Feminists From The United States

"As a veteran of the 1960s civil rights movement, I hope this year's Martin Luther King Day will be more than the usual constant repetition of his “I have a dream” speech. This has flattened the very essence of the movement, which was the vastness and the vibrancy of hundreds of thousands of “ordinary” people who wouldn’t and couldn’t stand for any more indignities and any more insults. I know because I was in Georgia, Virginia and Mississippi as a staffer of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; I spent two years in Atlanta. This great movement of African-American civilians and their white allies lacked an army or air force, yet we imprinted our freedom demands on the national consciousness for the following decades and presumably, for decades to come...It may surprise people to know that Palestinians read Dr. King's words and call his name and study the American civil rights movement, among other histories of other peoples, for ways to bring to the attention of the world the fact that little by little, their land is disappearing along with their rights."

"I take issue with the Jewish Currents editorial, “Supporting the Black Lives Matter Platform, Its Slander of Israel Notwithstanding” (Autumn, 2016), in which the magazine unfortunately joined the pack of the hands-in-the-air-I’m–shocked-and-horrified Zionist groups that condemned the Movement for Black Lives — a very large coalition of which Black Lives Matter is one organization — for using the words “genocide” and “apartheid” in relation to Israel’s policies toward the Palestinian people...Echoing Dr. Joy James, if the situation of the Palestinians under Israeli control is not genocide, what is it?"

"What propelled me into the civil rights movement in the first place as a young woman was the exhortation I had received from my secular Jewish progressive parents: that it is unethical to stand idly by while people are oppressed and suffering."

"it is our tradition: we were slaves in Egypt, we were victims, we learned the hard way what happens when you stand around doing nothing. At least half of the lawyers who went south during the civil rights movement were Jewish. At least half of the Americans who went to Spain to fight were Jewish. That comes out of a deeply held social justice movement."

"For me, the events in Ferguson and the events halfway around the world are linked. I am not saying they are the same. I am not even saying there are many parallels, but there are some similar lessons."

"When I grew up, the great heroes of my teenage life were the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, and I used to– as a young teenager, I imagined what would happen if the Nazis were marching up Second Avenue? Would I go on the roof and be a sniper? Well that’s romantic. But I thought, What’s wrong with that? But if you’re challenging me on this social justice tradition, and saying that’s just romanticism, you’re exaggerating it, I say no, I’m not exaggerating it. It was real. I don’t feel that’s romantic."

"I am a critic of Zionism. The more I read about it the more critical I am of it."

"Florence Kelley's vibrant personality comes back to me clearly...I had a special interest in Florence Kelley because she had been the first chief factory inspector in Illinois, appointed by Governor Altgeld. With admiration I saw her war on child labor, sweatshops, and laws discriminating against women-often in the face of great obstacles, including whispering campaigns of slander set in motion by her enemies. I can see her now on the platform, answering a reactionary opponent who in a debate on a vital piece of legislation, claimed to be "open-minded." She replied that some people were so open-minded that ideas never stayed in their heads."

"What can we do to free our consciences? There is one line of action by which we can do much. We can enlist the workingmen on behalf of our enfranchisement just in proportion as we strive with them to free the children. No labor organization in this country ever fails to respond to an appeal for help in the freeing of the children."

"For the sake of the children, for the Republic in which these children will vote after we are dead, and for the sake of our cause, we should enlist the workingmen voters, with us, in this task of freeing the children from toil!"

"Although many social workers like Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and Sophonisba P. Breckenridge, and socialists like Emma Goldman advocated the rights of immigrants and working women, in most instances during the 1890 to 1910 period their advocacy had little or no effect on the suffragist movement's attitude toward minority or working-class women"

"We do not wish this. We prefer to have our work done by men and women. But we are almost powerless. Not wholly powerless, however, are citizens who enjoy the right of petition. For myself, I shall use this power in every possible way until the right to the ballot is granted, and then I shall continue to use both."

"No other portion of the wage earning class increased so rapidly from decade to decade as the young girls from fourteen to twenty years...They are in commerce, in offices, in manufacturing."

"Tonight while we sleep, several thousand little girls will be working in textile mills, all the night through, in the deafening noise of the spindles and the looms spinning and weaving cotton and wool, silks and ribbons for us to buy."

"Florence Kelley's speech first opened my mind to the necessity for and the possibility of the work which became my vocation."

"If the mothers and the teachers in Georgia could vote, would the Georgia Legislature have refused at every session for the last three years to stop the work in the mills of children under twelve years of age? Would the New Jersey Legislature have passed that shameful repeal bill enabling girls of fourteen years to work all night, if the mothers in New Jersey were enfranchised? Until the mothers in the great industrial states are enfranchised, we shall none of us be able to free our consciences from participation in this great evil. No one in this room tonight can feel free from such participation. The children make our shoes in the shoe factories; they knit our stockings, our knitted underwear in the knitting factories. They spin and weave our cotton underwear in the cotton mills. Children braid straw for our hats, they spin and weave the silk and velvet wherewith we trim our hats. They stamp buckles and metal ornaments of all kinds, as well as pins and hat-pins. Under the sweating system, tiny children make artificial flowers and neckwear for us to buy. They carry bundles of garments from the factories to the tenements, little beasts of burden, robbed of school life that they may work for us."

"Translators, again-the most abused and patient lot of folk on earth-are helpful in making us better acquainted; though we hope the time will soon come when citizens of the twenty-one republics will no longer need translators. There is no reason for our not speaking each other's language. Among these translators we may mention Alice Stone Blackwell, Isaac Goldberg, the late Thomas Walsh..."

"For seventy years, the women leaders of this country have been asking the government to recognize this possibility. Every great woman who stands out in our history-Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Clara Barton, Mary Livermore, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Willard, Lucy Stone, Jane Addams, Ella Flagg Young, Alice Stone Blackwell, Anna Howard Shaw, Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt-all have asked the government to permit women to serve more effectively the national welfare. All have felt that the energy, the thought, and the suffering that was spent in trying to obtain permission to serve directly should as quickly as possible be turned to the actual service."

"Today, at eighty-three, she is still a vigorous champion of human rights. Just last year I had a wonderful visit with her at her home in Boston, discussing our precious heritage of great American women."

"Alice Blackwell was an exception to me. I saw during my personal acquaintance with her that she was apt to embrace the whole world with her beautiful heart, her strong soul; to press it to her bosom, and never be tired of working for it. But she did too much for her human strength, and now she must rest a while."

"We have, in this country, two million children under the age of sixteen years who are earning their bread. They vary in age from six and seven years (in the cotton mills of Georgia) and eight, nine and ten years (in the coal-breakers of Pennsylvania), to fourteen, fifteen and sixteen years in more enlightened states."

"I want to speak of Florence Kelley, whom I knew in this period and who was one of the first American women Socialists who influenced me greatly. Florence Kelley made an important contribution to the literature of socialism in this country by her translation of Engels' Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844, and her own writings. She was for many years secretary of the National Consumers' League of America and a leading member of the National Child Labor Committee. Her influence was great among working class women and her death in 1932 was a terrible loss. In those days the Intercollegiate Socialist Society was a vigorous organization. I remember one occasion when the I.S.S. was giving a dinner in New Haven at which Florence Kelley was the main speaker. The chairman, Graham Phelps Stokes, was called away at the last moment, and Upton Sinclair, one of the vice-presidents, was called upon to preside. In introducing Mrs. Kelley he explained the purposes of the I.S.S. and how people were drawn into the socialist movement through its activities, attracting even such nationally known persons as Mrs. Kelley. Mrs. Kelley got up and told him that she had been a Socialist before he was dry behind the ears."

"irresistible has been the influence exercised by Mrs. Florence Kelley, now and for many years a member of the settlement family. She has long consecrated her energies to securing protective legislation throughout the country for children compelled to labor and, with the late Edgar Gardner Murphy, of Alabama, suggested the creation of the National Child Labor Committee. In its ten years' existence it has affected legislation in forty-seven states, which have enacted new or improved child labor laws. On this and on the New York State Committee Mrs. Kelley and I have served since their creation."

"Except where there is some very strong reason to the contrary, it is generally admitted that every man has a right to be consulted in regard to his own concerns. The laws which he has to obey and the taxes he has to pay are things that do most intimately concern him, and the only way of being directly consulted in regard to them, under our form of government, is through the ballot. Is there any very good reason why women should not be free to be consulted in this direct manner?"

"I have no doubt that if women alone had made the laws, those laws would be just as one-sided as they are to-day, only in the opposite direction."

"it is said that this movement is making no progress; that while the movements along other lines are largely succeeding, there has been no advance along this line. Twenty-five years ago, with insignificant exceptions, women could not vote anywhere. To-day they have school suffrage in twenty-three States, full suffrage in Wyoming, municipal suffrage in Kansas, and municipal suffrage for single women and widows in England, Scotland and most of the British provinces. The common sense of the world is slowly but surely working toward the enfranchisement of women."

"The direction her life took was probably established by the fact that her first important love was another woman, a hard reality that is not discussed in Prison Notes (this is probably the reason she insisted that her letter to Norma Becker be included in any reissue of that book). This truth about herself took personal political years in which she wrote stories and poems and she became a fine artist who suffered because she was unable to fully use the one unchangeable fact of her life-that she was a woman who loved women."

"As a writer myself, I must believe that Barbara's attention to the "other" (who used to be called the stranger) was an organic part of her life as an artist-the writer's natural business is a long stretch toward the unknown life. All Barbara's "others" (the world's "others," too), the neighbor, the cop, the black woman or man, the Vietnamese, led her inexorably to the shadowed lives of women, and finally to the unknown humiliated lesbian, herself. It was hard when this knowledge forced her to separate her life and work from other comrades, most of whom believed themselves eternally connected to her. "Why leave us now?" friends cried out in the pages of WIN magazine. "Now, just when we have great tasks. She explained: "Because I realize that just as the black life is invisible to white America, so I see now my life is invisible to you." Of course she was not the separator. They had been, the friends who wrote, saying, "We know it's okay to be a woman," but hated to hear the word "feminist" said again and again. She stubbornly insisted that they recognize Woman, and especially Lesbian, as an oppressed class from which much of the radical world had separated itself-some for ideological reasons, some with a kind of absentminded "We'll get to that later." (And many did.)"

"Prison Notes is the story of two walks undertaken to help change the world without killing it. Barbara Deming was an important member of both. Twenty years of her brave life lie between them. On that first long journey, men and women walked and went to jail together. Women alone took the second shorter walk, and fifty-four were jailed. Barbara was among them. It was her last action, and those who were arrested with her are blessed to have lived beside her strong, informed, and loving spirit for those few days. That difference between the two walks measures a development in movement history and also tells the distance Barbara traveled in those twenty years."

"Of course she never separated herself from the struggles against racism and militarism. She integrated them into her thinking. As she lived her life, she made new connections which required new analyses. And with each new understanding, she acted, "clinging to the truth," as she had learned from Gandhi, offering opposition as education and love as a way to patience. The long letters that Barbara began to write after her terrible automobile accident in '71 have become books. They are studious, relentless in argument; she seems sometimes in these letters to be lifting one straw at a time from a haystack of misunderstanding to get to a needle of perfect communication stuck somewhere at the bottom. At the same time she had developed a style which enabled her to appear to be listening to her correspondent while writing the letter."

"I believe in the stubbornness of civil disobedience and I'm not afraid of it. I remember one May Day demonstration. In 1971. Still wartime. We were arrested and we were in this big, sort of football field. Barbara Deming and I were walking around, arm in arm. We had been arrested together. It was very cold. Everybody was finding someone to walk very close to. Later on, one person wasn't enough, we would try to get into groups that huddled: fifteen. But at that point, Barbara and I were walking arm in arm and it was a pretty messy place, because that was the year they arrested thirteen or fourteen thousand people, just picking them up off the street, and then they didn't know what the hell to do with them. At that point we were in a football field. Later, we were put inside a stadium. And so we were walking around, arm in arm, talking to each other, and then congresspeople came in to see what was going on, and Bella Abzug came over to talk to us. She and I had always had these disagreements about the electoral work and what you can call action, direct action, and we would talk to each other about this. So she came over and she looked at me and Barbara walking arm in arm. She asked how we were. She was a congresswoman at this time. She was worried about us. We said we were all right. And then she said, "Well, I guess you're where you want to be and I'm where I want to be." And we laughed, we all laughed together. And I want to say about Bella that she was at this Women's Pentagon demonstration. She came, she walked with everybody, she didn't look for any limelight of any kind. She just sort of walked, and begged me not to get arrested. Again, she said she thought it was a waste of time. I could do more outside. But she really was just a part of the action. That's what we wanted all of our leaders to be, just a part of the women's action."

"Learning from Barbara Deming: First: She's a listener. So you can learn something about paying attention. Second: She's stubborn. So you can learn how to stand, look into the other's face, and not run. Third: She's just. So you can learn something about patience. Fourth: She loves us-women, I mean-and speaks to the world. So you can learn how to love women and men."

"This has recently been stressed by Barbara Deming in her plea for nonviolent action-"On Revolution and Equilibrium," in Revolution: Violent and Nonviolent, reprinted from Liberation, February, 1968. She says about Fanon, on p. 3: "It is my conviction that he can be quoted as well to plead for nonviolence.... Every time you find the word 'violence' in his pages, substitute for it the phrase 'radical and uncompromising action.' I contend that with the exception of a very few passages this substitution can be made, and that the action he calls for could just as well be nonviolent action." Even more important for my purposes: Miss Deming also tries to distinguish clearly between power and violence, and she recognizes that "nonviolent disruption" means "to exert force.... It resorts even to what can only be called physical force" (p. 6). However, she curiously underestimates the effect of this force of disruption, which stops short only of physical injury, when she says, "the human rights of the adversary are respected" (p. 7). Only the opponent's right to life, but none of the other human rights, is actually respected. The same is of course true for those who advocate "violence against things" as opposed to "violence against persons.""

"At the Friends' Meeting House a couple of weeks after Barbara Deming died, we gathered to remember her for one another, to take some comfort and establish her continuity in our bones..."This too," our friend Blue said, and gave me an envelope. In it were shards and stones gathered from the rubble of Vietnamese towns in '67 or '68. On the envelope, these shaky letters were written: "endless love." Nothing personal there, not "with endless love." The words were written waveringly, with a dying hand, on paper that covered bits and pieces of our common remembrance and understanding of another people's great suffering. I thought Barbara was saying, Send those words out, out out into the airy rubbly meaty mortal fact of the world, endless love, the dangerous transforming spirit."

"In 1967, she spoke of “the need to become more bold, and therefore more effective” and that would bring more government repression. “And then if we do not all stand together, helping always whomever is singled out for punishment, our effectiveness will end… We must certainly be frank with each other when we disagree,” she told War Resisters League. “We will need every one of us. We are all part of one another.”"

"I had felt for a long time that the two struggles for disarmament and for Negro rights-were properly parts of the one struggle. The same nonviolent tactic joined us, but more than this: our struggles were fundamentally one-to commit our country in act as well as in word to the extraordinary faith announced in our Declaration of Independence: that all men are endowed with certain rights that must not be denied them."

"the issue of war and peace remains fundamentally the issue of whether or not one is going to be willing to respect one’s fellow man."

"the memoirs of poet Elsa Gidlow and civil rights and peace activist Barbara Deming evidenced the struggle with which so many have engaged for a lesbian identity rooted in self-esteem and dignity. In publicly affirming who they were, each encouraged the sense of continuity and tradition central to the formation of lesbian archives. Deming, writing in 1971 to her "dear brother and dear sister," Ray Robinson and Cheryl Buswell-Robinson, southern civil rights activists with whom she had worked in the 1960s, confronted her own oppression as a lesbian and the anger and agony of her feelings of powerlessness: "The bottom I write about of course is the bottom of being a homosexual. Facing always the threat of being despised for that. . . . And as I write this, the tears begin to gush from my eyes, and I know I'm writing the truth of it.""

"picking up the pen for Chicanas became a "political act." ...Women also founded and edited newspapers-El Grito (Betita Martinez); Encuentro Feminil (Adelaida del Castillo and Anna Nieto-Gómez); Regeneracion (Francisca Flores); and El Chicano (Gloria Macias Harrison). Through their writings, Chicanas problematized and challenged prescribed gender roles at home (familial oligarchy); at school (the home economics track); and at meetings (the clean-up committee),"

"Articles from Chicana print media and the development and publication of oral histories played a vital role in the development of the Chicana studies curriculum. The Chicana press included Francisca Flores's Regeneración, a magazine published in Los Angeles; Chicana newspapers such as Hijas de Cuauhtémoc and Pepita Martinez's El Grito del Norte from New Mexico; and journals such as Encuentro Femenil, a Chicana feminist journal from Long Beach, and San Francisco's Dorinda Moreno's La Mestiza. In addition, there were special edition community newspapers from all parts of the nation."

"In the words of Francisca Flores, "Women must learn to say what they think and feel, and free to state it without apologizing or prefacing every statement to reassure men that they are not competing with them.""

"Women, like any minority, have personal problems which many do not feel can be, or will be, discussed in general meetings of men. Women must have an avenue open to them, to deal with these issues so that they can project them for support of the whole movement of la causa."

"The women will have a lot to say from now on. Not only on those questions which affect them personally, such as abortions, the pill, sex information, child care, well being of the family, relationship to other women's organizations, education, equality, etc., but also issues of interest to the whole group, such as peace, prison reform, law enforcement. And this includes the welfare of the men."

"we insist that "our cultural heritage" implies that the woman must be placed on a pedestal, without examining the reason for this attitude, it's inevitable consequences and it's effect on the youth. We must bring this issue out into the open ... discuss it and its psychological implications upon our community. Only in this way will it be possible to lift the burden it is placing on our women."

"The effort and work of Chicana/Mexican women in the Chicano movement is generally obscured because women are not accepted as community leaders either by the Chicano movement or by the Anglo establishment."

"If the promulgators of the "Chicana's role is in the home having large families" also projects concern with the health problems of abnormal or self-induced abortions and still born births, we might accept their contentions as a basis for discussion. As it stands, however, we have to conclude that their belief on the role of the Mexican women is based on erroneous cultural and historical understanding of what is meant by "our cultural heritage," as it relates to the family."

"those who promote backward and reactionary theories cannot cleanse themselves by engaging in diversionary tactics... blaming all who do not agree with them-as being women's lib! The tactics of reaction used to be red-baiting... now we have women-baiting. Women's lib, indeed!"

"long-time labor activist Francisca Flores and Ramona Morin of the women's auxiliary of GI Forum founded La Carta Editorial in the mid-1960s to serve as a community-based publication that would report on political activities. Flores went on to found Regeneración in 1970 and made vital contributions through her magazine's singularly forthright analysis regarding women's issues. Besides two Chicana special issues published in 1971 and 1973, Regeneración was known for its news stories that reported on women's organizing, op-ed pieces that critiqued sexist practices in the Chicano movement, artwork featuring local Chicana artists, and articles analyzing political issues and legislation affecting the lives of Chicanas."

"Some of the workshops held on Saturday were so large that only the most vocal and most aggressive could be heard discussing issues that interest women but which are shaking the men who feel threatened by women in action, women in leadership roles, women who are literally out of reach of the masculine dictum. The three workshops which received the greatest and the hottest discussion were: Sex and the Chicana-Noun and Verb; Marriage: Chicana Style; and the Feminist Movement: Do We Have a Place in It?"

"more Chicanas are fighting for their do not care who does not like it. Women must learn to say what they think and feel, and free to state it without apologizing or prefacing every statement to reassure that they are not competing with them."