Women in Social Protest postcard set, front cover
From Chapter 5
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Drawing on feminist and material rhetorics, the authors of Women Making History demonstrate that, by creating postcards, Helaine Victoria Press aimed to do more than provide a convenient writing surface or even affect collective memory; instead, they argue, the press generated feminist memory. The cards, each with the picture of a woman or group of women from history, were multimodal. Pictures were framed in colors and borders appropriate to the era and subject. Lengthy captions offered details about the lives of the women pictured. Unlike other memorials, the cards were mobile; they traveled through the postal system, viewed along the way by the purchasers, mail sorters, mail carriers, and recipients. Upon arriving at their destinations, cards were often posted on office bulletin boards or refrigerators at home, where surroundings shaped their meanings.
Women Making History shows that Helaine Victoria Press’s cards, like the movement from which they emanated, were dynamic and participatory. They were, in short, a multidirectional, open ended, rhetorically evolving process of transforming feminist consciousness. The print edition includes many images from the press’s records, and the digital edition offers additional images plus audio and video clips from press participants.
This is the first book to demonstrate the relationships between the feminist art movement, the women in print movement, and the scholars studying women’s history. Readers will be drawn to both the large quantity of illustrative materials and the theoretical framework of the book, as it provides an expanded understanding of rhetorical multimodality. Scholars of gender and women’s studies, art history, media studies, and the history of rhetoric, as well as members of the public with interests in feminism, Lesbian feminist culture, postcards, fine letterpress printing, and papermaking will be inspired by this richly produced history.
About the authors
Julia M. Allen is professor emerita of English at Sonoma State University.
Jocelyn H. Cohen is an artist, arborist and co-founder of Helaine Victoria Press, Inc.
The complete manuscript of this work was subjected to a fully closed (“double-blind”) review process. For more information, please see our Peer Review Commitments and Guidelines.
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From Chapter 5
Women in Social Protest: The US Since 1915, a Photographic Postcard Series with twenty-two powerful cards.
From Chapter 3
Women in Social Protest: The US Since 1915, a Photographic Postcard Series with twenty-two powerful cards.
From Chapter 5
“2-4-6-8 We Want a Deaf President Now” was the chant of women students at Gallaudet University during the week of March 6, 1988. Gallaudet University, founded in 1864 in Washington, D.C., is the only liberal arts college in the U.S. mandated to provide educational services for people who are deaf or hearing-impaired. The impetus for the protest was the selection of a woman who is hearing and did not know sign language as the next University president. In nonviolent protest, students demanded a president who is deaf; the replacement of the board chairperson; the appointment to the board of more members who are deaf; and no reprisals against student leaders. At week’s end, all protest Page 402 →demands had been met. The Gallaudet protest, termed “the Selma for people who are deaf,” continued the tradition of civil disobedience among people with disabilities fighting for self-determination.
In 1983 Sharon Kowalski suffered severe brain damage from a car accident. Karen Thompson, Sharon’s lover for four years before the accident, was denied visitation rights by Kowalski’s father when he was awarded legal guardianship in July 1985. Claiming that Sharon was incapable of making decisions, he placed her in a nursing home, where her condition deteriorated. Sharon’s plight has been the catalyst for court action and Page 400 →demonstrations seeking to strengthen the rights of Lesbian, gay, and disabled persons in relationships; to protect them from guardianship abuse; and to ensure that disabled people are allowed to speak for themselves. In February 1989 Sharon and Karen started visiting again; Sharon’s father asked to resign as guardian; and in June 1989, Sharon moved to a rehabilitation center where she is now allowed to participate in making decisions about her life.
From Chapter 5
Page 401 →Over 650,000 Lesbians, gay men, and gay rights supporters marched on Washington, D.C., on October 11, 1987, in one of the largest civil rights gatherings in U.S. history. The march was a coming together of the Lesbian and gay movements to affirm strength and solidarity, increase visibility, and demand more AIDS funding. More than 80 events made up the demonstration, including the Harvey Milk Memorial, the wedding, the unfurling of the Names Project Quilt embroidered with the names of people who died of AIDS, the rally organized by the People of Color Caucus, the march itself, and the October 13 civil disobedience at the Supreme Court. Chants included “For Love and For Life, We're Not Going Back,” while speeches inspired the crowd to fight for social change. Ginny Apuzzo, former executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, expressed the sentiments of many: “This movement saved my life. I will be committed to it until the day I die.”
From Chapter 5
The anti-pornography movement of the late 1970s was sustained initially by a general consensus that pornography was degrading to women. The movement argued that pornography depicting violence against women was especially harmful because it contributed to the acceptance of the rape myth. Prodded by demonstrations in “sex districts” like Times Square, feminist groups argued for strict enforcement of criminal obscenity laws and lobbied for legislation declaring pornography a form of sex discrimination that violated women's civil rights. They were joined by right-wing fundamentalists who opposed pornography for religious reasons. By the early 1980s, feminist anti-pornography groups formed to oppose legislation against pornography primarily on First Amendment grounds. Feminists, like the courts and public opinion, remain strongly divided about what constitutes pornography and whether pornography that degrades and violates women should be censored.
Chinese American women, having learned from the civil rights movement, began demonstrating for improved living and working conditions in the early 1970s. In 1973, young and old, foreign-born and American-born, joined forces in San Francisco to protest proposed federal cutbacks in childcare funding that would adversely affect low-income families in the Chinatown community. The women later initiated a lawsuit that successfully delayed implementation of the proposed cutbacks while they actively supported new legislation to expand childcare services. Since the 1970s Chinese American women have repeatedly broken the stereotype of the fragile and passive “China doll” by actively participating in mainstream politics and protesting against social injustices.
From Chapter 5
These Dine (Navajo) women resting in Malcolm X Park at the end of The Longest Walk of 1978 are two of the hundreds of American Indian people who walked across Turtle Island (North America) from California's Alcatraz Island, symbol of the current American Indian spirit of liberation and site of its emergence, to Washington, D.C. They marched together to symbolize the unity of American Indian peoples in the fifth generation, when the Sacred Hoop comes together again as prophesied by Black Elk. Indian representatives met with government officials to demand the protection of human Page 397 →rights and the preservation of existing treaty relations between the United States and the Indian Nations. The Longest Walk had spiritual as well as political goals. At its end, the Dine, Lakota, and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) nations called upon “all the peoples of the world to join us in seeking peace, and in seeking to ensure survival and justice for all indigenous peoples, for all the Earth's creatures, and for all nations of the Earth.”
From Chapter 5
The garment industry in the United States has long exploited women workers, including Chinese immigrant women who entered the trade in the 1920s. Their lack of English and other marketable job skills, combined with the pressures of low family income and the lack of childcare services, left many Chinese women no choice but to work long hours for piece-rate wages in Chinatown sweatshops, taking their children to work with them. A number of times they have organized to protest intolerable working conditions. In 1974, 128 Chinese garment workers at the Great Chinese American (Jung Sai) Company went on strike against Esprit de Corp to protest unsanitary working conditions and interference with unionization activities. Esprit responded by closing the plant. The workers, with the help of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, persisted in fighting Esprit in the courts until they finally won a favorable settlement almost 10 years later in 1983.
From Chapter 5
In 1966 and 1967, African American women opposed to the war in Vietnam raised placards and voices condemning the war and its destructive effect on their communities. Ironically, the war in Vietnam was the first fought by racially integrated U.S. forces. It took a tremendous toll on African American soldiers. Department of Defense data clearly showed that African American men were more likely than their white counterparts to be sent to Vietnam, assigned to combat duty, and wounded or killed. The participation of African Americans in the antiwar movement significantly strengthened it. By joining in the protest, African American women continued a long and heroic tradition of struggle for freedom and justice.
From Chapter 5
“Jim Crow Can't Teach” was the slogan in a massive New York City school boycott against inadequate, separate, and unequal education. On February 3, 1964, 464,362 of New York’s one million public school students stayed home, went to alternative “Freedom Schools,” or marched for equality protesting de facto segregated schools. African American and Hispanic communities from around the city joined with concerned whites to make this citywide action the largest civil rights demonstration to date. “Jim Crow” laws and practices had enforced segregation of African Americans and whites in virtually every aspect of life. The 1964 boycott proclaimed the importance of quality school integration to employment, housing, and community life. Concerned mothers demonstrated and encouraged their children to join the school boycott movement. The protest sparked similar boycotts in major Northern cities, thus focusing on one of the most insistent racial issues in the 1960s.
From Chapter 5
Make-shift jails, like this hospital that formerly housed polio patients, imprisoned sit-in demonstrators in Greensboro, North Carolina, during May 1963. In Greensboro, crowds of more than 2,000 marched through the city's streets, braving threats of arrest as they demanded school and public desegregation and equal opportunity in employment. At the Page 393 →height of the protests, local police detained as many as 1,400, most of them students. Sit-ins first appeared in Greensboro, when four African American college students sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter to eat. Refused service, they remained seated to protest the segregation of public accommodations. In the months and years that followed, civil rights activists across the South used the sit-in as an effective nonviolent direct action tactic to dramatize the inequities of segregation.
From Chapter 5
When members of Women Strike for Peace (WSP) attempted to enter the atomic nuclear test site at Camp Mercury, Nevada, on July 14, 1962, to prevent the testing of an atmospheric atomic bomb, they were turned away. WSP had first surfaced eight months earlier when an estimated 50,000 women in 60 cities walked out of their kitchens and off their jobs in an unprecedented national women’s peace action. Demanding “No Tests East or West,” “Pure Milk-Not Poison,” and “Let the Children Grow,” the striking women made national headlines. In the process of transforming their one-day strike into a national movement, the women of WSP developed an innovative political style, characterized by nonhierarchical structure, local autonomy, and maternalistic rhetoric. The WSP campaign for the test ban treaty of 1963 did not end nuclear testing or the arms race. Yet by demanding that women be included in all decisions concerned with life and death, WSP proclaimed that motherhood is political and that the human family is the whole world.
From Chapter 5
Women and children, members of the Queens Jamaica chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), picketed a New York City Woolworth’s to show their support for the Southern sit-in movement begun in Greensboro, North Carolina in February 1960 to protest segregation in chain stores. In the days and months which followed the sit-in at a Greensboro Woolworth's lunch counter, similar non-violent protests occurred across the country. They attracted African Americans and whites, students and professors, workers and the unemployed. Children, often boycotting segregated school systems, joined women on the picket lines. Women vital to the sit-in and subsequent jail-in/jail-no-bail actions included Ella Baker, Diane Nash, Annie Jackson, Jane Stembridge, Ruby Doris Stewart, Mary King, and Anne Moody.
From Introduction and Chapter 5
Women such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Jessie Daniel Ames played an important role in the U.S. anti-lynching campaign from its beginnings in the 1890s. After World War II, the crusade again intensified. In September 1946, demonstrations in Washington, D.C., protested brutal lynchings in Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Many women worked through the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Women also joined the American Crusade to End Lynching, led by Paul Robeson, singer and political activist, and Mrs. Harper Sibley, president of the National Council of Church Women, among others. In separate meetings with President Truman, both coalitions requested legislative and educational programs to curb mass violence. To Truman’s displeasure, Mrs. Sibley noted the incongruity of U.S. leadership in the Page 18 →Nuremberg Trials when it was doing so little to fight racism at home. Although Truman never endorsed a federal anti-lynching law, in December 1946 he established the first President's Committee on Civil Rights.
From Chapter 5
Jewish working women in New York City “learn to vote” in 1936 from International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) organizers working on behalf of the American Labor Party. The ALP, formerly the New York branch of the National Labor’s Non-Partisan League, an independent party, supported the New Deal, Herbert Lehman for New York governor, and the reelection of President Franklin Roosevelt. The ILGWU, with women numbering 75 percent of the membership, launched an ardent campaign for the ALP candidates to get socialist and union voters who supported Roosevelt but would Page 389 →not vote Democratic. Justice, the official publication of the ILGWU was printed in Yiddish and also in Italian, Spanish, French, and English. The use of Yiddish was crucial in organizing union and voters because it long had been the language of the sweatshop.
From Chapter 5
Page 388 →Women pickets jeered at company guards and closed down the textile mill in Greensboro, Georgia, in 1934. Protesting the deteriorating work conditions brought about by the NRA Cotton Textile Industry Committee, the militant rank and file of the United Textile Workers overrode the conservative union leadership and called for a nationwide general strike in the cotton and woolen industries on September 3, 1934. As the battle raged, women took an increasingly active part. In both North and South, violence was launched against the strikers, who were beaten, kidnapped, tear gassed, and jailed; 15 strikers were killed. Despite the terror, the strike remained solid until the union leadership acquiesced to Franklin Roosevelt’s request that strikers return to work in exchange for a study of working conditions. The promised examination or the industry was hollow. Many strikers were not rehired. Textile unionism was temporarily crushed. But the participation of women in the 1934 strike demonstrated their militancy and their support for collective bargaining, fair wages, and better working conditions.
From Chapter 5
In October 1933, truck caravans of striking California cotton pickers from the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Union carried picketers over 114 miles of back roads. When workers were spotted, migrant farm workers set up picket lines and attempted to talk them out of the fields. The union sought recognition, equal pay for equal work, wage increases, and improved living conditions. Co-led by Caroline Decker, over 18,000 farmworkers struck, paralyzing the cotton industry. Evicted from grower-owned housing, strikers were also refused service at stores because of pressure from growers. The state of California eventually provided food, marking the only time the government fed the strikers. When workers assembled in Pixley on October 12 to protest the arrest of 17 strikers, two workers were killed and several wounded by “deputy sheriffs,” growers deputized by law enforcement. After 24 days, a State Mediation Board forced a compromise, ending one of the largest farm workers strikes in history.
From Chapter 5
After the Tulsa (Oklahoma) Tribune published an inaccurate and inflammatory report of an assault on a white woman by an African American youth, a mob of almost 2,000 whites gathered for vigilante action and lynching on May 31, 1921. At daybreak, whites began invading the African American community of “Deep Greenwood.” While whites fired guns and burned homes and businesses, and private airplanes bombed the area, over 6,000 African Americans were arrested and interned. By the time martial law was imposed, 250 people were dead, over 1,000 African American homes were destroyed, Page 387 →and the once thriving Greenwood community was looted and burned. Although Tulsa authorities implied that white Tulsa would make reparation and rebuild Deep Greenwood, it did not do so. Eventually, the African American community, drawing on its limited financial but deep personal resources, itself rebuilt the neighborhood.
From Chapter 5
Page 386 →This suffrage parade up Fifth Avenue in New York City on November 1, 1915, was one of many organized by the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women (later called the Women’s Political Union). Although such mass demonstrations departed from the usual demure organizing style of the National Women’s Suffrage Association, they attracted suffragists of all political stripes, from Socialist to mainstream. Despite the predominance of bourgeois values in the suffrage movement, epitomized by signs like the one carried here by Jewish suffragist Jane Schneiderman (on the right), many working-class women supported the principles of suffrage. They viewed the vote as a vehicle to address the ills of industrial life and the special needs of working-class women. After 1914, the Socialist Party prohibited suffrage work as part of a capitalist conspiracy against the working class. Still, many Socialist women who were also committed feminists and suffragists defied the ban by joining the Equality League in this march. Prominent League members included Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Florence Kelley, Lavinia Dock, and Inez Milholland.