Just As I Thought (19 page)

There were so many other events that ought to be written about, and I know will be. But briefly … the busloads of women who came all the way from Minnesota … the women from Greenham Common in England, and Comiso in Italy, and from the Netherlands and Germany who worked so hard to share their experiences with us … the religious women who asked if they could pray in the depot chapel, were given permission, then asked to leave when the pacific nature of the prayers was understood … the walk to Harriet Tubman’s house … the civil disobedience actions of Labor Day, when women chose to dig a hole under the fence instead of climbing over it.

One of the most important events, and I do think of it as an event in itself, was the local news that the Seneca encampment became. That news coverage is part of the news I brought home. The combination of stubbornness that is nonviolent action, the peculiar, arduous, delicate process of our constantly public meetings set against the opposition’s vituperative rage illuminated the issues. What we talked and acted about was Peace and Justice, and the way we went about it spoke to the word “Future.”

One more story: I am waiting to use the phone. There are two phones. I am pretty annoyed with the long, gabby calls of the people on the line in front of me, until I’m finally close enough to hear a couple. One woman is giving information about her entire affinity group to a contact person … Someone’s dog has to be picked up … A mother must be called … A job has to be put off. The woman on the other phone is young and in tears. She’s saying, “Mom. Ma, please, it’s my world they’re gonna blow up.” Then some silence. Then: “Ma, please, I have to do it. It’s not terrible to get arrested. I’m all right, Ma, please listen, you got married and had us and everything and a house, but they still kept making nuclear bombs.” More tears. “Listen, listen please, Ma.”

I wanted to take the phone from her and say, “Ma, don’t worry, your kid’s okay. She’s great. Don’t you see she’s one of the young women who will save my granddaughter’s life?”

—1983

Pressing the Limits of Action

When did you first get involved in civil disobedience actions? Can you tell us some stories about early actions that you were involved in and then how you got involved in the peace movement?

If you consider the important actions of the civil-rights movement I don’t think I’ve done so much. There aren’t a lot of experiences that seem striking or interesting, but it does seem that my general disposition has been disobedient, civil or otherwise, though years ago we did have some kinds of local success. We were adamant about keeping the buses out of the park [Washington Square]. We were adamant about not letting the park be cut into for real-estate interests. One of the things I learned was stubbornness. And I’ve thought more and more that that’s the real meaning of nonviolent civil disobedience—to be utterly and absolutely stubborn.

Another example—although no one was arrested—they would not allow any music in the same park, which is hard to believe right now. But they wouldn’t allow any guitars or singing, flutes or oboes, anything. And we finally simply sat down together in the fountain circle with the children and we just sat and played guitars and recorders and fiddles. The police came from another precinct; they didn’t dare send the sixth. They went after us, knocking people around a little, but we were stubborn. Then we won. Now it’s so noisy you can hardly stand it. It seems if you have these early successes, no matter how small, they seem to form hopeful expectations.

Also, there was one action that seemed to wake us up in New York, and probably Boston, too. That was around the civil defense shelter drills. Dorothy Day was the only person in New York who, for a couple of years, refused publicly to take shelter. Then one year there were fifteen women and men. Then we were hundreds who stood in the open of City Hall park. Those actions were simple, because the drills were idiotic. Disobedience began to occur everywhere. People were arrested. The drills ended.

I don’t think the thing for me has been civil disobedience so much as the importance of
not
asking permission. For instance, we had kids in our public school who had trouble reading or writing. A few of us just got together and said we’d better go ahead and help out. We suspected that the principal wouldn’t want us around. So we simply went into the school and scattered ourselves among the teachers and began to work with the kids. It’s true that three months later we were kicked out, but we got a lot done, and methods and forms were created so parents could come back and be useful. People will say to this day, “How did you women do that? Who did you talk to?” We didn’t talk to anyone. We just did it. So I can’t say that was civil disobedience. It was just an effort to make change by making change. We talk a lot about living in a free and democratic country but we’re always asking permission to do very simple things.

Another fact, I came out of a socialist background as a kid and my meeting with pacifists was an extraordinary experience. I met people in the American Friends and the War Resisters League, people like that, totally unfamiliar to me. I had a normal Socialist childhood.

What’s a normal Socialist childhood?

Well, you know, on May Day you wear a red tie. I was a Falcon (Communist children were Pioneers). Then you sometimes took a course in Marxism when you were twelve or thirteen, something like that. I always worked as a kid in the student unions and in groups like that. The idea of nonviolence or pacifism may have been abroad in the land, but it was not abroad in my head at all. It never entered my mind. In those years—I’m talking about the forties—political positions shifted and changed and you really couldn’t hold your course in them because so much depended on what the Soviet Union said or did and whether you were for or against it. On either side you were often steered by that.

So my meeting in the early sixties, very early, maybe even ’59, with what I later discovered were Friends, was a real breakthrough. The whole idea, the simple sentence “Speak truth to power” really shook me. Meanwhile, I was writing more and more [stories] and thinking about the truth of art and the truth of politics and going further—
Act
truth to power. Circumvention and manipulation in the movements of my youth had begun to disgust me—that was one of the reasons I got into so much local work—I had really just had it with the grown-up men and the big picture without quite realizing it.

The first action I took that could be described in formal terms as civil disobedience was during the Armed Forces Day Parade in the sixties. Somebody said, “You want to do that with us?” And I said, “Oh sure.” So we sat down in front of the parade, sat down and threw flowers at the tanks, etc. And the good thing about that is that I got six days in jail. I’ve never spent more than that at any one time. I learned a lot. I learned that it was interesting. I mean, when you’re in jail, it’s not as if you’re no place. You’re in another place. You’re
SOMEPLACE
. It is not as if you’re not among people. You’re among women and they’re interesting, not frightening. Whoever they are, the people, the prisoners, those women can educate you. And the whole experience is one that, well, you are suddenly in an American colony. You can think of that vast prison population that way. You have to go into it from time to time. This is how the colonized live. Prison is not a metaphor.

How does your commitment to nonviolence affect the kind of political work that you do?

Well, first of all, I think most people are nonviolent. I think there’s an awful lot of junk written about the naturalness of competition and revenge—survivalism. Which is not to say there aren’t certain cultures where people go out and kill each other and kill each other back. But for me, when I say nonviolence, it only means I will be nonviolent as long as I possibly can. I can’t think that armed struggle is the only way to change the world or the neighborhood. And it’s just words. I know this view will anger people—even some who are dear to me—but most of the people in the United States who use the term so frequently have no idea of what killing and war and death are. They have no feeling for the suffering. “Armed struggle” is two words in a pamphlet, repeated many times in a book. So you can see I hate the cheap use of that term. Still, nonviolence does
not
mean personal safety.
Pacifism is not passive-ism.
If it means that, it’s useless. So I will try with others to make change in this world as stubbornly as I possibly can without inflicting pain or death but without dodging conflict confrontation—even initiating it—as at Greenham, Seneca, Livermore, Griffiss, all the wonderful Ploughshares actions at draft boards.

All of this is related of course to what I said about not asking permission to move through my time in this world. It relates also closely to the idea, the Quaker idea again, that there is a light in every human being and that light has to be addressed first before anything else. And that doesn’t mean that I don’t get angry. I’ve elbowed a few cops in my time for getting too close for my comfort or, in certain cases, my children’s. But it does mean that your first approach to another human being is with the assumption that that woman or man is human and you can at least begin to talk—approach without hatred.

Then you say, “How do you feel about the Nicaraguans—El Salvador?” Well, first I don’t judge them. I don’t judge other people, other nations that our government and their own have pressed beyond bearing. In the second place, how can I judge them in the position they’re in when I myself, without such experience of oppression, have lived with all the abstractions of war in my own head. As a little girl growing up—as any little girl growing up in my generation—we really looked to that little-boy image of energy no matter how lively we were ourselves. People assume it’s a natural progression—the only forward. It took me a long time to think in other ways. Our histories are written in chapters of war and violence. Where are the long histories of nonviolent lives and actions? In fact, we here in the United States have infinite possibilities for nonviolent actions. There are people who talk a lot about armed struggle and there are many passiveists who say they can’t possibly withhold taxes, they’d get in trouble with the IRS.

How did you become a feminist?

It’s a long process. It begins in childhood, doesn’t it? I’ve always had a lot of girl friends—women friends and always circles of friends. I’ve never been far from the lives of women. But I liked men a lot, too. I think it was called boy crazy once. During the Second World War, I lived in army camps for a couple of years with my husband. In those days all the boys I knew were in the Pacific or Europe. At war. I still have a lot of feeling for soldiers. At Seneca—the Women’s Peace Encampment—I saw those kids and they meant something to me. We don’t think about those young fellows enough. But your question: After my kids were a couple of years old, I began to write stories that were really mostly about women’s lives. That was because I was pained by the peculiar life of the women my age—in their twenties and thirties, a lot of them with kids and a lot of them alone already, objects of considerable contempt but kind of tough, ironic, becoming angry. I didn’t think of myself as a feminist writing those stories, but I would say I’d begun to educate myself without knowing it. I was learning from myself, among others.

And then when, in response to nuclear testing and the Vietnam War, the Greenwich Village Peace Center was formed, we tried to form a women’s task force. But Women’s Strike for Peace had gathered itself together within that year and they seemed to fill peace-women’s needs for more autonomous action. I was more interested in local work then, and in fact, many of us in the Peace Center came out of PTAs, park work, tenants’ organizations—we had lived in the community’s life. There were very strong women at the center and we didn’t suffer too much the experiences you’ve probably heard about from women who worked in mixed (men and women) antiwar groups. Also, we were on home turf, not at meetings far away. Still, I had enough discontent to join an early consciousness-raising group. And I thought of myself more and more as a feminist. But when several women left Resist in the early seventies, I didn’t do that, I didn’t think we should all leave. At the time I thought we should (we women) have gotten together and decided in some common way who should remain, who should go. It seemed important for feminists to continue to work inside groups like Resist that were offering support and funding to women. The war was still going on, there were also resistance groups that had to be supported—in and out of the Army. (Maybe that was the central committee of my youth still talking.)

It was in early consciousness-raising groups that I began to think of myself as a feminist and also see that I had been one for some years in argument and concern. But it was really later that I decided that was the way I wanted to work. I had to go through some years of the anti-nuke movement first, really, before I decided I wanted to work in autonomous women’s groups.

What was it about your experiences in the anti-nuke movement that led you to make that decision?

The split over the Seabrook actions. Both sides infuriated me. That’s wrong, there were at least three positions, when Clamshell on a moment and a half’s notice decided not to do the planned CD at Seabrook, and then the other side’s bossy male leadership wanted to take over the place (naturally disgusted but with the same macho thoughtless muscle-making). These were, by the way, mostly Boston people (I was working and living in Vermont at the time). So I’d begun to say words like that—rural, urban—and also to see the differences.

When you said you had to go through the whole anti-nuke movement, did you see that as being separate from the feminist movement? Did you see them as being two different things?