By Frankie Witzenburg
Today the Rainbow History Project remembers Mary-Helen Mautner, beloved partner, mother, feminist, activist, lawyer, and namesake of The Mautner Project. This summer, the founder of the trailblazing organization and Mautner’s partner, Susan Hester, donated 4 large boxes of archival documents detailing Mary-Helen’s extraordinary life and the activities of The Mautner Project to RHP.
Mary-Helen Mautner was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1982, and ultimately succumbed to the disease on August 24th, 1989 at the age of 44. Even as her own life came to its premature end, Mautner thought of what she could do to better the world around her. Three weeks before her death, she expressed to her long-term partner, Susan Hester, her wish for a support system for every lesbian fighting cancer. Mautner wanted every gay woman to know the support she herself was shown by her partner, family, friends, and community in her final years.
“Mary Helen had said, ‘We need to start something, start an organization that will give support to women with life-threatening illnesses–particularly breast cancer,’” Hester said in a 1998 oral history. “This is how she put it.”
In January 1990, Hester and a group of the couple’s friends made Mautner’s last wish a reality when they founded the Mary-Helen Mautner Project for Lesbians with Cancer. Within its first few years, the DC-based Mautner Project established several services for lesbians with life-threatening illnesses and their families. Volunteers provided direct services such as transportation to medical appointments and pet care for hospitalized patients, in addition to helping women to obtain competent care and to navigate the insurance process.
The Mautner Project quickly became one of the first, if not the first, organizations to call for a national lesbian health agenda. In 2009, First Lady Michelle Obama sat with a representative of The Mautner Project during President Barack Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress on health care reform. In 2013, the group officially became an arm of DC’s Whitman-Walker Clinic.
A native of Columbus, Ohio, Mary-Helen Mautner attended Antioch College before obtaining her law degree from the University of Chicago. Mautner arrived in Washington, DC in 1969 when she obtained a position as a Prettyman Law Clerk with the Georgetown University Law Center.
As her career in law and advocacy grew, Mautner joined the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission where she played a pivotal role in the 1978 landmark Supreme Court Case that guaranteed equal pensions for women in the workforce. She spent the next 10 years of her career as Counsel in the Supreme Court and Special Appellate Division of the Department of Labor.
Mautner’s passion for community advocacy also flourished in her personal life. In the early 1970s, Mautner was a part of the core collective of women who published The Furies, the newspaper of The Furies Collective, a lesbian separatist commune on 11th Street, SE. She went on to serve as founder and editor of Quest: a feminist quarterly, a journal on feminist political theory. She used her background in law to found the Women’s Legal Defense Fund, and served as a member of the city council task force which successfully reformed the DC rape laws in the early 1970s. She was also known as a fierce advocate for gay men suffering during the AIDS epidemic, providing direct support to men living with HIV/AIDS in the way people would eventually do for others in her name.
“Mary Helen had a strong lesbian identity, and certainly her working the Furies had to do with lesbian health. But we both identified, I think, first and foremost as feminists, and then as lesbians–or lesbian feminists,” Hester said. “But we weren’t just lesbians. [It] wasn’t just about being lesbians. It was about being females or feminists.”
Sources: https://www.washingtonblade.com/2010/03/18/mautner-project-celebrates-20th-year/
https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/6113
https://wearinggayhistory.com/exhibits/show/lesbiancapital/health-and-healing
https://archives.rainbowhistory.org/items/show/1277