Archives for November 2014

Women’s Pentagon Action

November 28, 2014 By Pam

In November 1980 and again in ‘81, women gathered at the Pentagon to mourn, rage, empower, and defy, in a pageant-like demonstration that combined rational thought with deep emotion.

A JARGON-FREE MANIFESTO

The idea for the Women’s Pentagon Action (WPA) emerged from an ecofeminism conference on Women and Life on Earth held in Amherst, MA in spring, 1980. The next fall, a spinoff group met to examine the connections between violence against women, racism, and the destruction of the earth.

With input from over 200 women, author-activist Grace Paley drafted a jargon-free manifesto called the Unity Statement. In her essay, “All Is Connectedness,” Ynestra King, an ecofeminist activist-scholar, wrote that the process of collectively creating the Unity Statement set the tone for the actions to follow.

For weeks Grace took phone calls, read the statement to women in her kitchen, on the subway, in New York, Vermont, Massachusetts. The spirit of unity from the Hartford meeting and the process of writing the statement and reaching consensus on it at our next planning meeting told our politics and brought us together. We all listened to each other, everyone was heard and satisfied, and we took this statement home with us to organize.

The Women’s Pentagon Action was guerrilla theater, ritual, and pageant, with opportunities for civil disobedience woven throughout. As King wrote, “All of us were the theater, the actors, there were no speakers, no stage, no leaders…”

MOURNING

In the first stage, thousands of women walked to the beat of a slow drum through Arlington Cemetery, past endless neat rows of tombstones. They were led by a giant Bread and Puppet Theatre papier-mâché figure. (The first year it was draped in black, the second in white.) When they reached Pentagon property, they knelt to place homemade grave-markers: “Mary Dyer,” “Anne Frank,” “Karen Silkwood,” “My mother Roberta, self-induced abortion, 1964,” “the Salem witches,” “the mother of the soldier my son killed in Vietnam.”

RAGE

The drumbeat changed to a faster, more insistent beat, and a fiery red puppet took the lead for the second stage. To the astonishment of the cynical press and Pentagon personnel who peered from the windows, women began to circle the building chanting, “No more war,” and “Take the toys away from the boys.” They ululated and howled, stomped the ground, pumped the air with raised fists, shook cans filled with pebbles. White bird puppets atop long poles rent the sky, swooping, flapping long, gauzy wings. All was fury and chaos.

EMPOWERMENT

From rage evolved the third stage. Another puppet appeared to lead the way (the first year gold, the second year black). The empowerment puppet held a basket of scarves. The women helped themselves as they began to encircle the Pentagon, a building one mile in circumference. As they circled, they read aloud the Unity Statement and sang, “We Shall Not Be Moved,” “Song of the Soul,” and “You Can’t Just Take My Dreams Away.” By using the scarves to connect woman-to-woman, the circle finally closed around the war building, and the women gave an exultant whoop of victory. (Photo: WPA logo, designed by Vermont artist-activist Bonnie Acker.)

DEFIANCE

The fourth stage began. Women who had taken workshops on nonviolent civil disobedience began the work of blocking three of the five major entrances to the Pentagon. Some of the women sat on the steps, linking arms and letting their bodies become limp as soon as officers approached to arrest them. (Photo: Grace Paley being arrested)

Other women, led by the Spinsters, a Vermont affinity group of feminist activists, began spinning webs of multi-colored yarns across two of the entrances to express their conviction that all life is connected. They decorated the webs with flowers, feathers, leaves and bells.

As if following a prepared script, police came out with pocketknives to shred the webs and clear the entrances. Unwittingly, they played their part in the pageant. In a dance of destruction, they ripped apart the symbolic webs, demonstrating how our connections to each other, the animals, the earth, are severed.

A BOOK JACKET AND BEYOND

When New Society Publishers went to press with my 448 page anthology, Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence, featuring essays by Joan Baez, Barbara Deming, Karla Jay, Holly Near, Alice Walker, and dozens of other author-activists, several photos of the WPA were included inside, as well as one on the cover by Joan E. Biren (or JEB). Unfortunately, some readers, unfamiliar with feminist symbolic use of webs to block entrances, thought the women were caught in the web.

When the book was reprinted, a different cover photo was chosen, this one, also by JEB, showed cheering women triumphantly holding a web over their heads.

In November, 1981, several months before the book’s publication, Grace Paley and several other New York-area contributors to Reweaving joined me in a reading at the Woman’s Salon, co-founded by Erika Duncan. What a night it was! (Photo, L-R: Erika Duncan, one of her daughters, me, Grace Paley, Leah Fritz, and Catherine Reid.)

TO GO DEEPER

Unity Statement, 1980 — Read the entire text!

“All is Connectedness: Scenes from the Women’s Pentagon Action USA” by Ynestra King in Keeping the Peace: A Women’s Peace Handbook, edited by Lynne Jones. The Women’s Press Limited, London, 1983.

“Finding Hope: Reweaving — Then and Now” by Pam McAllister in On the Issues, Summer, 2011 (Looking back 30 years on the experience of editing a groundbreaking and transformative anthology.)

Grace Paley: Collected Shorts by Lilly Rivlin (Paley’s life & times on film)

CREDITS

Photo by War Resisters League showing the Bread and Puppet Theatre creations by Amy Trompetter.

1980 WPA Poster designed by Yolanda Fundora for Feminist Resources on Energy and Ecology (FREE).

Book cover photos by JEB (Joan E. Biren). Photography Collection at George Washington University

WPA logo: designed by Vermont artist-activist Bonnie Acker.

The Uprising of the 20,000

November 21, 2014 By Pam

On November 22, 1909, young Clara Lemlich sat beside other garment workers, listening to speeches in the Great Hall of New York’s Cooper Union. Her body was bruised and aching after the beating she’d taken two days earlier on the picket line. In late September, she and 100 other women had walked out of their factory on the Lower East Side. They’d had enough.

Working conditions at the garment shops were deplorable. The women and girls, some as young as eight, worked from 7:30 in the morning to 6:30 or later each evening, sewing “waists,” women’s blouses. Very few took home more that $6 a week after a full seven days of work. Most were Jewish or Italian immigrants who provided for their families and sent what they could to relatives in Europe. Out of their low wages, they paid work expenses and fines.

The shops were stifling in summer and freezing in winter. There was rarely any ventilation or clean water. Most of the shops were fire traps, something that wouldn’t be taken seriously by management until the Triangle Waist Company fire in March, 1911.

SHE HAD FIRE IN HER MOUTH

On November 22, Clara (photo), already arrested numerous times and still in pain from her most recent beating, was determined to attend this meeting — but what a disappointment! Two hours of long-winded speeches and cautious rhetoric was more than enough. The men droned on and on. Couldn’t they feel the tension in the room? the readiness? the ache for action?

On impulse, Clara stood and interrupted a speech, calling out, “I’ve got something to say!” Years later, she would recall, “Ah — then I had fire in my mouth … Audacity — that was all I had — audacity!”

The moderator, as surprised as everyone, decided that the young striker had as much right to the platform as he did. He granted her request. As Lemlich made her way to the podium, several thousand people strained to see the one they called “a pint of trouble for the bosses.”

“I am a working girl,” she called out, “one of those who are on strike against intolerable conditions.” The workers knew what she was talking about. “I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared — now!”

The mass of workers rose to their feet as one body, shouting, waving their hats and handkerchiefs for a good five minutes. When at last the crowd settled down, the moderator asked if anyone wanted to second Clara’s resolution. Again, the room erupted with people on their feet, shouting. Everyone in the Great Hall seconded the motion. Then, Clara led them all in the Yiddish oath: “If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise!”

“WE ROSE AND WON WITH WOMEN’S MIGHT!”

Messengers ran with the news to where other garment workers were meeting. They, too, endorsed the call for a general strike. Over the next two days, women from over 500 shops walked out in the first great strike of women.

Out on the picket lines, the women were cold in their thin coats and over-sized hats, hungry, and subjected to public humiliation and arrest. The bosses hired thugs to beat them up. One reporter for the New York Sun described the scene:

The girls, headed by teenage Clara Lemlich … began singing Italian and Russian working-class songs as they paced in twos before the factory door. Of a sudden, around the corner came a dozen tough-looking customers, for whom the union label “gorillas” seemed well-chosen.

“Stand fast, girls,” called Clara, and then the thugs rushed the line, knocking Clara to her knees, striking at the pickets, opening the way for a group of frightened scabs to slip through the broken line.

As is often the case with violent tactics, the employers’ brutality backfired and, instead of frightening the picketers away, strengthened their resolve and won support for the strike by heightening public sympathy for the workers.

The strike lasted four months. The “Uprising of the 20,000” left the majority of those who’d gone on strike with improved conditions, a shorter work week, union representation, and better pay. Hard-working women had tasted worker solidarity, union organizing, and the power inherent in nonviolent collective action.

Later, they sang a song written by members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union:

In the black of the winter of nineteen nine,
When we froze and bled on the picket line,
We showed the world that women could fight
And we rose and won with women’s might.

TO GO DEEPER

Books

Brave Girl: Clara and the Shirtwaist Makers’ Strike of 1909 by Michelle Markel, Balzer & Bray, 2013 — A picture book for children.

Rivington Street (a novel) by Meredith Tax, University of Illinois Press, 2001. Originally published in 1982, Rivington Street paints a vivid picture of the Lower East side and the women garment workers and other East European Jewish immigrants who lived and worked there at the turn of the last century. This review includes an audio clip of Tax reading a few pages of her fictionalized account of the beginning of the Shirtwaist Strike.

We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America by Barbara Mayer Wertheimer, New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.

Other

Labor Arts presents the Clara Lemlich Social Activist Awards (website)

“Cooper Union” Zachary Aarons tells the story of Clara Lemlich’s famous speech (2 minutes)

Women’s “Night of Terror”

November 14, 2014 By Pam

The “Night of Terror” is what suffrage activists in the United States later called November 14, 1917.

The U.S. was fighting WWI to “make the world safe for democracy.” Women, vote-deprived and, so, denied participation in American democracy, thought this the height of hypocrisy and let Woodrow Wilson know.

For months, peaceful demonstrators endured harassment, mob attacks, and ridicule, called heretics or worse, merely because they wanted the right to vote. Arrested for “obstructing traffic,” they were given long prison sentences; made to strip in front of each other; denied toiletries, pencils, paper. Some were sent to the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia where they shared cells with rats and found worms floating in their soup. Those who chose to go on hunger strikes were brutally force-fed.

A NIGHTMARE OF VIOLENCE

In the days leading up the the Night of Terror, radical suffrage leader Alice Paul was arrested and, in an effort to undermine her credibility, sent to a psychiatric ward,. There, she was denied legal counsel.

On November 14, 31 picketers, absent their leader, were arrested. They demanded to be acknowledged as political prisoners. As they waited to see the prison superintendent, the holding room filled with male security guards.

Then, on cue, the room erupted into a nightmare of violence. Guards with clubs beat, kicked, and choked the women. They grabbed them, one at a time, and hauled them off down a long corridor and shoved them into cells.

Dorothy Day, the future co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, was there. A “slight girl” at the time, she was thrown hard against an iron bench in a cell. In her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, she wrote:

When another prisoner tried to come to my rescue, we found ourselves in the midst of a milling crowd of guards being pummeled and pushed and kicked and dragged, so that we were scarcely conscious, in the shock of what was taking place.

One woman collapsed with severe chest pains, but the guards refused to send for a doctor. Another woman was placed in the men’s wing for the entire sleepless night.

LUCY BURNS IN CHARGE

In the midst of the chaos, Lucy Burns (in photo), a fearless redhead from Brooklyn, began to call the roll and bring a sense of order. Her strong voice calmed the others.

“Where’s Mrs. Lewis?” she called out.

Down the row of cells a voice called back, “They’ve thrown her in here.”

Burns continued down the roster, determining who was safe, who was missing, who needed help. The guards warned her to stop, but she forged ahead.

Suddenly, men stormed into her cell. They grabbed her arms, handcuffed her wrists and fastened them above her head to the bars of the cell door. They left, swearing to return with a buckle gag if she made another sound.

A LONE GESTURE OF SOLIDARITY

In most history textbooks, the “Night of Terror” is omitted, let alone the story of one small gesture that happened in a dark corner, where only one other could see.

Julia Emory, a young activist in the cell directly across from Lucy Burns, watched the guards enter and leave. She saw Burns’ lonely punishment, her arms cuffed over her head. After thinking for a moment, Emory stood up and walked to her cell door. Then, looking directly at Lucy, she raised her arms over her own head. The two women stood like that for hours, facing each other in tortured position, neither saying a word.

Lucy understood that she was not alone. Another woman suffered with her.

Julia Emory maintained her personal vigil of suffering and witness until the guards returned to unlock the handcuffs from the bars of Burns’ cell door. Only then did both women lower their arms.

TO GO DEEPER

Books

Alice Paul: Equality for Women by Christine Lunardini (2012) A concise and readable first book about the suffrage leader from the Lives of American Women series edited by Carol Berkin.

The Story of Alice Paul and The National Women’s Party by Inez Haynes Irwin (1964/1977) Full of details.

Jailed for Freedom: The Story of the Militant American Suffragist Movement by Doris Stevens 1976/1995) This is a detailed memoir, with photos, by one of the activists.

Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States by Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick 1959/ 1996) Considered the classic book of women’s history in the U.S., from colonial days to the 1920s

The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement: 1890-1920 by Aileen S. Kraditor (1965/1981) Theories behind both suffrage and antisuffrage activism

Other

Woman’s Suffrage Monument — People are working to raise funds to erect a suffragist memorial (Turning Point Suffragist Memorial) in Virginia, where women activists were imprisoned in the Occoquan Workhouse. Check out their website:

AUDIO CLIP: Podcast #1 “Night of Terror” 3 minutes (from a series)

FILM: Iron Jawed Angels, 2004 movie featuring Hilary Swank as Alice Paul and Frances O-Connor as Lucy Burns, leading the fight for the 19th Amendment giving women the vote.

YOUTUBE: “Alice Paul, presented by The Alice Paul Institute” (6 minutes) Powerful, short summary of highlights in the fight for the right to vote.

The Alice Paul Institute website, educates about and honors the suffrage leader who wrote the Equal Rights Amendment:

Grille, Baby, Grille! Muriel Matters Acts for Justice

November 7, 2014 By Pam

Have you heard about the grille that became famous in women’s suffrage history? We’re not talking about barbecue grills for veggie shish kabobs — although this post concerns skewered politicians, barbed comments, and heated arguments. Read on.

INTERRUPTING FOR A CAUSE

It didn’t take much for suffrage activists to be considered hecklers in early 1900s England. Bold activists like mill-worker Annie Kenney and privileged Christabel Pankhurst united across class lines to interrupt male politicians and ask, “When will the government give women the vote?” Outraged blokes cursed, shook their fists, and threw stuff — dead fish, rotten eggs. The women often got roughed up and arrested. Still, nothing stopped them.

A favorite target was Winston Churchill who sneered, “NOTHING would induce me to vote for giving women the franchise.”

LAUGHING AFTER A LONG DAY

In April 1906, when a resolution on women’s suffrage was presented for debate in the House of Commons, women converged on Parliament. Unfortunately, they had to sit in the Ladies’ Gallery, out of sight, behind an ornate metal screen that obstructed their view.

The grille was an apt symbol for women’s invisibility and exclusion from the decision-making process. Male visitors to Parliament sat in the Strangers’ Gallery, which had no grille.

Suffrage activists waited for hours that day to hear men debate the resolution. Instead, they heard condescending jokes and raucous laughter.

Just before the debate was scheduled to close, the women, dead set on serious consideration, began to shout, demanding that the legislators vote on the suffrage resolution.

Police, primed and waiting for such an outburst, rushed the women. To their horror, the women laughed in their faces. As Sylvia Pankhurst, Christabel’s radical pacifist, socialist sister, remembered, “We laughed as the police came rushing down over the tiers of seats to drag us out; it was fun to show our contempt.”

DISMANTLING THE GRILLE

The women continued to swarm men’s meetings, heckle the speakers, and laugh. On October 28, 1908, a suffrage activist and professional actress from Australia, Muriel Matters, interrupted the proceedings at the House of Commons to deliver a speech from the Ladies’ Gallery. When guards rushed to evict her, they found that she had chained and padlocked herself to the grille.

As men pondered what to do about Muriel, a second woman began to deliver a suffrage speech. She too, it was soon discovered, had attached herself to the grille with a heavy chain.

As sounds of struggle came from the Ladies’ Gallery, a male ally in the Strangers’ Gallery shouted, “Why don’t you do justice to women?” Several activists began flinging suffrage leaflets into the air.

Work continued to dislodge Muriel and her friend from the grille. Pieces of it had to be partially dismantled before the women could be removed (although it would not be permanently retired until 1917). The next day, Matters and a dozen other activists were found guilty of willfully obstructing London police and were sentenced to a month in Holloway jail.

But, this wasn’t the end of Muriel. A few months later, on the day King Edward opened Parliament with a grand procession, Matters hired an airship bearing the words VOTES FOR WOMEN, stepped into a basket on the balloon’s underside, and, once aloft, floated over London, tossing leaflets overboard. She meant to drop the pamphlets on the King’s head, but was blown off course. Nevertheless, she won lots of publicity for the suffrage cause and had a good time doing it.

Today, there is a Muriel Matters Society in Australia; a “Muriel Matters Room” at the South Australian Parliamentary Library; and a plaque in her honor in Hastings, England. Her story has been told on stage and screen. The chain she used to attach herself to the grille, as well as a piece of the ironwork and her prison badge have been displayed in museums in England and Australia.

TO GO DEEPER

“Muriel Matters: An Australian Suffragette’s Unsung Legacy” by Amy Fallon, The Guardian, October 10 2013.

Muriel Matters Society (founded in 2009) website

AUDIO CLIP & ARTICLE “The Suffragette Airship”: To hear Ms. Matters’ distinctive voice as she describes floating over London in a balloon, listen here: (@3 mins.)

VIMEO: “Muriel Matters” by Louie Joyce, with clips of the performance Muriel Matters! written and directed by Sonia Bible. (1 1/2 mins)

Women’s Strike for Peace

November 1, 2014 By Pam

On November 1, 1961, women across the United States — homemakers and factory workers, clerical workers and waitresses — interrupted their daily routines and took to the streets in the Women’s Strike for Peace.

That day, the women didn’t make beds or pack lunches. They didn’t type the bosses’ letters or file any papers. They didn’t milk the cows or work on their dissertations. Fifty thousand women in over sixty cities called on the world’s governments to “end the arms race, not the human race.”

In Washington, D.C., over 1,000 women picketed the White House, leafletted, and sent delegations to the Soviet Embassy. Letters were dispatched to Jackie Kennedy and Nina Petrovna Khrushchev inviting these “first ladies” to join the Women’s Strike for Peace and help end the arms race.

That night, just as they’d hoped, they made headlines. An article in The San Francisco Chronicle began, “Plodding doggedly through a faintly radioactive drizzle of rain, 200 San Francisco women carried their plea for world disarmament to city, federal, and school offices here.”

Dagmar Wilson

The symbolic strike by women was the brainchild of Dagmar Wilson, a children’s book illustrator and mother of three daughters. A few weeks earlier, she had read a statement by Bertrand Russell, winner of the 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature and a philosopher some called the spiritual leader of the civil disobedience movement in England: “I cannot bear the thought of this beautiful planet spinning timelessly in space — without life.” That sentence resonated with Wilson.

The next morning, she called five friends and asked them to join her for coffee in her garden. There, they discussed their frustrations with the latest insanity: the Soviet Union and United States had accused each other of breaking a moratorium on nuclear testing.The women didn’t care who broke it. They cared about what the radioactive strontium 90 did to their children and were outraged with the government’s promotion of a fallout shelter program. They cared about the “Duck and Cover” civil defense drills their children were rehearsing at school.

Before they’d brewed a second pot, the women had prepared lists of names to call announcing a women’s strike against the bomb. Then, they got busy drafting, typing, mimeographing, and distributing the call to action.

The women didn’t want to form an organization with board meetings, dues, membership lists, and committees. They envisioned an action that would be the equivalent of a scream loud enough for the world to hear.

Not Just a Onetime Thing

Though it was conceived as a one-day action, the Women’s Strike for Peace (WSP or WISP, as it was sometimes called) continued long past November 1, 1961. Rather than get bogged down in the trappings of an organization, WSP mobilized women to join already established peace groups and to spread their influence on a local level through the Parents and Teachers Associations (PTA), churches, and bridge clubs. WSP set up pickets, demonstrations, and letter-writing campaigns. It promoted nationwide boycotts of milk after every atmospheric nuclear test to protest contamination from fallout.

Amy Swerdlow, a founder of New York WSP, watched the tone and style of the movement change over the years. Remembering the early years, she told a New York Times reporter:

In a sense, we used the “feminine mystique” to our advantage … We were doing a job of being good mothers by becoming involved in political action for the sake of our children’s survival.

In 1962, Wilson and others involved in WSP were subpoenaed to appear before the house Un-American Activities Committee. The women took over the proceedings — cheering and applauding each other much to the bewilderment of the senators, but that and other outrageous tales about WSP will have to wait for another day.

To Go Deeper

Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s by Amy Swerdlow (University of Chicago Press,1993)

“No Nukes: Women for Peace, 1961” (2 minutes)

“Duck and Cover” (1951) Bert the Turtle Civil Defense Film (9 minutes)