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This book, In The Worldwide Family of Militant Women, is a hybrid social history and memoir. The book excavates the forgotten remains of the anti-imperialist women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, primarily by unearthing my own political roots and growth. It was an epoch-defining time, like today, when the genocidal war that the U.S. waged against a small, peasant country exposed both the vicious destructive power and the weaknesses of the U.S. Empire.
I especially want to share experiences with some of the millions of young people who, outraged by the impunity of the Empire, are impelled to challenge the same intolerable war machine that we confronted in the 1960s. For this reason, I am honored that Nadya Tannous, longtime activist in the Palestinian Youth Movement, agreed to write the Foreword to the book.
Those Times
The narrative begins in 1961—when Freedom Riders risked their lives to defy Jim Crow; the year the US, brokered the assassination of the first President of independent Congo: Patrice Lumumba; when a Cuban militia repelled a CIA-organized invasion; when abortions throughout the U.S. were illegal and when job discrimination against women was rampant, blatant and legal. There were no mobile phones, no answering machines; no computers, not even electric typewriters; no internet and everyone’s pronouns were “he, his, him”.
Stories within the Story
The book opens to a scene many women may identify with: in a seedy hotel, making love for the first time, without pleasure, and hemorrhaging. In that scene, and all the scenes that follow: interviewing union organizers in the Peruvian Sierra; surviving as an inmate in a psychiatric hospital; presiding over an early meeting of SDS; meeting Malcolm X; attempting to block troop trains carrying US recruits to Viet Nam; following Ché Guevara’s escape route in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra; and in meetings with members of the “worldwide family of militant women” in Viet Nam and Paris, I encourage readers to discover, along with me, that we not only need an anti-imperialist women’s movement, we also have the potential to build and grow that movement.
Meet the Family
A long line of brilliant Black women revolutionaries has lit a path for all women’s liberation. Vicki Garvin, Toni Cade Bambara, Kathleen Cleaver, Roberta Alexander, members of the Third World Women’s Alliance, Pat Parker and the Combahee River Collective directly shared their insights with me. This book also features the political wisdom that sisters and comrades from the Viet Nam Women’s Union and from survivors of Latin American dictatorships taught me. Last, I had the great joyful privilege of learning from Meridel LeSueur, the communist, feminist, writer and veteran of nearly a century of working class struggles. Thanks to their teachings and my own experience, the dominant white women’s movement—that is the one only concerned with gaining equal status with white men within the white supremacist, patriarchal capitalist system—never attracted me.
I look forward to continuing a sisterly exchange of ideas and experiences with anyone interested in the past, present or future of a worldwide family of militant women.