Unknown Speaker  00:00
Hi this is Gladys I'm trying to find out if I know what I'm doing. Somehow this thing is in delay. I'm monitoring tape. I'm gonna figure it out but I'm taking up everything okay, now I'm monitoring source and I'm not in delay and I can figure out for the life of me which is better to monitor what I'm receiving or to monitor what I'm hearing I guess I better monitor what I'm receiving Okay, coming back and asking questions now

Unknown Speaker  01:09
we are in the map so

Unknown Speaker  01:19
now I'm speaking and I'm answering the question.

Unknown Speaker  02:55
setting, setting even that's a bit abstract. I'll try not to stay too abstract. But it becomes a habit and sociology, I don't know what it is I just want to sort of wander around in the clouds. But anyway, the these women's lives really allowed me to tap into things in a way that I probably would not have done and had would not have occurred to me to do in terms of hooking things up with what people were doing presently with what had gone on historically and really discovering through these women's lives really at that level. Did the day community work in the black community? Needs political character and makes it really the culture of resistance that it has been. Black women's community work in a sense, is an historical framework. White

Unknown Speaker  05:37
RIGHT. Keep in mind slaves is weapons struggle that's been involved in the backlog is in groups first of all, they had to go out and recruit black women

Unknown Speaker  06:52
into factory jobs and she talked about organizing and using black community institutions such as Ratan.

Unknown Speaker  07:07
Tata, with a quick answer that shuts them up that makes them not feel like they ever want to do that again. And it was, it's not a good way to operate if you really want to maintain a decent working relationship. So these are some, you know, this is just one task one set of tasks. That one woman in my study defined as an issue, another woman talked about her individual struggles and learning from her individual struggles, how to advise her friend in terms of being assertive in the workplace, just teaching somebody as you go around for a job. When you are turned away, well, we want someone with experience and learning how to combat I won't get any experience if I don't have a job, and learning to fight with people to really be assertive about getting a job. And then of course, after you get in the workplace, being assertive about making sure that you're not treated as one woman said, like a dog in the workplace, and for black women in the labor market, and this is a source. You know, when we started looking at, you know what kinds of antagonisms exists particularly among all women of different races, that experience in the workplace under white female supervisors very often is a very fresh and vivid memory in the minds of some of the women that I talked to. So some of these strategies were aimed at other women. And this was something that you're dealing with work. People may involve themselves in activities surrounding ideas, the ideas and the structures that are specifically problematic concerning racism, what is racism? How do you deal with

Unknown Speaker  08:48
it? What was a women's movement, that Ida wells Barnett as the leader in terms of her organization, starting out, when it comes time for her to develop a larger base, it is other women who come together around the issue of lynching. And as the history of the black women's movement grows as women become conscious, and the assaults on black women directly, give them a reason to come together mentioned becomes one of the major issues and when you look at lists of items that women dealt with, within these black women's organizations, they were issues pertaining to women and families issues pertaining to women in the workplace, and issues pertaining to children and men in the workplace, young people going out and apprenticeships, the whole problem, education for both, as they would say boys and girls, as well as work for males. So these were some of the very broad issues that they dealt with, but They were dealt with in the context of an organized movement really directed at issues like ideas of racism, how do racist ideas affect them where they were in their particular location, and then looking around to see what the consequences of that was. I'd wells Barnett, as some of you may be familiar, not only was involved in anti legend, but also in terms of trying to keep back Jim Crow. This is the period when the Jim Crow laws are being created. And one of the things that she tried to do was to stop the segregation on the railroad, she sued, and she got tossed off of railroad trains. I mean, the woman was very formidable, and she was finally driven out of Memphis, Tennessee, because the lynch mob, burned her newspaper and waiting for her at the railroad station. So that was the end of her. But dealing with ideas and dealing with some of these ideas is a direct struggle. Dealing with the structures of racism, as I've already mentioned, Jim Crow, various issues, women, black women in the community got involved very early in the abolition movement, okay, the abolition movement was segregated white abolition societies did not necessarily always want black people around, they just wanted slavery abolished, and then they sort of plan to ship black folks out. So they weren't necessarily egalitarian in their orientation. In fact, they were very often quite racist. Black men and women in the North were very interesting in that they organized abolition societies, black women were working during this period. So they belong to working people's organizations working men's organization sometime. And it's interesting that Linda Perkins, in her research finds evidence that during this period, black men were somewhat sensitive about the fact that white men excluded white women. And she actually has data where they talk about learning from the mistakes of our oppressors. And so they have women on the boards of some of these old working peoples organizations that flourished among Black people in the North, and also among black abolitionists. So you find a setting in which you don't find women and men separate within this black community context. And women provide a lot of the support for this.

Unknown Speaker  12:21
Black, educated black women at this point prior to abolition, right after it's also being recruited, as commute as educators within the black community. So that gives them extra set of leverage. And in terms of public discourse, how do you get involved in public affairs of some of your earliest female lecturers were black women. So this whole issue of involvement in public service involvement in public affairs was never an issue of conflict. Early on in the black community's history, it's later and it's interesting how that comes about. So you deal with the problems of ideas, you deal with the problems of MIS education, so you're not only trying to change ideas and the dominant culture, but the problem with racism is that and those of you who are involved in feminist activities know from the whole consciousness raising issue that you often have to disabuse the press people with some of the ideas that are dumped Finally, some times they grab hold. And so dealing with this issue of MIS education, the whole Black History Month movement, we tend to identify it, usually with one leader, Carter Woodson, again, was a movement involving both black women and men, and its most militant expression of it, were with people like men, a woman by the name of nanny, Helen burrows, who was a militant, pro black history, then it was called Negro history. Month advocate was a founder of an Association for the Study of Negro life in history, which was the group that created what is now Black History Month was earlier Negro History Week. And when she founded her own school made that a graduation requirement in terms of declination public speaking, etc, for women, that they be able to talk about black women talk about their history. So that was, the whole problem of MIS education becomes a source of a tremendous amount of work, you can just organize whole institutions around that and do nothing else. And you've got a 60 hour a week job. Regardless, such activities will be directed at closing the gap and minimizing the distance. And remember, we're not just talking about economic distance, we're not just talking about political distance, you're also talking about spatial distance that one of the realities with racism, at least racism directed towards black people in the United States, after slavery has been this separation and this push out pushing this sort of gradual pushing out in the system. that's another whole lecture which we can get into what probably the biggest task for black people has been the issue of legal and civil personhood. Okay, it's, it's been the central task. Okay? bulk of the community work is aimed at acquiring the legal and civil rights necessary for black people to just be framed around. Black meaning

Unknown Speaker  15:36
media as leader, because if you, if you only went by the media image of who's involved in movements in the black community, you'd have this, this image of it's all male. And it's not. I mean, that's nonsense. But getting to understand the role of women means getting back and going into the community context where women operate to see where some of these male leaders come from, you know, who nominates them who pushes the who puts the organizations together, Ralph Abernathy, at one point made the statement. In fact, quite recently, he said, If women ever leave the movement, he says, I'm going with women, because nothing's gonna happen without the women. I mean, they very clearly understand that the whole infrastructure was dependent, again on the structures that were peopled by women. So the media image is this black male leadership. The reality is this black female participant ship, that and black women leaders tend to be ignored by both local and national media, even where they exist, where they participate, where you can see them sitting there, they sometimes won't even be identified in newspaper pictures, which shows you the kind of selection of the dominant culture does within the community that has a certain amount of consequences and has had some very serious consequences, particularly in the last 20 years. It's a very serious negative consequences.

Unknown Speaker  17:10
Members of black communities must contend with the consequences and hit this is another issue that gets dealt with in community work, you get the idea that there's a lot of work to do in, you know, in terms of being in a black community and being conscious, you should it's very overburdening for some women. Some of the women I interviewed were out of their homes like 80 hours a week. And these were women who had full time jobs. We're not talking about volunteers. By the way, we're talking about folks who work a full time job, usually in Human Services, because of their interest and feeling that that's where they're supposed to be. In order to help deal with a particular problem. I was dealing with a particular generation of women. Women who, some of whom had started out as blue collar workers, a few of whom had started out as college educated, black women who plan to be professionals. But all of whom at the time I interviewed them were working full time in a job that they were in primarily because of their

Unknown Speaker  18:22
race and health, what was interesting, she told me was in terms of getting the job because she had such good professional credentials. She took something like a $5,000 cut and pay to come and be the head of the center. And of course, all the men on the board got real suspicious that why does she want to come here? Be the head of the Center? Why don't you know, you know, and right away, they got nervous, you know, you're constantly coming because you might o'clock in the morning every day and be out of my house, the time that she wants. And this was the kind of thing and she was trying to do some new things structurally within the institution. So you had this very dedicated person who was started out as a professional got these wonderful professional credentials in here she comes moving in. I had other women in the study, one woman was working as a social worker, and she had a job where she had been the secretary for years and years and years, she'd been the secretary for this program. And it was a program that was run by a black women's club, one of these clubs that stretched back to the 19th century, who had gotten the figured out how to get grants during the 1960s. Remember when everybody was learned how to get grants? Well, these very elderly women, the boys consisted of women in their 80s, who had hired women in their 40s to do all their work for them. And they kept hiring the social workers who came in with all these wonderful professional credentials, who believed in being professional, which meant you made the client sit out behind something while you waited to do the interviews, and here's the secretary who was also in her 40s. At the time, I interviewed her in her 50s, who kept reaching out and making clients comfortable in getting them coffee and sitting down and just having these wonderful conversations with and this social workers would come out saying that you met professional, I'm doing an imitation of what her invitation was. And she said, Finally, after they've gone through about 10 social workers, because the board members realize that this wasn't working, what they wanted to do with their program and the kind of services they wanted to provide in the black community compared to what were the kind of social services that other people provided in the black community, because we weren't they're not the only social service agency, was they needed somebody different. So one of the chairman of the board at that time, who was 83 said to this woman, she said, Well, you've been secretary for a long time, you must know how to run the program, don't you want to be the director. And that's how she was explained to me how she got this job, that she said, I don't have the degree, I'm not supposed to have this job. But I wish some of these people who want to do this work would get the kind of training that I have, will you sit down and have somebody breathe in your face alcohol fumes and see how they feel. And that's the kind of training we need to have, not everybody who has credential, which was this wonderful critique of Credentialism, and Human Services and making human services more humane. And they all reached this point through practice in the black community. And these were women who had drawn from the 1920s, in terms of uplift to the point where they were at in terms of changing the whole style of doing human services that but this was a woman who came up starting in blue collar job work, and was at the time trying to finish school to get the credentials to go with the job that she already had. So that's the extreme

Unknown Speaker  21:56
announcement because these sessions are being recorded. If you feel uncomfortable being recorded, either don't speak or don't give your name.

Unknown Speaker  22:07
Okay, hello, hello. Do you know where either is, oh, I know your item. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So anyway, let, um, so that gives you some sense of this range that we're talking about.

Unknown Speaker  22:32
Okay, let me skip over some material here, because I can see I'm moving very fast. And there's another piece and what I'm what I'm talking about in terms of what women do different ways in which racial oppression identifies itself, the workplace, the ideas, the MIS education. And there's another piece that goes with this, that's highly problematic, which is the fact that black communities generally get caught in the middle and historically, not just contemporary black communities, but historically have often been caught between the rock of white capital and the hard place of white working class false consciousness. In other words, what kind of ideological squeezing, you find yourself in as the black community find themselves having to negotiate with people in order to relieve some level to reduce some level or some aspect of racial oppression, find ourselves negotiating with the people who have the power to change things, who are also the people who are benefiting. Lack of solidarity, to change the situation because there is no worker solidarity, that the segmentation, the racial segmentation of the labor force is such that you get it from both sides, you really do get it from both sides. So the other side of that, of course, is you ended up being sort of a dual vanguard in for change, you have to change for yourself. And usually, and what these women taught me was a very interesting point was that a lot of the problems that they had dealt with in the past, were problems that now white working class people were dealing with, and didn't know how to deal with one woman gave me a very good example. And this is, in a sense, what you mean by dual Vanguard, you're not only you're pushing against the system before other folks who should be pushing against it, realize what's going on. But then you have to turn around at some point later on down the road, and ended up teaching people how to survive. One woman talked about what happened during the Depression. I had some I had two very elderly ladies, one was 86 and one was 83. And an 86 year old is now she's in her mid 90s. Now, so she's, she's still going strong too. The other lady passed away. Which is sad, but she lived a good life and she said so she was die. And at her funeral, the minister said, Well, we were all upset there. And we were in our house and she's getting ready to slip away. And she got very upset when they said, Look, now, I can't stay here forever, you got to do some of this work, too. So I always had mixed feelings when I talked about the fact that she has passed because she said, I cannot stay here forever. And you all have to do the work, which is true. But one of the points that she made was that during the Depression, she would be in a store, buying different kinds of food, that she was used to cooking because she worked as a household domestic and never had much money. At this point. Now she's, by the way, she's the same person who's the 83 year old chairman of the board that hired this woman. So you realize her her life has changed over the years. But she's always worked with his club, even though she was doing domestic service in the 1920s. And so she was saying she wouldn't be buying these things, and why people would come to the store and say, how do you cook them? What do you do with that, because all of a sudden, they were now having to buy poor people's food, which had traditionally been black people's food. And now they're learning how to deal with this problem. Another woman that I interviewed who was fascinating woman, she,

Unknown Speaker  26:12
this, she was a woman who had she did not have a college degree, she was running a program at a mental health, mental, a state mental hospital, which the federal government had ordered her to move back onto the grounds of the hospital was a program designed to help mothers cope, singlet Well, at that time, that term, single parent, when she first started, the problem wasn't the Vogue term, because when it was just black folks who were single parents, it was the mother, hen and household. So in a very negative and derogatory terms, for those of you who remember the Moynihan Report, you know what I'm talking about. So anyway, she had this program, because she said, sometimes these mothers just can't cope, it's a lot of pressure. So she had taken the program and based it in the smack in the middle of the black community, because as she said to me, people don't want to come to a state mental hospital to go to a counseling program, they, they might feel some sort of shame, they might feel, you know, the society makes you feel that he was. So she had moved off, federal government said, if you want to be refunded, you got to move it back on and program, you know, anything to sort of push people down, you know, psychologically anything. So she was very upset the day that I interviewed her, and she didn't have a college degree, she had over 300 credits towards a college degree, but she didn't have a college degree, because one of the things that these women did,

Unknown Speaker  27:36
roles who went to higher education after getting involved in community work, you know, go through Myers and workers, blue collar workers, then they discovered these problems they get involved in, they need to take courses to learn how to do things to help people. And this woman had taken things in drug education, education, social welfare, she had taken things in nutrition. And at that point, she had started these nutrition classes for welfare mothers to teach them how to use surplus foods, so that they would taste good. She said, Because I throw this stuff away, too. I didn't know how to cook with it. And she said, you know, maybe, you know, they learned how to cook with it. We can save some money and try to do some other things while we find them jobs. This woman had taken courses in law enforcement. She at that point was on the police commission. And when I asked her, I said, How did you get on the police commission, she said, and she told me the story about the fact that this woman who was a drug addict, had gotten arrested. And because the other people in the neighborhood were afraid to go near that house, because they had all these drug dealers and this drug addicts were hanging around. They didn't want to have anything to do with it. But of course, when the babies arrested the woman, they left her baby in the crib. And the baby cried and cried and cried and people got upset after they listened for about eight or nine hours to this child cry. So they call this woman that I'm interviewing, who, in which point, she goes to the house, she's not afraid of anything, right? She goes to the house gets the baby and goes she said and I've turned out such and such police station, which if anyone who knows anything about black language, this is you know, when I said I turned the place out, admit that I went in there and sort of, you know, kick people in the sort of the old style western style, I'm borrowing bra. And you have to realize that this woman was a missionary from a very conservative style church so that when she said, I turned the place out, she went from an attitude of where she was talking very softly, she said, I turn out you know, she went and expressed her rate. She ended up on the police commission of that city, that it was such a formidable and they don't no longer arrest women in that particular city without calling and social welfare people they can't leave the house until they've straightened out and disposed up the children. So this woman was talking about the fact that she was teaching these welfare mothers and the fact that Her classes had gone from being all black, to both black and white, because now we're talking about the feminization of poverty, which means more white women are being confronted with the problem of poverty, public welfare, and public housing. And so they were coming through her various programs in her outreach that had started out to the black community, but was now dealing with white women as well, that was a long way around to tell you how you ended up doing this double Vanguard work, there's a large amount of things that go along with this all I could go on. Community Work can be any number of tests that are attempted on behalf of the community, by the community, whether these activities are designed to enable the group to survive, or to thrive, survival is one thing, thriving is another game, simply surviving is not enough. The simply surviving does not necessarily change things. We're talking about activities also designed to advance and advance the group and to affect change. These activities can be carried out with any number of levels of consciousness and was interesting, the people that the community pick and named is their persons that these were the folks they recognized that they trusted. And this was, again, we're talking about people in the 1970s and 1980s. Hold, I identify, and it was interested that men and women, women and men in the black community expressed the same kinds of thoughts and thinking about who really they could trust to speak for them, who will go up for us who will do the job for us, in terms of seeing it as women, which was the same thing that St. Clair Drake and Horace Katyn had run into in the 1930s. In Chicago, where they saw at that time, the term wasn't community work, it was race man, and race woman. And they saw the race women as more trustworthy than the men. And in a sense, it was a grassroots perception that sexism operates in our society such that women can't be as opportunistic as men, therefore, we have trustworthy leaders. And so the I could go into any number of details about the recruitment processes that are involved. But the point is that in any community, in any black community, and I think in any community, particularly people of color, who have a history that goes back beyond 1850, in the United States, in terms of what the realities are, that confront them that have structured their lives, you will find a group of written that of women who can be identified by the grassroots, who are engaged in economic work, political work, ideological work, moral work, as well as counter cultural work. And all of this is comprised by this term community work, which means any range of number of tasks and who've identified themselves, prove themselves and therefore are seen by the community as belonging to them. And the other piece of it is that the women I interviewed even though they had moved up in the job market, was still engaged in active strategies when they had a very collectivist ethic, not an individualistic orientation, where I'm gonna moving on up, it was a week moving on up, and if the job wasn't effective anymore, for we moving, they left it and found another job from which they could work for we'd move. And so they always the sense of, what is it doing for us lately? What am I doing for us? And how do I maintain these commitments? One woman said, she said, there's no, she said, there's no leisure time. She said, there's no exclusive clubs for us. She said, any of the places we go in the community, it's y'all come you hear she said, so you do business, even when you're out playing. And this is the thing, it's a lifestyle that these women have chosen. That means that they do really, regardless of what full time job they were, they still spend another anywhere from 20 to 60 hours in the community. Doing One woman had two phones in her house that rang. She said, I asked them one of the big questions I asked. I said, Well, what what's a typical day and they say typical days when I get a call at five o'clock in the morning, because of some crisis. And she said, Well, sometimes people take advantage. She said, they'll call you at three o'clock in the morning with something that's not really an emergency, she said, But I've learned to deal with that. She says, I just call you back at three o'clock the next morning with the answer. And she and she talked about the fact she I was directed to her by a man in the community said, Oh, you've got to go talk to this wonderful professional woman. And he went on and on about how professional she was. He was a doctor and he considered her a fellow professional. And I got there, she said to me, she said, people think I'm a professional, I have all these degrees. She said, I finished high school the same day as my daughter, she said, but I have a PhD in survival. And that's what I teach from my house. So these are women who have PhDs in survival. And that's what they teach from their house will go on? And I don't know, and then we can save our questions.

Unknown Speaker  35:27
Yeah, why don't we do that? Quick? Because I think that'd be a lot of questions. I know that people. And I think it's good to get some participation.

Unknown Speaker  35:44
Okay, um, well, first of all, I want to say that everything that you said fits perfectly into the kind of thing that I was going to talk about. And just to sort of take from the other side, because my research included really black working class women and white working class women. And I'm going to emphasize more the white working class, because I think what you said really applies. And an interesting thing is that, to give it the same kind of backup story is that there was a street fair being organized in the neighborhood where I worked in New York City among Polish American and white ethnic groups. And they couldn't find any tables for the street, that they couldn't find any things to cook outside. And they went to the Polish American Center, and the guy at the Polish American Center, sort of threw them out and had nothing for them. So finally, they ended up going to the housing projects, where the black woman had a senior citizen center, and they got tables, and they got fires to cook their fair on and to, you know, hand out the sausages and whatever else they did. And it was very, very clear that the black women in that area, were much better organized, and historically had much more experience than the new organizations that I'm going to talk about. And they learned a tremendous amount. And it was a lot, the racism that was present is no denying it was mostly it seemed to me among the white working class men, who very much resented the help. And that help had to be given surreptitiously. When the white women went over to the citizens. They didn't demand them come with them. And they didn't tell them where they got the help from. So it was the divisions are there. But the history of black organizations has been tremendously helpful. For the what I'm going to talk about the community protests of the 70s and 80s, among white working class women, I think it's really, the history is much stronger in terms of experience, and probably because experience of poverty is longer term. So the research that I did, is in two places, first was in New York City in Brooklyn, and Greenpoint, Williamsburg, I don't know if any of you familiar that it's just right across the river, the East River. And this is a neighborhood that's been really was a very stable, working class neighborhood. But the industry has left no industry has been leaving New York City since the mid 60s 64,000 manufacturing jobs a year some of that time. And now. It's, you know, they say we're having this economic recovery, but it's not the same people who are recovering. So the neighborhood is really what you might call the changing neighborhood in terms of the poor people are being squeezed out because they can't pay the rents, and wealthy professional, wealthy people. We couldn't have many of us couldn't afford to live there. But you know, people with jobs and insurance and banking, young professionals are moving in, because it's lower rents than, say, the Upper West Side. So that's the kind of area where I did the field work. And then the last few years, I've been working in Puerto Rico. And the Puerto Rican research was in a rural area in a rural village where a multinational corporation has set up a factory, a petrochemical factory, and it's rural in terms of there's trees and grass, but in terms of the people's experience, basically, the men work in the factory, the women. So for government work, I don't think there's that much that you wouldn't, you know, imagine in the ideal rural setting, it's mostly a question of unemployment, welfare and working for the factory, and tremendous problems of pollution, occupational health and that kind of thing. I'm starting out really talking about the main field work in Brooklyn, which was from 1975 to 78. And then I'll finish with some comparisons with Puerto Rico where I'd been working recently like the last couple of years and

Unknown Speaker  40:01
I think it's interesting to see how under different conditions in different historical settings, women take on different kinds of roles, and are able to act in different ways. I think it's very different in Puerto Rico than in Brooklyn. And historically, I think there'd been tremendous changes in Brooklyn. So what I've been trying to do is try and figure out under what conditions are women active, in what ways in the community in many of the same kinds of ways that Cheryl was talking about? And in in Brooklyn, it seems or, and I think this probably applies, like to many of the cities, with the old working class neighborhoods, you know, Chicago, Cleveland, I'm not so much sure about what's happening in the southwest. But I think, from what I've read, I don't know if any of you know Kathleen McCourt's work on women in Chicago, it's very, very similar. So and some other work that I did in Cleveland, I think it's pretty much widespread, I would think I would suggest that two things, one, the disappearance of jobs, the changing workplace format, the disappearance of those stable manufacturing, unionized, reasonably paying jobs, which could find, you know, a woman, supposedly to stay home or at least to do a tremendous amount of work in the household and perhaps take a part time job. Those kinds of jobs are really disappearing. We all know that right? I think that's that, combined with the structure of government system programs, the way our welfare programs work, the way our unemployment benefits work, food stamp program, and SSI, those state programs, and the way they actually get to people, you know, how you have to wait in line and welfare, how you have to lose your SSI and come back for them keep fighting and fighting those that situation of state dependency, which is increasing all around the country, among the white working class, I think that has forced women to assume new roles in communities and to confront new political issues, white working class women, I think black women have always had to confront many of those issues and the different conditions. And, and I think that this has women have begun to act collectively and to deal with these problems. And also, I think they've had to reevaluate their own views of women's place in society in these particular situations. So I think I'll give you well, Greenpoint, Williamsburg, was set up originally as a working class neighborhood to look at the state and how it's changed. People were encouraged to move there, the tenements were built there, the government, the New York City, municipality, funded many things to bring a working class population into Greenpoint, and Williamsburg. They built the bridges, they built the subways, they built the canals to allow the industry to develop there, they advertised to bring industry there. So it's not that there hasn't always been an influence of the state, then, with changing the changing the shifts in the international economy, became cheaper to hire people in Latin America, to hire people in the south to do the jobs that the people in Williamsburg used to do Greenpoint, Williamsburg. And also, the tax money from the people in New York City has been spent out of New York has been spent more on Southwest developing military, those kind of things. So there's been tremendous changes on an international and national level that have left the people in Greenpoint, Williamsburg, where I did my research in this situation that I'm going to talk about. And I would say, Well, nowadays, it's very ethnically mixed. They're they're ethnically and racially mixed, Scott large Polish American population, a large Hispanic population, large Italian American population, the black population is in the housing projects, mostly because of the discrimination among landlords, so that the other groups are more or less, you know, reflecting racism and and generally, economic trends in New York City, you'll find the Polish American Italian American, more in one area and then as you move down, you find more Hispanic areas. And then the housing projects are kind of spread between them because of political political fights that have gone on since the 50s in terms of building the housing project. So the thing that I'm suggesting is that it's been the destruction, the cat the continuing destruction. And these inner city neighborhoods, and the departure of these

Unknown Speaker  45:05
manufacturing jobs that have led women to take leadership roles where before, I would say, you know, women have always been involved in community activities, black and white one. But nowadays, white women are taking many leadership roles. But I don't think that they were as active in leadership, historically, although we have to look into that. And there isn't that much data. And that they've been taking these roles to defend the collective goods in their neighborhoods, schools, housing, health centers, sanitation services, you know, to defend the goods that are being taken away with the destruction of the inner city neighborhoods that sanitation has been cut back, you know, with it, when I did my fieldwork is in 1975, began when New York City fiscal crisis was announced in June 75. And I moved to live in this area in September. So it was just the time when may have been was cutting back, you know, fire houses were being closed libraries were being closed hospital, baby, well, baby clinics were being shut down, you know, funding was being taken away from the schools, teachers were being shifted into other areas. So these were the areas where the neighborhood was under attack. And these were the areas where women took collective leadership became involved in collective leadership. And I would say that it was also because of the male unemployment, women had to look for resources elsewhere, not only were their neighborhoods being attacked, but they also had to find other forms of resources, they had more women had to go, you know, down to public assistance, they had to fight for summer lunch programs, they had to fight for food for senior citizens, because of the, at the same time that the neighborhoods were being destroyed, that services were being removed, people were losing jobs. So there were two pressures on this one on the one just to keep their neighborhoods, at least at some level of livability, you know, not necessarily thriving yet. And then on the other sense, just to bring food, whereas they used to have those kinds of things. So it's those two pressures that were leading women to take on much larger leadership roles. And working class women in this area, were not simply involved in the care of their own families, they didn't, you know, it was really very collective. They assisted their neighbors, their friends, their relatives, to go and get public assistance to learn how to make it through the public assistance programs, to find jobs, you know, there was lots of gossip networks about where you could possibly get a job in a factory doing packing as a salesperson, as a waitress wherever it was, and jobs for men as well, like there was gossip networks among women. Gossip is like a word, I don't like to use it because it's got to sort of put now sign to it. But I mean, networks for information, where people are talking day in, day out, it's not like a lecture or anything formal, but tremendous amount of information gets passed, and the put down word we've had has been gossip, you know, maybe we should raise gossip to a higher level. But anyway, so that this conversations that women had with each other long discussions day in and day out, would help them husbands or the men that they were with, or the men that they knew find jobs, it wasn't just among women, they got the conversations were mostly among women, but they assisted many people who many men as well, and children, you know how to get your child into daycare, if you didn't really qualify, you know, how to get where were the possibilities of daycare centers, how to help somebody who was 59 and had no money to get senior citizen lunches, you know, all sorts of ways of working with the requirements of the state to provide resources for people to survive. They also participated in neighborhood organizations, you know, they had citizens to set up senior citizen citizen centers to set up daycare centers to protest the removal of public services. They went down to the city, you know, down to the you know, Chamber Street to different various offices in the city, downtown news, to protest removal of public services to sit in the offices. They said.

Unknown Speaker  49:29
They organize demonstrations, they had every every kind of thing. And they were usually directed these demonstrations and organizations were not usually directed, which I thought was interesting against corporations. You know, they didn't, although there was one demonstration to keep to prevent a corporation from expanding and pulling down some buildings. Basically, most of them were directed against the city in the state. And I think that's interesting. I think it reflects that Where who is going to provide funding that there are no jobs, that they're not going they're not this area used to be a very strong union area, they had strikes the teamsters were strong there in the 40s. If you talk to the women, their fathers, were very active as union organizers. So that now that that's not really the focus anymore, they can't, there's unions have been broken his you know, in the last 10 years in New York. So it's very hard for them to work through unions, that the way that they're working in their neighborhoods is through demanding resources from the state to make up for the fact that industry has been allowed to leave without paying for the costs that they've created in bringing the population there to work. And without providing for the people that used to be their workers. So most of the demonstrations were, even when it was around an issue of what a corporation was doing. It was looking for the city or the state or the federal government to step in, and work with, to improve the situation. And so I would say that women use the system wherever possible, you know, they would try and get public assistance, they didn't always organize a protest, they would use the system in every way that they could, if when they couldn't just, you know, fun, try and get around regulations. At that point, they would take up more strongly kind of protest kind of demonstration type things. I just wanted to say a little bit about the literature and why what's been said and literature, which hasn't really dealt with these issues at all. I think working class women have played a significant role both in the labor force, you know, union organizing, and in community organizations and protest movements historically. And I have, for example, in Glasgow, women started the rent strike the very first rent strike for housing authority that was run by when, you know, in the 1919, sometimes, the very first housing authority, but building was women sitting in and women demonstrated in Glasgow, for better housing. So I'm not saying women haven't always been involved in this kind of thing. But if you look at the sociological research, blue collar women working men's wives, you know, things like that, you get a very different picture. They very few of this disc descriptions, talk about anything about women's organizations at all. They talk about, you know, women as being isolated in their homes as being miserable as being passive as being subordinate to their husbands. It's a very miserable, isolated, and low key kind of picture that you get from sort of, there were studies working classroom, and it's even up till now, if you know, the worlds of pain of you know, a million ribbons, there's no discussion of women in communities. I think there's probably two reasons for this. One is that it's methodological, even welded, pain was done interview wise, although I think you did interviews, and you got a very different picture. Different, but most of these studies are done on a survey basis, you know, picking out a sample, and then interviewing them, you don't follow women around, you don't watch them. I think women undervalue their own activities, and the researchers undervalued them, so you just don't hear even though it may have been occurring, wasn't in the, in the literature, you know, like miracle murasky, who teaches right here. You know, you get an maybe a picture of, you know, blue collar marriage on some level, but you don't get any sense of women and their neighbors and women and their community and how the men and the women relate outside. And I think it is partly the interview, partly the interview technique, and worlds of pen was also done that way. And

Unknown Speaker  54:05
the epidemiological studies also show that a woman, I don't know, you probably haven't heard this book by Brandon Harris that shows that any women with working class women with three children under 14, and in the home, are the most at risk for depression, which isn't such a big surprise, they kind of the ones, not the ones that go to hospital because they don't have daycare to even get to the point where they see a therapist, so nobody even identifies that's in the community. The point is, you do get that side of it. And I'm not denying it. I think there is that side of it. I think that living on the borders of poverty can be a very miserable experience. And it is very isolating for many, many women, but you don't get the other side. And partly, I think there's two reasons partly is the interview technique. And partly, I think the change historical changes that when there were studies done in the 50s and the early 60s, white working class women were involved in voluntary associations Probably. And they were involved in helping their friends and neighbors in many different ways. And that wasn't documented. But I don't think that they were in leadership roles. And I think that the fact that now, they're not only leadership, but had very adversarial leadership roles, has brought them into the public media slightly more. So now it's less ignored, or at least you can, you know, we can see it more clearly than in those days. I mean, I may be wrong, because it's not really well documented. But that's my feeling that the changes in historical phases of women's experience has led to more out of adversarial activities, which has brought leadership of women more into the public eye currently.

Unknown Speaker  55:49
We have this, you know, image of the silent majority that came up with Nixon and say the kind of people tend to accept that was one reason I went to do the field work actually was because I didn't really accept those definitions of working class America. And another point is that, if you read the ethnographies, like Kelly's corner, or even Carroll stack 1970, for all our kin, you find no description of political action among black Americans. So that, you know, these kinds of studies have ignored a huge area of activity, which I think is extremely important. And in maintaining neighborhoods and in defining the survival strategies of men and women, both men and women, the most important political aspects of of working class history, both black and white. Okay, so I think perhaps I should give you I don't want to talk too long. Just a few examples. I was actually one of the women that I work with, I will give you a background. She's very similar to the woman that you talk about. So I mentioned her because I think it's important. I call her Jackie, she was born in 1926. She worked in the cotton fields in the South as a child, and she came to New York City with two young children in 1955. And she left her husband and south. In the north, she worked in a laundry at very low pay, and she's always as long as long as she could find a job. She's always worked. And neighbors helped her with her children. And because of her community activities, she was offered a job in the voluntary agency in the 60s when funding was more available for those kinds of things. And she was funded by the OIO. Later, she had a seated job. And now she's unemployed because of the seeds of cutbacks. That's one of the one she was working in the housing authority. She was the one who was the director, that senior citizen center that I mentioned to you, that was very helpful to the white American white women organizations.

Unknown Speaker  58:00
She from 1965, she was an extremely articulate and active community spokeswoman. She supervised and cooked practically all the free cynicism lunches, which were provided daily in her agency, and she organized the protest against rent raises in the housing authority. She always attended planning board meetings, police patrol meetings, and she probed involved was involved in all the protests or many of the protests against budget cutbacks. She was never afraid to speak out in public and rally supporters who covered the racial and ethnic spectrum of Greenpoint. Well, she really did. When she spoke out in the meeting, she really got read, you know, the clapping and everything. And the meetings were very mixed, you know, racially and ethnically, but she was really respected and they everybody wanted her to talk. She also ran for the school board while I was doing the field, but she didn't win. Because the UFC kept her name off the ballot. You know, there's all sorts of internal political fights, but she certainly was a very widely respected community organizer, she could not this is just society, she in terms of education, she hadn't finished high school. And I think, maybe something she had had maybe some terrible experience with a disease when she was like, in her early 30s. She couldn't really write very, she couldn't write straight sentences, you know, she couldn't get her activity in the neighborhood, you know, level of education had so little to do with how effective she was. But she, she wouldn't necessarily read all the documents, but she would hear what was going on meetings and stuff really helped her tremendously. Because she was so active, she was better informed than anybody who couldn't read all the stuff they want to very quickly, you know, so I just wanted to point out that level of education is not the defining characteristic and community effectiveness. Alright, the other woman that I want to talk about, I call her Mary She was born in Brooklyn in 1938. She claimed you know that her great grandfather was German. And on the other side perhaps of Swedish, you know, she really didn't know too much about her history. And I found that, in fact that Americans have very short, shallow genealogies. I mean, compared like, I'm an anthropologist, and I have to stand up in front of classes or in front of places where everyone's nail polish, and they want to genealogy from way back, you know, the last five generations and the people I work with couldn't give it to me. And you know, and then you get accused of not your fieldwork isn't systematic enough. I'm going to talk in Pat's class next week, I bet they're gonna say that social organization class, because my genealogies are not very deep. And the women couldn't really tell me, they really said, Well, my grandfather said he came from somewhere in near Denver, and then he moved to Brooklyn, and where did he meet your grandma? Well, I didn't know he came to Brooklyn, or she was living here. And that's that, you know, and they both died. And now we have the generation where I know, you know, there's the mother and the five kids and her grandchildren. But it's not like people really remember. So anyway, she's American, immigrant of past the past. And I don't think that people at least where I worked, there's this Italian American organizations, and there's Polish American organizations, and there's a memory and recreation of many traditional ideas, you know, like sauerkraut, and

Unknown Speaker  1:01:28
polish, there's Italian American in this nice little stores where they sell cheese, and I'm not putting it down, I think it really helps to build the strength in the neighborhood. But there's a lot of people that will go along with a lot of this and know it because they grew up in the neighborhood, but their father's Irish and their mother's polish or their mother's Austrian, you they don't really know. But they like it. And really, Polish music holds people together. And, you know, the little stores people know about, you know, ravioli, it's, I don't think it's really all that strong among many people. But the tradition helps to hold the communities together. But I don't like to reify American ethnicity, because I really don't think it's the way that's many people, you know, anthropologists go and study the Italian American community of Williamsburg or this community. And where I work, it's much more fluid, the boundaries and much a huge amount of intermarriage and very little real knowledge of their history, a lot of ideas. And, you know, they tell the American community that they can tell me that well, my grandfather came here in 1910. And he couldn't get a job. And he went back to Italy, until 1920. And then he came back here in 1925. And since then, we've lived in this neighborhood, but they don't either be they can't tell you what the grandfather or father's father where they came from in Italy. You know, some people can some people can't. Anyway, so this woman couldn't she marry had she married a man who was born in Puerto Rica. So she I don't know, what are children are some of that sometimes they identify as Hispanic because the son could get a job in a construction company because there was an affirmative action program for Hispanics. So he got he used to say that he was Hispanic, her daughters concern themselves. You know, Brooklyn, I guess is what you know, they don't identify as Hispanic at all, but they married Hispanic men. I don't know, you know, you can decide. But I think it's really not as clear as we make out. Anyway, this woman, her husband, was from Puerto Rico, but they they had four children, and they split up in 1959. And she went to work in a dyeing factory. And then the factory left New York City in 1970. And she and her sisters all become unemployed. Then she tried various other jobs. And finally, she went on to public assistance until 1977 When she got a job cleaning factories after hours, and that's what she did now. Now, the part that is important from political activity is that she and her children and her grandchildren were like the central organizers of the distribution of summer lunches on the block where they lived, also in setting up block activities for the children. They were like the her and her sisters like a kind of kindred among women were the this the core of a larger group that spent all their time telephoning agencies to get the seminar just delivered, deciding which kids could have them deciding which senior citizens could have and deciding which families in fact, the summer lunches were distributed throughout the area. They didn't just go to children, although that was mandated by this New York State. They were the supplementary diet for all the unemployed people and people living on public assistance, that many people it was their main meal, you know, they they save them for supper time, their sandwiches, and it was the control by these women that I'm talking that, that allowed people to survive, you know, without who would really have starving like then Mary and her children never had any food, some summers when her son couldn't get a job or when their daughter couldn't get a job, except those lunch, summer lunches, and her mother also was provided and other families around the block. That was the food that they had, because they lived on public assistance, public assistance, paid the rent, but they couldn't keep up the utilities. So they didn't have a stove. So they couldn't cook. They didn't have lights, because they couldn't keep that up, they didn't have a telephone only some people had telephones, they didn't have money for cigarettes, they didn't have money for transportation, sometimes, like one of the daughters would have a job as a salesperson or the son would have a part time summer job, you know, but it was really marginal. Plus, because of welfare, inflexible regulations, a lot of times if a woman moved out of the house and then move back, or if her children moved around, or if they got married or thought they were gonna get married, and she took them off welfare, then they were had weren't getting much fewer benefits than they really were entitled to. And as far as I'm concerned, the problem with benefits is that too few people are getting them to few people who are the, you know, have no other resources being put on the public assistance roles that need them. And certainly in this house, my Mary lived, she lived in this apartment, she had

Unknown Speaker  1:06:28
one son and three daughters, to all of the daughter's had children. And one period, she was always changing, you know, because if you're trying to live on the very bottom of your resources, you're always moving around trying to find place to live. One time that was her, her son, her daughter and a baby, and her other daughter and twins and an older child, living in this little railroad apartment, living on her one public assistance, her sheet and the mother Mary was the only one that had kept her public assistance, which was $49 Every two weeks plus the rent was paid. And one of the daughters was getting some subsidy from the military where her husband had you know, there's this is a thing, you're either controlled by the state on public assistance, or people go and look for jobs in the military, which is then your life is controlled by the army, you can come home on Christmas and Thanksgiving. You know, she had to beg when the twins were born that her husband could fly home from Alabama or he was in Georgia, I think. Anyway, so the summer lunches are extremely important. And that's the kind of thing that women were very much involved in and learning about how to deal with. Okay. I don't ever watch him go. Okay, I'll talk just very, very quickly that I would say that a lot of the basis for women's collective action was centered around childcare, that that was where women hang out on the street. Whenever you know, they grandmothers or pregnant women or whatever, meet one another and talk and learn about how to deal with Medicaid, how to deal with pregnancy, how to deal with childbirth, how to deal with child rearing, how to deal with bills, how to deal with rent, how to deal with public assistance, is on the street, I would say and babysitting. And this the sort of groups that form around babysitting are important for that kind of information and that kind of control of the area and for the later political organization, community organizations that develop and the most important demonstration and protests that occurred while I was in Greenpoint, was around the firehouse, maybe you've seen it was on the news a lot. Most people sometimes around 7675 76. And they still have it was beam was going to close that 24 fire houses and the neighborhood. The people, the firemen were very well known to the people in the area. And there was a lot of cooperation. It was always a social center. So when they heard that they were possibly going to be closed down, there was a lot of cooperation. The fireman rang the bell to let the community know that that firehouse that the engine was going to be taken away. And the firehouse would been closed down. And 300 people within an hour of the bell was rung, turned up and sat in the firehouse and some people moved in and they stayed there for over two years. Yeah. So and they got that firehouse back, of course while they were sitting in the firehouse, the hospital was being closed. You know, the library was getting close, but they did when the firehouse back and they also did a lot of other things demonstrating like they actually come up with the police because if you have the firemen on your side, you also have the police on your side and the question of jobs in New York City if you cut back on police and firemen, it's also in their interest to work in the Union firefighters union was extremely cooperative. And firefighters testified about the problems if you don't have a firehouse in an area that has

Unknown Speaker  1:10:08
liquid natural gas tanks, and wood frame houses and arson, no firehouse, right. So they the firefighters provided much of the information that community needed. And the they also got the police's cooperation. So when they said, they blocked the BQ, ie the Brooklyn Queens expressway during rush hour, at eight o'clock in the morning, seven, eight in the morning, the police cooperated. In fact, they had already told the police and he said you can block the area between this intersection this intersection, because that is our area. We, we you know, that was their district. If they went across the other intersection, they were in the wrong district and a different police force would come and arrest. So they were informed exactly where they could sit and they stay there for a couple hours. Nobody was arrested. The people were furious in the cars, you know, but it got on the news. And I really felt sorry for these trucks and the people late for work. But I mean, it was good. And you know, it works. They got the firehouse back. And with a lot of cooperation, and that wasn't just women. But it was built on a lot of assistance from women, a woman at her whole family moved into a fat house, a woman, her husband, husband's mother and all her friends. So the elderly women are very important. And the children, they had tremendous help with child care from other women with laundry with cooking with provision of food, so that they could live in that firehouse. And the reason just to point out how the state comes in again. The reason the man moved in and could thus harm the father that household was because he had just been put on disability just done something to his back in this where he worked in a soda factory, so he couldn't go back to work. And so they had a small income from disability that allowed the whole family to stay in that firehouse. The wife went on working throughout the whole thing and a meatpacking factory. And, you know, she ran the firehouse, provided the food looked after the kids and also kept a full time job. And that's another thing women on welfare are very, like Cheryl pointed out, they're not not working its way to call them not working class, because as far as I'm concerned, they're all most people on welfare are also working wherever they can, they're just not earning enough to live on or to pay the rent. And most of the women that I found, were working if they for as long as they could, and for as much time as they could pay. So there's the kind of things that were going on in Greenpoint, Williamsburg. I just wanted to contrast it in a way with what was going on in Puerto Rico. So that to get an idea of, I'm not going to talk a long time about Puerto Rico, just to give you a sense of the difference. It's a very different situation. The issues that again, there was a very strong protest movement around the air pollution and the occupational health hazards caused by the multinational corporation Union Carbide, which was polluting the area and spreading carcinogenic pitch throughout people's homes and food and clothes. And the people who work there were coming down with all sorts of problems. 600 workers were in the factory, about 50 of them came from this little village where I'm doing fieldwork, which was 500 yards from the factory. The leadership was very clearly male. That's one thing. That was I very few women leaders in this particular rural area, I'm not sure if it's the same in the city. And I don't want to expand from that, because I think it's very different depending on each situation. But although the leadership was male, and although the women were more isolated, because you had to get around by con the men drove many of the women didn't drive or they didn't drive a stick shift and the only cause people had the stiction. So the women were isolated, even though they had some neighbors, but it wasn't quite the same. But there was despite that, of course, there were women helping one another with laundry, women helping one another with cooking total exchange of chickens and rice and plantains and breadfruit. And everything, you know, you've got breadfruit in your garden, I've got bananas in mine, you know, those kinds of exchanges all the time. But it wasn't just women. It was also between men, rabbits, you know, everything was exchanged. Women were of course, doing all the cooking, and all the preparation of food. And it was not usually one woman It was usually their sisters, even if their sisters lived in another town. Tremendous cooperation. So that if you had a meeting, the women, of course, provided all that, but they didn't usually take leadership roles, although there was one point at which the women organized a women's protest to this factory and and when the governor came to this town, there was a women's demonstration and they went all the way to San Juan, which is about 50 miles away, but it's a long trip for where there's long term and

Unknown Speaker  1:14:48
to put, you know, to put their point of view about what was happening in the community, but even though it was a community organization, and surrender, it was around school issues around health issues was around Real Estate issues, it was not just around the factory because the factory was influencing all these areas, men were in leadership. And there was there was a leadership of five people a steering committee, it was all men. However, the people who pointed out the early health problem were the women. And the connection between the five men on the steering committee was that they were brothers in law, you know that it was the women's the sisters that pulled together, one man who was in Independence, one man who was much more conservative, one man who was a factory worker, one that it was, they were all married to the same Sisters is a family of seven sisters. And then on the other side, the man that first started the demonstration. His son was married to one of those sisters, too. And his son was married to a woman whose sister was the wife of the man who became the second head, you know, so clearly the women extremely involved and all the connections were between mostly many, many of the strongest groups, and the base for that organization was among brothers in laws. And the sisters did a tremendous amount, but they did not take leadership positions. And I'm not sure exactly I don't have the answer. I'm just telling you the differences, if you've got some answers, one of the differences is there is no public assistance in Puerto Rico, there are only food stamps, so that women cannot through access to state funds provide for the family. So the fans that the unemployment in this village was 20% of the people were working. And 20% were unemployed. And the rest were, didn't catch themselves as they're like, when I did a survey, they said we're housewives, retired, disabled, all sorts of words. They didn't say they were unemployed. So you get a thing. You've just do unemployment say it's 20% unemployment, you do employment, you find 20% employment. So I think it's a very high rate of unemployment of people dependent on funds other than work funds, you know, social security, they get SSI, you can get in Puerto Rico, Supplemental Security, and you can get Social Security if you work and men have more access, because they've been working in more long term jobs, although women if they work as garment workers can also get that. And then food stamps, yeah, food stamps, but you don't get it through directly through them. And you do not get welfare through women. So that's a big difference. And I don't know if it's the defining difference, no Medicaid. They have public clinics and Puerto Rico, they have a different system. So it's different. And I think that may be the reason or, you know, I don't really I'm not sure yet, I'm still thinking about this issue. So I'll leave it at that. But there really was a difference in the way that men and women related within political and community organizations. And although women were extremely important and active, they weren't in quite the same role that you find them here in New York City. And I'm talking in New York City. This is I don't think it's a difference of Hispanic. And you know, why not kidding? Because in New York City, many of the women that I work with and taught were Hispanic, or, you know, like I said, there's very difficult to work out exactly. But I don't think that's the direct difference. And I'm not sure that in San Juan, it wouldn't be more like New York City. So that's basically, if you have any questions. Many people have.

Unknown Speaker  1:18:50
I have a question. Comment in terms of what I was involved in a study of women, community organizers in several cities, and found in Chicago, this is not unlike Puerto Rico that several of them had been involved in COVID. Org, his community organization and found it necessary to set up their own organization to do the company they thought was more important. They had trouble in attaining their community organizations there. This might just be one instance.

Unknown Speaker  1:19:26
I think that's probably true. I mean, I think it's probably saying, because there was tremendous, I talked to a lot of the women and they were extremely well informed and ready to go out there. And they said, but my husband won't let me off. And so I can't and when when my children grow up, I'm going to leave and I'm going to organize,

Unknown Speaker  1:19:45
it's also priorities, numbers, they're more interested in certain education, childcare, and the inter COVID organization would not put that up as the high priority story.

Unknown Speaker  1:19:57
Well, in this case, one thing I didn't say The the men in this little barrier, were involved in all those activities with the women and become involved notice, they were the ones that took you down to Social Security. They were the ones that went through the different financial problems with the state. They took those roles. And did they worked around health issues and education. It wasn't the community wasn't involved in the same issues. It was just that it was men who were doing it. Right. And I thought that was kind of interesting. And I don't know why I'm

Unknown Speaker  1:20:30
in that areas have Puerto Rican and lived out the 10 years pingbacks teaching a daycare center, Neyland, frustrating thing that you find is, and I hate to define this as like, an ethnic stereotype or something, but sort of the macho image and a nerdy way that you know, the men go out and do things associated with men and women look pretty and have babies.

Unknown Speaker  1:20:58
Well, it's funny, though, because it doesn't fit the Magi image that the men are working around health issues and helping people get health insurance and organizing all the things that we regard as women's roles. And

Unknown Speaker  1:21:09
it just being so that they're in charge, or whatever my friend teaches in the daycare center, it is mostly women teachers, because I think, yeah, that's the thing women are supposed to do. But even there are some men who teach their buddies and he's so frustrated by boys do this, the girls do that. And it just seems to be, he said, he never really felt that Hispanic when he was growing up. But being in that center, I said, this culture is so weird, because that said, that has something to do with. Well, I think

Unknown Speaker  1:21:42
historically in rural areas, so it's more of a division of labor. It's not so much matchup, but it's a different relationship between men and women. And where I worked was just, it had farms just as one multinational two had worked moved in and 69. So you know, that might have had something to do with it. I don't think it's like necessarily that there's a culture that's keeping people down

Unknown Speaker  1:22:10
black women teachers, as doing cultural work survival.

Unknown Speaker  1:22:18
As they've been elementary school teachers, or high school teachers, did the respondents in your sample mentioned, doing any kind of important cultural work or not?

Unknown Speaker  1:22:32
Historically, had one woman in the serve in fact, I'll read you a quote from her because she, at the time I interviewed her, she was an elected official, she was one of the women who had done the blue collar work, role, marriage, and in the, in the larger analysis. Coming up working class meant that instead of going to college, like your parents wanted you to do, which is the whole aspirations issue in the black community. You went to work and got married and had children all practically, you know, that was like the same time, there's no, you don't sequence it out. So she's in the labor force. And she talked about those problems. But then as she started doing the doing community work, and she gotten involved through her children, in certain issues, she and she, she acquired a bachelor's degree and I asked her, when did you get the degree because at this point, I'm talking to a state official, and she said, in elementary education, so and she said, and I quote, I heard people talking about how black parents were apathetic. And I never believed that black parents were apathetic. There were a number of circumstances that kept them from participating in the process. First of all, most of them were working and couldn't. The second thing was that parents had always had the feeling that I was under the same impression until I became involved with the teachers, that teachers were always right, because we meaning black people always have this great respect for education. I felt even though I worked with a parents group, that because I wasn't a teacher, no one took my words very seriously. And I decided that I was going to become a teacher not to work in the classroom, but to work with parents, once she's reflecting though, is historically, the black leadership class has been school teachers, and male and female. Had I done a study of community workers without reference to gender. I went and ended up with the women's sample was largely human service education that people in Human Services sometimes did a stint in schools. I mean, education is the biggie and you That's I mean, everybody gets involved in a fight surrounding education at some point because schools never do right by black children. I mean, that just one woman said, so Well, you can't, you can't assume that the institution is organized, you know, to help you, you assume that the organization is organized, the institution is organized to be hostile towards you. That's the basic assumption. So that traditionally, no, if I had done a male sample, I would have had almost the reverse of what I had with women, the women, I had mostly human service professionals, and a couple of religious professionals, ministers, and one who ran a bureaucracy, where she was the head honcho, and then had to sort of push all these blackmail ministers into doing what they were supposed to be doing. Hadn't been do a male sample, it would have been a lot of black male ministers and a few black male human service professionals educated. But mostly, even the ministers have done your stint, elementary school teacher. So that your leadership classes start with your post Civil War leadership class has been preachers and teachers, meaning men and women, okay, and always, within the black cultural context, referred to as educators, collectively. So you have to deal with the fact that you don't have this gender separation, when it comes to organizing around these tasks. And that education traditionally, has been an enemy prior to the end of the Civil War, it was treated like a sacrament, and which is why one of the reasons that your early educational contexts are also these black religious institutions. So educating, educating and the race, combating mis education, which ends up with Woodson and borrows the rest of them and Black History Month. And then the educational structure, and the whole problem of Jim Crow, and everything that's followed after has been central to the tasks of community work. You know, watching.

Unknown Speaker  1:27:40
Describe this incredible amount of organizing work that goes on in history for escapologist really great, your networks out there the things that are going on? And I don't know about. And that's wonderful. But then I think, well, if it is that way, then and all of that is just sort of helping people to keep the status quo, just helping them to keep from starving to death out there, then my question is What? What can one do with those networks that are there that have not been detected? Once one knows that they're there, to try to organize on another level against I don't know, the real estate or big city interest? It, I find it on the one hand encouraging and discouraging when I hear that there's so much going on, that I didn't know about that word there, then, you know, the body was tired of the whole thing. But where are we going to take that? Or do you see your work?

Unknown Speaker  1:28:48
Well, I think that as the movements that they are right now, they're not going to bring about major changes. I think it's more that if you recognize that there's this amount of organizing and networks within these communities, that has not really been like the community organization has never been put together with workers organizations in any very strong form. That was the fact that now we're dealing with a situation where you've got to somehow limit industry require corporate responsibility, those kinds of questions in order to survive, you know, to say that people have a way of life in cities that you can't evict poor people tend those kind of things, that it has to be abroad and national movement. But it has to take into account the fact that we have that in neighborhoods there is this level of energy and organizing that can be tapped that can be brought in and brought into a much more systematic national organizations, I don't think as of themselves are going to mushroom. I haven't seen that happen. There's been some effort to organize neighborhood networks nationally and things like that. since then I haven't been very effective. And I don't think they can be I think the reason that the firehouse demonstration was effective was just because the firefighters and police were involved. And that if you take, you've got to get those women in the community organizations, the level of respect to their leadership and their capabilities, working together with the unemployed men, in some kind of larger organization is the only way I see it being important and effective. Not mean, I see, it's important that by itself, but not nationally, having major effects.

Unknown Speaker  1:30:34
Well, I was just what,

Unknown Speaker  1:30:37
if you remember, what I think I remember

Unknown Speaker  1:30:40
correctly, most of us who were fighting, were involved in anti busing.

Unknown Speaker  1:30:45
Some of them, it was half and half, she doesn't look at issues, which is like one of my criticisms of that book.

Unknown Speaker  1:30:51
The reason I mentioned, it is important not to romanticize what women do. Because in fact, it's not yet really progressively political.

Unknown Speaker  1:31:01
I think that's what you have to do with it. See, I

Unknown Speaker  1:31:04
think there's a there's people out there that are looking to organize around issues, and they then you get, I think, it's it's important to put, you know, to encourage in the direction that's not reactionary and things like that. And I didn't see in a way where I work, that much of that kind of organizing among women, Kathy McCourt documented a lot more, maybe the issue was much harder, but an awesome last minute.

Unknown Speaker  1:31:30
But the other thing is, you got to say which women,

Unknown Speaker  1:31:34
which women, you know, you say what women do is not necessarily progressive. I mean, my historical reading of black woman's activities comes up very different judgments on their role, and what a lot of these women get, and particularly, in terms of, you know, what difference does it make that, you know, women are hooked up in a community, and you have folks whose class origins are mixed, the reality is that you've had two major movements within black America among black women, that have smashed the various plants to different generations, enough so that you have enough of the infrastructure among women that does cross community lines, people do know each other. And people do share through a variety of networks that are not necessarily women's organizations, per se. But maybe women's segments are there, or if they're autonomous women's organizations and women who come to power in organizations that to both men and women, usually have good constituency, in their own organizations and women's autonomous organization. So depends on what it means

Unknown Speaker  1:32:50
to suggest that there has a dynamic progressive change has been initiated, carried out by not at all, but

Unknown Speaker  1:32:57
just I'm sort of interested in finding out from both of you what the reaction of the men was to these women's organizations and groups. I mean, is there a lot of tension going on? Is there a lot of cooperation, or the women's organizations they seem to be? They? I mean, I was wondering whether the reason why there's no national political movement of these sort of organizations is because their goals are to preserve their community, and they're there to preserve their home and perhaps to preserve their husband's job or to get their husband a job or to get their community back to work or, you know, and how does it help the men look at these women? Do they support them? Do they not support them is does that prevent women from becoming nationally organized? Because they don't want to usurp the roles that they assume should be for their men? Is that something that's going on?

Unknown Speaker  1:33:53
I don't think so. That's my impression. I

Unknown Speaker  1:33:55
mean, well,

Unknown Speaker  1:33:57
when I when I've run into basically the problems that black women have had over the last 20 years, and the women that I interviewed, really talked about what the problem they had with black men was that, you know, they've been hit at this organization. They may have even found or up the chair before. And they'd say, No, don't you think you ought to step aside? No memory, they think they already have the power in that particular agency or this particular I don't want to step aside and let a man take over because it looks bad. Okay.

Unknown Speaker  1:34:38
They didn't have that problem.

Unknown Speaker  1:34:41
Prior to the 1960s. We got Mr. Blaney and go back. Very good written record of black new attitudes towards women and leadership. Joining me WB Dubois is crisis. And you get this very supportive said crisis right? He's when he was the editor of WEB DuBois was first editor of the crisis, which is the national magazine for the NAACP. And it just talks about the role of black women. And you can sort of argue indirectly from the voice that statement that the magazine was almost a reaction of black men to say, let's get into gear because women already have this together, and we don't. And that's an implicate it's an influence, one could draw. And which is arguable, but it can be drawn and I think, arguably a certain degree of reasonableness. But the fact of the matter is that be Josephine St. Pierre referred definition of the women's movement, which is what 918 9690 right around that time, is that a women's movement is a movement led by women, that does not alienate or withdraw, etc. So if you go to a black woman's convention for any kind of group, like a church group, you'll find with men there who come along with their wives to enjoy the same way, when you go to conventions, where it's mostly men, you find women coming along with their husbands to go enjoy. And the husbands may even get to get, but there's a certain supportiveness, particularly among men came of age prior to that you don't find the real generational difference. And when I report, the more I see of the kinds of mindsets that I run into, particularly in males, who have been influenced or affected by either it or the post Moynihan period, is that give me a 55 year old black man any day to support in terms of what a woman's role in terms of leadership could be, because they're not affected by that. But the younger ones are, and because it made the race look bad. And so it was like women, traditionally, they had got snatches like some it takes a tablecloth and goes to and you know, tries to leave China standing but fail. And the that was the one cultural assault on black women, it was the one time it really did penetrate, I think, to the core, internal core, more so than other historical assaults on animated black, white America has traditionally used black women's roles as an ideological point, you say, See, you're not ready. And that's become, you know, historically. But this was the one time it penetrated to the core, because the delivery of the message was to the black elite. If you remember, the Moynihan Report came out after Johnson gave the speech at how to the house graduating class telling them that you got to get rid of your mother headed households and your dependency on women. And this is to a graduating class whose parents are three generation nuclear families. And so the message straight to the black elite, and sponsor, black press was very different than what it had been before, when it was a message that came from non credible white sources going into prison in the United States people listened. So the I am very angry, really I get the more I study, look at the ideological effect, the angrier I get. And, you know, the classic statement in that report, you know, by your dear senator is, ours is a society that presumes male leadership and public and private affair, any segment of the society that doesn't like why he's doing it? That's the second half, it is not the backwards, but the first part is just a society that presumes male leadership and public and private. And, you know, straight up and what's interesting is that, you know, it hurt me, it hurt, not emotional sense, but it hurt me structural sense, in terms of organizations becoming conscious of the fact that it doesn't do good for us to have leadership. And unfortunately, a lot of women say it doesn't look good for us to be in so you get, you know, younger women who are less assertive

Unknown Speaker  1:39:42
and less aggressive about holding wrong. And these women that I interviewed, they said, Well, we're holding on to these, you know, these younger women get get their act together. But they noticed the difference in terms of the men being less progressive and that was all on what one was at play, she

Unknown Speaker  1:40:01
said, you're less progressive. And that was those exactly what she said. And that

Unknown Speaker  1:40:08
it was a problem. So how long can you hold on to these institutions to this place until folks get their act together? So it's a real, you know, we had a regressive effect on the position.

Unknown Speaker  1:40:20
Yeah, I think just one show that a lot of the women were in personal ways, their husbands objected to them going out at night, and they had a lot of trouble

Unknown Speaker  1:40:29
with that they

Unknown Speaker  1:40:31
had a lot of trouble with them borrowing. Yeah. And then I was gonna say, and then in terms of racism, I think that was a big issue, not just that one example, many examples, where there was a lot more unwillingness on the part of the men to cooperate across racial ethnic groups, much more, because they weren't directly involved in the organization, they didn't recognize nearly as quickly as the women that that they were in a very similar situation. And that was, the women were much, much

Unknown Speaker  1:41:00
with one more point, the women in

Unknown Speaker  1:41:02
my study to not have husband, that was when they were married, their husbands were extremely supportive. And to the point where I had a couple of couples who had partnerships and community with their husbands would have done males, their husbands would have been in the male sample. So

Unknown Speaker  1:41:20
a lot of the people who were very organizing my men or women, it didn't lead if they had an independent income, like seated, so people splitting up.

Unknown Speaker  1:41:32
I actually have a question that sort of follows on that, which is about the consciousness of these women. I'm struck by in both of your talks, but contrast between on the one hand the sort of powerful, resourceful roles that the women play in the community at the same time, the issues that they're working around are really not at all gender specific. It sounds like from what you I guess, I just wonder what, to what extent that is what creates the space for their ability to be active in the community? And to what extent there is anything that sort of woman specific and not necessarily feminists, which I gather is not part of the picture, but just what comments do you both have on on that dimension?

Unknown Speaker  1:42:10
Well, they were instantly organized around daycare, I don't know, women's specific, is that the kind of thing you'd be no women's jobs,

Unknown Speaker  1:42:17
in particular in mind, I guess, except it sounds like the issues that you've offered, that you refer to are more survival is just for the community as a whole and not involved with any kind of gender conflict, either in the community or elsewhere, or female identity or anything like that. Is that a right? A correct reading of it? Or?

Unknown Speaker  1:42:36
Well, nobody, where I would put it in those terms at all. I mean, that wasn't, it wasn't like, you know, I'm a woman and I have the right to do this. It was more like, we need this and women's responsibilities. I don't think I think it's gender specific. And the things that they took that were women's responsibilities, you know, education, childcare, health, but I don't think that they were organizing for women in particular,

Unknown Speaker  1:43:03
there's a difference also in the populations that we're talking to your entire communities. I have an entire community. But it's a whole spectrum. I have women who remember who have been identified by reputation. by others, I mean, so I have sort of, I have a political elite in the sense that they're the most admired. And they're the busiest and to certain extent, therefore the most powerful, but the other piece of that is that in addition to the community, identification of the blue networks, to people who went into saying this, they also had have within black community newspapers, various, they had to have been identified this for a certain year, so that they were not women who were drawn in by poverty programs. And then, you know, I had the folks who were already at it, and had been identified by the community prior to a certain date, and that was prizes. So my sample for the folks who really become very skilled at it, and, you know, have moved and they've been mobile, not necessarily economically, but status wise, but on behalf of the community so that they're, we're dealing with a slightly different ballgame. And also the historical depth. I've got people and all the women in my state belong to organizations that were all women's organizations. I mean, they made no bones about the fact that they needed a collective base from which to deal with these other issues. And one of the things about coming to power, and things like Urban League, and things like that NAACP, we always see the National Presidents we don't see the local president and someone estimate It interview that I did here in New York in the national office, that the majority of local urban league presidents women. Now, I don't know that

Unknown Speaker  1:45:10
the unions, okay. And certain unions,

Unknown Speaker  1:45:13
so that so that and but they come to power because they've already been in women's groups and they see those as key to their having the sophistication to be able to fight on a more complex scale. So, we're Yeah, we have populations that we focused on, she had a question.

Unknown Speaker  1:45:38
My question has to do with the

Unknown Speaker  1:45:40
Moynihan Report, during the 60s, late 60s and early 70s, there was a movement in a certain segment of the black community, where as the women were supposed to walk behind the men, and there was polygamous relationships. Stemming from the fact I think I need to know that the man is supposed to lead the woman, therefore, since there weren't enough men to go around, I think there's statistics that prove that a man can have more than one women so that he can guide them.

Unknown Speaker  1:46:18
I would call it

Unknown Speaker  1:46:19
a movement. Let's put this

Unknown Speaker  1:46:23
in terms of numbers of folks. Because I mean, folks who have a the late 60s When he was when people started adopting different nationalist ideas, okay, when nationalism came to the fore, again, which the two ideas, integration, ism, and nationalism, nationalism, slash separatism, always have really a parallel track and throughout the entire history of the black community, and you look straight back into slavery, and it's fine. Those two sets of ideas and various along, let's say an integration is continuous and separate is continuous. Those complexes of ideas have always coexisted at sometimes, under some conditions, they come to the fore, what the, the eruption that you're talking about, occurred in some areas, where folks were trying on through science, different kinds of national, cultural nationalist, as well as politically nationalist ideas. So folks borrow from polygamy they borrowed from what their conception of Islam was. Okay. But what was interesting, and Tony Kaye writes about this in the book, the black woman, she has a beautiful essay, she talks about how women's would have been was his attitude. Well, you know, let's get behind the brothers. Yeah. And that didn't last too long. But it lasted too long. And for some folks, that reality, and for a lot of men, and see it was, it was not so much the women as the men wear, you know, white America assessment guides, if you will, if you obey sexes, we will store exes. And some, and I mean, the oh, I mean, I don't want to go into it, here, but it. You know, they picked up on the anti woman message in that generation. And part of the reason being that, I know that one of your input didn't just come out with the speech from Nixon, I mean, from Johnson. From Johnson, and then the report coming out, it was a whole public relations campaign that went on in the federal government, pamphlets were passed out, my father worked for the Small Business Administration, and they had stacks of these little Catholics talking about the problem of the black man. And it was just, I mean, you know, you hear it, you know, here I am a freshman in college and sophomore in college, you're supposed to pick up on all of this. There was just something really wrong with that. But I mean, things like the inhabiting the city were distributed for free among federal bureaucrats. There was a whole ideological campaign to turn around and to, you know, really get this blaming the victim ideology into the public consciousness. The whole story stereotype of black people, kids in my classes is saying, well, people don't tend they don't want go to school with us, because we don't have no fathers. And we're for that I mean, that whole period a number it changed the face of racism in terms of what was a racial stereotype, it was no longer on step in Fetchit. Now because you're poor, and you don't have no fathers, and whatever racial stereotype comes down the pipe, for any group, you know, being racial stereotype or ethnic stereotype, the group's going to try to act in a way to avoid getting accused of fitting in. And so there was a whole set of ideas that were riding around and assaulting. I mean, it was one big cultural assault. And the black community with the assault was on the Civil Rights Movement. Therefore, it was on the black community, which was, you know, one expression of that larger political culture that had been so much a part of the history. So you have to look at that larger context and it's why you can