In commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the coup in Chile, I am posting images of silk-screened posters printed at Red River Women’s Press. This image and many others are included in the book, Collected Art of Solidarity: Austin, Texas, 1974-1989.
April 13, 1980, Austin, Texas
February 22, 1979, Austin, Texas
April 23, 1978, Austin, Texas
September 10, 1977, Austin, Texas
Women’s Liberation
Below is an overview of Austin Women’s Liberation activities in 1969 and 1970 in Austin, Texas. It was published in the first issue of Second Coming, December 1, 1970. The author, Barbara Hines, has donated her copies of Second Coming to the University of Texas Briscoe Center for American History.
The most exciting thing about writing this article is the realization of just how far Women’s Liberation in Austin has come since a small group got together two years ago to try to decide what Women’s Liberation exactly was or could be.
The group began in February 1969, when about ten women gathered to discuss the subject. Most of the women had been active in the New Left and were disenchanted with the male dominated movement. But none were really into the women’s movement or had done much reading about it.
I started going in April when a friend invited me; at that time I’d never heard of Women’s Liberation. I’d been out of the country for a year and a half and was going through a difficult period of readjustment. I figured it would be a good way to meet people, never realizing the profound effects it would have on my life over a period of a year and a half.
That spring about 15-20 met regularly to try to define women’s liberation, what impact it could have on us and on the whole community. The group remained small and we simply rapped and tried to get to know each other. By May we decided it was time to try to convey to others what we were all about…our first action was the guerrilla theater at the Neiman-Marcus fashion show. We painted ourselves with exaggerated theater make-up, donned paper dresses made from sexist advertisements and picketed. I was a bit embarrassed; I’d never done anything like that before, but when it was all over we agreed it was a success and we attracted women to the group.
Summer was beautiful. About 25 of us met weekly. We didn’t form permanent rap groups like most women do now, but rather we flowed freely in and out of the three groups we usually broke down into. Perhaps this was because of the intimacy and smallness of the group or the excitement of the newness of the group. Perhaps none of us were quite as alienated as we are now and didn’t feel the need for a stable support group. But we formed some real strong bonds that summer.
Fall 69… our first meetings were large and enthusiastic. The birth control information center happened, our first concrete project, and we were excited.
Then the problems began…we had little structure and no program; we ended up breaking into small groups at every meeting. This served the needs of the constant influx of new women eager to find out what the movement was all about, but many older members became tired of rehashing the same issues. We didn’t want to become elitist; dividing the group into “old and “new,” but we didn’t know how to deal with the problem. We tried to get projects underway, but since we’d been socialized never to take initiative, few ever materialized. Consequently, we lost a lot of fine women.
By this time, the conventional media had made us into a “legitimate controversial” subject as we spent much time speaking to classes and organizations. We did guerrilla theater to greet our honored guest Miss America, dressing ourselves in lipstick tubes, Toni permanent boxes and all the other products Miss America uses her body to sell.
The most fun of all, was the Campus Date Auction. We dressed as slaves and chained ourselves together, led by a slave-master. Everyone liked it and the audience really participated. [Note: Protesting a date auction was the point, but re-enacting a slae auction, even as protest, would not happen today.]
That spring activities picked up again – study groups and rap groups formed, the Abortion Repeal Committee began to meet.
This summer I wasn’t there, but people have told me that not too much happened. Self defense classes met and so did some rap groups.
This relative calm lasted until Aug. 26, the first national women’s strike. We leafleted, held a rally and a potluck dinner.
The big impetus this year was the Conference. it was a heck of a lot of work and hassle. Many of us feared it wouldn’t fulfill expectations, but in retrospect, it was all and even more than we had hoped for. Women from all over Texas spent an entire week-end with each other, talking, planning, eating and relaxing. For many women, it was the first time to get together with their own sex and talk about meaningful issues. We realized how powerful sisterhood could be.
A million things are happening now… we’ve overcome the dilemma that plagued us last year, that of the emergence of an elite within the group, our “leaders.” It wasn’t that we wanted it to happen; in fact, it was totally contrary to our basic assumption of a structure-less group. It was just that few people ever took initiative and all the shitwork fell on a small few. Now the general meetings are planned by a different collective each meeting and presents the program. Many, many groups are actively working on specific projects. We’ve also managed to spread the shitwork around, thank god.
The Women’s Center will soon be a reality. The Abortion Committee is actively working, day care is underway, a community women’s liberation group has formed… study groups, rap groups, a newspaper. Kate came and proved to many of us that we can build a structure-less anarchist movement; our sisters defied the frat rats’ exploitation of women during the “great sign controversy.” It’s all happening and I’m very happy.
The Women’s Cranky was a creation of the San Francisco Women’s Street Theater. Its debut performance was on International Women’s Day in 1970 in San Francisco’s Dolores Park. It was performed in many other venues, including classrooms. Melody James, Ellen Sorrin (Waxman), and Robin Brady were original authors and illustrators. Jane Norling contributed her artistic talent when The Women’s Cranky was revised to be printed and distributed by People’s Press in San Francisco.
The People’s Press version with the graphics and the script are archived at the University of Texas Briscoe Center for American History.
The San Francisco Women’s Street Theater described the cranky this way:
A cranky is a paper movie or cartoon sequence inside a simple wooden frame. The moving paper roll unwinds (is cranked) onto a take-up reel, enabling you to tell a story with a minimum number of words and maximum number of strong images. THIS cranky is a brief history of women’s oppression and struggles. About how the myth of women’s inferiority began and has been perpetuated to oppress us, and about how women are refusing to submit to that HIS-STORY any longer. We, the Women’s Street Theater, wanted to share the script and directions… with all our sisters. …It’s been great at rallies, small meetings, in parks, on the back of flat bed trucks, and on the marble steps of the Pacific Stock Exchange. People love it. They laugh, get involved, and have always been eager to discuss it afterwards.
Here is how the Cranky starts:
In the beginning [Cymbal clash followed by tambourine shake about 5 seconds]
Women were ALWAYS pregnant
The Women’s Cranky came to Austin in 1970 when members of People’s Press in San Francisco arrived with copies of the instructions and graphics.
The cranky was low-tech media. It took more time to draw the images onto a scroll of butcher paper than it takes to shoot and post a You Tube video. But it was a great device for introducing women’s liberation to a crowd. It was performed in the Student Union at the University of Texas at Austin, at the Oleo Strut GI coffeehouse in Killeen, Texas and many other places. With its compelling graphics and easy script, it made for lively street theater. It only took a handful of women – two to crank the story along, one to read, and the others to produce sound effects with tambourines, pots and pans, and kazoos. It should be remembered for its no-software, no-electricity-required, means of production. It never failed to draw a crowd and get them laughing along with a radical message about women’s liberation.
A Youtube video displays the graphics. See a separate post to view the script and directions for sound effects. The University of Texas Briscoe Center for American History has digitized the People’s Press publication that includes instructions to build a cranky, graphic images, and the script.
In order to preserve and document important history on movement attorneys based in Austin, Texas, Peoples’ History in Texas (PHIT) gathered oral histories from four attorneys and an office worker in the Austin Law Commune. PHIT intends to make the material available several ways:
Description of the Austin Law Commune
In the midst of the national upheaval ignited by the civil rights and antiwar movements, attorneys created a law practice devoted to the needs of the movement. They defended movement leaders who were harassed on the streets or in their offices; they defended demonstrators when they were arrested, draft resisters facing charges and GIs at courts martial. They came to the aid of an ever-growing community of dissidents who needed to be defended in courts of law. They worked to create a statewide network with other like-minded attorneys, and they created a unique, collectively run, model for practicing law.
Background
On October 1, 1969, the Austin Law Commune was born. First located in a small office on West 24th Street, they moved to an office at West 15th and then, in 1973, to an office on West 12th. According to Time magazine, it was the third such commune in the country.
INTERVIEWS
Cam Cunningham, October 2009
Jim Simons, July 2018
Brady Coleman, September 2019
Bobby Nelson, September 2019
Julie Howell, February 2020
Defending Dissidents, the 27-minute video on the People’s History in Texas website, features interviews with four attorneys and a legal worker. John Howard, who began as a law clerk before joining the practice as a partner in the 70s, died in 1988. He worked on the Wounded Knee defense with Jim Simons. Vivian Mahlab and Steve Russell worked as law clerks with the Austin Law Commune.
ARTICLES / BOOKS
Hall, David, “Movement Legal Services Aids Unpopular Defendants,” The Texas Law Forum, March 3, 1969.
Muir, John, “The Daring Duo,” The Rag, September 9, 1969.
Northcott, Kaye, “Radical Caucus of Bar,” Texas Observer, July 24, 1970.
Northcott, Karen, “Sex Discrimination at UT,” Texas Observer, July 30, 1971.
Scott, Glenn, “Law Collective Cures Perry Mason Palsy,” The Rag, October 7, 1974.
Simons, Jim, “Memoirs of a Movement Lawyer,” The Texas Observer, 1977.
Simons, Jim, “Barrister at the Barricades,” No Apologies: Texas Radicals Celebrate the 60s, Austin: Eakin Press, pp. 131-147, 1992.
Simons, Jim, Molly Chronicles: Serotonin Serenade, Austin: Plain View Press, 2006.
Simons, Jim, “Remembering Cam Cunningham,” The Rag Blog, July 15, 2012.
Simons, Jim, “The Fifty Year Lawyer: Defying the Systems of Power,” The Rag Blog, July 30, 2014.
ARCHIVES
The Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin houses papers of Jim Simons and Cam Cunningham. Oral histories conducted by People’s History in Texas will be archived at the Briscoe Center.
This post appeared in The Rag Blog, September 26, 2022
By Alice Embree
Well, I tumble outta bed and stumble to the kitchen
‘9 to 5‘ lyrics by Dolly Parton
Pour myself a cup of ambition
I expected Ellen Cassedy’s book, Working 9 to 5: A Women’s Movement, A Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie, to be a lively history of clerical workers mobilizing. I knew that the 9 to 5 organization she helped organize inspired the movie 9 to 5, with the hilarious combo of Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton cast as disgruntled office workers. The lively beat of Dolly Parton’s title song became an anthem for women workers scrambling out of bed in the 80s.
What surprised me about this book is that it is an organizer’s manual for organizing. The book tells the story of an enormously effective group of women who intended to transform the world of working women and did.
In 1973, the Boston 9 to 5 group scraped together funds to send Ellen Cassedy, the author, to an organizing school run by the Midwest Academy in Chicago.
Cassedy eagerly shared the skills she learned with her Boston compatriots as they worked out of a small office in Boston’s “Y.” They kept records of contacts, they used a simple order (pie and coffee) for lunch meetings with prospective members, and they made sure their meetings resulted in action steps. They’d compare notes after every major event. They asked a lot of each other and became an extraordinary team.
The 9 to 5 group in Boston used daring theatrical tactics and dogged leafleting. With their fingers freezing, they passed out thousands of fliers at Boston transit stops. When they began in the early 70s, “sexual harassment” wasn’t a term; employment ads in newspapers were divided by gender, often as “Men and Girls;” there were no policies for maternity leave; employers refused to post jobs internally, preventing women from knowing they could apply; and there weren’t career ladders for clerical workers who often trained the men who took the supervisory jobs.
9 to 5 went outside the box in organizing, enlisting community support, adopting strategies such as family-friendly lunch-hour meetings, embarrassing employers with “Bad Boss” awards, observing Secretaries Day with rallies that featured oversized typewriters and coffee cups and demands for raises, not just roses. They used corporate research to target companies. They showed up at a tennis tournament sponsored by a bank with picket signs shaped like tennis rackets demanding, “Even the Score for Working Women!” They used the help of government agencies that investigated discrimination and illegal collusion in the setting of wages. They worked with the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office to win back pay for clerical workers.
They just use your mind and they never give you credit
‘9 to 5‘ lyrics by Dolly Parton
It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it
When they began, women’s work was underpaid, as it still is, and clerical workers had to battle the prejudice that they were working for “pin money,” whiling away time before pregnancy and childrearing began. Even labor unions didn’t see women office workers as a sector that could be organized.
9 to 5 wasn’t a union when they began, but they became a union. As they sought out organized labor, they connected with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to create Local 925 and later District 925 that allowed them to use their proven tactics within the labor movement. They were intentional with their outreach, prioritizing cities where the workforce was racially diverse. Their work in Cleveland, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Atlanta ensured an interracial movement. By the 1980s, they had organizations in 45 states and offices in 14 major cities, and 50 paid organizers.
Then Ronald Reagan became president. His first act was firing 11,000 air-traffic controllers who were on strike. Throughout the 80s, there was anti-labor pushback, emboldened union busting by corporations, a National Labor Relations Board that was unresponsive, and backlogs at federal agencies that ensured a dead-end for many discrimination complaints. Frequently, unions found that they could win a union election, but not get a contract.
It’s a rich man’s game no matter what they call it
‘9 to 5‘ lyrics by Dolly Parton
And you spend your life putting money in his pocket
The book also tells the story of getting on to the big screen in 1980. Jane Fonda wrote an introduction to Cassedy’s book and the author uses an entire chapter to describe the origin and development of the film that used 9 to 5 organizers as consultants. Cassedy explains that Jane Fonda did not want a preachy plot and the comedy format wasn’t initially embraced by 9 to 5 organizers. It was, however, inspired by them when a writer asked if they ever fantasized killing their boss. The movie put office workers onto the big screen for the first time in central roles. It was a huge box office success, grossing over $100 million.
Cassedy’s book is a lively history lesson for organizers. True to form, she looks to the future with her insights and draws parallels between 9 to 5’s work of mobilizing community stakeholders, not just taking on a workplace. The Fight for $15 is an example she gives of an effort that relies on both labor and community pressure to demand increases in the minimum wage.
She looks back on the legacy of 9 to 5’s work and celebrates the continued organizing of clerical workers by other labor unions, not just SEIU, recognizing efforts of the Teamsters, the Communications Workers of America, and the American Federation of Teachers, among others.
Ever the organizer, Cassedy has gathered the group’s advice and I will end with my favorites:
Note: Ellen Cassedy is the coauthor, with Karen Nussbaum, of 9 to 5: The Working Women’s Guide to Office Survival and she coauthored The 9 to 5 Guide to Combating Sexual Harassment with Ellen Bravo.
Alice Embree is the author of the memoir Voice Lessons. Alice’s book was the 2021 co-winner of the Liz Carpenter Award given by the Texas State Historical Association for Best Book on the History of Texas Women and has been selected for the 2022 Texas Book Festival.
The fight didn’t start in a courtroom and it will not end there. This post was originally published in The Rag Blog on June 25, 2022 and in Democratic Left on June 27, 2022.
AUSTIN — The Supreme Court decision was telegraphed on May 1st and moved across the weeks like a slow motion train wreck to the announcement on June 24 that Roe v. Wade has been overturned. The leak, seeping like an oil spill, is a stain on rights secured by courageous Texans nearly 50 years ago.
My daughter told me the news. I looked at my granddaughter, just shy of nine-months-old, and thought about her future as a post-Roe baby. I felt the dull edge of sorrow.
I have talked with many of the women who were on the front lines of this fight decades ago. Bobby Nelson, a feminist friend, helped with the legal research for Roe v. Wade as Sarah Weddington prepared the case. She also helped with a 1971 hearing at the Texas Legislature on abortion. Sarah Weddington gave Bobby bound editions of the Supreme Court testimony. In May, Bobby told me, “I’m glad Sarah died before this happened.” Every time I remember her words, tears well up.
What everyone needs to know is that this fight didn’t start in a courtroom and it will not end there.
The deep well of emotion I feel is laced with anger. That alchemy of anger is familiar magic. I felt it when I decided to write for an underground newspaper rather than just type copy.
Last night, I watched The Janes on HBO. It is a remarkable account of the young women who organized an underground network in Chicago to meet the needs of women desperate for safe and affordable abortions. The courage of the Janes was mesmerizing. Several were arrested in 1972. Their charges were dismissed when the Supreme Court decision came down on January 22, 1973, making abortion legal.
I’ve been thinking what to say to younger women and allies engaged in this struggle now. They are equally courageous. They are fierce advocates for abortion as healthcare. Their network is nationwide. In Texas, they have funded trips out of state. They have given out emergency contraception. They connect people with information about safe, self-managed abortion via Plan C abortion pills. I want those younger women to know the backstory to Roe v. Wade. Magic began there.
It is a Texas story documented in a book I co-edited, Celebrating The Rag: Austin’s Iconic Underground Newspaper. When we had a final draft of the book in 2016, I contacted Sarah Weddington to request a book blurb. I delivered a copy of the draft in a three ring binder to her house.
The book blurb she wrote tells this uniquely Texan story.
Those of us who treasure reproductive rights owe a great debt to Ragstaffers. At a time when the U.T. Health Center would not provide contraception or information about avoiding pregnancy, Judy Smith, Bea Durden, and Victoria Foe started the work of collecting information about contraception and disseminating that information in The Rag and women’s consciousness-raising meetings. As questions about abortion came up, they were the key people (with help from other Ragstaffers), investigating the subject of abortion and finding good places to refer people for medical services and the bad places people should stay away from. They were the people most likely to be on the telephone answering calls for information, sometimes arranging transportation for people to get to providers, and, when needed, helping to organize necessary funds.
After Judy’s “special guy” Jim Wheelis started at the U.T. School of Law where I had graduated and was then working, we were joined one morning in the snack bar there by Ron Weddington, another law student. Judy talked me into volunteering to file a lawsuit against the Texas anti-abortion law; Jim and Ron enthusiastically agreed to help with research and encouragement. Barbara Hines, a U.T. law student, was most helpful in preparing the documents in the case. That coffee meeting was the beginning of Roe v. Wade, the case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on January 22, l973, which overturned the anti-abortion statute in Texas and, by extension, throughout the U.S.
YEAH for those Ragstaffers and the others who made major contributions!
Sarah Weddington, Attorney who argued and won Roe v. Wade and author of A Question of Choice
I was not at the center of this story, but I have written about it frequently. When I returned from New York to Austin in late 1969, I found the movement community and The Rag newspaper transformed by some very bold feminists. These feminists had begun to re-shape leadership, consciousness, and content at The Rag newspaper. I believe the paper’s embrace of feminism accounts for The Rag’s remarkable longevity (1966-1977).
Judy Smith, Barbara Hines, Bea Durdin, and others had started a Birth Control Information Center in the Rag office, literally claiming space for a small room. They published a phone number for their center in the paper. It was the number of the pay phone in the hallway. In a film version captured by Peoples History in Texas, Judy talks about answering that hallway phone and hearing the “click…click” that indicated a tapped line.
Birth control information was not easily available, so these women began by addressing that need: what worked, what didn’t, how to get prescriptions for pills. Soon they were receiving desperate calls about unplanned pregnancies. They turned their attention to the issue of abortion and began to research where you could obtain a safe abortion at a reasonable cost. They found such a place across the border in Mexico.
They were assisting with information and sometimes travel, but they knew they might face legal repercussions in Texas for doing this work. At that time, Judy Smith was a University of Texas graduate student in the sciences and her partner was studying law at UT. As Sarah wrote, they approached her in the law school cafeteria. Judy, who could be very persuasive, talked Sarah into filing a lawsuit.
The story that we all need to remember is that the work the women took on in Chicago and in Austin didn’t begin in a courtroom. Women and their allies educated themselves about options. While the Texas women did not perform abortions as the Janes did, they answered desperate phone calls, and they provided much-needed information on safe birth control and safe abortions. Sometimes they provided material support and travel assistance. They organized to meet needs. Those needs do not go away when four men and one woman on the Supreme Court overturned fifty years of legal access to abortion.
Demonstrate, organize, and vote. For Judy Smith and the Janes, consider making a contribution to the National Network of Abortion Funds. These funds are on the front lines of this fight and they are answering the calls.
The fight didn’t start in a courtroom. It doesn’t end there.
The Board of Regents of the University of Texas at Austin did not love The Rag and Austin’s underground newspaper did not love the Board of Regents. In the second issue of The Rag (October 17, 1966), George Vizard recounts his escapades tangling with campus cops to sell the paper on campus. On July 8, 1969, the UT Board of Regents sought and got an injunction in state court to prevent sales of The Rag on campus. The Rag famously defied structure, so the Regents named the New Left Education Project, the Radical Media Project, and eight individuals as the plaintiffs in their suit in state court.
David Richards filed a counter suit in a federal court which decided that the case should be heard by a panel of three judges. The three-judge panel then decided the case against the Regents, finding that their rules were overly broad and infringed on protected rights. The Regents appealed to the US Supreme Court, which decided that the three-judge District Court panel was not appropriate and referred the case back to the federal District Court for action. A single judge in the federal District Court again sided with Richards and reissued the ban on the Regents rules. The Regents appealed that decision to the federal Circuit Court, arguing that they had revoked the offensive rules in the meantime, but they lost once again, leaving in place Richard’s victory. In his book, Once Upon a Time in Texas: A Liberal in the Lone Star State, David Richards devotes an entertaining chapter to the legal fight.
Naturally, The Rag bragged about its Supreme Court victory, even though the Court had not really addressed the Regents rules themselves. Justice William O. Douglas had rightly dissented from the Supreme Court’s overly technical opinion, noting the free speech issues involved. And we all know that The Rag continued throughout its many years (1966-1977) to sell the paper on campus and across the street from the campus, undeterred by the UT Board of Regents and the UT Administration.
[Former Ragstaffer Doyle Niemann, provided substantial assistance with this explanation of The Rag‘s legal journey to the US Supreme Court. The Travis County Archives Repository provided the 1969 Regents pleadings in state court.
See attachments below for the Regents v. New Left Education Project et Al. (July 8, 1969), the New Left Education Project et Al. v. Regents (September 3, 1970), and Regents v. New Left Education Project et Al. (Decided January 24, 1972).]
First you make history and then the participants need to document it from the perspective of participants. You donate the archives with as much annotation as possible. You gather and participate in oral histories. You ensure that material is digitized so that it can be accessed by radical activists, students, and researchers. I began this blog to document collective history and make it searchable online.
I am often asked where material can be found. I have focused primarily on Texas and information about the movements of the 60s and 70s. I will continue to update this information.
The Austin Women Activists Oral History Project Records is a collaboration between the University of Texas (UT) Briscoe Center for American History and the Department of History, and undergraduate students working under the direction of Dr. Laurie B. Green. In 2017, Glenn Scott and Alice Embree worked with Dr. Green to provide contact information for initial interviews. Dr. Green has continued to have students gather oral histories, and the list shown below is long.
Civil Rights in Black and Brown, is an important 2022 addition to Dr. Green’s work.
Some class presentations have been documented on the University of Texas (UT) History Department Blog, Not Even Past. The following list indicates interviews are available at the Briscoe Center for American History as of May 18, 2022.
Austin Women Activists Oral History Project
In 2018, Dr. Suzanne Seriff, working with the University of Texas Schusterman Center, directed students to gather history on UT Jews in the Civil Rights Era and that material was presented in a Symposium sponsored by the UT Schusterman Center. In 2021, Dr. Laurie B. Green and Dr. Suzanne Seriff collaborated with students focused on Mapping Social Justice Activism in Austin, with class presentations presented in a symposium on December 11, 2021.
A community activist, Anne Lewis, worked on a similar mapping project that is detailed in this blog. Anne Lewis is an independent documentary-maker and professor of practice in UT’s Moody College of Communication, Department of Radio-Television-Film. Anne Lewis’ 2013 work, Austin Beloved Community, brings movement history alive in a digital collage of collective memory — audio, film, photos and maps, with a rich diversity of local recollection.
The Rag newspaper has become an invaluable resource for activists and historians. At the first Rag Reunion held in 2005, Peoples History in Texas collected oral histories from attendees and produced a documentary about the pioneering underground newspaper. The Rag: Austin Underground Press 1966-1977 is a three-part documentary featuring interviews and photography from members of The Rag collective.
In 2016, Ragstaffers organized a second reunion to commemorate the paper’s fiftieth anniversary. At that time, New Journalism Project published Celebrating The Rag: Austin’s Iconic Underground Newspaper. The book features more than 100 articles from The Rag’s 11-year history, plus contemporary essays and eye-popping vintage art and photography. This collection captures the radical politics and subversive humor that marked the pages of this upstart newspaper between 1966 and 1977. More detail about The Rag and the book Celebrating The Rag can be found at The Rag Blog.
In 2021, New Journalism Project published a second book about the Houston newspaper Space City!. A companion to Celebrating The Rag published five years earlier, Exploring Space City!: Houston’s Historic Underground Newspaper is a 376-page exploration of Houston’s groundbreaking publication. New Journalism Project compiled a complete collection of the newspaper and had it digitized and made available on the Internet Archive.
Last, and hopefully not least, there is my memoir, Voice Lessons, published in 2021, It can be ordered through UT Press as shown on my website.
Peoples History in Texas has been collecting oral histories, producing documentaries, and written material, and has launched a podcast series. Their projects are varied and well worth a deep dive. They produced The Rag documentary mentioned earlier in this post. Here are some other projects Peoples History in Texas has undertaken:
Peoples History in Texas produced a documentary on the 1960 theater demonstrations, The Stand-Ins, that integrated movie theaters near the University of Texas at Austin.
Peoples History in Texas did ground-breaking work collecting oral histories from women participants in two major Texas labor strikes in the 1930s, the San Antonio pecanshellers strike and the garment strikes that were statewide. Talkin’ Union features these oral histories in a documentary format as does a book published by New Journalism Project called Talkin’ Union: Texas Women Workers.
Sarah Pike, as an intern at Peoples History in Texas, also produced a blog introduction to Jeff Friedman, who at the age of 26, was the youngest person elected to the Austin City Council. Serving as Austin’s mayor from 1975-1977, he was the city’s first Jewish mayor.
Sarah Pike, as a student of Dr. Suzanne Seriff, created a website for Fly By Night Press. I shared Sarah Pike’s blog on this site. Earlier posts of mine on this site featured both Fly By Night and Red River Women’s Press
In 1988, a UT undergraduate student, Beverly Burr, wrote a detailed Plan II thesis on The History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin (1960-1988). It stands the test of time.
In 2017, Rachel E. Brown wrote a graduate thesis on Repeal Politics: Abortion in Austin, Texas, 1965-1975. Rachel had attended the 2016 Rag reunion where she heard about the Birth Control Information Center established in The Rag‘s office.
The UT Briscoe Center for American History is a resource for archival records, photographs, and personal papers. The Sara Clark Collection on Social, Political, and Environmental Reform contains papers from individuals and organizations. Here is a list of organizations and individuals with papers archived at the Briscoe Center for American History. I’m limiting these to 60s and 70s Texas activists.
People:
Organizations:
Professor Max Krochmal at Texas Christian University, is an important resource for Texas oral histories. His latest book, Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas, uses more than 530 new interviews with grassroots organizers to reconstruct the history of the intersecting African American and Chicanx liberation movements across the Lone Star State.
The Rag v. Regents, the story of The Rag‘s journey to the US Supreme Court, is a separate post on Collective Impressions.
Here is the script for The History of Women. It accompanied the images of the Women’s Cranky performed by the Bay Area Women’s Street Theater. [An earlier post on this site describes the Cranky.] I’m posting the script because of its historical significance. It provides a glimpse of women’s liberation consciousness in 1970. It covers a lot of territory, but falls short in acknowledging the issue of gender non-conformity. As a model of explaining patriarchy through street theater, the Cranky stands the test of time.
HISTORY OF WOMEN CRANKY SCRIPT
In the beginning (cymbal crash, tambourine shake)
Women …were ALWAYS pregnant
So men hunted… (low, sustained flute) while women gathered vegetables, planted, harvested, wove, hunted small game, built shelters, tanned and preserved leather, tamed animals, and did other things. (flute stops)
Men would bring home meat…when they could find it. For a long time there was barely enough. But with the domestication of animals men could stay closer to home. (Hum: “Be it ever so humble). Men began to raise cattle and to further develop techniques of agriculture….They became the producers and women became the sustainers. There began to be more. (tambourine)
In the new society men became the principle property owners……
Some had more (tambourine) some had less (wood block). That’s how class structure began. (cymbals)
A man needed a wife to give him legal heirs so he could pass on his property and name to the next generation. This was the beginning of…monogamy. (sing: “love and marriage, love and marriage”)
And it was enforced by…law (wood block)
And religion (gong)
From then on property was owned by the man. His wife and children became his servants (snap fingers and point)
White men…came to America (hum: “Oh beautiful for spacious skies”) looking for more property.
English merchants….putting money into the colony (tambourine) decided to send women to stabilize the community and bear children….. But still more working hands were needed. Indentured servants volunteered for a seven year period of slavery, or were kidnapped or sold from the prisons of Europe. Often mothers and their new born children were thrown overboard (scream, slide whistle, cymbals)…..because they were too much trouble to keep alive.
20 million black people were torn from Africa (drum) Those that survived the voyage to America (drum) were sold as permanent slaves to the cotton and tobacco plantations (drum) ALL the slaves worked in the fields (drum) But the female slave was used for breeding new slaves for her owner (drum) And (drum) she was used for his pleasure (2 drum beats)
In class societies everywhere, it was believed that women were inferior, their brains smaller, and that their nature kept them from rising to a state of equality with men…..It is this MYTH (hands and head in stocks) which has enslaved women.
(CRANKER: HEY, JUST HOW’D THEY KEEP THIS MYTH ALIVE????)
For centuries women were barred…from schools.
The famous philosopher…Jacques Rousseau said: (French ditty on flute)
(pompous) The whole education of women ought to be relative to men: to please them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to educate them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, to make life sweet and agreeable to them. These are the duties of women at all times and what should be taught to them from their infancy.
Women fought…to get into schools (racket)——if only to be able to teach their SONS better. The first schools were the privilege of the wealthy. But with the growing population more teachers were demanded. Women were needed for this job, so schools began to open up….(sing: school days, school days”)
But if white girls were considered mentally incapable of receiving an education …Black girls had the least chance of anyone to learn.
Today more women go to school, but they are still directed away…from analytical subjects like science and math, and into clerical courses (click, click, click B ING)…home economics (Whaaaaa) nursing (yes doctor, yes doctor) and lower paying jobs (slide whistle, wood block)
All over the world women got together to fight for their rights… (We demand) the right to property, (we demand) the right to bear witness (WE DEMAND) the right to our earnings, (WE DEMAND THE RIGHT TO VOTE)
Men laughed and argued that women were weak and helpless. Sojourner Truth… an ex-slave and abolitionist leader answered their jeers:
(LOOK at my arm) She said (I have plowed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me, and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as any man, when I could get it, and bear the lash as well. And ain’t I a woman? I have born 13 children and seen most of em sold into slavery, and ain’t I a woman???)
But when there was a need for labor outside the home, men forgot women’s weakness and called them to these jobs…By 1850 women worked in more than one hundred industrial occupations (whistle)
Women and men came to America (hum: “Oh beautiful for spacious skies”) from all over the world, expecting to find a good life. Instead…in 1833 men were paid $5 a week, women $1.25 a week for the same work, and children made even less.
The surplus labor made for competition and low earnings. With the stamp of inferiority. (plop) women were barred from equal pay and training for more skilled work.
And women had trouble organizing against intolerable work conditions. After a 14 hour day they had their housework to do. Many…had to learn English (cranker: America is the land of opportunity, no?)
And men considered them a threat to their jobs…and barred them from their unions (cymbal crash) (And STAY OUT!!!)
But women got together on their own….and fought in the struggle against long hours and low wages. (sing “solidarity forever” continue humming) In 1846 women textile workers were part of attacking columns armed with sticks and stones that captured and silenced the looms. Struggle after struggle, women proved they could be organized and they could fight. (sing: “Our union makes us strong”)
During World War II the myths of women’s weakness had to be pushed aside again. Men went off to war…(drum roll) and women (hand through Uncle Sam) were told their first responsibility was to leave the home….
They worked in machinery plants, in arsenals, drove heavy trucks, were riveters, and worked in all areas of heavy industry (whistle) previously man’s domain.
Day care centers…were set up to take care of the children (happy baby sounds)
As the war ended, women were reminded of their proper places…. (hum: “Be it ever so humble”) (Yes sir-yes sir, coffee-tea-or-milk, your number please, ANYTHING YOU SAY SIR)
Today…women are one third of the work force. White women earn 40% less than white men. Third world women earn 50% less than white men. The low wages are often excused because they only supplement men’s wages. But one out of eight working women is the sole support of her family.
And working women usually hold down two jobs. They are wage earners AND housewives. It is estimated that these women do almost 99.6 hours of work a week. (sigh, oh my head)
If women were paid $2.00 an hour for their housekeeping and childcare they’d make about…$$520.00 a month (tambourine) before taxes (wood block)
Instead of being paid, the housewife is seduced to buy…75% of all advertising is aimed at women. She is told that her family needs a new car, she needs a new hair color, a new face and a new shape. (“Is it true blondes have more fun???” “NO!”)
Women are buying and crying, doped up and raped because of a system that defines them as being sub-human. We are exposing the oppressive system in which we exist, and in solidarity with oppressed people everywhere we demand equal respect and treatment for all. We claim the right and accept the responsibility to struggle in everyway possible for our freedom. Because we know (A WOMAN’S WORK IS NEVER DONE. FREE ANGELA)
Source: Melody James, Document 26D, Alexander Street archival collection curated by Professor Thomas Dublin.
Sarah Pike created a stunning website highlighting the history of Fly By Night Women’s Printing Collective. Her work was part of a class project under the guidance of Suzanne Seriff at the University of Texas at Austin, but she has taken her research to an innovative level and given new life to this important chapter in the ’70s women’s community of Austin. Kudos to Sarah Pike for her interest, diligent research, and website skill.
Sarah used this photo of Rita Starpattern and Alice Embree accepting a check for Red River Women’s Press. Fly By Night morphed into Red River Women’s Press in 1977, operating from a storefront on West 12th Street in Austin.
Fight Like A Girl: How Women’s Activism Shapes History
by Alice Embree
“Fight Like a Girl” appears as a feature article in the Summer 2018 magazine, Life & Letters, a publication of the Liberal Arts College at the University of Texas at Austin. The article, written by Rachel Griess, is accompanied by a video. Life & Letters and the Humanities Media Project at the University of Texas at Austin collaborated on the video.
The article grew out of a Fall 2017 History class taught by UT History Professor Laurie Green. Rag staffer Glenn Scott and I identified a list of women to contact, some far flung, most still living in Austin. Dr. Green had her students gather oral histories from these women, all involved in 60s and 70s movements and uprisings. Three of us are highlighted in the Griess article: Barbara Hines, Martha Cotera, and me. Two of us, Barbara Hines and me, were Rag staffers and participants in Austin’s women’s liberation movement. Martha Cotera is well known for her Chicana and Latina activism.
Those of us who were interviewed were invited to class presentations made by the students at an end of semester event. While, it is still somewhat difficult to accept that we are “history,” it is clear that students see us that way. Their questions and insights were as illuminating to me as my history appeared to be to them. The video includes some footage made at the class presentation and interviews with Dr. Laurie Green, the three of us featured in the magazine article, and several of the students involved in the collection of the oral histories.
The taped interviews will be transcribed and housed at the UT Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. I have been donating papers to the Sara Clark collection there as well, and encourage others with 60s and 70s material to do the same.
The video incorporates photographs of documentary genius and former Rag staffer Alan Pogue. The class relied on the book, Celebrating The Rag: Austin’s Iconic Underground Newspaper, edited by Thorne Dreyer, Alice Embree, and Richard Croxdale as source material. Published in 2016, the book continues to be cited as a unique deep dive into the history bracketed by the life of The Rag, 1966-1977.
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