Turning 40, Going Global
It's 1969 and East Coast to West, there are marches and teach-ins and
sit-ins and rallies. People are taking to the streets, gathering in
church basements, walking out of classrooms to protest the war in
Vietnam, demand civil rights, and press feminist agendas.
Everywhere,
women's power symbols are popping up: on the Boardwalk at Atlantic
City, where a sheep is crowned Miss
America while Bert Parks croons to pageant goers inside the
Convention Center; at the University of Washington student Hub, where
Bernadine Dohrn, National Secretary of the Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) joins a roster of Seattle peace and justice activists
to discuss the “woman question”; in Chicago, where hundreds of women
from leftist organizations and causes gather and found the Chicago
Women’s Liberation Union.
In Boston on May 4th that year,
some 500 women make their way to the Fenway neighborhood for a
conference in the red brick halls of Emmanuel College, then, as at its
founding by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, an all-female
institution. In 1999, activist and author Susan Brownmiller would write
about a performance she saw that day in which members of the radical
separatist feminist group, Cell 16, publicly cut
off their hair to protest male domination. Nancy Miriam Hawley,
whose work with the SDS had led her to help organize the conference,
later characterized the milieu and the women who were drawn to Emmanuel
to talk
about women's rights: “Many of us were involved in other movements
for liberation – the New Left or civil rights or the antiwar movement.
When the women’s movement came along, it hit home, because it was
addressing our oppression as women, which we hadn’t identified before.”
Hawley,
who would go on to work for years as a clinical social worker, group
therapist, and organizational consultant, served at the conference as
the leader of a workshop. She recalled, “A number of us were
particularly concerned about health issues because as young women, were
having our first babies, and birth control and childbirth were prominent
issues for us.”