“We made it clear that we were different. We said that we would not take liquor and cigarettes, which was kind of an interesting position for a small [advertising] agency to come out with – starting out by saying who we weren’t interested in.” (my italics)
- Barbara Proctor, in a 1984 interview
“‘I prefer not to.’”
- Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
I. Conscientious Objector
Recently, our little trio made the journey from Texas to visit my sister-in-law, on sabbatical with her family in southern Mexico. It was a delight to witness the changes that a few months of growing up abroad had wrought in our 3-and-a-half-year-old niece. Ensconced in a plant-filled courtyard complex, safe from the bustle of commerce outside, she had emerged into a free-range independence that was thrilling to observe.
The visit with my niece also took me back to raising a child of that age and stage: the intensity of wanting, alongside the ferocity of refusal. Much like her beloved courtyard cat Hildi, who would occasionally scratch to communicate her boundaries, my niece was equally adept at saying ‘no’, sometimes with a gentle, demurring shake of the head, other times at the top of her lungs. Bath-time, in particular, was met with howls of rejection.
As child psychologists will tell you, the gravitational pull of the word ‘no’ for kids ages 2 and 3 is an important developmental milestone. It signals a desire to assert their will and experience some measure of control in a baffling and inexplicable adult world. However maddening for caregivers, young children’s discovery of their own power to resist is a crucial step on the road toward confident, well-adjusted personhood.
In contrast, I sometimes feel like my parenting approach is a series of reluctant ‘yeses’ despite the reasonable advice to set boundaries.
Fine, dude. Take a second piece of candy. Stay up another hour. Watch that next YouTube video. Fine.
Acquiescence stands in for assent.
And yet, I look around the world that we are bequeathing to these kids and see oh-so-much that my inner toddler yearns to reject loudly and wholly. Preferably with a shot of pea soup launched directly into the eye of any nearby grownups.
How do we keep that vital spark of protest alive as we age into a kind of tired complacency? How can we be models of ethical refusal for our kids, when every choice, every system seems compromised—not to mention that sometimes, we just want to choose the path of least resistance so we can ‘Netflix and chill’ before bed?
I turned, as usual, to history, to a pioneer in advertising who made her mark, took her stand, claimed her power by setting boundaries. By demonstrating that a value-driven career does not just turn toward the good, toward the changes we want to see in the world. It also embraces refusal.*
II. When Barbara Proctor Said ‘No’
The year was 1969. After a five year-stint with Chicago advertising firm Post-Keys-Gardner, Barbara Proctor had taken a job with competing firm North. Among her many complaints about the position, including that she was given only “women’s accounts,” the breaking point came when she was assigned to work on an ad concept for a hair-care product. In a shallow parody of the decade’s civil-rights protests, the ad would feature women taking to the streets with product bottles held aloft, insisting that hairdressers foam their hair.
For her refusal to work on this “terribly offensive” ad concept, Proctor was fired.
Although Proctor acted swiftly and without regrets, her choice did not come without professional and financial risk. A single parent with a seven-year-old son, Proctor was still trying to find her way in the industry.
Advertising was Proctor’s second career, following a successful and rather lucrative one as jazz critic and record company executive. (A fascinating aside about Proctor’s career history: as International Director for Vee-Jay Records, Proctor was responsible for bringing then-unknown British band The Beatles to the U.S. market.)
For Proctor, the 1960s, much like the American decade writ large, had been a time of reinvention and struggle. Her birth into advertising was also bound up with the birth of her son Morgan in 1962 and the demise of her marriage to music producer Carl Proctor a year later. Proctor would refer back to those 18 months between leaving her husband and the music industry and being hired by Post-Keys-Gardner as her “twilight time.” It was a time of introspection, recalibration, and hardship—working odd jobs, relying on savings and help from friends to support her young son.
Proctor would later joke that she “considered (son Morgan) the only positive result of her union with Carl Proctor.” But she found one other use for her ex-husband: the name of her advertising agency. When Proctor established Proctor and Gardner Advertising in 1970, she combined both her married and maiden surnames “because it suggested that a man was participating in operations.”
Proctor in 1974, four years after she became the first African American woman to start her own ad agency.
Moreover, her refusal to work on that ad campaign at North would also plant the seeds of her decision to start her own agency, and to accept or reject clients on her own terms. As biographer Judy Foster Davis explains,
Of course, in setting boundaries around the ad accounts she wouldn’t accept, Proctor was also laying the groundwork for the work she did want to create. One through-line in Proctor’s portfolio is an appeal to working mothers and an emphasis on positive representation of black families. Her advertisements for grocery chain Jewel Foods, for instance, featured loving images of parents, grandparents, and kids coming together over meals alongside text like “Fathers and families make it better” and “Together, we’re good food people.” Her ad campaigns for brands like Jewel and Kraft gave Proctor “the opportunity to show the strength, beauty, and family respect that is a very proud tradition in the Black experience.”
Proctor’s ad campaigns, like this one for Kraft Naturals in 1977, celebrated loving and joyful Black family relationships.
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Another set of limits, refusals, that shaped Proctor’s career in advertising center around being a single working parent. Having grown-up poor in rural North Carolina, Proctor was determined to provide financially for Morgan: “I would not permit my son to be raised in poverty, and I did whatever it took to get it done.”
On the other hand, concern about her son’s emotional well-being influenced Proctor’s business decisions. According to Foster Davis, Proctor exemplifies an early “mompreneur,” long before such a term had entered the cultural vernacular. Her spirit of entrepreneurship did not come at the expense of her son’s development; she set boundaries for her work that prioritized her relationship with Morgan.
For example, Proctor resolved to say “‘good morning’ and ‘good night’ to her son daily when he was young.” She refused clients without offices in or near the Chicago area, so that she didn’t have to travel for extended periods away from her son.
Proctor pictured with Oprah Winfrey and son Morgan, then in his early 20s, in 1984. As this photo indicates, Proctor would become an influential, well-off, and well-connected figure, but her fateful decisions to reject certain ad campaigns and accounts came earlier, when she was still figuring out how to support her young child and not fully established in her second career.
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Proctor’s firm thrived in the 1970s and early ‘80s. At its height, Proctor & Gardner was billing $13 million annually. While a number of factors contributed to its eventual decline (the business declared bankruptcy in 1995), Foster Davis suggests that Proctor’s value-driven approach eventually became a liability. The firm’s initial strength of saying ‘no’ to focus on family-oriented campaigns and products grew into a competitive disadvantage.
From another angle, though, Proctor’s power of refusal was its own reward, success defined on her own terms:
III. A Brief History of Refusal
Admittedly, the history of social movements has always been as much about saying ‘no’ as saying ‘yes.’ About resisting the current reality as much as dreaming of a better future. ‘Conscientious objectors’ resisted mandatory vaccination, and later military service. Luddites in England broke machinery to protest the devaluation of their skills. Enslaved Africans in the Americas broke tools to subvert the capitalist greed that used racism to justify free labor.
No, no, and again no.**
Most tactics for social change also involve refusal. Boycotts. Sit-ins. Hunger strikes. Non-violent direct action. A refusal to consume, to budge, to nourish the body, to engage in violence when provoked.
But I think what draws me to Barbara Proctor’s decisions to say ‘no’, what feels personally inspiring, is that, while Proctor was certainly civically involved, she was not a political leader or a grassroots activist. She was a working parent like so many of us, trying to balance creative fulfillment and raising kids. Even Proctor, who believed that ad campaigns could influence society for the good, would not have deemed advertising a noble or sainted profession. She enjoyed the creative challenge of advertising, along with the money and lifestyle it provided, as much as the opportunity to make social change.
Proctor was a creator, a boss, an entrepreneur who pursued the work she loved, the work that would provide for her kid. She also approached her career from a place of value. Proctor was remarkable, but her stance of quiet rebellion should not be.
The relatability of Proctor’s story points to a way forward for the working parent who feels complicit out of sheer tiredness and overwhelm. How can we all look to the smaller circles of our own homes, our communities, or our chosen professions, and find something that we feel compelled to say ‘no’ to? What are our boundaries, our lines in the sand?
IV. Hell No / Hell Yes
I’ve been thinking of Barbara Proctor lately as our parents’ climate group embarks on a new effort to bring caregiver voices into the debate over I-35.
I-35 is an interstate highway that runs through Austin. It is an explicit legacy of racist city planning, dividing the generally wealthier and whiter west side from the generally poorer and browner east side. To solve our city’s traffic woes, the state’s Department of Transportation plans to widen this (geographically, politically, racially) divisive highway to a boggling 20 lanes.
I like to think of myself as someone who favors dialogue, diverse perspectives, nuance, negotiation. But, to me, the response to this proposed I-35 expansion that feels the most genuine, and in some way most constructive, is one of outright refusal. I refuse to accept a 20-lane highway in my city in the middle of a climate crisis, when we have only a few years left to change course. I refuse to make a massive expanse of congested, polluting asphalt my legacy to the next generation of Austinites.
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When I stumbled into climate organizing a few years ago, I’d assumed that my central motivation was a positive one: that I am acting for our kids’ futures. It took meditating on what has moved me to fight the I-35 expansion, and on the example of Barbara Proctor, to acknowledge that there is another motivating force at play—an opposing or shadow voice of refusal.
At the heart of my activism is not only love but also rejection. A rejection of the status quo. Of what I had thought were the ingredients for a ‘successful’ life. Of a jaded, apathetic stance toward the condition of the world.
The phrase “No, I won’t” doesn’t exactly have the inspirational quality—or, frankly, the seeming maturity—of “Yes, we can.”
But, looked at another way, they are two sides of the same coin. Proctor’s refusal to work on ad campaigns that demeaned or harmed African Americans and women stemmed from a positive, generative force. It was a gesture of love toward her son, the grandmother who raised her, and the Black community.
What I’m learning is the surprising vitality and power of saying ‘no.’ It’s like a time machine back to youth, to that pure and uncompromising voice of rebellion. Regardless of our avocation or creative endeavor, we need to cultivate both sides—the positive vision of what we hope to achieve alongside the strength to resist what we cannot, will not, abide.
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Heck no. Hell no. My inner toddler is alive and well, and she is not getting into that bathtub without a fight.
NOTES
*Originally, I’d meant to explore the lives of two parents from history, but Albert Vinicio Baez got the shaft. Not because he wasn’t an interesting case study! I just couldn’t find adequate source material.
Baez is famous today by association with his daughters, the countercultural folk singers Joan Baez and Mimi Fariña. Born in Puebla, Mexico in 1912, Baez emigrated to the United States when he was a toddler. As a physicist, he would become known for his contributions to X-ray optics, co-inventing the X-ray reflection microscope still in use today.
But in the late ‘40s and 1950s, when his daughters were young, the money and funding for American physicists of Baez’s stature was in nuclear weapons. A convert to Quakerism and a lifelong pacifist, Baez “refused to use his considerable expertise to advance the nuclear arms race during the Cold War.”
As with Proctor, alongside Baez’s act of refusal was a corresponding impetus toward social change. He turned his attention instead to science education and anti-poverty efforts, building labs with UNESCO in the 1950s and ‘60s and later chairing the education and community-development non-profit Vivamos Mejor.
Albert Baez in 1944 with daughters Pauline and Joan. Mimi was born a year later.
**Two more modern calls to resistance: Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and Tricia Hersey’s The Nap Ministry, which urge us to refuse the distractions of social media and the exploitations of ‘grind culture.’