We are going to begin our
look at Women's Liberation, mid-20th century into the 60s and 70s feminism, by looking at a
specific person, Florynce Flo Kennedy. She kind of
exemplifies a lot of what was going on at this time, a lot of thoughts, ideologies, and events that were happening around
women's rights during this period. Who is Florence Flo or Flo Kennedy?
People magazine called her "the biggest, loudest, and indisputably,
the rudest mouth on the battleground where
feminist activists and radical politics join in mostly common cause." She's, admittedly, fairly
exceptional. She had kind of a long history
of activism even going back to her very early
adulthood, where she organized a boycott
of a Coca-Cola bottler who refused to employ Black drivers while she was living in Kansas City
being a small business owner with her sisters. She's already being an activist both for labor,
but also specifically Black labor. She ends up moving to New York
City with one of her sisters in 1942. This is very early. Well, her activism in Kansas City is
not specific to women, but it is part of ongoing activism by Black people
and certainly a long history of labor activism. She hasn't quite
shifted to her focus on women at this point. In 1942, she
moves to New York and enrolls in Columbia University as
a pre-law student, where she does graduate. She applies
to Columbia Law and is rejected. She threatens to sue them, and magically, a spot opens up for her.
She was the only Black woman in Columbia Law at that point and
only 1 of 8 women in the whole graduating class. She does
graduate with her law degree from Colombia and opens
a law practice in New York. She is still focusing on helping Black people. She takes on cases
for the estates of Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker,
two really prominent musicians from the Harlem Renaissance
period in New York City. They were due royalties from
their record companies and were having to sue to get
those royalties. She's taking on more of this activist vision through her law
practice at this time. Her activism expands. She gets really
frustrated with the legal system at this point in the
mid-20th century and sees that she needs to turn her attention to other ways to improve U.S.
society, specifically racism and sexism. She realizes that a good way
to challenge these issues is to make them public and make these
challenges or protests memorable. She gets really actively involved in many ways with this idea. She establishes the Media Workshop in 1966,
which pickets ad agencies who refuse to reveal their hiring information. She's sponsoring sort of public,
visible protest regarding unjust hiring--if companies
are not hiring women equally to men or not
hiring people of color equally to white people. She's an
early member of the National Organization of Women. She's
involved in a class action suit, Abramowicz versus Lefkowitz,
which had to do with abortion restrictions in New York, relying on testimony from women who had
illegal abortions as expert witnesses. This becomes part of what is presented in Roe v. Wade,
the Supreme Court case that ultimately makes
abortion legal nationwide. She's also part of the anti-Vietnam War
movement. She's protesting that, generally speaking. She's
not only working within ideas of racism and sexism.
She's also still helping Black people with her legal expertise. She participates as a lawyer for people within the
Black Power movement, including the Black Panthers. She's fighting oppression, as
this image caption says. Working to end all forms of oppression
in this country, and sexism is only one facet of that. Very, very
involved in many social issues. She helps form the Feminist Party,
so involved in politics as well starting in 1971. This party
supports Shirley Chisholm for president, who we'll talk
about in a few minutes. Kennedy, Flo Kennedy, also founded …
helped found the National Women's Political Caucus, wanting to
increase the number of women in politics. She's starting
to work in a more ... on more systemic injustices
or imbalances. Not just for specific groups or people, but working in a more
global sense. She's helping to found also the
National Black Feminist Organization, so again, working
to help Black people in particular. She talks
about this, and I won't read this whole quote on the
slide, but she talks about the distorted images of Black women
in U.S. history. She calls them, "grinning Beulahs, castrating Sapphires,
and pancake-box Jemimas," so Aunt Jemima, so that mammy
symbol that goes back to slavery and Reconstruction. She's talking
about the need for Black feminists to have an
independent organization, and we've talked about this before.
That the women's rights organizations were so dominated by white
women and even excluded Black women in many cases. There's this ongoing need for many, many decades, especially in the
20th century, for Black women to create their own organizations, and
Flo Kennedy is part of that. She links that to the Black liberation struggle in the
United States in general. That Black women can be leaders
in this in the community. One of her most sort of famous or
infamous events that she helped sponsor was the protest of the
Miss America Pageant in 1968. She and the New York
Radical Women held this protest. It was a wide-ranging protest. It's
focused on the Miss America Pageant, but it also included protesting
against the Vietnam War and really just generally
consumerism that is becoming ever more an issue and what they called the "degrading
Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol" of Miss America. Kennedy is
involved in this, also still thinking about centering Black
women and their issues by pointing to the racist nature of Miss
America Pageant at this point and beauty standards in general. That
there were very few, if any, non-white women involved in these kind of pageants,
these beauty pageants being held up as the ideal beautiful woman
in the United States. This event became linked in the
public mind with burning bras. In fact, that was part of the plan. They had, as part of this protest
of the Miss America Pageant, in addition to picket
lines, gorilla theater, leaflets, lobbying visits
to the contestants themselves to urge them to reject this,
but this freedom trash can that we see here in this image. In this
quote from Kennedy, she talks about the trash can
"into which we will throw bras, girdles, curlers,
false eyelashes, wigs, and representative issues" of
various women's magazines. She calls that "woman-garbage."
These are commercial products that women
should reject as objectifying women. They wanted to
burn the contents of this trashcan on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, but
they couldn't get permission from the fire department so it just became
a symbolic trashing of this. It became linked in the
public mind with bra burning in part because
of a New York Post article reporting on the event that referenced
the burning of draft cards, so the card that men would get to
be drafted into the military. As a Vietnam War protest, some men would
burn those draft cards, which was illegal to do. In the public
mind, it became linked with this idea of bra burning as part
of women's liberation protests and feminism. You can see
these photos from this event. Lots of signs talking about women being
beautiful intrinsically. They don't have to be objectified. That they are not a toy,
a pet, or a mascot. Women holding up their bras and then throwing them in the
trash can, for example. A really dynamic, vibrant event that was covered
in the media and became very symbolic of this rise of feminist thought during
the late 60s and early 70s. We referenced Flo Kennedy's sponsorship or help in Shirley Chisholm's presidential
run. Shirley Chisholm is this really important person in U.S. political history,
but in particular feminist history. She was a member of the New York State
legislature--only the second Black woman to serve there--and then was elected to the U.S.
Congress as a representative in 1968. She was the first Black woman
elected to congress, so really a trailblazer. She worked on women's issues, reintroducing the Equal Rights
Amendment in 1969, but also focusing on issues like child care and food
insecurity that affected families and women.
Then, also, again, helping Black people in helping to found the Congressional
Black Caucus, so the internal organization in Congress of Black senators and representatives.
She served in Congress for almost 20 years, so she was
a very important representative. She, during that time, ran for president in 1972. Flo Kennedy
is one of the people helping her with this. Again, a
trailblazer. First Black majority party candidate. The first woman to run as a Democrat. There had been others that had … one
woman who had tried to be the Republican nominee in 1964 a little bit earlier. She was the first woman to participate
in a U.S. presidential debate. Super groundbreaking both as a Black person and
as a woman. This is definitely right up Flo Kennedy's alley. Another event that Kennedy was
involved with was this kind of humorous, but important
message, the Harvard Pee-In in 1973. This name, pee-in, is
referencing the sit-in, where students would go to, for example,
the president's office of a university and sit down and refuse to leave. It's a peaceful form of protest, civil disobedience. In the
context of Harvard, Harvard had been
originally only for men, but by this middle 20th century
time period had been pushed by social pressure in the United
States in general to admit more and more women. We know, though, that they really during this early 70s time period,
were still restricting the number of women allowed to enter
as a student in Harvard. Generally keeping a ratio of
4 men to 1 woman. They didn't achieve 50/50 male/female
enrollment until 2007. This is a long period of working toward gender
equality in Harvard. The context of it being originally
an all-men institution was that many buildings only
had one bathroom, which had been for men, and
so there were not facilities, bathroom facilities, for women. To be admitted to Harvard, women would go to Lowell Hall, which we see in this photo,
to take their admission exams. Sorry about that. Okay. If they had to go to the bathroom
during this admission exam, they had to leave the building and cross
the street to another building to find a bathroom. This is not equitable. It's not fair. It's
not convenient. The women of Harvard asked Flo Kennedy to help them
plan a protest. They did a public protest outside the building with slogans on signs saying, "To pee or
not to pee, that is the question," right in Harvard Yard in the main
center of the Harvard campus. Kennedy makes a speech, and then
they poured a symbolic urine--it wasn't really urine but a bright yellow
liquid--on the steps of Lowell Hall. In her speech, she says, "Let the
Dean of Harvard be warned. Unless Lowell Hall gets a room for women
so that women taking exams don't have to hold it in, run across the
street or waste time deciding whether to pee or not to pee,
next year we will be back doing the real thing," meaning peeing on the steps
or pouring pee on the steps. Again, a really sort of public, memorable, effective sort of civil disobedience protest that … It's kind of a
signature of Flo Kennedy. She is kind of deeply
involved with feminism. You can see her here
on the left with other well-known feminists,
including Gloria Steinem, making lots of speeches, really being
a public figure during this time. She's a figure not only
of feminists, feminism, of Black power, civil rights. She kind of
combines all of these issues. We can talk about her as an intersectional figure. Intersectionality is this really important
concept developed by a legal scholar, Kimberlé
Crenshaw, in 1989, originally focusing on the intersection
of race and sex, or we would say gender. She coined this term "intersectionality"
to describe the ways that people have multiple
overlapping identities. That changes how they
experience discrimination. For example, Kimberlé
Crenshaw is a woman, and she's also black. a woman can be heterosexual
or lesbian or many other sexual identities. You could be a Hispanic
trans woman, for example. Lots of different aspects. Class, economics can be an
aspect of that. You can be a first-generation college
student. You can be … You can have come from what we
call a working-class background. Crenshaw initially focused on Black women and saying that their
intersectional experience of being Black and a woman is a specific
way that they experience discrimination. It's important
to understand, though, that the idea of intersectionality
doesn't mean that it's additive. What additive would mean is that Black women experience the same racism as
Black men and white women, just added together. That's not what this is saying.
Intersectionality is that, for example, Black women experience a different kind of racism or
sexism than people with other categories. White women
and Black women: different. White men or Black men and Black
women: different experiences. It's not additive. It's
interlocking in this sense. It's a really important way to look at these historical aspects of women's history. A great example are these issues
of Black women in labor. We've got examples that Kimberlé
Crenshaw talks about in her article. For example, this legal case DeGraffenreid
versus General Motors, where General Motors
had fired a bunch of workers during the 1970s. Of those people, all of the
Black women who had been hired after 1970 were fired. Five
of them sued General Motors. The layoffs were based on seniority. If you were more recently hired, you
were more likely to be fired. GM had not hired any Black women until
1964, so Black women are automatically more likely to have been
fired in this situation. The ruling argued that General
Motors' policy didn't fit only race … racial discrimination or
gender discrimination, and that the 1965 Civil Rights Act did
not create a classification of Black women, which is true.
The Civil Rights Act was not intersectional in that sense. The court said, "Well, there's no
discrimination on the basis of sex because General Motors did
hire women before 1964, just not any Black women." Black women are experiencing a different
situation here than the white women at General Motors. This is an example
that Kimberlé Crenshaw gives of an intersectional experience
of discrimination. This is still an issue, or it's still an
important way to look at the issues today. For example,
Black trans women are facing violence and
being killed at much higher rates than white
trans women or Black cisgender women. There is the way Black women
are treated by law enforcement that is distinctly different
than how white women are treated. This is still a really useful
sort of scholarly idea that can be used to look at not
only history, but current events. Flo Kennedy was always sort of intersectional in how she
worked with issues of, in her case, race and gender and also
labor and class in that sense. To sum up, Flo Kennedy's
activism really gives us a view of lots of these
aspects of women's liberation and this effort that
was going on during this late 60s, early 70s time period.
Certainly, her way of doing this--being kind of loud and proud, being very
public, her words memorable-- is a departure from other methods of women's organizing
in the 20th century. Certainly, we've had women suffrage protesters using violence, using
public protest, for example, but that was significantly limited. That was not the norm and was
not typical of most women's organizations. Kennedy is a departure and a new form
of protest, what she was organizing during this time. She's also an important figure in the uniting of
women's rights, civil rights, and Black Power, from being a lawyer for Black plaintiffs through to developing these broader
protests and events. We would call this intersectional, even
though that concept hadn't been developed yet at the time. A
fascinating view kind of to start looking at the feminist movement in this
mid-20th century period.