Dorothy and Gloria began speaking together in 1969. They did so almost every week into 1971.25 Reflecting the rising interest in youth movements, most of the press coverage of their speaking events highlights their appearance on college campuses. When Dorothy could no longer travel as much, Gloria invited Flo Kennedy or Margaret Sloan to take her place.26
Their goal on the road was to start a conversation with their audience.27 Sometimes the conversation came easily. Other times were more fraught, such as when they spoke at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, in May 1972. Dorothy and Gloria were nervous as they stood to speak in front of four thousand raucous midshipmen, who had oranges from dinner with them. As the midshipmen tossed their oranges in the air or to each other, Dorothy commented, “I guess they’re to be thrown,” meaning at them on the stage. As the midshipman groaned, Dorothy let them know she was not afraid of some fruit, having grown up in Georgia where she was terrorized by the KKK. When she realized the oranges were not meant for her and Gloria, she smiled, acknowledged she had nothing to fear from the Navy officers to be, and was rewarded by a loud ovation in response.
Very few women were in the crowd at Annapolis that night, and Dorothy and Gloria probably did not spark a lot of feminist consciousness raising among the midshipmen. There were about seventy African American midshipmen present, however. After Dorothy’s remarks on racism and the divide between life at the Academy and in the poorer neighborhoods in Annapolis, reporters noted that every Black midshipman was “surrounded by his white mates, all of them in earnest conversation, mostly cases of Black talking and white listening.”28 Even the toughest crowd took something away from the appearance of Dorothy and Gloria.
Just as Dorothy and Gloria began speaking in public together, Dorothy’s relationship with her husband, Bill, started to change. Their relationship had always had a degree of openness. Dorothy knew Bill had an interest in someone else in 1969, and she was becoming closer to a mutual friend, Clarence Hughes. Clarence, a tall African American man, was part of their social circle in New York. According to Dorothy’s daughter, Patrice, they were just a good “fit” for each other.29 By 1972, Dorothy decided to buy a place in Harlem and move there with Clarence and her two daughters. She and Bill divorced but remained on very good terms. Bill stayed on the West Side, seeing his daughter Patrice on weekends and taking her to England and Ireland when she was older.30 Dorothy’s new house in Harlem needed work. Bill happily contributed his expertise as a builder, and collectively, they all pitched in to make it a great place for Dorothy’s family, with a bedroom for each daughter. Even after Dorothy married Clarence, there was no animosity between Dorothy and Bill. They remained friends until Bill’s death in 1995.
The new relationship emerged just as Dorothy was most active in the women’s movement. In fact, when Dorothy and Clarence married, Gloria officiated at the ceremony. In 1971, when Dorothy had her third daughter, Angela, she came on the road with them. Gloria held the baby while Dorothy spoke. More scandalous than the content of their speeches was the rumor that Angela was actually Dorothy and Gloria’s daughter.31
“WOMEN’S LIB” AND THE MEDIA
Despite an initial synergy that centered race and racial difference in Gloria and Dorothy’s presentations of feminism, media representations of the movement, especially of Gloria’s place in the movement, contributed to the elision of race as a foundational experience informing feminism. For my purpose, the issue of sources illustrates the difficulty of accessing the earlier moment. I can identify the influence that Dorothy’s intersectional feminist organizing had on Gloria’s trajectory. From the moment they begin to work together, the conspicuous discussion of race and of different experiences influences the conversation. Yet the materials that allow us to recover this story privilege one woman over the other. Not only does the media coverage abet this difference, but the differences between Dorothy and Gloria are notable in who had time to communicate in writing and who understood that papers should be preserved and moved from one residence to another.
A discussion of two different shared speaking engagements helps to illustrate this point. In both, the focus on race and feminism centrally occupies the reporting of the presentation. Their narratives are quite different, however. Ironically, the coverage of one event, by New York’s premier Black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, helps illustrate the role that preservation of speeches plays in how we understand the history. In the second example, the irony has a stronger impact on our understanding of Dorothy’s role in shaping this movement. In this second example, the longest textual documentation of a speech given by Dorothy occurs in the very McCall’s article that launched Gloria Steinem as the singular iconic spokesperson for a movement that refused to create a leader. A comparison of these two articles serves to help us understand the process that moved Dorothy’s role to the periphery, at the very moment that the speakers sought to confront the racist tendencies of the women’s movement.
In 1970, the Socialist Party hosted Dorothy Pitman Hughes and Gloria Steinem in the ballroom at Union Square West to address the provocative question of whether the women’s movement was “hopelessly middle class.”32 The Amsterdam News article highlighted questions such as “Can the current Women’s Liberation movement speak to the needs of working women?” and “Are men the real source of women’s exploitation?” Even more provocatively, the article focused on questions of influence that assumed class and economic resources, such as “Are wives and homemakers brainwashed into accepting these roles?”33 Dorothy and Gloria were joined by Midge Decter and Velma Hill, a paraprofessional representative for the United Federation of Teachers. Velma, the East Coast CORE field secretary who had organized the boycott of the 1964 World’s Fair and led a desegregation charge for schools and beaches, was a friend of Dorothy’s. It was important to Dorothy to not be the only Black woman on the stage. She wanted to highlight that the struggle for gender equality crossed racial and economic boundaries.
The question framed by the Amsterdam News, “Are Liberated Women Hopelessly Middle Class?” focused the reader’s attention away from the kind of interracial cooperation that the participants hoped to create. Given what I see as Dorothy’s role in helping to make sure educators shared the stage for this event, the implicit critique presented by the Black newspaper undermined the potential for biracial organizing. We have only Steinem’s speech from this event, but as she put it then, “The Women’s Movement is the one area I know of in the country where cooperation between Blacks and whites is increasing, rather than decreasing.”34 The comparison, here, for Steinem, is in the way women worked together for change. She contrasts white women working to make revolutionary change with “white liberals, working for someone else’s freedom,” in the civil rights movement. Gloria described the shared discrimination that women faced and directly linked her claims to Dorothy’s vision, when she wrote, “They are working together on equal pay, equal job access, equal promotion, abortion repeal, childcare centers, and all the issues that oppress women of all colors in this country.” Because “white women become radicalized on their own concerns,” they are able to “see their second-class status clearly, and understand that all of us are marked by second-class status in this country by physical difference—women, Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, Indians—that all of us must stand up together.”35 Of course, not everyone made the easy leap from their own oppression to the oppression of all.
For Steinem, the trajectory of thinking about the women’s movement may, indeed, be directly connected to her learning from friends like Dorothy and Flo, but she was frustrated with how the movement was being represented in the media. An undated copy of a Steinem speech that refers to speaking with Dorothy suggests the call to speak about the women’s movement was enough to get the writer away from her typewriter, primarily because “as a writer, I am deeply ashamed at the way this revolution has been trivialized, distorted, and ridiculed by the press.”36 Traveling around the country with her speaking partners
, Steinem describes the movement as stronger, “and sometimes much stronger,” outside of the big cities, acknowledging there is no town without a women’s liberation group.37 While the movement’s geographical diversity was important to this speech, the message hinges on its racial diversity, with the comment, “Black women are in the leadership of the Movement.” Steinem goes on to explain the rationale for this, “since they have always had to be stronger and more courageous.”38 The important part of this discussion recognizes how the movement is covered and why this frame might seem new to some of her listeners, who might be surprised if “you’ve been reading only about white upper middle class Vassar girls, or accused SDS bombers.”39
The challenge of recovering this history lies in the coverage itself. One of the most comprehensive texts describing Dorothy’s speaking presentations illustrates this point. In January 1972, McCall’s magazine named Gloria Steinem its “Woman of the Year.” The editors rationalized their choice to some eight million readers, claiming, “because this is the year of the women’s movement, and she has become its most effective spokeswoman and symbol.”40 Steinem is described as an activist in bell-bottoms, with tinted glasses and blond-streaked hair, “the reluctant superstar of the woman’s movement.” The rationale for the article was a pluralized “women’s movement,” but the profile of what is called “the most visible of the activists, although her precise role remains undefined,” slips to the singular, “the woman’s movement.”41 The change of a single letter—women’s to woman’s—“e” for “a,” is telling.
At a moment when the country struggled to understand a movement calling for the upending of economic, structural, and social orders, the press created a singular symbol, a simplified message returned to an older form of address. The nineteenth-century woman’s movement assumed a shared identity and predicament for all women. Yet the story of Steinem in this issue is actually the story of two women. The writer Marilyn Mercer described the “incredible energy barnstorming at the grass-roots level” of the popularizer of the women’s movement. Yet in doing so, she erases a speaker who shared the stage with Gloria Steinem, indeed, who initially talked the shy reluctant speaker onto that stage in the first place. As the piece notes, “she usually appears with a Black partner—most frequently day care expert Dorothy Pitman Hughes.”42
The coverage of the speaking duo privileges the white woman and her vision, and in doing so, struggles against its own narrative. Dorothy’s presence becomes part of Gloria’s vision, not Dorothy’s. Yet Dorothy’s determination to be at meetings speaking on the women’s movement around the country demanded much more from her than from Gloria. Dorothy had to make arrangements for her two daughters to be picked up from school, dressed, fed, and cared for. She had to coordinate and troubleshoot as the director of a community and day-care center, and she had to pack not only for herself but for her eight-month-old infant, Angela. Named after Angela Davis, Dorothy’s baby daughter also shared the lecture platform with Gloria and Dorothy, came to the after-lecture rap sessions and parties, and traveled from event to event on planes, buses, cars, and trains. Packing for an infant, even in the relatively new age of disposable diapers, meant food, bottles, skin cream, and changing cloths, often bundled into a basket.
The struggle to have a place for herself and her daughter at the podium is invisible in the McCall’s article. Instead, McCall’s used Dorothy’s presence “to underscore” Gloria’s point that “whatever the color, women are sisters under the skin” and that “Black and white women have more in common than they have dividing them.”43 Gloria certainly believed this, and Gloria and Dorothy had a remarkable relationship in this way. These sentiments, however, could not be easily generalized. For instance, in 1971, Toni Morrison posed the question: “What do Black women feel about Women’s Lib?” Her answer, “Distrust.” For Morrison, “liberating movements in the Black world have been catalysts for white feminism,” yet women’s lib didn’t pay “much attention to the problems of most Black women.”44 Toni Cade Bambara put the issue even more starkly in 1970 writing that Black women “look at White women and see the enemy, for they know that racism is not confined to white men and that there are more white women than men in this country.”45 Dorothy shared similar sentiments despite her relationship with Gloria. When they spoke together, Gloria made a point of greeting the audience as “friends and sisters.” Dorothy, who always spoke second, would usually say, “I find when I speak to groups like this, I have very few ‘sisters’ in the audience, and after I leave I find I had very few friends.”46 In other words, Dorothy recognized that her relationship with Gloria was not representative or easily reproduced.
In 1973, the Paramus, New Jersey, chapter of NOW invited Dorothy to speak to them about why Black women were joining the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), an organization that Dorothy helped found, instead of NOW. Dorothy told the women of Paramus, “White women are still benefiting from racism and classism: under those circumstances, it’s ridiculous to pretend at sisterhood with Black women.”47 For Dorothy, feminist action was not complete unless it simultaneously addressed sexism, classism, and racism. The NBFO was a means to this kind of intersectional feminism. Dorothy thought that if the NBFO was successful, eventually Black and white feminists would meet, communicate, be honest with each other, and “then we’ll really have that thing everybody’s talking about—sisterhood.”48
Dorothy and Gloria were trying to overcome the racial divide in feminism, but their media coverage did little to help. Consider how the same McCall’s article describes Dorothy and Gloria’s meeting at a domestic workers’ cooperative in Auburn, Alabama. Thirty Black co-op members and the white women supporting their efforts to organize for higher wages were told by Gloria that the effort represented change: “The white housewife who exploits her Black sister is really saying that women’s work isn’t worth anything.” Exploitation, based on race and class privilege, represented a “lack of respect for her own work.” Instead, the speaker urged the women in the audience, Black and white, to recognize the power of working together. “Black women,” said Gloria, “have the courage, and white women have the skills, and we both have the common problem of boring, repetitive, underpaid, work, whether it’s in our own kitchen or someone else’s.”49
This message, connecting employers and employees by the commonality of the labor, seemed to miss the point. However well intentioned, the message could not overcome the basic difference in the perspective of the two groups of women, who “sat shy and silent, absorbing this message.”
That is until Dorothy took the stage. Recounting her experience as a domestic worker, she focused on the difference in power. The result was tangible to the reporter, who explained, “Shyness melted away and, one after another, the Black women stood up and testified, with a cadence and eloquence born of a lifetime of Sundays in rural Black churches, to the indignities that they had suffered.” Echoing the perspective that Dorothy captured, they cried out “Yes, sister!” and “Tell it, sister.” One woman took it even further and brought the message home to the white women who saw themselves as “helping” to organize the domestic workers. Addressing the group of white women directly, a Black woman warned, “You give us hate, but we give you love. We was brought up that way; we was taught that way. Love one another.”50
The challenge of understanding the crucial role that Dorothy plays here is key. I do not have the text of her speech—she did not save it or perhaps even write it down. What she brought to the encounter was her experience as well as her willingness and ability to turn that experience into a point of organizing. Just as the posters on the walls of her day-care center offered tangible examples to children of how to perceive themselves, the representation of her experience, and her willingness to share it with a white speaking partner, helped to frame the intersectional discussion of privilege, employment, and vulnerability.
The difficulty of the exchange between the Black domestic workers and the patronizing white women
was not easily resolved. But that was the point. Traveling together, the Black and white duo modeled the complexity and importance of open conversations about race and privilege. From its inception, what was erroneously called the second wave women’s movement included complicated relationships around race.51 The misrepresentation of this narrative, one that erased the central role of understanding the relative positions of what would later be called “intersectional analysis,” emerged from the call to name and to capture for popular consumption the hard work of revolutionary change.
In the meeting described above, the erasure happens narratively. An impending airline flight ended the meeting, which could have continued “all afternoon.” White women with tears in their eyes approached Gloria, asking for help: “How do we organize? Where do we start?”52 The biographical essay on the Woman of the Year ignores that woman’s partner, and the Black women who called her “sister.” In doing so, the magazine reflected the kind of racism that granted only white women in the women’s movement the agency and power to create political change. Gloria and Dorothy frequently and consciously modeled the difficulty and importance of interracial conversations, but the writer, writing for a magazine intended for white middle class housewives, honed the story to misrepresent.
In response to this kind of media bias, Gloria, Dorothy, and other feminists decided to take control over their own stories by creating their own media. In response to the Esquire issue that first published the image of Dorothy and Gloria with fists raised, they proposed creating their own magazine. They decided to call it Ms. Gloria’s impact on Ms. is easier to trace than Dorothy’s. Gloria, a writer by profession, assumed the role of editor when the preview issue came out in 1971. Dorothy did not write for the magazine, but articles related to children, gender roles, and childcare appeared regularly, often written by Letty Pogrebin, another founder of the magazine attuned to issues of motherhood.53
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