Mind Field

On Sundays, MacNair joined Quakers who met in a basement apartment on 39th Street. The apartment also served as a classroom for a UMKC Communiversity course called "Non-Violent Actions for Peace," a class MacNair took in 1972, at age 13.

While other girls her age were forming social cliques, she was learning about coalitions. With the United Farm Workers, she picketed grocery stores and passed out fliers to boycott lettuce and grapes. A few years later, she joined a now-defunct local chapter of the War Resisters League and staged die-ins, lying down and playing dead at midtown parks. She became a vegetarian at 16 and helped affix "Under Protest" stickers to draft registrations at the downtown post office.

By taking summer classes, MacNair graduated from Paseo High School in three years. She didn't date. She never played sports. She doesn't remember a prom.

"I remember deciding at age 14 that this teenage bit was for the birds and I was going straight to adulthood," she says.

She went on to earn a degree in peace and conflict studies from Earlham College, a Quaker school in Indiana. There, MacNair joined the American Friends Service Committee, the activist arm of the Quakers. In the late '70s, she landed the activist's equivalent of a job -- full-time protesting. Joining an anti-nuclear coalition, she began caravaning to nuclear power plants and weapons facilities across the nation. To build her credibility, she got ticketed at the Russian Embassy during a United Nations special session for disarmament. "I knew from doing vigils in Kansas and whatnot that the first question people were going to ask was, 'What about the Soviets?'" and I wanted to say, 'Yeah, I protested them, too.'"

She slept in church basements, wore shirts that read "Better Active Today than Radioactive Tomorrow" and collected arrest citations.

To make ends meet, MacNair worked a series of "bread jobs," such as installing home insulation. She had a short gig as a librarian at UMKC's Linda Hall Library but was forced to quit after someone discovered that she'd slipped Hiroshima brochures inside books being shipped to Bendix Corporation, a Kansas City plant that made non-nuclear components for nuclear weapons.

By her mid-20s, MacNair's definition of violence had expanded to include abortion. She joined Consistent Life, a peace organization that espoused the belief that the arms race, abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, poverty, racism and war were all forms of violence. In college, MacNair says, she had been generally pro-choice, but Consistent Life offered a philosophy on violence that would let her reconcile all of her issues.

In 1984, she rose to prominence when she was elected president of the 1,000-member group Feminists for Life at its national convention in Omaha. She held the post for the next ten years, working out of an office at 47th Street and Troost, until the anti-abortion group relocated to Washington, D.C.

She left the picket lines in 1985, after becoming pregnant from an anonymous donor through in vitro fertilization. She had no car and lived in her childhood home with her mother and brother (as she does today, with her son). "It is deliberately old-fashioned," MacNair says. "I believe in extended family. We support each other well." The living arrangement was convenient and simplistic. She could challenge the world at large, then retreat to a nurturing environment.

But she found less peace at Quaker meetings, which had become a nexus for activists from numerous anti-war groups. At the meetings, members sat in silence until they were moved to speak about any pressing issue.

"Somebody would make a comment, and she would feel morally outraged about it and stand up and say, 'I want to make it clear. There's another point of view of this,'" says fellow Quaker Don McClain. "I felt she was taking advantage of the process."

Others remember her using the forum to stump. "At that time, she was out of sync with nearly everyone at the meeting," one member says.

After her son was born, MacNair strapped him to her chest and resumed protesting, this time at the Planned Parenthood clinic at 45th Street and Troost. The clinic was known nationally as a flash point, recalls Peter Brownlie, the current CEO of Planned Parenthood in Overland Park, who at the time was managing a Planned Parenthood in Texas.

The organization put up a wrought-iron fence to keep the swell at bay, and patients were ushered inside by volunteer chaperones, at least one of whom was a member of MacNair's Quaker group. Bullhorns blared, and neighbors complained about the near-constant ruckus. Threatened by a Missouri law that would deny state funding to family-planning centers that performed abortions, Planned Parenthood officials moved the Troost surgical center to Overland Park.

MacNair knew that protesting abortion was different from protesting war. Because the act of "violence" was initiated by women themselves, not by an enemy, showing pictures of bloody fetuses risked alienating her audience. So MacNair carried a sign with a generic message: "Abortion Hurts Women." Whereas her Vietnam-era pamphlets had illustrated the atrocities of Hiroshima, her leaflets now focused on the positives of keeping a child and included pictures of healthy babies.