Unknown Speaker 00:00 I'd like your attention please could you please return to your seat close down the literature tables get back to seats all my closest friends are standing in clumps talking to one another back Unknown Speaker 00:47 please find a seat we'll be ready to begin. Want to welcome you back to the afternoon session scholar and feminist, we're going to begin with a panel of speakers. We hope that a lot of the issues that were raised in the forums will be raised in a different context here. And we hope to lead directly from the panel into the plenary session at some point and in some cases, people had wanted to return to the to the workshop. And I think now I'd like to ask you not to do that. But to stay into the plenary because the whole afternoon session is will be somewhat abbreviated. And I'd also like to share have us all share the energy from the morning forum. So that I would like when we begin the plenary for people to to talk about some of the major issues and see if we can join some of the issues from the different forums and have a collective discussion. I want to begin to introduce the first member of the panel who will speak to you who is my dear friend Dolores Hayden, who is my colleague in UCLA and person who taught me to see the political as well as to read about it and to think about it and to talk about it, but to have a sense of visual space and night and maybe see a whole other dimension to politics. Her most recent book is redesigning the American dream the future of housing work and family life. It's hot off the presses. And I urge you to read it. I've read it a few times. And I've enjoyed it more each time. So I think it warrants a few readings, but you better start now. It's a real eye opener. It gives me great pleasure to introduce Dolores Hayden. Unknown Speaker 03:23 Thank you, Tim. Thank you, Tim. It's a pleasure to be here today. As the only speaker from the fields of architecture and urban planning. I'd like to talk a little bit about the spatial settings for women and resistance the settings that may promote resistance or hinder it. Let me begin by describing a city to you. It's a racially integrated city. It's a new city planned with affordable multifamily housing. In this city, there is 24 hour a day childcare on three shifts. It costs 75 cents per week for each child. There is an infirmary and every daycare center so that sick children can be taken care of and parents do not have to miss work because of their children's illness. There are bathtubs in this childcare center specially designed child size bathtubs. So perhaps at the end of a long day, mothers don't have to go home and wrestle with bathing two or three kids. There is a kitchen in this childcare center and there are meals to go. hot meals that can be picked up at the door when the children are picked up so that the mother then heads for home and food can be prepared very quickly without a stop at the supermarket. And another half an hour in the kitchen whipping something up. From the childcare center. There are views leading out designed to lead out to the parents workplace Just so that it's possible to see and know what parents do all day. This town has been planned with public transportation in mind, it's assumed that gasoline is expensive and in very short supply, and that there should be plenty of comfortable well designed bus stops, and buses that run on a straight line from the housing to the workplace so that parents don't have to make detours to drop their children at the childcare center. And that these routes can be coordinated not only the route from housing, to childcare to the workplace, but also the public transit aspect of it. It's coordinated. And last of all, parents and children at home, to not have to deal with many of the issues about maintenance of the home, leaking faucets, broken window panes, that sometimes are kind of the last straw for the employed parent. Instead, one picks up the telephone, and someone comes over immediately from the Maintenance Group someone with a paid job, whose job is to fix those leaky faucets and gross broken window panes. So the focus is on making it easy for parents to be both nurturers and paid workers. Is this a feminist utopia that I'm describing. I can tell by the laughter in the audience that you all think that this is my particular dream. But it isn't. It's a real place. That is it was a real place. It was the fifth largest city in the northwest of the United States. It was a town of 40,000 people built by the federal public housing authority. And the Kaiser shipyards in 1943, was built in 10 months in order to house a particular segment of the labor force that was considered crucial to this country's resistance in World War Two. It was the town built for Rosie the Riveter. Just as many women who served as riveters and welders in World War Two, found that their labor contracts were written for the duration. And when the war was over, they no longer had jobs. They no longer were members of trade unions. So the town was built for the duration. At the end of World War Two, part of it was dismantled. A little bit later, the rest of it was destroyed in a flood. And Henry J. Kaiser, who had made his money on building ships during World War Two went into the business of making single family tract houses. He like Levitt here in the east, began to build vast communities for 30 and 40 and 50,000 people that were tracts of little boxes. There were no jobs for women, there was no public transportation, there was no provision for childcare. And whatever home maintenance got done got been done by men who are breadwinners and commuters during the day, and home maintenance workers at night or else it was done by their wives. There were no mortgages in these new tracks for women or for members of minority groups. Unknown Speaker 08:23 Is this what I am describing to you a feminist dystopia? Well, I'm describing the standard US housing policy for the last 40 years, the housing policy that a tremendous percentage of government funds has gone to supporting into the creation of 54 million single family detached houses that constitute two thirds of our current American housing stock. I would argue that we are suffering from what I would call an architecture of gender stereotypes. And adjust as women all over the world have found a need to examine the work of members of male dominated professions such as medicine and law, so too, we need to understand the profound effects of the male dominated professions of architecture and urban planning on our lives. And we need to find the counter examples to know what it might mean to have a city which would support women's struggles for equality, rather than contradict them. I was very pleased to be invited to the conference today because of the tremendous diversity of panels on women and resistance to read a program that included so many different kinds of panels, about struggles around the world struggles that women are encountering, as mothers as community members as members of ethnic minorities as members of immigrant groups. And I've read carefully the definition of resistance. The theme of this conference, the definition of resistance as commitment to survival through organizations, mobilizations, economic strategies and literature. Well, I paused over this definition for a while. And it did seem to me that perhaps this definition of resistance, tended to emphasize the social context of women's struggles. And in some cases make it more important than either the economic context or the spatial context. These days, I would define economic is anything which is relating to work that is paid or unpaid work. And I'm sure you're all familiar with the United Nations statistics, that women do three quarters of the world's socially necessary work, they earn 1/10 of the world's wages, and they own 1/100 of the world's property. These are numbers that I think, require a fair amount of theoretical energy behind them to really, really insist on understanding what what it means to struggle in this kind of a world economic context. I would try to define women's commitment to survival, women's resistance, as a very large labor struggle worldwide. It's not usually recognized as a labor struggle by either Marxist or neoclassical economists. It's almost never recognized as a labor struggle by political leaders in most parts of the world. And it isn't even always explicitly stated as a labor struggle by feminists in different countries. But the example of Kaiser Ville I gave that is Vanport city Kaisers New Town. For the Rosie the Riveter types in 1943 does I think contain a few lessons about women's labor and when it gets recognized and how it gets recognized. In that case, women's labor was necessary to win a war. And so the great part of women's labor which is hidden and unrecognized by politicians and economists and planners, that part of women's labor, which is done in a home, which is the reproduction of society, which is inextricably linked to women's paid labor, that part of women's labor that's usually hidden was suddenly discovered, and in 10 months, and entire city was built to really solve that labor problem. Unlike men's labor, women's labor all over the world is almost always split between the private space and the public space, as defined in human settlements. That is almost all over the world. Women are working and struggling in cities and towns planned and designed by men to keep women's work invisible, and to constantly underlying the notion of women's place in the home. Unknown Speaker 13:09 Women's spend their lives in both advanced industrial societies and developing countries, reconnecting the realms of home and paid work that men have divided. Women spend their lives making cities work and making human survival in those cities work, because women are constantly trying to reconnect the fragmented spaces and fragmented pieces. This means that unlike men's labor struggles, which often occur in a place of paid work, and which involves strikes and negotiations that appear to be rather public in nature, women's labor struggles are conducted in both private and public realms. women's labor struggles are conducted at different scales of physical space. And often they are not recognized as such. In my book, The Grand domestic revolution, and in my new book, redesigning the American dream, I've attempted to find ways to really look at the 19th century women's movement and the 20th century women's movement in terms of the different issues that have been raised. In the 19th century the domestic feminist issues concerning the household the material, feminist issues concerning that were hood, the social feminist issues concerning the city in the nation. I've looked at those issues in the 19th century and others in the 20th century reproductive rights, male housework, the need for taking back the night taking back the space of the city. I find in many ways we're still struggling around different scales of physical space. We're struggling at the scale of the body. We're struggling at the spatial scale of the dwelling and the neighbor But we're struggling at the place of paid work, we're struggling in the city and in the nation. What I would finally argue is that many different pieces of the 19th century and 20th century women's movement do hinge on this struggle for women to control their labor, because it's the struggle that women have had to control the reproduction of society. I would conclude from that, that for women, to control their workplace is to control a built environment to control both the rooms and the streets, to control housing, neighborhoods and cities. And by control I mean, to simply have enough power to plan and design those places to support human nurturing. Well, one might say very broad goals, and how would one ever go about this? Let me just pose a few possibilities. What if contemporary women were to follow the model of the 19th century material feminists, those women like Melo Sina, say purse, who in 1869, organized 40 Housewives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, they rented a building and began to do their cooking their sewing their laundry, in this building, as a produces Co Op of housewives. And they refused to deliver cooked food or clean laundry to their husbands without cash on delivery. That was a that that was 1869. And it was a very effective political performance. Let me give you another What if What if women were to follow the model that occurred one day in 1975, when the women of Iceland all took the day off housewives cabinet ministers, architects, secretaries, they all took the day off, a general strike of women took place. And they occupied the capital city, its streets and its buildings for one day. The newspaper photographs of that event are still very, very striking documents. And what if this is my concluding question? What if all of us were to organize and to vote ourselves? Wartime emergency cities like Kaiser Ville in Oregon? What if we were to vote those cities for ourselves in peacetime? Thank you? Next Unknown Speaker 17:54 speaker is Elizabeth Janeway, my first new through her books and one of which is most relevant to this conference, which is called the powers of the week. I came to know Elizabeth when I was being interviewed for my job at Barnard and I thought, boy, I want to be in a place where she is. And I know I always learn from whatever she says so I look forward to hearing her speak. Unknown Speaker 18:32 Thank you. Thank you. Tama Thank you. To Lori's. It's interesting to see how much the insides of women's heads Connect. Thinking about resistance, I wanted to talk a little bit about what seems to me a very general kind of resistance and one that's still very much needed. And that is a resistance to ideas, the ideas of patriarchy, the ideas that have been in the in our heads for so long that it's very difficult, perhaps impossible to get them all out. The book I'm writing now goes on from powers of the week. It's about definitions and the implicit prescriptions to action to proper behavior that are included in definitions which label which assigned to a particular category for consideration, which gives importance to one question or topic or person or issue over others. And which always tell you what's the right thing to do. So my book will be called improper behavior. improper behavior begins with action. And that happens when roles don't fit anymore and you discover that You're breaking rules without really intending to, you just can't go on, it's not realistic to do the things that are supposed to be proper behavior to follow the traditional female role. You get scolded for that blamed or shamed very useful kinds of social control. If however, there is, there are enough women, and now of any group, making those same mistakes, to find each other and to begin to discover that we're all caught in the switches together, that there is indeed a positive common interest, which is indicated by the things that we are told are negative and wrong, then we start to come together we start to bond we can witness for each other. To my mind, our own structure of ideas and ideology comes last will be needed, it will be needed greatly as a structure to maintain and strengthen any action group. But it is and should be long in building. We pay a price for a coherent and structured framework of ideas and to some degree, there's no way we can not pay for it by losing some spontaneity by denying a certain amount of creativeness. It's not I won't say a Mexican standoff that's isn't not a terrible little bit left in the back of your head of a kind of nasty ethnicity that when you get into a bond with two ideas hitting each other, you call it a Mexican standoff. I just realized that as I did it, but it's typical of what of how we need to resist the old language and the old ideas. I think, however, that the time certainly as we come together and grow, the need for a coherent continuing structure of ideas is more important. The reward we get is bigger than any loss, we suffer. I wanted to speak for just a minute. Give an example from the 19th century, which Dolores knows all about. I just learned I hadn't ever heard of it before. I've been out at a conference in South Dakota, the first one first woman's conference ever held at the University of South Dakota, it was very interesting. I learned a lot there are enormously Unknown Speaker 23:00 valuable, intelligent, thoughtful, hardworking women out there. One of them talked about the Belton Commonwealth of women. I'm not sure whether anybody besides Dolores knows much about this. And I'm going to give you just a little bit of what happened in Belton, Texas, from 1870 to 1906, was a small town. It was a very religious town. But it was so small that they had to have just one church and all the Protestant denominations that didn't seem to be anybody else around. And that part of Texas at that time, came together as a union church. However, there got to be enough Methodist, so the Methodist decided to withdraw and set up their own church. However, some of the Methodist Women who were a part of the Union church felt they preferred the common ground, the United Church. And so they sort of said, well, you go off if you want, we'll stay here and they set up a woman's prayer group. They taught their children in Sunday school, some of the things that seemed important to them. And part of the belief structure of the prayer group was that a person could be sanctified. A person could receive grace, a person would then have a particular channel to what was right and could ignore the myths that she had been handed by the regular patriarchal structure. This I think, was fairly common throughout the 19th century, people found that they could strengthen themselves by channels to truth and then that day and age the channel to truth seem to be have a direct channel to God. Now I've got some notes on this here all I have to do is find them. So one of the leaders of, of the women's prayer group was Mrs McWhirter, and Mrs. McWhirter received the grace of sanctification while she was washing the breakfast dishes one morning it came home to her that she could indeed now that she was sanctified, go about doing things in her own way. She talked with other members of the prayer group here was the bonded group already existing with the basis for common interest. And they decided that there were a number of things they didn't like about the way the world in an Boulton was run by their husbands. They they did not like, let me see, yes, I didn't like but they probably had been praying for patience to endure. They financial restrictions, which their husband set on them a certain amount of abuse and beating adultery, drinking. And they had great moral concerns over some sharp commercial practices that their husbands engaged in. So they decided that they would raise their children in another way. And they are according to their own structure of thought, and that there was no need under the circumstances for them to continue to have conjugal relations with their husbands, that this might bring them to a better attitude. So you had sort of a spontaneous Lysistrata taking place. I don't know that any of them had ever heard of it, they just by accident, by breaking the rules began to act in a different way very improper behavior. Well, this is what McWherter had turned out, was not only rather a charismatic person, she also was a very sawn businesswoman. They did not take women from their husbands, they decided they would not be obligated. So this group began to sell butter and eggs, and baked goods. And they did very well indeed, Unknown Speaker 27:34 in time, they owned a hotel in Waco, and in Belton and two in Waco. And they set up a real structure of work in which they change jobs, so that people all had a chance to do different things, they moved around, nobody was stuck in a particular kind of scut work. And they managed so successfully, that by the turn of the century, around 1900, they had a backlog of about $250,000, which was an enormous amount of money in those days. So they had begun to feel a bit isolated and cut off from find cultural values that they wanted to be closer to, and they decided to sort of shut up shop and move to a cultural center and they bought a house just outside of Washington and they all went and kind of lived their happily ever after. Dolores may be able to correct me on some of this, but I think that's the basic structure of what Unknown Speaker 28:47 they sent from the younger women in the community to professional school. Unknown Speaker 28:50 Yes, they did in the big city. That's right, so that they had professional scales. They said some of the younger women to college and to get professional training and skills and thus they were able to maintain their their work and their they return upon it. Now the one thing they didn't do was think about continuing this Commonwealth they had they had not thought about succession they had made no arrangements for it. And so after a while when the founders died off this disappeared and I hear again died as with Vanport and the Kaiser shipyards which I happen to have seen and younger days died an idea a structure something that did not go on because the while the fact they behave havior the action had taken place, it was not incorporated into a continuing system of ideas and thoughts. Well, that's my example. I will conclude very briefly by suggesting to you that we stand today, someplace between inadvertent actions, and with relatively organized action groups going, some of which hang on, some of which disappear. There, we have a range of awareness and recognition of how destructive the ideas of patriarchy are. But we have not as yet begun to put together and to formulate a consistent force by which to resist them, and they come back and they come back and they come back, we get told, we have at all, where you got told that we will still get along best by imitating man, I don't know whether people in business are still dressing for success or not. I suspect that some of them are some places where you have to do it all over again, over and over again. I think that we can be a little encouraged by such things as the Evidence Act of a gender gap, that our ideas have come together sufficiently so that we bring them out into the public world. And we act upon them voting differently from men. Well, I think much of putting our ideas, our ideas together so that their ideas will meet a strong and sturdy barrier lies ahead. And I want to say only this, I think it will be done, I hope it will not be done too quickly. I believe that there is a great need as yet to plumb to look at to take a count of the enormous variety of experience that women have, that we do not as yet want to say there is a right way to do it for us. I hope we try not to do that. I hope we say there are many right ways to do it. And out of that knowledge of many right ways, we will arrive at a certain basic agreement on what are the fundamental things that must not be done the kind of behavior which isn't improper, but as lethal for us the kind of willingness to accept the patriarchal myth, when it rises again, and looks over our shoulders and said, Don't you feel a little bit guilty about what you've been doing lately? The resistance to ideas by ideas is a continuing process in which I know that all of you will play a part. Unknown Speaker 33:44 Barbara Smith, who taught Black Women of Color lesbian literature here at Barnard earlier in the year is editor of kitchen table, women of color press, and most and Her most recent book is home girls, black feminist anthology. She's also been a great contributor to this conference. And though she isn't listed, a lot of you wouldn't be here if if she hadn't given me your names. And I'm very grateful to her for that. Unknown Speaker 34:25 What I want to talk about briefly and I know my assumption about this panel is that we're trying to kind of I guess, summarize an experience, which none of us have had entirely since you know, only we could only like you go to a maximum probably have one workshop this morning. But what I want to talk about is a feminism of women of color as an act of resistance and just some general kinds of comments about what I feel resistance is. I was at the one of the first large planning meetings for this conference back in December, and I get So, you know, those of you who know, you know, my work, etc, knows that know that I have like, I would say, like one toe, and you know, the university or the academy, whatever, and my whole rest of my body outside of it. So I'm not necessarily, you know, used to, you know, although having been through the whole entire educational system, I'm not necessarily used to talking about things like resistance, survival, freedom, liberation, and justice, theoretically. But as I said, I was at this meeting, and people were talking about resistance, I think, in some ways that were kind of theoretical. And to me, it seemed as a woman of color, and a lesbian, somewhat beside the point. So I said to this other black woman who was sitting next to me, the only other black woman there, that, as far as I'm concerned, resistance is whenever people decide not to go along with the program, whatever the program may be. Now, if you're Afro American, you know that that means something particular, it's a phrase and expression that we use when we say, well, you know, he just doesn't go along with the program, she just doesn't go along with the program. And sometimes it's said in irritation, even by parents, to their children, you know, when they want them to, you know, act better than they're acting. But I think more basically, it shows a particular frame of reference, as far as how we look at reality, about the value of not going along with the program. We as black people who've never gone along with the program here, you know, some of us conform, but even in our conformity are very, you know, physical realities. And our social political status means that we're not going along with it. So I just really need to say that, that, like my interest and resistance isn't activism is in making fundamental material change for people. And for, for myself, and for people who do not have the opportunity to sit around and talk about it. Unknown Speaker 37:16 We're living in a world at war, we're living on a globe at war. And, I mean, we don't need to clap for that. I mean, it's just facts. But the thing is that, like, I feel like if you're interested in the topic of this conference, like what you have to do is figure out what your relationship is to that is the fact that we're living on a globe, you're on fire at war, what is it going to be? Are we going to be in the group of people who talk about it? Are we going to be in the people, a group of people who do something about it? Now this, this perspective, you know, that I have on resistance, as I said, is closely linked, and and to really knit linked with my relationship to feminist movement of women of color to third world feminism, which is not, by and large, a theoretical movement. It's a movement that came out of our flesh. I want to read to you from the introduction to home girls about black women's relationship to political struggle, which I think will probably be familiar to some of you. I also want to say that even though I speak is an Afro American woman, my perspective, I think, is usable by other women of color, my sisters, Latinas, American Indian women, Asian American women, Arab American women, and all varieties and combinations. There are, I speak as a black woman, I speak in solidarity with all of my third world sisters. But as I said, I'll be reading from this book that's called a black feminist anthology, so it says black here. I've always thought the black woman's ability to function with dignity, independence and imagination in the face of total adversity, that is in the face of white America points to an innate feminist potential. To me the phrase, at least you have some sense, probably spoken by at least one black woman to every black child who ever lived is a cryptic warning that says volumes about keeping your feet on the ground and your ass covered. Alice Walker's definition of Romanesque certainly makes a connection between plain common sense and a readiness to fight for change. She writes moments from womanish honestly girlish that is frivolous, irresponsible, not serious. A black feminists are feminists of color, from the colloquial expression of mothers to daughters, you're acting womanist that is like a woman, usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous our willful behavior, wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered good for one and arrested and grown up doings acting grown up, being grown up, interchangeable with other colloquial expression. You're trying to be grown responsible, in charge serious definition to also historically capable as N. Mama, I'm walking to Canada and I'm taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me reply it wouldn't be the first time I think that some of us have resistance as I said, in our very flesh, it we come by if not genetically, at least historically, you know, through, you know, our identities, as people of color as women of color as lesbians, etc. Which is not to say that we are the vanguard of any revolution, it's just to say that our hit on things, our approach to things may indeed look somewhat different than the approach of people who don't necessarily live in those shoes. Unknown Speaker 40:59 One of the contributions of third world feminism, which I think is most important, has been the way that we have looked at oppressions, multitudinous oppressions, as as happening occurring being connected simultaneously. In other words, that is not like one primary contradiction, you know, that if we could just get that primary contradiction fixed, then everything would be all right. I went to the workshop this morning about lesbianism and resistance. And one of the panelists talked about the possibility and this is taken out of context. But you know, she was talking about problems that lesbians have with men say I'm a lesbian, I don't have no problems with men, you know? I mean, I don't, you know, and is that like, that doesn't mean that I, you know, we all have them necessarily, in my close, personal, you know, at home life. I mean, that's what it means to be a lesbian, right? But on the other hand, like, I don't see them as a source of my problems, but he's had us it may, like, you know, to pick out one system of oppression, like patriarchy are men or whatever, is a one mono issued approach. Several women don't do that we have a multi issue approach. We look at our prices that affect us simultaneously. And the introduction to home girls are wrote, We examined our own lives and found that everything out there was kicking our behinds race, class, sex and homophobia, we saw no reason to rank oppressions, or as many forces would have us do to pretend that sexism among all the other isms was not happening to us. I just feel like it's real important to understand where we sit, we are living in imperialist America, we are living in the dominant imperialist power on this globe, you know, just by living here, we collude. And that activity and that exploitation, you know, I mean, it is our tax dollars that goes, they are sent, you know, and bombers, you know, sent in tank sent, however, to other places to rip people off of their land, you know, to close down people's, you know, chances for revolution, as in Grenada, you know, just to, you know, put a stop to our host, you know, for human freedom. That's our money that does that we have got to look at, like, as I said, where we sit, we do not just sit here, as women who are oppressed, we sit here and capitalist North America, that has a relationship to other people on the globe, that is despicable. And I just and this is not to make anybody feel terrible. I was just in London last week at the book, international book, fair, radical black and third world books, you know, and I go there as a member of kitchen table, women of color press, which is only pressed for women of color in this country. And that means that like we are in a disadvantaged position, you know, because we only have one press, but I go there, and I hear a man from Trinidad, talking about how they're trying to start a press in Trinidad when the when England has their copyright stuff, so messed up that you can hardly even barely do that, you know, talking about, you know, talking to another man on a panel that I was on about publishing from France, who lives in Paris, but who's from Africa, one of Africa's and one of France's former African colonies, the him handing me the mimeographed, you know, of a publication magazine that a group of black people in France were putting out and me thinking God damn, you know, I think I'm down off, you know, I think I'm that I'll try to deal with kids and table women of color press in North America, I should try it somewhere else, you know, we have got to have that kind of understanding. As I said, that comes that that commitment comes from having some Unknown Speaker 44:54 comprehension of how a precious interlock with each other and how there's more than one You know, approach more than one way to understand the things that affect us, particularly if you have a number of identities that are being affected by our systems of oppression. I want to talk just a little bit to about the visuals of this conference, which is like this is 11th scholar in the feminist conference, and the numbers of women of color here are rather minimal. And like, what does that mean, you'd have to examine that too, I'm not talking about the conference organizers, because it's tema says, you know, she and I consulted I know she did. She and other people connected with the conference did a huge amount to make this conference, you know, more representative than once in the past. On the other hand, it's called a scholar. And this, you know, I mean, in other words, material conditions, they're women of five blocks from here, you know, 10 blocks from here in Harlem, you know, who life is not about the scholar and the feminist. And resistance is about survival and resisting on a day to day basis. Unknown Speaker 46:10 One of the, I guess, the last thing I want to talk about is the significance of lesbians of color, you know, and the politics that I can only, you know, barely outline in such a short period of time. Many of the most outspoken feminists of color third row feminists have indeed, been lesbians. And I just think it's very important to always assert that because there's such a way that that fat gets the race, the fact that there are now women of color who are not lesbians who can say they're feminists and can't even be proud to say that they're feminists has to do with the kind of groundwork that we did have for decades, you know, with for decades pass. I just want to conclude, I think, but Oh, one other thing about that. I mean, I guess I thought this was about the conference, as opposed to about, you know, whatever it was that I always say, I'm interested in this conference, I was at, as I said, the lesbian and resistance panel. And I think I was I'd probably be accurate to say that, like 90 to 95% of the women in that room were lesbians. And we were talking, you know, about, you know, what does it mean that you always preach to the converted, I have been to dozens of women's studies, conferences, and the lesbian events are always packed. You know, I mean, people were flowing out of this room just as they do at the Berkshires and, you know, NWS, a and wherever else. And the thing is that most of the people in the room were lesbians and like, that's not to say that you had to be everywhere at one time, but like, I really want to see some kind of, you know, what did they call it cross over? I want to conclude by reading from Bernice Johnson Reagan's article, and homegirls, which is called coalition politics, turning the century. I feel like you know, I rely on this article so much I read it every time I have a chance to go somewhere and talk about you know, the kind of struggle that we are involved in the kind of resistance that we evolved in. I'm so happy that I had the opportunity to hear our Bernice, this afternoon deliver some more home truth. This article, as I said, it's called coalition politics, turning the century and talks about the fact that to do coalition work, and to do activist work, you're going to have to have, you know, a strong stomach and a strong bat, because it's not about being easy, that it's very hard to work in coalition is hard to deal with people who are different from yourself. And she talks about the origins of, of these politics, in the civil rights movement. This talk was given at West Coast women's Music Festival. So when she refers to festivals, that's what she's speaking of a women's Music Festival. There is an offensive movement that started in this country in the 60s that is continuing. The reason we are stumbling is that we are at the point where in order to take the next step, we've got to do it with some folk we don't care too much about and we got to vomit over that for a little while. We must just keep going. The media says that the civil rights movement was a dream. The media says that nothing happened in the 70s. And most of us get up on stage and we talk as if that in fact is the case and it's a lie. The only way it will be true is if you believe them and do not take the next step. Everybody who was in this space at this time belongs here. And it's a good thing if you came I don't care what you went through or what somebody did to you go for yourself. You give this weekend everything you can because no matter how much of a coalition space this is, it ain't nothing like the call is coalescing. You got to do tomorrow and Tuesday and Wednesday when you really got get out there back into the world that is ours to these festival weekends are are places of crisis and you can do wonderful things in a crisis. Or I remember when I got to Michigan one year, and they were talking about how these women during this thunderstorm storm held down the stage, right. And it was lightning. And they thought we're big Amazon's right. That's crisis. And it ain't that important what you do in a crisis, you go beyond yourself anyway, and you talk about it for years. In fact, that's all you pay attention to. When that gray day happen. You go wishing every day was like that, every day ain't like that. And what really counts is not what you do this weekend. But take what this weekend has meant. Try to digest it. And first thing Monday, Tuesday morning at work before 24 hours, go around, apply it, and then do it every day you get up and find yourself alive, thank you. Unknown Speaker 51:13 Okay Unknown Speaker 51:17 for many of us, Grace Paley has been a leader in everything we hold important in literature and politics in life. She's a member of the Women's Pentagon action. She's been involved in justice for Nicaragua, every time somebody important has to be heard. I think it's Grace who finds a path for them and a place for them to be heard. It's great pleasure to introduce Grace Paley. To get that microphone Unknown Speaker 52:14 is it on? Okay. Some of us wanted to stay in the service wanted to sit. Unknown Speaker 52:28 I feel I need to say a few words about patriarchy. Partly because I listen to the radio and I read the paper and I look at TV and what you really see as men. And I just I'm just reminded about it time and time again. And I guess the fact is that we're now living at the natural end of a couple of 1000 years of patriarchy, and the natural land of a couple of 1000 years of patriarchy, it's very likely to be the unnatural end of the world. The song of patriarchy was sung in homers time, the tone was okay. But the words were killed the other men rape the women, take them if you can. And sometimes, if you really want to insult them, and rape them to call them women, and then they die of shame. Then you steal the land and to make sure that that song can continue. And to make it sing, you sing a song of the amazing bravery and honor of the men that you've just killed that way, that way, the sons are able to continue this life of greedy rapaciousness right through 1000s of years of violence society. And that happens. And that has happened throughout our literature. And our literature, our songs are what tell us a great deal about what is happening in a large part of our world. But these are some of the natural facts just to feel nice about it. The earth is round, and it's pretty damn speedy when it runs around the sun. And it's full of green and pink and brown and blue growing things. And even the desert is very nice desert has lots of growing things too. And the surface of the earth is full of sweet and salty water. And the animals of all kinds inhabit it and it's hard and soft parts. Unfortunately, I think we're losing a species on naturally losing a species of those natural animals every day. One at least. I think someone here might know how many Exactly. But and we humans are still so far among those left. So to go on with the natural facts the human race is composed of women and men and children and grandchildren. And these people have been born and the most beautiful colors. darkest brown and pink and yellow and red and tan and Now the unnatural facts in our time, these people of color have been torn from their lands and enslaved and draped and in their own home countries, they've been enslaved and murdered and assaulted and exploited and cheated not only of their land, but of the lives of their children. And this country, our own USA suffers really, from that sin, that terrible curse, the curse the act of western man, and that is the pathology of racism. And we will really suffer that onto the seventh generation, just like it says in the Bible, that's what it really means when they say unto the seventh generation, you do a stunt like that, like what was done a couple of 100 years ago, bringing all the people over here. And when enslaving a well, you really you're gonna suffer onto the 14th generation, even if you even if you try to do better, that sin is on us. And I see and I hear I really believe this. And I understand that partly because for hundreds and hundreds of years, my own people, my grandmother, my mother, my great great great grandparents have really suffered and been tormented by the European by the other European pathology, which is the pathology of anti semitism. Among the natural facts is that women are about half of the of this earth. unnaturally, they do two thirds of the work and they own 1/10 of the income and 1/100 of the world's property. Someone's already said this, but I thought this, I'd like to say it again. Probably because I wrote it down. But probably because it wasn't I was impressed when I heard it. So I made him say it again later, okay. But the really the encompassing, unnatural fact the most unnatural fact that we can think of really, right now the one that really will embrace us with ice and fire is the fact that there are 40,000 nuclear bombs in the world today, at least maybe 50 by now. Unknown Speaker 57:11 And there are missiles on asphalt covered nations. First they cover the nation with asphalt, they pour a lot of cement all over Germany, say then they pour a lot of cement all over England, because they have to move all these weapons around, they have to move these giant missiles around. So they need to really cover the natural earth. And that and pretty soon unless we fight it, there may be I think, I guess I wonder how many of you know that very soon we will have more missiles in New York Harbor than then are all over Great Britain. So what are we going to do? And why us? Why us? Why us women? Well, partly because the way I looked at the television set and saw what the men were doing. And also because for 1000s and 1000s of years war has been there's no way out of it. War has been manmade. It's all I just want to read you a quote from this little green pamphlet from Greenham Common, it's, you can get it over there someplace. But it begins by saying, for centuries, men have left home to go to war. Now, women are leaving home for peace Unknown Speaker 58:42 so I want to say these names right now and I'm talking about what has happened in the last few years what women have been doing in the last few years to, to to look at all of this. I say Greenham Seneca, women's pentagon, Kimmy, so, elf peace camps in Minneapolis, Puget Sound, Wisconsin, South Carolina, on the line, here's something from my line of work initiated by women on behalf of all peoples, for lasting peace, justice, beauty and freedom. So I think that's what women have added to, to this the idea of lasting justice, beauty and freedom. This is a walk that is starting in Washington. It's going to the Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas, where all of this stuff is put together. And then it's going to go on to Charleston to the Charleston Naval Weapons Naval Weapons Station. These I'm just particularly talking really about peace camps. There are lots and lots and lots of other things happening all around the country. And and and I'm talking very specifically about these actions, which are really a which, which I guess, as we all hear really come together from different movements. One of the main movements I came from long ago into into the anti militarist movement actually was the PTA. So so what what I mean is you can come from anywhere and everywhere. And we've all come from from different movements to really think think together here and conspire in some way. With with the events in in, in NA are collected and uncollected lives. So I'm talking mostly right this minute about these peace camps. And one of the reasons I want to talk about them, is because I think they really are an extremely advanced idea. I think there are a wonderful fact that is to say, we've had lots and lots of demonstrations, and we go to demonstrations, and then we go home, and then we go on with our everyday work, which is what we should do. But these camps, these, these have, have really made something like a permanent demonstration, an effort to stay in one place, really not the same people because some people stay there for a long time, but lots of other people come and lots of other people go and come and go. So you have you have an event really where where, where there's a base, a continuous base, a piece of ground, a piece of land, a place a camp, where where you can continue an attack, really in a sense, and I use the word attack. In in a certain way, I don't like to say attack, because I'm really I happen to really be a pacifist, I don't like the word attack, what I like to say is be stubborn, in a way you stay there, you will maintain your position, you're you're you're stubborn, you don't ask for permission, the main thing in a white bottle was saying some of this, in essence, is we have got to stop asking for permission to be anywhere at all. Very often people will say, can I go over there? There's a police sawhorse there? Well, you know, first of all, why ask me? That's the first step. Second of all, why ask the police you know, now Unknown Speaker 1:02:43 the these these are these are the so these are actions which happen inside of the ideas of, of nonviolent direct actions. And they they are, they are what we can do now. We really can do them now. People will be at Seneca again this summer, I understand. But we don't have to go to Seneca. I mean, we are here and we can make our own camps and our own stable places, right around New York. And think about those 500 missiles in New York Harbor. Everybody. Keep that in mind when you think of what's happening in Europe and elsewhere. I want to talk about one other means of resistance that I've become involved with lately. And this again, is a woman's group that is doing women's tax resistance. Now, why why should we do tax resistance? Well, because it's the most natural thing to do. You take a look at the Senate, right? What did the Senate just do? And we applauded them we flipped wasn't that good of them. They went and they condemned the mining of the Nicaragua harbor. So they're just like us. We did that. Right? We condemned the mining of Nicaragua harbor. We don't like that. And then or before the Senate sent money to mine the Nicaragua Harbor, right? Well face it. We're just like them. Almost every one of us has sent money to mine the Nicaragua harbors. So the next time that we sit down and think about it, and think about how mad we are at the United States Congress and all these terrible people. Think about really what you can do to make you a little bit different and neat. And when I say you I mean me to to make us a little bit different than the US Congress and Senate. We too should continue to condemn but also begin to keep that money away from little slogan that from Seneca and you'll really see why I say it. It's a it's a little one I'm sure it's been said plenty of other places. But I thought of it just recently, because I thought of my own long time and will in various movements from even before the PTA, and unless thought of the fact that we really are stronger now. And I think that the reason that there's a chance that the reason someone asked me Do you really think that we can get through this terrible, awful, despairing, frightening, murderous time? And they? And first I said, probably not. Then I said, Then I thought, and I looked at and I looked, and I thought, you know, I stopped making a joke. And I thought seriously? I said, Yes, I think we can. Because we now have, where we didn't have before, a growing and powerful and active women's movement, a growing and powerful and active movement of feminists, of women of color of ecologists, we haven't mentioned that before, I want to say that and I really began by thinking about the poisoning of this earth, we have all of all of these movements now. Ready to speak to one another, and work together. We did not have that before. So I want to end with this little slogan, which says, We are the old women. We are the new women. We are the new women stronger than before. Unknown Speaker 1:06:53 In her work, and in her political life, Frances Fox Piven has dealt with the major social movements of our times. In the first book, I read by Richard cloud and Francis box, pivot and poor people's movement, I finally thought, well, there's some theorists who actually understand what been going on in the 60s. And Frances Fox, Piven has continued that integration of of intellectual work and political work, I think, because all of her intellectual work is so highly political. She's now one of the directors of the human surf campaign. And she will talk to you about what we can do to get out of this mess. Unknown Speaker 1:07:53 political resistance doesn't develop in a social vacuum. And I don't think it can be called forth only by ideas. Unknown Speaker 1:08:12 I don't think political resistance ever emerges in a social vacuum. And I don't think either that it is called forth only by ideas. I think rather, political resistance depends upon an institutional context, which brings people together so that they can engage in collective and aggressive action. I want to use my 15 minutes to argue that I think the social welfare programs in the United States, the programs, which together we call the welfare state, may provide such an institutional context for political resistance by poor and working women. I think that we've all become aware, especially in the last three years of the massive involvement of with women with social welfare programs, women of the majorities, the overwhelming majorities among the recipients of Social Security, AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, housing subsidies and a range of social services. Women are also the overwhelming majority among the people who staff these programs that provide benefits and services to other women. This development, both the growth of the welfare state, and the preponderance of women in it has very deep roots in institutional changes that have taken place in the United States. And women have been at the vortex of those changes those changes, of course, in the traditional family and changes in the labor market and for myself, and for most of you here. Those changes have been on balance good and liberating. But Thought for 10s of millions of other women, those changes have been very hard because they have meant the breakdown of the traditional family has meant that women had been provided had been deprived of a share of male wages and are left to raise their babies and children alone and are consequently much poorer. And it is also meant that without a source of support from the family wage that women had been moving into the labor market, but not into the academy in large numbers, and not into law and medicine, but rather have been moving into the low wage service sector where wages are low and getting lower, and where employment is very insecure. These developments combined to go a long way toward accounting for why women are the overwhelming majority of the recipients of the beneficiaries of the programs that protect the poor or the unemployed or provide services. But now again, these women are in the middle of another wrenching institutional change, which is sometimes airily called the crisis of the welfare state. And which has meant in practice in the United States that poor women who depend upon these programs have gotten much poorer. And that many of the women who work in these programs have found their jobs eliminated or at least threatened. The reactions of feminist scholars and of feminist organizations to these developments, has been hesitant. And I think it's been hesitant, because we have a profound ambivalence about the relationship of women to the welfare state. Some of the reasons for our ambivalence for our hesitation are really very well taken. We would say, for example, if any of us was called upon to explain, we don't like those programs. They are too niggardly too few people get enough to live on they keep people down. People are demeaned, women are demeaned when they have to go through these bureaucratic agencies and plead for their sustenance. And we would say also, that different groups of people have fragmented and completely irrational ways, politically, because they are fragmented among different programs. Unknown Speaker 1:12:23 Still, these criticisms are well taken, I said, but still, it would seem that even niggardly benefits are better than none. And all of these criticisms could have become an agenda for reform, but an agenda which would have led us to demand the expansion of the welfare state the raising of benefits, the consolidation of programs. That hasn't happened, we have instead remained ambivalent and confused, and perhaps more confused, in the wake of a flood of criticism from the right have these very same programs that we have been criticizing all along, failing almost to clear our heads and realize that the right criticism is the opposite of our criticism. They say the programs give too much we say too little. They say there are too few conditions, we say. There are too many, but none of this has been clarified. And I think the reason for that is not just that the programs are negatively fragmented the meaning. But rather than that we have another reason for being ambivalent. And that has to do with what we think the programs do to the power of the people who depend upon them. We think that welfare state programs, by definition, rob people of power, and that kind of conviction, which is very widespread, in turn has something to do with most of the ideas about power that exist in American social science. Whether the right or the left, most analysts think that the only authentic Power is power derived from the workplace, by contrast to power built on workplace organization