Reckitt, Hon. Lois Galgay

SOUTH PORTLAND – After spending many happy summers at Goose Rocks Beach in Maine, Lois Galgay told her mother when she was 7 that she wanted to move to Maine. Her mother suggested she wait until she grew up.

She waited, but she did end up in Maine in her 20s and became the fiercest advocate for woman and children the state has ever seen, her decades-long advocacy ending only with her death from cancer Oct. 30, 2023, at the age of 78. Maine recognized her achievements by inducting her into the Maine Women’s Hall of Fame and the Deborah Morton Society, and by giving her awards for her seminal work on domestic violence. The judicial system, the state bar association and the police chiefs’ association all honored her.

But she also was a leader on the national stage. The headline in Ms. Magazine after her death read: “Rest in Power: Lois Galgay Reckitt, Trailblazing Feminist Activist.”

Eleanor Smeal, an activist since the 1970s who was once called one of the most influential women in America, wrote these words in the magazine: “Lois Reckitt has not only been an inspirational leader for women and girls in Maine, but also nationwide. Lois was a champion for the Equal Rights Amendment both for the United States Constitution and the Maine Constitution. She was a leader in the National Organization for Women and a national leader in the fight to end violence against women and girls. I had the good fortune to work with her closely when I was president of the National Organization for Women, and she was the executive vice president. She worked for women’s rights until the time of her death and was very proud that she had just passed historic legislation in Maine to end sex trafficking.”

Reckitt was on NOW’s national board for 15 years and from 1984 to 1988 was executive vice president. She was elected to the position, and pursued the work with a vengeance, working 60 to 70 hours a week. She also served for eight years on the national board of the Human Rights Campaign Fund, a political action group she cofounded and replicated in Maine. She was a member of the National Coalition to End Domestic Violence for many years.

She is listed in “Feminists Who changed America ’63-’75.”

Reckitt grew up in Massachusetts, an only child and the daughter of parents who both were polio survivors. She came to Maine by following her husband, who was stationed in the Coast Guard in South Portland. She said she had no clue she was a lesbian at that time. That truth came to her during two marriages, and in due time she came out and became a champion for gay rights.

She was preceded in death by her father, George A. Galway of Winthrop, Mass. and her mother, Marjorie Lewis Wright of South Portland.

She is survived by Lyn Kjenstad Carter, her loving partner/wife of 20 years; stepdaughter, Barbara M. Carter-Eide, son-in-law, Pala Carter-Eide, stepdaughter, Crystal L. Hartford; five grandchildren; and many cousins in the Galway and Wright families.

She was not only a national leader on domestic violence – she was a true leader in Maine. She founded Family Crisis Shelter, which became Family Crisis Services, now Through These Doors, and headed it for more than three decades, taking time out for her work in Washington, D.C. When she returned to Maine, she was exhausted and said she would do nothing but sleep for six months. But she resumed her work, heading an agency with a $1.4 million budget, a staff of 30, three outreach offices and a battered women’s shelter. At the forefront of efforts to stop domestic abuse and help its victims, she lobbied for stronger laws and more aggressive enforcement of them. She raised public awareness of the magnitude of domestic abuse while lobbying successfully for anti-stalking legislation, a domestic violence homicide review panel and gun control measures for abusers.

She worked not just to pass laws but to help police, prosecutors and judges better understand domestic violence and the harm it caused. “Her approach rested on her belief that people want to do what is right and just, and that most people will respond better to a victim’s needs if that person has knowledge of the dynamics of domestic violence,” said retired judge Michael Cantara, a longtime friend.

Reckitt led many groups, but sometimes had to create them first. Maine’s NOW chapter, the Maine Right to Choose, the Maine Coalition for Human Rights and the Matlovich Society for Gay Rights and AIDS Awareness were among the organizations that were created, in whole or in part, by her. Forty-five years ago she and eight others, including now-Gov. Janet Mills, founded the Maine Women’s Lobby. Destia Hohman Sprague, current Women’s Lobby executive director, said Reckitt “set such a profound example of what it is like to work on an issue, to follow your heart and to work on an issue in every possible way. She never gave up working as an activist and then a policy maker, and I just admire that so much.”

State leaders lauded her on her passing, calling her a trailblazer, a feminist icon, a hero, a modern pioneer and “a truly remarkable person.”

“Lois never stopped trying to make our state better for everyone,” said Mills, who went to her home to swear her in for her last legislative term. “She was a dear friend, and I will miss her deeply.”

Reckitt knew her work would take endurance, a requirement that may have tested her mettle, but she never gave up. She introduced an Equal Rights Amendment in the Maine Legislature three times and was rebuffed every time. She helped create the coalition that put forward the first gay rights bill in Maine. She and other activists thought it would take 10 years to pass a law. It took 25. She could find only two sponsors. One was Gerald Talbot, the first black man elected to the Maine Legislature. To learn more about gay rights, Talbot went a bookstore to get a book. “They wouldn’t take the money out of his hand because they thought he was gay,” Reckitt recalled. The incident showed the difficulty they were up against. Reckitt provided the lead testimony on the bill, but even though no one spoke against it, it failed.

She came out at this time, but minimally. She decided to stay closeted until the first campaign was over and came out afterwards at the farmhouse of a straight friend in Newcastle. Gay rights was in her playbook from that moment on. Working with a gay man who was dying of AIDS, she founded a group that provided a safe space for gays and lesbians to gather, a way of lessening their isolation. It began with six or seven people and soon mushroomed to be as many as 150, some driving hours to get there. She would be a pallbearer at the man’s funeral.

Despite the intensity of her work to fix things that were broken, she wasn’t a rabble rouser — she tended to work behind the scenes – but she was arrested twice, once while protesting apartheid at the South African embassy in Washington. She jumped into the national fray again when the national gay rights movement went to Washington to protest Reagan’s inadequate response to the AIDS crisis. In an oral history interview, she was clearly dismayed that Reagan had never spoken the word AIDS. “Reagan was such a ditz,” she said.

Outside the White House, she protested in the prosaic way it was done in those days: sitting down and refusing to move. Sixty-seven people were arrested. She was the first, “not because I was particularly outrageous or anything” but because of the way the protest was set up, she said in her oral history interview. She claimed to have “the odd distinction of being the first women in the U.S. arrested by police using those Playtex rubber gloves,” which they used to “reach down my pants to see if I was carrying who knows what.”

She had widespread interests, including her Irish ancestry. She knitted, quilted and did needlepoint, traveled extensively, taught swimming and biology, played basketball in college. Most importantly, she loved the Boston Red Sox and Celtics.

In seeming contradiction to her life’s work, she received college degrees from Brandeis University in biology and from Boston University in marine biology and biological oceanography. But she said her scientific education taught her how to approach things in life.

“She loved the sea, and she loved that she lived only steps from the beach,” said longtime friend Lee Umphrey. “She liked to say her legislative district was on the ocean side of South Portland.”

She once said the three loves of her life were the women’s rights movement, the lesbian rights movement and the movement to end violence women. “I have lived an interesting life,” she said.

“Lois came of age when the civil rights movement, the environmental protection movement, the anti-Vietnam movement, the anti-apartheid movement, and the equality for women movement were front and center,” said Cantara, the retired judge. “She chose to become a lifelong engaged citizen who advocated for the poor, the marginalized, the forgotten, the dismissed. She took her legislative duties very seriously. She was working on legislative matters up to two days before she died.”

She even participated in a national conference from her hospital bed, one that focused on her pioneering Maine work to end sexual exploitation. In appreciation, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation gave her the Dignity Defense Award. “To the very end, Lois was in the saddle championing equality,” Umphrey said. “She gave it her all until the end.”

But in her 1999 oral history interview, she wondered what her life would add up to. “One of the things I’ve been concerned about my life is to not have my life disappear,” she said. “I figure somebody will remember sometime that I set foot on the planet. I’ve done a lot of good stuff. I know that, and I figure I’m only half done.”

A celebration of her life will be held from 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 12, at the Maine Irish Heritage Center, corner of Gray and State Streets, Portland. Reckitt had been on the center’s board and its treasurer.

In lieu of flowers, donations are suggested to

Through These Doors at

https://www.thehotline.org/donate

737-234-6464; OR

The Maine Irish Heritage Center,

34 Gray St.,

Portland, ME 04112-7588

207-780-0118