Activists With Attitude

thoughts on courage and creativity

  • Home
  • Pam’s Books
  • Savvy Sites
  • Cool Quotes
  • Archive
You are here: Home / Archives for Gainsville

Visiting Barbara Deming, then Women with Guns

May 29, 2014 By Pam

In 1979, I boarded a Greyhound bus and toured ten southern cities, my first time south of Washington, D.C.  I traveled alone. Ah, the courage of youth!

Along the way, I stayed in women’s collectives and collected anecdotes about the range of community responses to the threat of male violence — rape, battery, abuse, harassment. Two experiences on my tour stand out as most intense, memorable, and rewarding for me.Barbara-typing-634x360One was my week visiting radical feminist pacifist Barbara Deming and her partner Jane Gapen in the Florida Keys. I’d read Barbara’s books in college (Revolution and Equilibrium and Prison Notes). Most of my understanding of nonviolence was a direct result of her writing. She eventually became my mentor. Through her, I came to understand the vital link between feminism and nonviolence.Mornings at Sugarloaf Key were spent reading, bike riding, and exploring the tropical landscape, while Jane worked in her art studio and Barbara wrote, slowly pecking out an occasional sentence on her typewriter.

In the evenings, it was another story. Their little cottage overflowed with women from around the world. We ate together around an oval table and talked, in a delicious variety of accents, of our dreams for the world, each other, and ourselves.

Later, we listened by candlelight as Barbara cast long shadows with storytelling hands. She told of her experiences during the Civil Rights, antiwar, and feminist movements and of challenging hardened hearts encountered along the way. Listening, I began to understand more about Barbara’s “two hands of nonviolence” (the one refusing to cooperate with injustice, the other extended in invitation to help build a new world). And I began to understand Gandhi’s “clinging to the truth.”

women-with-gunsTwo days after I left the Keys, I visited a women’s collective in northern Florida. These women slept with pistols beneath their pillows, prepared to use guns for self defense.

They took me to a police range and gave me a lesson in how to shoot. (That’s me in dark sunglasses, seeing a gun up close for the first — and last — time.) I remember standing beneath a blue sky with six women absolutely committed to the “I’m-not-a- victim-anymore” spirit. When they put a pistol in my hand, I wasn’t the least bit unsure. I hit the bull’s eye with all but two shots. We were all astonished. “McAllister, you’re a natural killer!” exclaimed one with her version of a compliment. “So much for aimlessness,” quipped another in a Southern drawl.

How do I explain that I was so at home with radical pacifists and only slightly less with the gun-toting women? As a pacifist, how do I reconcile these contradictory experiences?

Gandhi said, “The first principle of nonviolent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating.” I believe this is the common ground I found at both communities — the total commitment to resistance. Still pondering after all these years. Stay tuned …

To Go Deeper:
I spoke about Barbara Deming at a War Resisters League panel discussion with Martin Duberman & David McReynolds on April 26, 2011 at Judson Memorial Church in NYC. I’m introduced at about the 18:30 minute mark:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9cMaMpMHlw

Read Barbara’s writing:
We Are All Part of One Another: Barbara Deming Reader, edited by Jane Meyerding (New Society Publishers, March 1984)
Prisons That Could Not Hold by Barbara Deming, Introduction by Grace Paley (Spinsters Ink, June 1985)

Filed Under: Featured Tagged With: Barbara Deming, Gainsville, South, Sugarloaf Key

Pam McAllister

In 1982, I edited the anthology Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence and then wrote two books about women’s use of resistance and action: You Can't Kill the Spirit and This River of Courage.

I've spent a lifetime compiling stories of courageous, creative actions, categorizing them (a la Gene Sharp), writing books and articles, speaking at university forums, church retreats, feminist conferences. I’ve also joined in the action -- antiwar protests in the '70s, Take Back the Night marches in the '80s, prison reform rallies in the '90s, and Occupy Wall Street actions in recent years.

I am currently researching more examples of nonviolent action for peace and justice around the world for two new books -- one for/about children and another about women (whose actions are still so often left out or overlooked).

Here I am with Barbara Deming, my mentor and friend, in Sugarloaf Key in the early ‘80s. The photo has faded, but the memories and love have not.

Connect With Pam Online

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
Your Comments: I’m new at blogging. After I've had some time to learn how to do this, I will have a way for you to leave comments and be in dialogue with me. My Author's Guild website is at: http://pammcallisterauthor.com. Also, see my Facebook Author Page Global Nonviolence: Stories of Creative Action and My Amazon "Author Page".

FOR EMAIL NOTICES

Sign up to be notified of new blog posts!
STEP 1: Enter info below
STEP 2: Click on purple bar
STEP 3: Then, an email will ask you to confirm this.
~ You're all set! ~

Search Site

Copyright © 2021, Activists With Attitude · Log in