56 
No. Anne and David, my cousin and his wife are, I think, were much, much healthier than I was 
growing up, and they had the same family that I did. They had a boy and three girls, and their 
boy was the second. But instead of having five grandchildren, they have ten because two of my 
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kids decided not to have children at all, because they're-- And I know that has a lot to do with 
having had a miserable childhood, that, and they had a miserable childhood because of all the 
fighting.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  10:33 
Between you and Jack? 
 
Delphine Bowers  10:34 
Between me and Jack, all the craziness in that household, but because of his drinking and my 
happy [inaudible]. And I see their kids, I don't know, I don't really know the children that well. 
Mostly, I hear them through their eyes. But it seems to me that, in general, their kids are 
probably a little better adjusted than mine are. But then I don't know them, I suppose if I were to 
find out, I would find out that, you know, they all have their stuff.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  11:15 
All their secrets.  
 
Delphine Bowers  11:11 
They're certainly, their kids are certainly more affluent than mine are, make more money, hold 
better jobs, whatever, so. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  11:20 
Well, thank you. 
 
Delphine Bowers  11:29 
Well, you're very welcome. We have one more appointment. Do we need more than that? 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  11:33 
I think-- I'm going to turn the tape off now again. 
 