America Dreaming

by Laban Carrick Hill

  Newark, NJ – Spirit House

  Chicago – The Organization of Black American Culture, Kuumba Theatre Company

  Los Angeles – Ebony Showcase, Inner City Repertory Company, Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles

  In March of 1965, following the February assassination of Malcolm X, Baraka moved from the Lower East Side of Manhattan uptown to Harlem. This move was more than just a physical move. It was also a psychological move for Baraka and the other artists who joined him. Baraka and the others, including Askia Touré and Larry Neal, were shedding their integrationist position. Baraka was a celebrated poet, music critic, OBIE Award–winning playwright, and a major figure in the white literary establishment. He rejected that position and moved into a brownstone on 130th Street near Lenox Avenue, where he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS). “The announcement of our arrival in Harlem was a parade, with the small group of young Black artists, led by the great genius Sun Ra and his then Myth Science Arkestra,” wrote Baraka years later. For eight weeks that summer, BARTS led a festival of the Black Arts in the streets of Harlem. Using five trucks and folding tables as stages, they brought poetry, drama, painting, music, and dance every night to playgrounds, street corners, vacant lots, and parks. Their mission was to celebrate the new idea of “Blackness” as a liberating force.

  BARTS, however, was much too revolutionary even for many blacks. It promoted violence and the overthrow of the government as the ways to achieve their goals. Obviously, this kind of extremism could not sustain itself. Nevertheless, the ambitions of this group and others less radical would eventually change American culture.

  In later years, Baraka wrote about what the Black Arts Movement was really about:

  To fight in the super structure, in the realm of ideas, philosophies, the arts, academia, the class struggle between the oppressed and the oppressor. To re-create and maintain our voice as a truly self-conscious, self-determining entity, to interpret and focus our whole lives and history. And create those organizations and institutions that will finally educate, employ, entertain, and liberate us!

  Others also participated in making these goals a reality. Around the same time that BARTS was being organized, Dr. Robert Pritchard helped establish a guild society called the American Festival of Negro Art, which promoted Africa as the “fount and reservoir of our cultural strength.” In Sumter, South Carolina, Morris College sponsored Negro History Week, which featured African arts and crafts, a special course on the Swahili language, and presentations on black history in the United States and black contributions to American culture through jazz and literature. It seemed like every black community was coming alive with festivals celebrating blackness. These efforts quickly helped African Americans redefine themselves within society by emphasizing their African and Caribbean heritage.

  REJECTING “NEGRO”

  Young blacks were offended by the term “Negro,” because it was an identity chosen by whites. They began looking for a name that blacks constructed themselves and that reflected the black community. The first choice was “Black.” As the discussion evolved in the ’60s and beyond, a more ethnic reference emerged: Afro American. This then evolved into African American because it encouraged the community to value its own heritage.

  The late ’60s and early ’70s became the “Black Is Beautiful” era. Symbols of African heritage became prevalent everywhere: new “Afro” haircuts, dashiki shirts, African robes. West Coast nationalist Maulana Ron Karenga developed a black cultural catechism, which included a black holiday (Kwanzaa), the Swahili language, and cultural imagery of traditional Tanzanian society.

  What began with black militants attempting to create a heightened sense of group identity quickly turned into a deeper and more accurate understanding of black people. This challenged traditional Eurocentric norms that for more than three centuries of slavery and segregation had forced blacks into an inferior role. It also opened the doors for other non-European cultures to finally take their rightful place in the American mosaic.

  * * *

  WOMEN

  WORKING

  * * *

  OUR BODIES

  OUR POLITICS

  WOMEN TAKING CONTROL OF THEIR DESTINY

  THE PROBLEM WITH NO NAME

  The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—

  “Is this all?”

  Just what was this problem that has no name?

  This excerpt from Betty Friedan’s 1963 groundbreaking book, The Feminine Mystique, describes the dissatisfaction felt by women all across the country. Its publication was an event that redefined American culture and put words to the feelings that many women were having—the problem that had no name.

  I feel as if I don’t exist.

  Friedan stumbled upon her topic at her fifteen-year college reunion at Smith, a women’s college. A housewife and freelance magazine writer, she crafted a questionnaire for her two hundred fellow classmates to fill out. The results confirmed something that she had been feeling herself—most of these highly educated, middle-class women were unhappy and did not know why.

  Just what was this problem that has no name? What were the words women used when they tried to express it? Sometimes a woman would say “I feel empty somehow … incomplete.” Or she would say, “I feel as if I don’t exist.” Sometimes she blotted out the feeling with a tranquilizer. Sometimes she thought the problem was with her husband or her children, or that what she really needed was to redecorate her house, or move to a better neighborhood, or have an affair, or another baby. Sometimes she went to a doctor with symptoms she could hardly describe: “A tired feeling … I get so angry with the children it scares me…. I feel like crying without any reason.” (A Cleveland doctor called it “the housewife’s syndrome.”) A number of women told me about great bleeding blisters that break out on their hands and arms. “I call it the housewife’s blight” said a family doctor in Pennsylvania. “I see it so often lately in these young women with four, five and six children who bury themselves in their dishpans. But it isn’t caused by detergent and it isn’t cured by cortisone.”

  The irony of her discovery was that no one initially wanted to hear what she had to say. Her research contradicted all the traditional assumptions about femininity—“a woman’s place was in the home.” She was turned down by three women’s magazines because, according to them, the topic was not pertinent to women.

  Eventually, the book sparked a national debate about a woman’s role in society and in time was recognized as one of the central works of the modern Women’s Movement.

  The women who suffer this problem have a hunger that food cannot fill.

  It is NO longer possible to ignore that voice, to dismiss the desperation of so many American women. This is not what being a woman means, no matter what the experts say. For human suffering there is a reason; perhaps the reason has not been found because the right questions have not been asked, or pressed far enough. I do not accept the answer that there is no problem because American women have luxuries that women in other times and lands never dreamed of; part of the strange newness of the problem is that it cannot be understood in terms of the age-old material problems of man: poverty, sickness, hunger, cold. The women who suffer this problem have a hunger that food cannot fill…. It is not caused by lack of material advantages; it may not even be felt by women preoccupied with desperate problems of hunger, poverty or illness…. It is no longer possible today to blame the problem on loss of femininity: to say that education and independence and equality with men have made American women un
feminine. I have heard so many women try to deny this dissatisfied voice within themselves because it does not fit the pretty picture of femininity the experts have given them. I think, in fact, that this is the first clue to the mystery; the problem cannot be understood in the generally accepted terms by which scientists have studied women, doctors have treated them, counselors have advised them, and writers have written about them. Women who suffer this problem, in whom this voice is stirring, have lived their whole lives in the pursuit of feminine fulfillment. They are not career women (although career women may have other problems); they are women whose greatest ambition has been marriage and children. For the oldest of these women, these daughters of the American middle class, no other dream was possible. The ones in their forties and fifties who once had other dreams gave them up and threw themselves joyously into life as housewives. For the youngest, the new wives and mothers, this was the only dream. They are the ones who quit high school and college to marry, or marked time in some job in which they had no real interest until they married. These women are very “feminine” in the usual sense, and yet they still suffer the problem.

  I feel empty somehow … incomplete.

  Betty Friedan

  We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: “I want some -thing more than my husband and my children and my home.”

  Marshaling a wealth of statistics and first-person accounts, Friedan came to a radical conclusion: The idealized image of the American family was causing irreparable harm to women. According to Friedan, women had been encouraged to confine themselves to the narrow roles of housewife and mother, forsaking education and career aspirations in the process. Friedan attempted to prove that the feminine mystique denied women the opportunity to develop their own identities, which could ultimately lead to problems for women and their families. Friedan saw the feminine mystique as a failed social experiment that the end of World War II and the Cold War helped to create. Women were forced to leave the work world when the soldiers came home from the war and to follow the ’50s dictate of “build a better America” by building families.

  NOW BILL OF RIGHTS

  The National Organization for Women (NOW) was established on June 30, 1966, in Washington, D.C., by people attending the Third National Conference of the Commission on the Status of Women. Among NOW’s twenty-eight founders was its first president, Betty Friedan, and the Rev. Pauli Murray, the first African-American woman Episcopal priest. They coauthored NOW's original Statement of Purpose, which began:

  The purpose of NOW is to take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men.

  One year later, in Washington, D.C., at its first national conference, the organization adopted a bill of rights:

  BILL OF RIGHTS

  We Demand

  I. That the U.S. Congress immediately pass the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution to provide that “Equality of Rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” and that such then be immediately ratified by the several states.

  II. That equal employment opportunity be guaranteed to all women, as well as men, by insisting that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission enforces the prohibition against racial discrimination.

  III. That women be protected by law to ensure their rights to return to their jobs within a reasonable time after childbirth without loss of seniority or other accrued benefits, and be paid maternity leave as a form of social security and/or employee benefits.

  IV. Immediate revision of tax laws to permit the deduction of home and childcare expenses for working parents.

  V. That childcare facilities be established by law on the same basis as parks, libraries, and public schools, adequate to the needs of children from the pre-school years through adolescence, as a community resource to be used by all citizens from all income levels.

  VI. That the right of women to be educated to their full potential equally with men be secured by Federal and State legislation, eliminating all discrimination and segregation by sex, written and unwritten, at all levels of education, including colleges, graduate and professional schools, loans and fellowships, and Federal and State training programs such as the Jobs Corps.

  VII. The right of women in poverty to secure job training, housing, and family allowances on equal terms with men, but without prejudice to a parent’s right to remain at home to care for his or her children; revision of welfare legislation and poverty programs which deny women dignity, privacy, and self-respect.

  VIII. The right of women to control their own reproductive lives by removing from the penal code laws limiting access to contraceptive information and devices, and by repealing penal laws governing abortion.

  THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL

  Sick and tired of being relegated to stuffing envelopes and preparing meals, fed up with sacrificing for causes that were peripheral to their own lives, angry at being pushed to the sidelines of Vietnam War protests and the Civil Rights Movement simply because of their gender, women involved in radical politics suddenly had a moment of self-awareness. While the men in the organizations dealt with the “real” issues, the women were relegated to “women’s work.” As they looked around and shared their experiences with each other, they realized their lives were not changing. In her 1970 bestseller Sisterhood Is Powerful, editor Robin Morgan wrote:

  Thinking we were involved in the struggle to build a new society, it was a slowly dawning and depressing realization that we were doing the same work in the Movement as out of it; typing the speeches men delivered; making coffee but not policy, being accessories to the men whose politics would supposedly replace the Old Order.

  In fact, their lives appeared to be no different from their mothers’. Their duties were in support of men. They might not be cleaning the house and raising children, but they also were not leading. The radical youth movements they had joined were structured just like the rest of society—male-dominated. While they watched the beliefs and rights of others—from draft-aged males to the poor—being promoted, they started to wonder about their own rights. They began to look at what was happening to each other personally. Out of these feelings of frustration came the battle cry of women’s rights: “The Personal Is Political.”

  Protester at the 1968 Miss America Pageant.

  “Miss America Is a Big Falsie.”

  Taking a page right out of the African liberation movements that had inspired the Black Panther Party, the women used this battle cry to express their feelings that women’s bodies had been colonized by the dominant male culture. Inspired by Frantz Fanon’s liberation theory, these newly radicalized feminists—women’s liberationists or “libbers”—held that they were members of an oppressed sex class made subordinate by systems of male domination. It was this male culture that was at the core of women’s oppression. Unlike liberal feminists, radicals believed that equality should not be the goal. Instead, women needed to seize power through a revolution. In this new utopia, women would reject traditional notions of family, marriage, love, and heterosexuality.

  By 1968, many women were leaving the radical political organizations in droves and organizing feminist groups around the nation. It was out of these groups that the most radical feminists emerged. Among the first of these radical groups to catch the nation’s attention were the New York Radical Women. They organized a successful protest of the 1968 Miss America Pageant. On September 7, one hundred women’s liberationists descended upon the Atlantic City boardwalk in front of the convention hall. They were there to protest the pageant’s promotion of physical attractiveness and charm as the primary attribute of femininity. Mocking the pageant, they crowned a sheep as Miss America and filled a trash barrel—the “Freedom Trash Can”—with symbols of women’s bondage: bras, high-heeled shoes, girdles, hair curlers, Playboy magazines, false eyelashes, typing books, and more
. They planned to burn the contents but were prevented by the police. The spectacle made headlines and the evening news, and though no bras were burned that day, bra burning became the symbol of women’s liberation.

  “The Personal Is Political.”

  After the protest, many of the most extreme participants organized the Redstockings. The name combined the derogatory slang for educated women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “bluestockings,” with the color of radical politics, “red.” Though the organization lasted only a few short years, it influenced the debate on women’s rights greatly. The Redstockings first appeared in 1969 at a New York City legislative hearing on abortion law reform. At the hearing, they tried to take over the microphone when only twelve speakers—eleven men and a nun—were scheduled.

  REDSTOCKINGS MANIFESTO (1969)

  published in Ladies’ Home Journal

  I. After centuries of individual and preliminary political struggle, women are united to achieve their final liberation from male supremacy. Redstockings is dedicated to building this unity and winning our freedom.

  II. Women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives. We are exploited as sex objects, breeders, domestic servants, and cheap labor. We are considered inferior beings, whose only purpose is to enhance men’s lives. Our humanity is denied. Our prescribed behavior is enforced by the threat of physical violence.

  Because we have lived so intimately with our oppressors, in isolation from each other, we have been kept from seeing our personal suffering as a political condition. This creates the illusion that a woman’s relationship with her man is a matter of interplay between two unique personalities, and can be worked out individually. In reality, every such relationship is a class relationship, and the conflicts between individual men and women are political conflicts that can only be solved collectively.