People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [302]
She added: “But times are changing, and from now on, more people will speak out and demand from their so-called bosses that they be treated the way the bosses themselves would like to be treated.”
Times indeed were changing. Around 1967, women in the various movements—civil rights, Students for a Democratic Society, antiwar groups—began meeting as women, and in early 1968, at a women’s antiwar meeting in Washington, hundreds of women carrying torches paraded to the Arlington National Cemetery and staged “The Burial of Traditional Womanhood.” At this point, and later too, there was some disagreement among women, and even more among men, on whether women should battle on specifically women’s issues, or just take part in general movements against racism, war, capitalism. But the idea of a feminist focus grew.
In the fall of 1968, a group called Radical Women attracted national attention when they protested the selection of Miss America, which they called “an image that oppresses women.” They all threw bras, girdles, curlers, false eyelashes, wigs, and other things they called “women’s garbage” into a Freedom Trash Can. A sheep was crowned Miss America. More important, people were beginning to speak of “Women’s Liberation.”
Some of the New York Radical Women shortly afterward formed WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), and its members, dressed as witches, appeared suddenly on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. A leaflet put out by WITCH in New York said:
WITCH lives and laughs in every woman. She is the free part of each of us, beneath the shy smiles, the acquiescence to absurd male domination, the make-up or flesh-suffocating clothes our sick society demands. There is no “joining” WITCH. If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a WITCH. You make your own rules.
WITCH in Washington, D.C., protested at the United Fruit Company for the corporation’s activities in the Third World and its treatment of its women office workers. In Chicago it protested the firing of a radical feminist teacher named Marlene Dixon.
Poor women, black women, expressed the universal problem of women in their own way. In 1964 Robert Coles (Children of Crisis) interviewed a black woman from the South recently moved to Boston, who spoke of the desperation of her life, the difficulty of finding happiness: “To me, having a baby inside me is the only time I’m really alive.”
Without talking specifically about their problems as women, many women, among the poor, did as they had always done, quietly organized neighborhood people to right injustices, to get needed services. In the mid-1960s, ten thousand black people in a community in Atlanta called Vine City joined together to help one another: they set up a thrift shop, a nursery, a medical clinic, monthly family suppers, a newspaper, a family counseling service. One of the organizers, Helen Howard, told Gerda Lerner (Black Women in White America) about it:
I organized this neighborhood organization, two men and six ladies started it. That was a hard pull. A lot of people joined in later. For about five months we had meetings pretty near every night. We learned how to work with other people. . . . A lot of people were afraid to really do anything. You were afraid to go to the city hall or ask for anything. You didn’t even ask the landlord for anything, you were afraid of him. Then we had meetings and then we weren’t afraid so much anymore. . . .
The way we got this playground: we blocked off the street, wouldn’t let anything come through. We wouldn’t let the trolley bus come through. The whole neighborhood was in it. Took record players and danced; it went on for a week. We didn’t get arrested, they was too many of us. So then the city put up this playground for the kids. . . .
A woman named Patricia Robinson wrote a pamphlet called Poor Black Woman, in which she connected