Nancy Simpson has no idea how long she has been a multiple personality.* After years of psychotherapy she has only a vague awareness of slipping into and out of about 16 different identities, which range from three-year-old Nancy to ten-year-old Tommie to several adults, among them Nance, Nancy, and Linda. She does know that for as long as she can remember life has been hell.
Nancy’s mother’s role remains vague. Nancy isn’t sure what her mother knew, but she remembers her mother beating her with a broom after a sexual encounter with her father. She remembers other incidents of physical abuse by her mother, but she’s not sure if they had anything to do with her father.
The idea of a daughter suing her incestuous father for damages can be traced back to the turn of this century, when a 15-year-old girl, Lulu Roller, tried to sue her father and was rebuffed by the Washington State Supreme Court. The court decreed that “the rule of prohibiting suits between parent and child is based on the interest that society has in preserving harmony in domestic relations.”
In Illinois, the law extending to 30 the age by which victims can sue for incest was passed as a result of a victim consulting state representative Helen Satterthwaite of Champaign-Urbana. The woman had first approached a lawyer, but he’d told her she was too old to sue. So Satterthwaite called on the Citizens’ Council for Women, a research and advocacy adjunct to the General Assembly. The council wrote a bill that contained no age ceiling; but, says Satterthwaite, “the judiciary committee that handles civil law wouldn’t consider leaving the age open-ended, so we settled for a ten-year extension.” There was, she says, “a lot of lobbying for the bill by women’s groups, and the bill passed easily in both houses.”
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Keefe graduated from Kent College of Law in 1978, at the age of 48, and became partners with a former classmate who was gay. The legal matters they handled included civil rights and gay issues, such as the bequeathal of one’s estate to one’s lover. Keefe’s experiences before law school gave her an especially humane insight into legal problems that often have a highly personal aspect. She had three children during her first marriage, acquired five more in her second, taught high school English for many years, and spent five years living with a lawsuit brought against her and her husband John by the Lake County Forest Preserve District, which sought to evict the Keefes from a farm in Libertyville (the former Adlai Stevenson farm) that they were renting from the district. It seems the Keefes had lent the farm to Adlai Stevenson III for a rally, and “the Republicans on the district board didn’t much care for all those Democrats meeting on their property,” Keefe says. “They thought we had big Democratic connections, which we did not, and tried to get rid of us. We were simply big admirers of Governor Stevenson and didn’t mind lending our place to his son.”
The experience of the suit, which involved two jury trials that the Keefes won, led to her entering law school. “It taught me a lot about the law and I was fascinated by the process.”
But many times in history the taboo was violated for the sake of other interests. Cleopatra married her brother to keep wealth and power in the family. Until the law intervened in 1892, Mormon sisters and brothers married each other to avoid marrying outside the faith. And the Old Testament tells the story of Lot’s two young daughters, after the destruction of Sodom, lamenting that “Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come into us after the manner of all the earth.” They got him drunk and had sex with him, and “thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father.”
