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Washington Women’s Heritage Project records, 1900-2000 
University of Washington Libraries Special Collections 
Delphine Bowers 
February 12, 1998 
Cassette 5, Side 1 
 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  00:01 
Today is Thursday, February 12, 1998. This is the last interview with Delphine Bowers, and this 
is the fifth tape. [Tape stops and starts]-- Sound check here. And I was wondering if you had 
thought of some things too that you wanted to add on to what we were talking about.  
 
Delphine Bowers  00:26 
Well, one thing I wanted to say is that I'm really interested in the sort of common thread that I've 
discovered running through things, that my life has not just been helter skelter, higgledy 
piggledy, and I had never quite put things together in that way. I knew I had certain 
characteristics and I'd had certain experiences, but I didn't see how things had worked together to 
lead me to where I am now. And it's very obvious, I think, in this, that that's true.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  00:58 
What do you think those threads are? 
 
Delphine Bowers  01:01 
You don't quit, you're very good. Well, starting out with having multiple losses and some respite 
along the way, with the governess who loved me, with Miss Liggett.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  01:05 
How did you spell Miss Liggett, by the way?  
 
Delphine Bowers  01:22 
L-- Liggett, it's actually, I say Leg-it because that's what we said, but it's really Liggett. She was 
related to the Liggett and Myers tobacco family. She was a Mississippi woman.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  01:37 
So it's L-I-G-G-I-T? 
 
Delphine Bowers  01:37 
E-T, and I think there are two Ts. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  01:42 
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L-I-G-G-E-T-T.  
 
Delphine Bowers  01:43 
I think so. And that all along the way, there was something that I could hang onto that would 
keep me from disintegrating completely. My kids brought me a lot of pleasure, but there 
certainly was a lot of pain in that marriage for both of us, because it was a terrible place for him 
as well. And then, when I was in graduate school, the night staff at Harborview was very 
supportive, and I think that was the first time I ever felt like I belonged someplace. And then I 
was kind of on my own for quite a while, without any place to feel at home, and I got so 
depressed that I went into therapy, and that therapeutic community was very much a support for 
me and a home for me. And then, when that disintegrated, it was time for me to turn to the 
temple, and that was there. So I've always found some-- there's always been something there for 
me to hold onto, and the whole Jewish mysticism thing really fits into the little bits and pieces of 
stuff that I've gotten all along, because, you know, that embraces everything. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  03:14 
Would you say that spirituality was a thread for you as well? 
 
Delphine Bowers  03:18 
Yes, but I didn't know it. Because people would say to me, "Oh, I bet you, I bet you see other 
beings. I'll bet you see auras. I bet you know how to time travel or to, I bet you know how to 
leave your body." And I'm going, "No, no, no, no, I don't know any of those things." And they'd 
say, "Well, I can see it in your eyes that you're very spiritual." And I'd say, essentially, "Who 
me?" And I was, and I didn't know it. Because I knew from day one that there was no possibility 
that spirit was not always with me, I knew that. I knew that religions that said, "If you don't 
believe my way, then you're bad or you're going to hell," I knew that that was not true faith, I 
knew that, and I got into big arguments with people, scrappy, nasty, eight-year-old arguments. 
And, and so all of those things. I mean, I knew in my heart, I think, from the day I was born, and 
that, to me, is spiritual. I knew, I knew that everybody was the same, that there wasn't anybody 
better than each other. I used to argue with my parents, who were such colonials. And I realize 
now that that's who I am, and that that's far enough along on the spiritual path so that I can take 
some more steps in this lifetime, and that I'm doing it, and that I'm very undisciplined, and that 
that's part of what I need to learn, is to have it have a discipline, because I don't. So it does all fall 
together. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  05:21 
I was thinking about that listening to the tapes, and what you said about all of, that these women 
were respites as well, but they also seemed very spiritual-- 
 
Delphine Bowers  05:33 
Yes, they were. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  05:34 
--in the sense that your Aunt Rosa and then Felicia? 
 
Delphine Bowers  05:37 
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Felisa. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  05:38 
Felisa. 
 
Delphine Bowers  05:38 
There's no-- it's F-E-L-I-S-A. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  05:40 
F-E-L-I- oh, okay. 
 
Delphine Bowers  05:44 
There's no "cia" in it. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  05:46 
Okay, Felisa, and--  
 
Delphine Bowers  05:49 
Which is Spanish, I mean-- 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  05:50 
Yeah.  
 
Delphine Bowers  05:51 
--I'm sure in English, it would be Felicia. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  05:55 
And then Miss Liggett as well. 
 
Delphine Bowers  05:57 
Yeah, Miss Liggett, who never touched me, but who fed me. And one woman I went to pointed 
out that not only was I lying beside her, although I never touched her, and we had our own 
separate bed covers and being in her energy all night, but that I was consuming food that she 
prepared, which was another way of internalizing her. And one of the poems that I wrote last 
quarter was about her, about how I had ingested her and could feel her within me, even now.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  06:33 
Wow. 
 
Delphine Bowers  06:34 
And it's true. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  06:37 
You mentioned earlier about a sweet potato, you'd have the sweet potatoes, and then you said, 
"And what she put on it, well, that's another story I'll tell you later."  
 
Page 4 of 11 
 
Delphine Bowers  06:45 
You want to know the story?  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  06:47 
I want to know what she put on it. 
 
Delphine Bowers  06:50 
Well, years and years later, when Claire was in junior high, Claire is now 40, going to be 41 
almost immediately, I went to the first PTA meeting, and the teachers, you know, walked across 
the platform and were introduced, and there was Derek Whitmarsh. And I thought, I can't believe 
this, Derek Whitmarsh was a little nine year old boy when I was a 14 year old girl in prison 
camp. And so I went up to him afterwards, and he didn't remember, because little kids don't 
remember the big kids, but the big kids may remember the little kids. And we talked and we 
talked, and then I, they ended up, I don't know how it worked, I ended up sitting in their car, 
sitting in the car with him and the principal, and I think it was Derek's car and the principal was 
between us, and we got to talking about Miss Liggett. And she had been there for him too, 
because his parents were both sort of baby people that fought and fought and fought. And so 
after school, he'd go and talk to her, and that was before I got out of school, because he was in 
grade school. And so we talked about how this woman had so, had so quietly, been so important 
to both of us, thinking and, you know, and she was not a warm, fuzzy woman. And I laughed, 
and I said "She used to steal a camote for me and put it underneath my pillow, wrapped in a dish 
towel. So, I'd have it hot," I said, "There was some kind of grease on it. I don't know what it was. 
It was it was probably rendered rat."  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  08:45 
Rendered what? 
 
Delphine Bowers  08:46 
Rat.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  08:46 
Oh. 
 
Delphine Bowers  08:47 
In which he said, "Well, no, I think it's probably rendered mouse, because I used to catch the 
mice for her, until one day-- and she showed me how to catch them by the tail, until one day, one 
of them turned around and bit me, and then I wouldn't do it anymore."  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  09:02 
What is rendered? Do I know, do I want to know what rendered mice is?  
 
Delphine Bowers  09:07 
Well, when you render something, you get the grease out of it. Like, you could put bacon in a 
pan, and that would be rendering it. And so it was probably mouse fat, and it probably, didn't 
hurt me a bit and gave me nourishment that I needed very badly. But I laughed about that.  
 
Page 5 of 11 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  09:25 
When you say camote, that's the Japanese word for--  
 
Delphine Bowers  09:28 
It's a Filipino word. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  09:29 
Oh, how, what-- how, what is it? 
 
Delphine Bowers  09:31 
 C-A-M-O-T-E. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  09:32 
[Laughs]. I'm laughing because I thought it was something different. I wasn't sure what it was, 
but that's a surprise. Well. 
 
Delphine Bowers  09:49 
And the principal was sitting there going, just couldn't imagine this. And I, I said to him, I said, 
because Derek didn't have kids then, I said, "You need to understand that there were no tetanus 
shots. There was very little disinfectant and everything else. So, when Derek got bit by a mouse, 
nobody took care of it, and there wasn't," and he just sort of groaned. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  10:21 
Good thing they weren't in America, they would have been sued for years and years. Well, I have 
another question that's sort of on a different, it's on a different track, just because I went back 
through the tapes and listened to things and there were, you're in a you're an expert storyteller, 
and there really weren't very many gaps in your-- 
 
Delphine Bowers  10:47 
That's interesting.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  10:48 
Yeah, it really is.  
 
Delphine Bowers  10:49 
And it's pretty much been coming from my unconsciousness. I have not planned.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  10:54 
Well, you've done an astounding job, I think. And so these questions are really constructed from, 
from things I wanted to know more about but, but they aren't gaps. Throughout the previous two 
interviews, you've mentioned a number of things that have caught my attention, like the 
comments or opinions that you have, like about the colonial life in the Philippines, and how you 
notice that the Job Corps was extremely sexist, with the women being nurses and the men being 
heavy machine operators?  
 
Delphine Bowers  11:30 
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Yeah, well, they weren't even nurses. They were nurses aids. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  11:33 
Nurses aids. And, and then just also how you seemed, from what I was assuming, that some of 
the work that you did with the NORC was in African American communities, like that Yesler 
Terrace, with the story about the watermelon. And you seem to be incredibly comfortable and 
aware. And I was wondering about that, and if the political climate of the '60s and '70s affected 
you in that way, or if you were involved with any social organizations. 
 
Delphine Bowers  12:05 
No, I was pretty much busy with kids, because my my fourth child was born in 1959, and I had 
four kids in five and a half years. So in the '60s, I was not. By the the end of the '60s, I think 
probably by 1968,  '69, I was interviewing and working, but even that was part time because 
[inaudible]. And we lived in Bellevue, I spent a lot of time going back and forth. So I, I knew 
very, very little about what was going on in the real world. And I don't know, I think that some 
of this came from Aunt Rosa, because she was a very stern character. I think you saw her picture, 
very erect little lady. And when I was back with my cousins in Nantucket, David said that he was 
afraid of her and of Uncle Emil, because their eyes were so fierce. They had very dark, very 
fierce, kind of sunken eyes, and I think it's just the way they looked. But I was scared of her too. 
But they-- have you heard of the NRA that had the Blue Eagle sign? 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  13:18 
National Rifle-- 
 
Delphine Bowers  13:20 
No, no, this was long, long, long before that. This was in the early '30s, and I think it was the 
National Recovery Act. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  13:33 
Oh, it's ringing a history bell. 
 
Delphine Bowers  13:37 
Yeah, and it was something that was, it was very, very liberal, and it was, it was stopped. I mean, 
it didn't happen anymore. I don't know what the story is behind it, we could look it up. I'm sure I 
have something or other with it in it, if you're interested. But we had a Blue Eagle in our 
window, I remember the sticker with the Blue Eagle in the window of the little house that we 
lived in on Lookout Mountain. And I think that what I was being reared by were southern, 
liberal, Jewish Democrats that were related to the liberal Jews, like in New York City that were 
real activists. Now I can't imagine Aunt Rosa out picketing, but I can imagine her being very 
clear that nobody was better than anybody else. And although it was in the south, she came from 
the same part of the family as my relatives in Philadelphia, whose maid ate with them and would 
go with them to the movies, and was very much a member of the family, their black maid. And 
she cleaned, yeah, and she worked, and they did, she did things for them. There were two boys 
and two girls in the family. But she was very much a part of the family and it wasn't quite that 
way in the south, because I don't think you could get away with it on the [?compound?] in the 
'30s and the '20s. But she was very, very liberal, and I think some of that started there, and I 
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believe some of that I was born with. And of course, my father was so conservative. And to get 
to the colonialism, my father and stepmother truly believed they were better than people of color. 
They thought they were better than people of color, and because they were better, that's why they 
were due respect, that people of color would be making lots of money and living in nice houses 
if they were not primitive and uncivilized and inferior, and that's what they believed.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  15:52 
Your father didn't take into consideration the discrimination against Jews and the--  
 
Delphine Bowers  15:56 
No, he was one of the people that passed it on. And I have said to him, I can remember saying to 
him, "You have experienced discrimination, and I can't understand how you can feel this way 
and how to believe these things and say these things." And his answer was basically, well, those 
other people were not better than the Jews, but I am better than the Filipinos. That was his 
rational, he was a lawyer. And they were, my stepmother was an anglophile, and so she based a 
lot of what she believed and said on, on the British way of doing things. Because her parents 
were English, they came to Wyoming by way of Canada. So there was-- and I can't understand, 
and that may have been part of the rift between my father and his family, is that they may have 
not been that way, and they may have been just outraged by his views. I don't know. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  17:07 
Were you aware of the segregation when you came-- 
 
Delphine Bowers  17:07 
Oh, yeah. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  17:07 
--back to the states and--  
 
Delphine Bowers  17:07 
Well, I wasn't aware, it wasn't the segregation. I was aware of the craziness in the Philippines.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  17:08 
Yeah.  
 
Delphine Bowers  17:08 
Because I was a Girl Scout, I wanted to be a Girl Scout. I wanted to be a girl scout in the very, 
very worst way. So we sent away for all the stuff, and I became a tenderfoot. Took the test and 
all this stuff, and I had my little green handbook and a little green uniform. I didn't have any 
place to wear it, but I had my little green uniform. And I was, saw [inaudible] troop of Filipino 
Girl Scouts, you know, on their way to do something. And I said to my mother, "Look, it says, 
right here, the Girl Scout law is that a Girl Scout is a friend to all," I feel weepy now, "and a 
sister to every other girl scout. Why can't we invite a troop of Filipino Girl Scouts to the house 
and ask them if they'll have a meeting at our house, and give them cookies and milk, and let me 
see what it's like to be a girl scout in the Philippines, and let them see what it's like, how I live 
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and who I am." And she said, "That wouldn't be suitable." That never happened, of course-- [To 
cat] if you eat those flowers, I'll skin you.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  18:20 
Martha is right in front of the microphone too.  
 
Delphine Bowers  18:22 
Martha, no, no, I going to have to put them in on the counter. This is only, I can only keep my 
flowers on the kitchen counter because we have a cat that eats them. [Tape stops and starts] So I 
told you the story about the Girl Scouts, let's see, and the constant battling with my father over 
this and my mother believed everything he said and acted on everything he said about that kind 
of thing. And, although, she, she had her stuff, because she had a picture of her, I have a picture 
of her standing by a negro over somebody in the northern Luzon, and her caption on the back of 
it is, "This is a very fierce looking Igorot, and he doesn't smell very good, because, of course, 
these people don't bathe." You know, that kind of an inscription on the back of pictures she sent 
to her mother. When I was, I think I told you this, when I was a college kid, there was a man who 
worked out of oceanography or who was there. He was a fishery student getting a PhD, and he 
was Filipino, and he was, had a family back there, and he was going to take-- 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  19:52 
At the U?  
 
Delphine Bowers  19:53 
Yeah, he was going to, you know, get a PhD, and then go back and work in their fisheries and 
help them to do what they needed to do. And I asked, I invited him to the house for 
Thanksgiving. And my father said, "No, I won't have him in the house. I won't have a Filipino 
house." And I said, "This is a man getting a PhD and who is lonely for his family." And he said, 
"No," so I had to uninvite him. And so they were very limited. There's some things that are facts 
of life in the Philippines, that were then, I don't, probably not now, but you really had to have a 
chauffeur. If you didn't have a chauffeur and drove your own car, people would be mad because 
you were keeping someone from having the job, and someone might slam into you. And the 
courts would not be kind to you, even though someone deliberately crashed into you because 
they were mad at you, because they were Filipino and you were American, the courts would find 
you guilty of something. So, you had a chauffeur, and the people who insisted on driving, there 
were one or two of them, the white community was very critical of that. We, I was not allowed to 
play with Filipino children or to learn anything about the culture. I didn't know Filipino food, I 
didn't know any words in the language, I was not allowed to absorb this culture at all. Like, my 
friend Betsy, who lived in the same town, kept up with her house girl, and went back and visited 
her, stayed with her when, I mean, within the last 10 years. And Betsy's 75 and I'm 70, and I 
don't even know the last names of the people that were our servants, much less keeping up with 
them. And I thought, I think it's a great tragedy to live in another company, country like that, and 
to isolate your children from the culture, that's something they should be learning. Most of our 
foods were cold storage foods that came, I mean, we ate fruit, and we ate chickens, and fish, but 
we didn't ever have Filipino food. I didn't even know what it was. And other people that I knew 
from school and that I know now talked about, you know, walking with Filipino friends and 
buying stuff, and I never got to do that. 
Page 9 of 11 
 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  22:49 
When you came back to the States. Did you experience anything similar, like, similar to that with 
segregation? 
 
Delphine Bowers  22:55 
Do you mean, with my being segregated?  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  22:57 
Or with the, you know, with the segregation of whites and African Americans. I mean, at 
Stephens college, or anything like that? 
 
Delphine Bowers  23:06 
Well, at Stephens, I don't remember there being any black kids or any Asian kids or any Hispanic 
kids, but there weren't very many in the town. I mean, Missouri really isn't the South, so it wasn't 
as if there were all these black kids in town and none of them in the college. Out here, there were 
black kids in school, at the university and so forth. And one of the reasons I didn't want to live in 
Bellevue is that I wanted my kids to get used to being around people of all, all different kinds. 
And Bellevue was very segregated, we had, I think, one or two black families, and that was it. 
And I knew that that was wrong, but I wasn't involved in trying to do anything about it. I wasn't 
an activist. I talked a lot, in that way I was an activist. Oh, when I was at Stephens, I know 
something nice that happened. There was, I went to the Episcopal young people's group because 
I had gone to an Episcopal boarding school. And the man who was the, the who ran [inaudible], 
he was an Episcopal priest and his name was, was Blanchard. And later on he became a bishop, 
and he was just wonderful man. He, we used to have something called Sundays at 7:22, my guess 
is that it was supposed to be at seven, and it was usually 7:22 by the time everybody showed up, 
so we called it Sundays at 20-- 7:22 and it met in his house, which was a nice, big house. And he 
had kids, college kids, come from a black college to meet with us, a couple or three times so that 
we could talk to them and, and, and get some exposure.  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  25:06 
Oh, that's great. 
 
Delphine Bowers  25:07 
And he was wonder-- He was a wonderful man. And the girls from Texas did not like that at all. 
We had, because Columbia, Missouri is where the University of Missouri is, and also a Christian 
College, which you would not have going to an Episcopal Church, because I'm sure they were 
more fundamentalist than that, and Stephens, so there were three colleges. So we had MU kids, 
and Stephens kids, and then he would invite these people from a from a black school, a black 
college, and we'd have discussions with them, and that was really nice. And the Texas girls were 
very upset, and their parents were very upset that their girls should be, they, I mean, the, in the 
back of everyone's mind was, what if they fall in love and get married? That was always the big 
fear. When I got to the university, the first interviewing I did was for sociology class. I looked 
over my transcript when I got my degree in microbiology, and saw that I had very little else. So, 
I took a fourth, I was a fourth quarter senior, and I took sociology. And my, in order to avoid 
writing a paper, I got to interview, and it was a study about next door neighbors and stuff. And I 
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can remember interviewing around Green Lake and finding out, one of the questions was, "Well, 
what, how would you feel if a black family moved next door to you?" And this, they were a lot 
of Scandinavians. I remember this old Norwegian woman saying, "Well, they might be nice 
people, they might keep their house nice, they might be clean, they might not be noisy, but what 
if we had a boy and they had a girl and they fell in love and got married?" That was what was 
always everybody's mind. And I can remember my stepmother saying, well, I said, "Well, what's 
wrong within a marriage? You know, what's," and she talked about cultural differences. And I 
said, "Well, that's true, but it happens from different parts of the country and everything else. So, 
what's wrong with it?" And she said, "Well, eventually there'd be a grey race." And I said, "So 
what's wrong with that?" And she didn't get it. Being white is very important to her, much more 
important to her than being human. So does that answer your question?  
 
Jenny Kurzweil  27:55 
Yes, it does. Thank you. My next question was, if you had any thoughts on, if roles have 
changed for women in your lifetime, and the work? You know, because you had mentioned 
sexist circumstances for women working-- 
 
Delphine Bowers  28:18 
Oh, yeah. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  28:19 
--and if you feel that you were fortunate in the sense that you had a career, really, or you started 
your career? 
 
Delphine Bowers  28:25 
I didn't start my career until I was 52. 
 
Jenny Kurzweil  28:29 
That's true, but, but you had mentioned about women in Bellevue saying snide remarks about 
you working. 
 
Delphine Bowers  28:37 
Yeah. Well, yeah, the-- I was married in 1950 when, during the, the Second World War, was 
Rosie the Riveter, and women went to work in the factories and did the jobs that the men had 
done, and the men were all gone. When the men came back, the women all lost their jobs. The 
men were considered, they had to have the jobs [?for them, for all?], they were, quote, the 
providers. There was very little attention paid to single mothers or women who really were 
providers. They still could scrub floors for a living, they were not given jobs in the factories. The 
women were supposed to go home and make nice houses, and this was the days of the Good 
Housekeeping stories when your next door neighbor was Nikki or Tony or somebody, interesting 
little, little cute names that were really men's names, you know, and you'd borrow cups of sugar, 
and you talked about your husbands, but you never talked about anything really important. And I 
tried to be like that, it didn't work, and it was the Leave it to Beaver days. I tried to be like June 
Cleaver, that didn't work either, and women, it, were really weird-- We were given washing 
machines, automatic washers, and automatic dishwashers to try to make staying at home more 
palatable, and I actually have those things, but it didn't make up for not being considered people. 
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Any time, any segment of the population that has dealt with the earth and with dirt, like dirty 
diapers and with bodies, are always considered inferior to the people who deal in other ways. 
And it's I mean, we were cleaning houses and changing diapers and doing those things-- 
[Recording ends]. 
 