Wearing the Armor of Our History

At this time of year when so many of us are overwhelmed with taking care of other people, it may help to be reminded of the women whose tireless work has benefited women everywhere, while not yet lightening the load conferred by doing the essential work—caretaking, teaching—without adequate pay. I like to remind myself of how radical our philosophy is, and how often targeted, diminished and deleted by the patriarchy that surrounds us like a woolen scarf tied much too tight.

For years, the agents of patriarchy have tried to find ways to separate us, beginning in 1970 with the often repeated claim that black women were not given fair representation in our movement.

The death of Dorothy Pitman Hughes, “Black Feminist Trailblazer” according to the half-page New York Times obituary, brings back the photograph I remember well of Gloria Steinem and Hughes, standing side by side, their left arms raised, fists clenched, in the universal sign of rebellion. It’s ironic that this photo was first published in Esquire Magazine.

Hughes died recently at 84, leaving behind as a legacy her fierce fight to have her sisters’ issues—race, class and motherhood—boldly represented by the women’s movement. These are, of course, the issues of all women but their impact falls hardest on women of color in our racist system.

Steinem and Hughes met in 1969 when Steinem was writing an article about the West 80th Street Day Care Center in Manhattan, which Hughes had founded in 1966 when the idea of a daycare center for the children of working women was itself revolutionary. Parents ran the Center’s board of directors.

Steinem called Hughes, “a beautiful black Saul Alinsky,” a reference to the Chicago labor organizer. Her understanding of the connection between the struggles of black working-class mothers and systemic racism brought a needed point of view to the movement that woke me to political consciousness in the 70’s and ever after.

I was fortunate to see them both in Kentucky when they came to the University of Kentucky as part of their national tour in the early 1970’s. At that time, I’d never seen a black woman and a white woman on the stage together. Their presentation was electrifying. Most impressive to me was Steinem’s concluding insistence that the hundreds of women students in the audience must begin at once to organize. Sitting, listening and agreeing were not enough.

Later, at another occasion, Hughes said, ”In most audiences that I speak to, I don’t see very many friends or sisters because white women have not yet learned or come to the conclusion to change for themselves how much they have been part of my oppression as a black woman and only until that has been changed can we have sisterhood”—a statement that was hard for me and perhaps for many others in the nearly all-white audience to accept. And yet of course it was true and remains true to this day.

Hughes continued her campaign to support daycare centers for working mothers, fighting off by means of a strike of 150 daycare workers New York City’s attempt to regulate these centers and absorb them into the welfare system. It didn’t work. By the 1980’s, the city required all daycare workers to have college degrees and government licenses, neither of which Hughes had, and which were largely unobtainable by the black women who ran her center. She closed it in 1985.

She then opened a printing center in Harlem where black activists could print leaflets and fliers for a moderate sum. Later she expanded it to sell office supplies to city agencies and black-owned businesses in the area. But when the federal government founded a so-called “opportunity zone” in Harlem, designed to lure big businesses, Hughes closed her shop. A Staples Office Supply Store had moved across the street.

As she told The Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville in 2013, “ Without economic empowerment, you are not free, and Black folks have not gained the freedom we fought for.”

What a long way she had come from her beginnings, one of nine children in Lumpkin, Georgia where Jim Crow laws manacled the black residents to poverty and roving bands of white men sometimes drove through the town on Saturday nights, shooting into houses where Hughes and the other children hid under beds.

Hughes and Steinem remained friends for the rest of her life. In 2013, they posed together for a retake of their iconic portrait, their left hands still raised in the air.

[The 2013 photo can be seen at this Ms. Magazine article from 2021.]

In Women feminism Gloria Steinem