Dorothy mobilized the Committee for Community Control of Child Care to oppose the implementation of this income-based day-care policy. For Dorothy, the message was clear. This new policy would create a bifurcated childcare system, with the “economically and racially integrated classes” replaced by day care, which would become “another dumping ground for poor, non-white people.”67 The narrative of the replacement of responsive community-controlled centers with those meant to merely “hold” the children of the poor so that their parents could work for welfare benefits would become the rallying cry of the National Welfare Rights Organization’s March for Children’s Survival the year after Dorothy began pushing back at state cuts to childcare. Indeed, her strategy would become one of the components of the national strikes the organization created.
Angela Jones, a parent at one of the day-care centers that Dorothy organized to oppose the new legislation, made clear the implications of the income limits requirement. “A lot of working mothers who in the past were able to pay the day-care fees, will have to quit their jobs and go back on welfare,” said Jones. “Does that make sense?”68
Despite coverage in the New York Times, New York City officials were not willing to disregard the state regulations. So, on January 19, 1972, Dorothy led 350 women, children, and day-care workers to occupy John Lindsay’s New York City presidential campaign headquarters. Dorothy made sure to bring food and water to the occupation, fully intending to stay as long as needed. With families in every office and the hallways in between, their presence could not be missed. A photographer for the New York Times cleverly juxtaposed the protesters to an image of Lindsay campaigning with a “Free Day Care for All” sign plastered into his hands. Dorothy and the protesters heightened their rhetoric that the income limits would destroy integrated day-care centers and turn them into “concentration camps for the children of the very poorest Blacks and Puerto Ricans.”69 After only three hours Dorothy and Bob Gangi had convinced the mayor and his staff to stand with them in opposing the state’s February 1 deadline and to promise city funding should the state not agree.
What is important here, in addition to Dorothy’s success in wrangling politicians and state regulations, is her defense of her community’s sense of self-determination. The West 80th Street Day Care Center was created as a hub for community. The parents formed the board of directors, community members were welcome to contribute regardless of credentials, and the center created its own curriculum to meet the needs that the community defined. They did not separate “school” from “real life”—they wanted to “establish links between what children see in the classroom and what they experience in the community.”70
Dorothy’s activism did not separate “school” from “real life”—her advocacy for children through the West 80th Street Day Care Center showed that she saw children and their parents as immersed in a community that was racially and economically diverse. Dorothy’s real success—indeed her brilliance—lay in the insight that creating a center defined and controlled by the community as a whole was the best vehicle for her to support children and their families and to counter pervasive discrimination.
CHAPTER 4
“SISTERS UNDER THE SKIN”
Taking the Stage in the Women’s Movement
Dorothy came to the women’s liberation movement through her experiences as a community organizer and civil rights activist. She did not become radicalized as many white women did by reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex or confronting “the feminine mystique” that Betty Friedan argued had robbed white middle-class suburban women of truly meaningful lives.1 Dorothy defined herself as a feminist but rooted her feminism in her experience and in more fundamental needs for safety, food, shelter, and childcare. Dorothy entered the women’s movement by way of her community and the needs of the women she encountered every day in the 1960s and 1970s. Domestic violence, the welfare system, and childcare—issues that profoundly affected the working-class Black and Latino women who visited the West 80th Street Day Care Center and turned to the West Side Community Alliance for help—became the defining issues of Dorothy’s feminism. For Dorothy, the women’s movement had value because it illuminated the problems that she and other women in her neighborhood faced daily.
As Barbara Smith notes, movement organizing and community organizing are fundamentally different. A founder of the National Black Feminist Organization and a member of the Combahee River Collective, Smith observed that “in movement organizing, people come together because they share certain basic political principles and beliefs.”2 In community organizing, however, “people come together because there are immediate pressing problems that need to be solved, such as the lack of affordable decent housing, no summer activities for children and youth.” The shared political commitments of movement organizing cannot be taken for granted in community organizing, where a range of political beliefs must be negotiated to create coalitions and address common problems. Dorothy, like Barbara Smith and many others, circulated between movement organizing and community organizing as she moved from CORE and other New York City civil rights and Black Power groups to her work at the West 80th Street Day Care Center and on to the women’s movement. The result was an approach to feminism that spoke to the needs of her community, blending community and movement organizing.
Dorothy started thinking about her position as a woman when she was at CORE, where she was considered capable of producing a Broadway fundraiser but not excused from answering the phones. After CORE, she became involved in the antiwar movement and began organizing events with her attorney friend Flo Kennedy. She studied Flo, who called herself “radicalism’s rudest mouth,” with keen awareness. To Dorothy, Flo was a model for generating protests that not only linked war and race but drew on her experience suing advertising firms on behalf of Black clients and garnering widespread press coverage. Though of course the term didn’t exist in the late 1960s, for Flo, feminism was fundamentally intersectional—a component of radical politics from the Left that connected Black Power with the war in Vietnam and gender equity.3 At about the same time Dorothy’s friend Joan Hamilton introduced her to Ti-Grace Atkinson, who helped Dorothy articulate feminist principles that resonated with her life. So, when Gloria Steinem interviewed Dorothy at the day-care center in February 1969, Dorothy already had an understanding of feminism grounded in her experience as a Black woman and modeled on the feminism of other Black women.
Dorothy and Gloria connected as feminists at their first meeting during a discussion with their mutual friend Bob Gangi. As Steinem remembers it, Gangi wasn’t sure whether his fiancée should work after they married. In her words, “Dorothy and I didn’t know each other, but we went to work pointing out parallels between equality for women and the rest of his radical politics.”4 Although Gangi does not recall this discussion, and says he never discouraged his spouse from working, he remembers Gloria telling him that he was one of her first male friends with whom she discussed women’s equality.5
Dorothy, finding in Gloria someone who shared her vision, pushed further, suggesting that if they worked well “one-on-one” that they could work well as a team. In Dorothy’s words, “Then we could each talk about our own different but parallel experiences, and she could take over if I froze or flagged.”6 Speaking on For Women Only, a panel talk show hosted by Aline Saarinen on NBC, just three days after Gloria’s article on Dorothy’s center appeared in New York’s The City Politic, Dorothy announced that she was looking for a collaborator in making change.7 Gloria would become that collaborator.
At the time, Gloria Steinem was just beginning to be recognized for her work in the women’s movement, including founding a politics column in New York magazine that covered social movements treated as dilettantish in other media venues. Gloria was also getting invitations to speak, though she didn’t like public speaking.8 In contrast, Dorothy, as a former nightclub singer, was perfectly at home on the stage. From 1969 into 1973, the two spoke at events together, eventu
ally traveling all over the country to address audiences about the women’s movement. Gloria would typically speak first, followed by Dorothy, and then they would lead the audience in a long discussion, which they believed was the most important part of their speaking engagements. They usually did not have rehearsed speeches but tailored their presentations to the occasion. They always made sure to include the topic of childcare, a leading issue for Dorothy. The two began speaking in school basements and progressed to “community centers, union halls, suburban theaters, welfare rights groups, high school gyms, YWCAs, and even a football stadium or two.”9
For Dorothy, these speeches with Gloria were not just a way to raise awareness about the women’s movement, the antiwar movement, and civil rights; they also drew attention and financial support to the West 80th Street Day Care Center. Dorothy was working sixty hours a week as the center’s co-director, mostly doing fundraising and community outreach. This fundraising was essential because the State of New York had begun cutting day-care funding in 1969. The speaking fees also helped provide Dorothy with what she called a “decent income” for her growing family.10
As Gloria records in My Life on the Road, she and Dorothy worked well together. The relationship between the two came to define, in her words, the potential for the women’s movement. Their speaking engagements exemplified the possibility of interracial sisterhood, of being “sisters under the skin,” as they frequently put it.11
Dorothy’s style was to call out the racism she saw in the white women’s movement. She frequently took to the stage to articulate the way in which white women’s privilege oppressed Black women but also offered her friendship with Gloria as proof this obstacle could be overcome. In more general terms, their relationship speaks to tensions in the early women’s movement regarding race and the ease with which Black women’s experience and activism could be pushed to the margins.
Coming to terms with this tension also presents a challenge to the historian. Consider how cultural critic Kimberly Springer frames the initial struggles over the relationship between the “women’s movement and the Black feminist activism” in terms of which came first and which caused the other. In her narrative, white feminists may have been inspired by the work of Black women in the civil rights movement, but the establishment of Black feminist activist organizations emerged as a “reaction to racism in the women’s movement.”12 Of course, Black feminists had much to say about the larger women’s movement, but this sequentialist historical treatment elides the contributions of foundational Black feminists, such as Dorothy, Flo Kennedy, Shirley Chisholm, Dorothy Height, and Angela Davis among others
Consider Gloria’s article on the women’s liberation movement and its relationship to the civil rights movement, written shortly after she met Dorothy, for the April 1969 issue of New York magazine titled “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.” One of the most-cited feminist documents of the 1970s, the article contrasts new groups of younger feminists, such as WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), the Redstockings, and New York Radical Women, with the members of the women’s liberation movement who identified with Betty Friedan’s feminine mystique.
Gloria describes New York Radical Women as “rapping” about their position with an understanding that this consciousness-raising would change the world. In her words, “They couldn’t become Black or risk jail by burning their draft cards, but they could change society from the bottom up by radicalizing (engaging with basic truth) the consciousness of women; by going into the streets on such women’s issues as abortion, free childcare centers and a final break with the nineteenth-century definition of females as sex objects whose main function is to service men and their children.”13 (Ironically, the New York magazine cover featured a photograph of football quarterback Joe Namath surrounded by six women lounging in lingerie under the title “All Night Long.”) Gloria’s article translated a potentially radical movement for a bourgeois reading public, including the tool for “consciousness-raising.” One of the things that Gloria and Dorothy often did together was attend these rap sessions in New York City.
I remember one evening when Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker, Angela Davis, and about five other women were together. We had dinner together in Harlem. And, we talked, and we left, we left Harlem we went to Gloria’s house and sat up all night long, and when we would have sessions, we would actually, time was not a factor, we didn’t care about time. We would really sit down and discuss until we came up with solutions. So, we sort of really gave a lot to each other. I know I got a lot from being in that group. It also helped to erase the fear, ’cause you know you’re not alone. You know that there are other women who are having problems and maybe it’s not the same problem.14
Asked about less-integrated sessions Dorothy said, “I remember silently thinking sometimes . . ., ‘How can these women complain about having wall-to-wall carpeting, staying home, caring for the children, being put on what they called a pedestal while the man of the house worked and brought in the money?’ I remember wishing that I could have wall-to-wall carpets, I wished I didn’t have to work every day and sometimes nights, I wished I didn’t have to worry about money. I also would have liked to go shopping for myself and with my children and not worry about spending over fifty dollars.”15 Yet these realizations did not turn her away from a women’s movement that focused on the gendered experiences of a particular group of white women.
When questioned about her involvement in the women’s movement, Dorothy reflects that she was “a woman without human rights” and that she wanted to be part of a movement to empower women.16 Other Black women were much more critical of what they saw as a white woman’s movement. In 1972, for instance, Black feminist Jacqui Jackson wrote that “Black women regard white women as willful, pretty children and mean ugly children, but never as capable adults handling their men and the world.”17 Dorothy was much less dismissive but very willing to be critical of white women unaware of both the extent to which they too were being exploited by capitalism and the extent to which they were contributing to racism that kept women apart.18
Still, Dorothy was deeply aware of the “double jeopardy” of being a Black woman.19 Reflecting on her work experience she remembers, “Wherever we women work for social, political, corporate, community organizations or individual domestic jobs, it was always a double whammy. I was always going to be Black and woman.”20 When a reporter from Mademoiselle magazine asked her about Stokely Carmichael’s infamous quip that the proper position for women in the civil rights movement was “prone,”21 Dorothy shot back, “Lying down, standing up—if you’re going to be screwed, you’re going to be screwed.”22 Sexism produced some solidarity, it seemed.
In her article on Black Power and women’s liberation, Steinem explicitly linked the agenda of the radical feminists that she interviewed to that of women of color, even as she described the organizing tool of “rap” sessions that would cast feminism in the popular imagination as solely a “white, middle-class women’s movement.” As she noted, “If the WLM [women’s liberation movement] can feel solidarity with the hated middle class, and vice versa,” referring to the concessions regarding the organization of NOW in 1966, “then an alliance with the second mass movement—poor women of all colors—should be no problem.”23 The call to see the connections between all women was rooted in Gloria’s awareness that “poor women of all colors” were already organizing for change with regard to “welfare problems, free daycare centers, for mothers who must work, and food prices.”
These three issues—welfare, day care, and food prices—came directly from Dorothy’s agenda at the West 80th Street Day Care Center. As Steinem had already noted in her first article, organizing was a central part of Dorothy’s vision, from the cost of day care and the debate over its inclusion in the women’s liberation movement to attacks on the difficulties posed by welfare hotels and the dangerous connection between welfare dependency and education.24 Dorothy also called out loc
al merchants for increasing food prices on the days that welfare checks were mailed. She saw the center as a safe space for women suffering from what would come to be called domestic violence. From the very beginning of their work together, Dorothy’s influence on Gloria was distinctive and reflected Dorothy’s experience as a Black woman.
The labor of organizing, of meeting primarily with groups of women, and walking them through what it would take to make real change inspired both organizers. It took work, and risk. For Dorothy, the risk involved travel. She hated flying on airplanes. Today, more than fifty years after her first “barnstorming” trips, she prefers to travel by train for days rather than fly. During their flights together, Gloria would hold Dorothy’s hand, always during takeoff, sometimes for the entire flight, to stop her from trembling. The singer and organizer would also use her strength to help Gloria. More comfortable writing, Gloria initially hated public speaking. Taking the stage and holding an audience’s attention seemed terrifying. Dorothy, ever the performer, helped her friend, sometimes holding her hand on the stage.
The connection the two of them formed during these early years was significant and lasting. Dan Wynn’s iconic photograph depicts Dorothy and Gloria together, serious and engaged in feminist struggle. The contact sheets for that photo session tell a different story. In the many pages of images taken that day, Dorothy and Gloria are laughing, talking, and looking at each other as much as at the camera. Their fists are raised in the Black Power salute in just a few images. Most of the images depict two friends at ease with each other, even as they were politically committed to changing their communities, their country, and the world.
With Her Fist Raised Page 8