America Dreaming

by Laban Carrick Hill

  III. We identify the agents of our oppression as men. Male supremacy is the oldest, most basic form of domination. All other forms of exploitation and oppression (racism, capitalism, imperialism, etc.) are extensions of male supremacy: men dominate women, a few men dominate the rest. All power structures throughout history have been male-dominated and male-oriented. Men have controlled all political, economic and cultural institutions and backed up this control with physical force. They have used their power to keep women in an inferior position. All men receive economic, sexual, and psychological benefits from male supremacy. All men have oppressed women.

  IV. Attempts have been made to shift the burden of responsibility from men to institutions or to women themselves. We condemn these arguments as evasions. Institutions alone do not oppress; they are merely tools of the oppressor. To blame institutions implies that men and women are equally victimized, obscures the fact that men benefit from the subordination of women, and gives men the excuse that they are forced to be oppressors. On the contrary, any man is free to renounce his superior position provided that he is willing to be treated like a woman by other men.

  We also reject the idea that women consent to or are to blame for their own oppression. Women’s submission is not the result of brainwashing, stupidity, or mental illness but of continual, daily pressure from men. We do not need to change our-selves, but to change men.

  The most slanderous evasion of all is that women can oppress men. The basis for this illusion is the isolation of individual relationships from their political context and the tendency of men to see any legitimate challenge to their privileges as persecution.

  V. We regard our personal experience, and our feelings about that experience, as the basis for an analysis of our common situation. We cannot rely on existing ideologies as they are all products of male supremacist culture. We question every generalization and accept none that are not confirmed by our experience.

  Our chief task at present is to develop female class consciousness through sharing experience and publicly exposing the sexist foundation of all our institutions. Consciousness-raising is not “therapy,” which implies the existence of individual solutions and falsely assumes that the male-female relationship is purely personal, but the only method by which we can ensure that our program for liberation is based on the concrete realities of our lives.

  The first requirement for raising class consciousness is honesty, in private and in public, with ourselves and other women.

  VI. We identify with all women. We define our best interest as that of the poorest, most brutally exploited woman.

  We repudiate all economic, racial, educational or status privileges that divide us from other women. We are determined to recognize and eliminate any prejudices we may hold against other women.

  We are committed to achieving internal democracy. We will do whatever is necessary to ensure that every woman in our movement has an equal chance to participate, assume responsibility, and develop her political potential.

  VII. We call on all our sisters to unite with us in struggle.

  We call on all men to give up their male privileges and support women’s liberation in the interest of our humanity and their own.

  In fighting for our liberation we will always take the side of women against their oppressors. We will not ask what is “revolutionary” or “reformist,” only what is good for women.

  The time for individual skirmishes has passed. This time we are going all the way.

  They went on to occupy the offices of the Ladies’ Home Journal to demand that they be allowed to put out a “liberated” issue and that the magazine replace the male editor and publisher. The magazine, which had a 6.9 million circulation, agreed to let them publish a special section.

  “Sisterhood Is Powerful.”

  ERA

  In 1972, Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment, which outlawed any gender discrimination in all aspects of American life, and sent it to the states for ratification. Thirty-five states passed the amendment, but it fell three states short of being ratified and amended to the Constitution. Supporters of the amendment believed it was essential in order for men and women to be equal in all aspects of American life, particularly in the workplace. Opponents feared a number of things, including the undermining of special protections women receive under the law and the destruction of the traditional roles men and women play in families. The debate on this amendment highlighted just how much ’60s activism had split the country on fundamental questions about justice and how to attain it.

  OUR BODIES, OURSELVES

  In 1969, Norma, Pam, Judy, Nancy, Paula, Ruth, Wilma, Esther, Jane, Wendy, and Joan gathered in a small room to talk about their health. They were attending a women’s liberation conference in Boston. The conference was one of the first gatherings of women to meet and talk about their lives and health. Each of these women had signed up for the workshop “Control of Our Bodies,” which was being led by Nancy. As each shared her experiences with doctors and her knowledge—or lack thereof—about her body, a surprising consensus began to arise. “We had all experienced similar feelings of frustration and anger toward specific doctors and the medical maze in general, and we initially wanted to do something about those doctors who were condescending, paternalistic, judgmental and noninformative,” remembered the women.

  Anti-ERA demonstrators

  As the workshop ended, they decided they didn’t want the discussion to end. They formed a study group, which they called the Doctor’s Group, and committed to meeting regularly to discuss women’s health topics. Their initial goal was simply to know more about themselves. They lived in a culture where women were not supposed to talk about their bodies because it was shameful, and doctors did not share what they knew about women’s health. It was a culture where women were passive and were expected to accept a doctor’s authority.

  “From the start, our goals have been to share information, empower ourselves and one another, to make connections with one another…”

  Our Bodies, Ourselves has been banned by high schools and public libraries across the country. Jerry Falwell, the conservative founder of the Moral Majority, famously condemned the book as “obscene trash.”

  What surprised—and, more important, empowered—these women was their discovery that they knew as much, if not more, about themselves as their doctors. Outside of reproductive health, the medical profession treated their bodies as if they were simply men with breasts. All of the women were college-educated, mostly white, and mostly middle-class, but they had all been indoctrinated into the myth that medical information was too complex for them to understand. What they discovered was that technical research and medical documents were not above their heads.

  Original members of the Doctor’s Group

  “In my heart, I think a woman has two choices: either she’s a feminist or a masochist.”

  —Gloria Steinem

  Would your be more careful if it was you who get pregnant?

  * * *

  ROE V. WADE For many feminists, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision guaranteeing a woman’s right to abortion in the first trimester of her pregnancy was the single most important achievement in their movement. It guaranteed that women had control of their bodies and could make decisions about their health without the interference of outside parties. The ruling was in response to a 1969 class-action suit brought in Texas by Norma McCorvey (under the pseudonym “Jane Roe”) against Texas district attorney Henry Wade. The court ruled that the “right to privacy” expressed in the Fourteenth and Ninth Amendments was “broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision to terminate her pregnancy.”

  * * *

  In the 1960s, a woman had to get permission from her husband to have a tubal ligation, a procedure that made pregnancy impossible. Single women were generally refused such procedures.

  * * *

  * * *

  At the time, there were virtually no books on women’s health issues fo
r women to read. When they began meeting weekly, the women shared what research they could with one another and began to teach themselves about women’s health issues. They covered even basic issues that were not widely known then, such as the function of the clitoris as a source of a woman’s personal pleasure. It didn’t take long for the group to realize that women’s health knowledge was important to share with women everywhere.

  The group’s first lecture was titled “Sexuality” and was scheduled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a traditionally male institution. The event was advertised by word of mouth and drew more than fifty women. Before the year was out, the Doctor’s Group had gathered their talks into book form. The small, radical New England Free Press published Women and Their Bodies, a 193-page booklet that was printed on newsprint and stapled. With almost no marketing, the booklet sold more than a quarter of a million copies.

  This breakthrough and success was only the beginning. In 1972, the same group of women incorporated as the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (BWHBC) and published the book with Simon & Schuster the following year. From the beginning, BWHBC was at the forefront of women’s health issues. They demonstrated for abortion rights. They publicized horrendous medical practices, such as the fact that a large percentage of women in Puerto Rico were sterilized without their knowledge. They urged women to go in pairs to doctors in order to ensure that they received answers to their questions.

  “From the start, our goals have been to share information, empower ourselves and one another, to make connections with one another, to create preventative-health alternatives, to improve health policies relevant to women and to work on changing the system to meet our needs,” writes Jane Pincus, a cofounder.

  To that end, they’ve stirred an enormous amount of controversy. Their 1973 edition included the chapter “In America, They Call Us Dykes,” which was one of the first pieces in support of women loving women. Later, they included chapters on the international exploitation of women and translated the book into dozens of languages. In 1976, Our Bodies, Ourselves was recognized by the American Library Association’s Young Adult Library Services Association as one of the best books of the decade.

  UPSIDE-DOWN FLAG

  FIGHTING FOR NATIVE AMERICAN RIGHTS

  People are fighting battles in the streets of Chicago. They’re fighting to stop the Vietnam War and bring about changes in the political party system. They’re fighting in the streets of Alabama to change the situation for blacks. The SDS movement is trying to change the whole structure of the universities. What the hell are we going to do? Are we going to sit here in Minnesota and not do a goddamn thing? Are we going to go on for another two hundred years, or even another five, the way we are without doing something for our Indian people?

  “What treaty that the whites

  have kept has the red man broken?

  Not one.

  What treaty that the white man

  ever made with us have they kept?

  Not one.”

  —Sitting Bull

  On the hot summer evening of July 28, 1968, Dennis Banks, who had recently finished a stint in prison for robbery, spoke these words to open a meeting in the basement of a local Minneapolis church. The basement was filled with around two hundred other Native Americans, but Banks’s words resonated particularly with three other ex-convicts—Eddie Benton Benai, George Mitchell, and Clyde Bellecourt.

  In the ’60s most Native-American adult males were in jail, on parole, or under supervision, or had been in the past. In his memoir, Ojibwa Warrior, Banks describes the environment with dripping irony:

  Together with the first robin came the annual renewal of the “quota system,” which meant that the police had to arrest a certain number of Indians—usually about two hundred a week—to provide unpaid labor for the work house and various city projects…. During the early sixties I got caught in that dragnet maybe twenty-five times…. For Indians, doing time in jail is almost a traditional rite of passage.

  America treated Native Americans as if they were scum. Over the previous three decades, they had been subject to a systematic attempt by the government to destroy their culture. Their children were removed from their homes on reservations and placed in boarding schools, where their hair was cut, they were forbidden to speak their native tongue, and their history was ignored. At the same time, the government relocated thousands of Native Americans off their reservations into cities like Minneapolis/St. Paul, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon. After living on isolated reservations, they had no experience negotiating the complex requirements of surviving in an urban environment. Quickly, these new urban enclaves came to be known as “red slums,” where Indians held the lowest-level jobs and were denied education and decent housing. In short, the government was trying to systematically destroy what little was left of Native-American culture.

  It was in this environment that these ex-convict Native Americans committed themselves to creating a civil rights organization for Indians. Clyde Bellecourt was elected chairman of the group. They initially called themselves the “Concerned Indian Americans,” but the irony of its initials—CIA—was quickly realized and within days they settled on a name with more appealing initials: the American Indian Movement, or AIM.

  Cofounder Dennis Banks summed up their hopes for AIM …

  Dennis Banks

  “We started here in the Twin Cities, but from the start, our Movement was based on the guarantees to Indians in all the treaties; we didn’t want to get caught up in the civil rights struggle because that was between blacks and whites; it was within the System, and the System had nothing to do with Indians.”

  —AIM cofounder Clyde Bellecourt

  * * *

  1960S NATIVE-AMERICAN POPULATION STATISTICS

  Because of poverty and a system that dealt harshly with them, Native Americans disproportionately were imprisoned in western states and Canada.

  % OF TOTAL POPULATION % OF PRISON POPULATION

  Minnesota 1% 8%

  South Dakota 6.5% 25–33%

  * * *

  Because of the slum housing conditions; the highest unemployment rate in the whole of this country; police brutality against our elders, women, and children; Native Warriors came together from the streets, prisons, jails and the urban ghettos of Minneapolis to form the American Indian Movement. They were tired of begging for welfare, tired of being scapegoats in America and decided to start building on the strengths of our own people; decided to build our own schools; our own job training programs; and our own destiny. That was our motivation to begin. That beginning is now being called “the Era of Indian Power.”

  At first, they took a page right out of the Black Panther strategy book and formed an Indian patrol, wearing identical red berets, to protect their community against the police. Unlike the Panthers, however, the Indian patrol used nonviolent strategies and carried cameras and tape recorders instead of guns. By filming arrests and advising those taken into custody that they did not have to plead guilty, that they were entitled to an attorney and a jury trial, Indian arrests and convictions dropped dramatically. The hostility by police and other authorities, however, increased instead of decreased. Over this period, Bellecourt was beaten more than thirty times and received a broken jaw by the police. The newly formed civil rights group also organized social services to help their community find adequate jobs, housing, and education. Their initial focus was simply improving the lives of Native Americans living in urban areas.

  Local authorities and the FBI immediately considered AIM a violent terrorist group in the vein of the Black Panther Party. It was clear that authorities for some reason could not get past their own biases. They looked at the members of AIM as criminals because they had committed crimes. Rather than recognizing AIM’s activism as a positive, they saw AIM’s efforts to improve their community as a threat.

  THE UNITED STATES IS INDIAN COUNTRY

  * * *

  NATIONAL INDIAN YOUTH COUNCIL


  In 1960, Vine Deloria Jr. and other educated young Indians founded the first all-Indian protest group. They staged “fish-ins” to act on their treaty rights. These actions began at a popular fishing place known as Frank’s Landing in Puget Sound and confronted authorities who wanted to limit Native-American fishing rights because of white overfishing.

  * * *

  * * *

  “The poorest of the poor—by far—are the Indian people. It is true that in our courts today the Indian has legal status as a citizen, but anyone familiar with Indian life, in cities or on reservations, can testify that justice for Indians is random and arbitrary where it exists at all.”

  —Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse

  * * *

  By 1973, AIM had seventy-nine chapters, eight of which were in Canada.

  * * *

  * * *

  Not surprisingly, the harder the authorities pushed the new group, the more belligerent and hostile the group became. The confrontational approach simply reinforced centuries-long feelings of being oppressed by the U.S. government—whether local or federal, it did not really matter. This drew new members to the cause and helped encourage AIM to expand its mission beyond simply helping urban Native Americans. As it grew, AIM became committed to restoring the lands that the government stole after signing treaties and committed to reclaiming the language, religion, and culture of its people. With this broadening of expectations came a dramatic shift in strategy.