Maland, Jeanine

Jeanine Maland was born on July 9, 1945 in Iowa. The product of a large family, Maland enjoyed a conventional childhood and adolescence in Charles City. Her solid high school record afforded her the opportunity to pursue an undergraduate degree at Iowa State University where she studied home economics. During her years at Iowa State, she bore witness to growing social movements of the 1960s. These social movements inspired her to look beyond her own experiences and she began to take her first steps toward a lifelong commitment to activism.

Maland’s interest in activism inspired her to spend a year doing an Undergraduate Seminar Study and Community Teaching at the Merrill-Palmer Institute of Human Development and Family life in Detroit, Michigan in 1967. For Maland, this experience deeply challenged her both intellectually and personally, and deepened her commitment to social change and activism, teaching her the value of community based activism. These lessons continued to inform her career throughout the rest of her life.

In 1968, Maland graduated from the Iowa State University with a degree in Child Development and concentrations in Sociology and Psychology. She then moved to New England to pursue work in health care and community organizing. Between 1972 and 1975, she worked as a nurse’s and physical therapy assistant in Providence, Rhode Island, and as an organizer for Local 1199 Hospital and Health Care Employees Union at the Park View Nursing Home. After completing her L.P.N certificate at the Rhode Island Junior College, Maland served as a nurse for cancer patients. Concurrently, Maland expanded on her community advocacy to be a founding member of the Rhode Island Women’s Health Collective where she organized workshops and worked to construct hospital advocacy program for low-income families in the community. Her advocacy work in Rhode Island also strengthened her feminist consciousness and placed her in a growing women’s health movement that began to connect women to their bodies and empower them to make their own health decisions.

In 1978, Maland gave birth to her daughter, Molly. Her advocacy work and growing involvement with the women’s health movement inspired her to go back to college to earn another bachelor’s degree in women’s studies. Maland moved to Amherst to begin her coursework at UMass. In addition to her studies, she also continued her advocacy work with Western Massachusetts Family Planning Council. There, Maland facilitated community education programs and served as a clinic counselor, an ideal complement to her intellectual work in women’s studies. After completing her Bachelor’s degree at UMass Amherst in 1981, Maland continued her community organizing efforts in a number of unique ways during the 1980s: serving as a coordinator for a cooperative parent playground, working as a daycare coordinator, collaborating on materials to educate parents on children’s fears about nuclear weapons, and mobilizing local activists as a community organizer for Central American Solidarity groups during the mid-1980s.

Maland’s years in Amherst connected her to local activist Margaret Holt. The two enjoyed a tremendous friendship over the last twenty years of Holt’s life. While the correspondence between the two women is minimal, their connections appear throughout the collection. Holt gave Maland numerous periodicals to read. The two spent countless hours organizing against the military industrial complex, the nuclear proliferation movement, against the wars in the Middle East, as well local events in concerns in Amherst with the Gray Panthers, the Amherst Disarmament Coalition and the Amherst Peace Vigil. In many respects, Holt acted as a mentor to Maland, providing her with reading material and connections to a variety of organizations she supported locally and nationally. As Holt continued to age and grow ill, Maland cared for her in her home. The two remained close until Holt’s death in 2004.

Encouraged by Holt, Maland’s interest in activism grew during the late 1980s; she expanded her perspective from local to global issues as she explored graduate school options. She considered programs in history, economics, and anthropology, and in 1987 enrolled in graduate courses in anthropology and economics at UMass Amherst. She formally enrolled in a graduate program in anthropology during the 1989 academic year, where she reviewed her earlier interests in healthcare and labor organization in a new context. She completed a Master’s thesis on healthcare and graduate students, entitled “Falling through the Cracks….” in 1992.

In addition to her academic pursuits, Maland put her earlier union experience to use by playing a key role in forming the University’s Graduate Student Union (G.E.O) in the late 1980s. Officially incorporated in 1990, the purpose of the G.E.O. was-and still is-to better the lives of graduate students. Maland led campaigns for child care, improved housing and health care, wage increases, and tuition waivers until 1998, when she left the University and took a job as an instructor at the Community College of Vermont.

During her time at the Community College of Vermont, Maland continued coordinating and volunteering for organizations and causes she supported. She became involved with more local advocacy groups, such as ARISE for Social Justice in Springfield, Massachusetts, an organization that works to provide a voice for low-income residents; and with many groups that worked to improve the lives of prisoners and their families.