Rev. Dr. Anna Pauline (Pauli) Murray (1910 - 1985)

Pauli Murray was a remarkable woman. Born into a family that blended slaves, slave-owning whites, Cherokee Indians, freeborn African Americans – a family whose history she would later celebrate in her book Proud Shoes – she grew up an orphan in her grandparents’ home in Durham, NC. Bright and energetic but poor, Murray graduated from the city’s segregated schools in 1926. In a display of characteristic determination, she applied to Hunter College in NYC. Rejected because she was so poorly prepared, she moved in with a cousin, enrolled in high school in NY, and entered Hunter a year later. The struggle to find work and stay in school in the midst of the Great Depression was so intense, however, that Murray, already suffering from malnutrition, nearly succumbed to tuberculosis. Shortly after her graduation from Hunter in 1933, she found brief sanctuary in Camp Tera, one of the handful of women’s camps established by the New Deal as a counterpart to the men’s Civilian Conservation Corps, and then as an employee of remedial reading and workers’ education projects funded by the WPA.

 

“World events were breeding a new militancy in younger Negroes like me,” she would write; “One did not need Communist propaganda to expose the inescapable parallel between Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany and the repression of Negroes in the American South. Daily occurrences pointed up the hypocrisy of a United States policy that condemned Fascism abroad while tolerating an incipient Fascism within its own borders.” In 1938, she applied to the law school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, attracted by the work of its sociologists on race relations and farm tenancy. Many law school students supported her admission, as did Frank Porter Graham, the president of the university, but state law mandated her rejection because of race.

Torn between her writing and law, Murray threw herself into working for social justice. Her involvement in the unsuccessful struggle to obtain clemency for Odell Waller, a black sharecropper whose right to be tried by a representative jury had been denied because Virginia called to jury service only those who had paid a poll tax, brought her to the attention of Leon Ransom of Howard University Law School in Washington, D.C. When Howard University offered her a scholarship in 1941, she entered law school “with the single-minded intention of destroying Jim Crow.”

Murray had an extraordinary legal career as a champion of racial and gender justice, serving as a consultant to the President’s Committee on the Status of Women in preparing its 1963 report and on the National Board of the ACLU. In January 1977, she became one of the first women to be ordained an Episcopal priest.

Here is an excerpt of her accounts of time at Howard Law School:

“Ironically, if Howard Law School equipped me for effective struggle against Jim Crow, it was also the place where I first became conscious of the twin evil of discriminatory sex bias, which I quickly labeled Jane Crow. In my preoccupation with the brutalities of racism, I had failed until now to recognize the subtler, more ambiguous expressions of sexism. In the all-female setting of Hunter College, women were prominent in professional and leadership positions. My awareness of the additional burden of sex discrimination had been further delayed by my WPA experience. Hilda Smith, national director of the WPA Workers’ Education Project, was a woman, my local project director and my immediate supervisor were both women, and it had not occurred to me that women as a group received unequal treatment. Now, however, the racial factor was removed in the intimate environment of a Negro law school dominated by men, and the factor of gender was fully exposed.

During my first year at Howard there were only two women in the law school student body, both of us in the first-year class. When the other woman dropped out before the end of the first term, I was left as the only female for the rest of that year, and I remained the only woman in my class for the entire three-year course. While I was there, not more than two or three women enrolled in the lower classes of the law school. We had no women on the faculty, and the only woman professional on staff was…the registrar, who had graduated from the law school many years earlier.

The men were not openly hostile; in fact, they were friendly. But I soon learned that women were often the objects of ridicule disguised as a joke. I was shocked on the first day of class when one of our professors said in his opening remarks that he really didn’t know why women came to law school, but that since we were there the men would have to put up with us. His banter brought forth loud laughter from the male students. I was too humiliated to respond, but thought the professor did not know it, he had just guaranteed that I would become the top student in his class. Later I began to notice that no matter how well prepared I was or how often I raised my hand, I seldom got to recite. It was not that professors deliberately ignored me but that their freewheeling classroom style of informal discussion allowed the men’s deeper voices to obliterate my lighter voice, and my classmates seemed to take it for granted that I had nothing to contribute. For much of that first year I was condemned to silence unless the male students exhausted their arguments or were completely stumped by a professor’s question.”

Kerber, Linda K. & DeHart, Jane Sherron, Eds. Women’s America: refocusing the past. Oxford University Press, NY, 1995. p.478-479

For your consideration: 

Jokes can often disguise hostility. Have you had a comparable experience to Pauli's? Can you think of individuals in the public sphere - pundits, comedians, teachers, etc. - who use 'humor' in this manner?

Jessie López de la Cruz (1919-)

Biography by Margaret Eleanor Rose

"It doesn't take courage. All it takes is standing up for what you believe in." This outlook has served as the guiding principle for Jessie López de la Cruz in her lifelong quest to improve the conditions of Mexican and Mexican American farm workers. Born in Anaheim, California, in 1919, de la Cruz was abandoned by her father when she was nine and lost her mother to cancer a few years later. She resided with her grandparents and was reared by her grandmother after her grandfather's death in 1930. "As far back as I can remember as a child," she recalled, "I've done farm work." Her extended family joined the stream of migrant workers who traveled up and down the state hoeing beets, picking prunes, apricots, and grapes, harvesting vegetables, and chopping cotton during the Great Depression in California. Moving from job to job, Jessie de la Cruz was in and out of school and only received a sixth-grade education. The family settled in Parlier, a small town not far from Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley.

She married her husband, Arnold de la Cruz, in 1938 at the age of 19. Very soon in their relationship she challenged the traditional expectation that wives defer to husbands. "I'd been trained as a child that the woman just walked behind the husband and kept quiet, no matter what the husband does. But in work I've been equal to men since I was a child, working alongside men, doing the same hard work and earning the same wages." At her insistence the couple developed a more equal division of labor based on mutual respect and sharing. The de la Cruzes had six children born between 1939 and 1947. When Jessie's sister died, the family adopted her daughter, Susan. The family struggled to make a living, endured poor living conditions in migrant labor camps, and faced illness and injury. She lost a baby daughter to malnutrition, lack of adequate sanitation, and inferior health care.

In her early forties, she found her life dramatically changed when farm labor organizers visited her home. One was a man named César Chávez. Having struggled all her life, she was immediately receptive to their objectives to obtain higher wages, adequate housing, improved working conditions, educational opportunities, and ethnic dignity. A beneficiary of the spirit of reform and social justice unleashed by the civil rights movement, she joined the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA)—the precursor to the United Farm Workers (UFW)—in 1965. Two years later she became a union organizer. She experienced a great sense of pride as the first woman field representative in the Fresno area, but her job was not always easy. "It was very hard being a woman organizer," she remembered. "Many of our people my age and older were raised with the old customs in Mexico." Holding fast to her beliefs and always outspoken, she persisted in hosting meetings at her home and in visiting and speaking at workers' houses. By providing services to union members, such as translating, writing letters, filling out forms, and advocating for their rights before various government agencies, she wore down initial resistance and earned the loyalty of workers.

Because of her seemingly boundless energy, enthusiasm, and organizing skills, Jessie de la Cruz was tapped to participate in collective bargaining talks with the Christian Brothers Winery. "I want you to learn this," union cofounder Dolores Huerta told her, "because eventually you might have to take over the negotiating of the contracts." This experience proved valuable when she served on the ranch committee (equivalent to a union local) and helped enforce contracts and pursued worker grievances against the company.

Workers took to the picket lines to enhance their bargaining power at their own ranches, as well as to further the union's leverage with the industry at large. De la Cruz was always at the forefront of these efforts to encourage coworkers, and women in particular, to ignore growers' intimidation and to become active in pressuring agribusiness to improve conditions in the fields and to recognize the union as the bargaining agent. When the union turned its strategy to the boycott, she again urged them to take part. Union members, led by de la Cruz, visited supermarkets in the area to plead with consumers not to purchase grapes, wines, lettuce, and other crops.

As the union became more established in the area, she assumed the responsibility for running the local union hiring hall. This innovation eliminated the abuses of labor contractors who often took advantage of workers, charging them exorbitant prices for transportation to jobs, as well as for housing, work tools, food, and clothing. The hiring hall also operated on the basis of seniority. Those who had worked with the union the longest received the first call when jobs became available.

The union served as a significant catalyst for her involvement in the affairs of the community. Her visibility, eloquence, and confidence made her a valuable community advocate and resource. She was appointed to a variety of boards and organizations, including the Fresno County Economic Opportunity Commission, the Central California Action Associates (a community education project in which she taught English to farm-workers), and the state's Commission on the Status of Women. She became active in school board and city council meetings and pushed for bilingual education. Her political activism reached a special highlight for her when she served as a delegate to the Democratic Party National Convention in 1972.

Always industrious, Jessie de la Cruz achieved a family dream in 1977 when the de la Cruzes, together with other families, purchased farmland outside of Fresno and established a cooperative. The venture was a success, and she went on speaking tours to talk about family farming, cooperative landownership, and the struggle of farm laborers. That same year she returned to school.

Currently, de la Cruz lives in a retirement community in Fresno. Although her husband died in 1990, she continues to derive joy from her children and grandchildren. She also volunteers for the UFW and participated in its convention in 2000. She is the recipient of many awards, including recognition from the League of Mexican American Women. Her life has been an inspiration for union and community members alike. Since 1980 she has served as a symbol of the grassroots origins of the UFW and provided a lesson in individual courage and determination for a generation of college students who have read her noteworthy oral history. Her life has demonstrated how one individual overcame abject poverty and limited education to make a difference. "[N]o matter who I talk to I always talk about the union because that's the best thing that ever happened to farm workers." Her remarks serve as a testament to the transformative power of the UFW to accomplish social and individual change. "It gives me great pride to know that I had something to do with it— that I was involved, that I was organizing people."

Maxine Hong Kingston (1940-)

“You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born.

“Don’t let your father know that I told you. He denies her. Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you. Don’t humiliate us. You wouldn’t like to be forgotten as if you had never been born. The villagers are watchful.”

Kerber, Linda K. & DeHart, Jane Sherron, Eds. Women’s America: refocusing the past. Oxford University Press, NY, 1995. p.507

Born in 1940, Maxine Hong Kingston grew up in Stockton, California, the eldest of her immigrant parents’ six children. As a child working in her parents’ laundry and attending public school, she experienced the tensions typical of immigrant children caught between their parents’ culture and the dominant culture. Yet the family ideology and gender prescriptions associated with cold war America were, in many respects, a much more benign version of the views her parents had brought with them from China. That Maxine resisted those prescriptions is evident not only in the bitterness with which she would later write about them, but in her decision to enroll in the University of California at Berkeley in 1958 and to become an author.

Here are some excerpts from "No Name Woman," White Tigers," and "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," chaps. 1, 2, and 5 of The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975). 

"Adultery is extravagance. Could people who hatch their own chicks and eat the embryos and the heads for delicacies and boil the feet in vinegar for party food, leaving only the gravel, eating even the gizzard lining - could such people engender a prodigal aunt? To be a woman, to have a daughter in starvation time was a wate enough. My aunt could not have been the lone romantic who gave up everything for sex. Women in the old China did not choose. Some man had commanded her to lie with him and be his secret evil. I wonder whether he masked himself when he joined the raid on her family...

Carrying the baby to the well shows loving. Otherwise abandon it. Turn its face into the mud. Mothers who love their children take them along. It was probably a girl; there is some hope of forgiveness for boys.

In the twenty years since I heard this story I have not asked for details nor said my aunt's name; I do not know it. People who can comfort the dead can also chase after them to hurt them further - a reverse ancestor worship. The real punishment was not the raid swiftly inflicted by the villagers, but the family's deliberately forgetting her. Her betrayal so maddened them, they saw to it that she would suffer forever, even after her death...

When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talking-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves. We could be heroines, swordswomen. Even if she had to rage across all China, a swordswoman got even with anybody who hurt her family. Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound...

At last I saw that I too had been in the presence of great power, my mother talking-story. After I grew up, I heard the chant of Fa Mu Lan, the girl who took her father's place in battle. Instantly I remembered that as a child I had followed my mother about the house, the two of us singing about how Fa Mu Lan fought gloriously and returned alive from war to settle in the village. I had forgotten this chant that was once mine, given me by my mother, who may not have known its power to remind. She said I would grow up a wife and a slave, but she taught me the song of the warrior woman, Fa Mu Lan. I would have to grow up a warrior woman.

My American life has been such a disappointment..."

For your consideration:

Maxine's mother gave her mixed messages about the fate of Chinese women. Do these messages merely confuse or do they honestly reflect the dichotomy of society's view of women?

Is it a true dichotomy? The mother/whore, the slave/warrior woman? Or is it possible to be both?

In forcing a choice (between roles) can society/can women ever be satisfied?

 

Kingston is a Chinese American author and Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated with a BA in English in 1962. She has written three novels and several works of non-fiction about the experiences of Chinese immigrants living in the United States.

She has contributed to the feminist movement with such works as her memoir The Woman Warrior, which discusses gender and ethnicity and how these concepts affect the lives of women. Kingston has received several awards for her contributions to Chinese American Literature including the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1981 for China Men.

Ellen Willis (1941 - 2006)

Thinking Seriously

In January 1969, Ellen Willis went to Washington to take part in a demonstration against the Vietnam War and for black liberation, which was staged to coincide with Richard Nixon’s inaugural as president. At the demonstration, women in the group had asked to make a statement about their subordinate position within the New Left and on behalf of their own liberation. When they tried to make what they described as a “moderate, pro-movement statement,” Willis reports, men in the audience “booed, laughed, cat-called and yelled enlightened remarks like 

‘Take her off the stage and fuck her.’” 

Instead of reprimanding the hecklers, (as was done during an unpopular speech by a black GI), male organizers hurried the women off the stage.

On her return to New York, Willis wrote an article entitled “Women and the Left”, in which she argued that the New Left was dominated by men and its theory, priorities, and strategy reflected male interests. Radical men would not take women seriously, she insisted, unless “we build an independent movement so strong that no revolution at all is possible without our cooperation.”

The article elicited criticism in the form of letters-to-editor, one of which Willis answered. Although the editor chose not to publish her reply, it is a cogent statement of the thinking of young women who would come to be known as radical feminists.

Here is a portion of that answer:

“Dear Wanda,

I was disturbed by your comments on my Guardian article, not because you disagreed but because you accused me of not thinking seriously…

You say ‘the basic misperception is that our enemy is man, not capitalism.’ I say, the basic misperception is the facile identification of ‘the system’ with ‘capitalism.’ In reality, the American system consists of two interdependent but distinct parts – the capitalist state, and the patriarchal family. Engels, in Origin of the Family,Private Property and the State, explains that the material basis of history is two-fold: the means of production of commodities, and the means of production of new human beings. The social organization for the production of commodities is the property system, in this case the capitalist state. The social organization for the production of new human beings is the family system. And within the family system, men function as a ruling class, women as an exploited class. Historically, women and their children have been the property of men (until recently, quite literally, even in ‘advanced’ countries). The mistake many radicals make is to assume that the family is simply part of the cultural superstructure of capitalism, while actually both capitalism and the family system make up the material subculture of society. It is difficult to see this because capitalism is so pervasive and powerful compared to the family, which is small, weak, and has far less influence on the larger economic system than vice versa. But it is important for women to recognize and deal with their exploited position in the family system, for it is primarily in terms of the family system that we are oppressed as women. Of course capitalism also exploits us, but the way in which it exploits us is primarily by taking advantage of, turning to its own purposes, our subordinate position in the family system and our historical domination by man, which stems from a time when the family system was all-powerful and the state did not yet exist. If you really think about our exploitation under capitalism – as cheap labor and as consumers – you will see that our position in the family system is at the root. This does not mean we shouldn’t fight capitalism. Unless the power of the corporate state is broken, there can be no revolution in the family system. Furthermore, to attack male supremacy (i.e. man’s class dominance in the family system) consistently inevitably means attacking capitalism in vulnerable areas. But if we simply work to destroy male supremacy on all levels, we will find that the resulting revolution is only vicarious…”

“I see men who consider themselves dedicated revolutionaries, yet exploit their wives and girl friends shamefully without ever noticing a contradiction.”

Kerber, Linda K. & DeHart, Jane Sherron, Eds. Women’s America: refocusing the past. Oxford University Press, NY, 1995. p.516-518

For your consideration:

Does Willis imply that capitalism exploits only women? Do you agree? Could women, as well as men, take advantage of the capitalist system?

Is the thought of a "revolution within the family system" encouraging? In other words, by individualizing the revolution within our own families can we see more hope for change than when we consider changing the whole of society? Does this contradict Willis' idea that the family is the weaker of the two 'subcultures'?

Within your own family experience, have "men functioned as a ruling class, women as an exploited class"?

NY Times Obituary

By MARGALIT FOX

Published: November 10, 2006

Ellen Willis, the noted journalist, feminist and cultural critic, whose work ranged seamlessly through politics and religion, sex, film and rock ’n’ roll, died yesterday at her home in Queens. She was 64.

The cause was lung cancer, said her husband, Stanley Aronowitz, the well-known sociologist and progressive activist. At her death, Ms. Willis was a professor of journalism at New York University. She also directed the journalism department’s cultural reporting and criticism program, which she founded in 1995.

As a writer, she was best known for her political essays, which appeared in The Nation, Dissent and elsewhere. She was also widely recognized for her rock criticism: she was the first pop-music critic of The New Yorker, and wrote regularly about music for Rolling Stone, The Village Voice and other publications.

In addition, Ms. Willis was a vital figure in the women’s movement of the late 1960s and afterward. She was a founder of Redstockings, a short-lived but highly influential radical feminist group begun in 1969. In the 1980s, she helped found No More Nice Girls, a street theater and protest group that focused on abortion rights.

At its core, Ms. Willis’s work was rooted in the three R’s, which for her were radicalism, religion and rock. But little escaped her scrutiny, and over the years, her writings embraced subjects as diverse as psychoanalysis, the O. J. Simpson trial, Monica Lewinsky and “The Sopranos.” To Ms. Willis, each of these was a strand in the contemporary social fabric, and her responsibility as critic was to map out the complex ways in which they interlaced.