CHAPTER 4

“SISTERS UNDER THE SKIN”

Taking the Stage in the Women’s Movement

Dorothy came to the women’s liberation movement through her experiences as a community organizer and civil rights activist. She did not become radicalized as many white women did by reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex or confronting “the feminine mystique” that Betty Friedan argued had robbed white middle-class suburban women of truly meaningful lives.¹ Dorothy defined herself as a feminist but rooted her feminism in her experience and in more fundamental needs for safety, food, shelter, and childcare. Dorothy entered the women’s movement by way of her community and the needs of the women she encountered every day in the 1960s and 1970s. Domestic violence, the welfare system, and childcare—issues that profoundly affected the working-class Black and Latino women who visited the West 80th Street Day Care Center and turned to the West Side Community Alliance for help—became the defining issues of Dorothy’s feminism. For Dorothy, the women’s movement had value because it illuminated the problems that she and other women in her neighborhood faced daily.

As Barbara Smith notes, movement organizing and community organizing are fundamentally different. A founder of the National Black Feminist Organization and a member of the Combahee River Collective, Smith observed that “in movement organizing, people come together because they share certain basic political principles and beliefs.”² In community organizing, however, “people come together because there are immediate pressing problems that need to be solved, such as the lack of affordable decent housing, no summer activities for children and youth.” The shared political commitments of movement organizing cannot be taken for granted in community organizing, where a range of political beliefs must be negotiated to create coalitions and address common problems. Dorothy, like Barbara Smith and many others, circulated between movement organizing and community organizing as she moved from CORE and other New York City civil rights and Black Power groups to her work at the West 80th Street Day Care Center and on to the women’s movement. The result was an approach to feminism that spoke to the needs of her community, blending community and movement organizing.

Dorothy started thinking about her position as a woman when she was at CORE, where she was considered capable of producing a Broadway fundraiser but not excused from answering the phones. After CORE, she became involved in the antiwar movement and began organizing events with her attorney friend Flo Kennedy. She studied Flo, who called herself “radicalism’s rudest mouth,” with keen awareness. To Dorothy, Flo was a model for generating protests that not only linked war and race but drew on her experience suing advertising firms on behalf of Black clients and garnering widespread press coverage. Though of course the term didn’t exist in the late 1960s, for Flo, feminism was fundamentally intersectional—a component of radical politics from the Left that connected Black Power with the war in Vietnam and gender equity.³ At about the same time Dorothy’s friend Joan Hamilton introduced her to Ti-Grace Atkinson, who helped Dorothy articulate feminist principles that resonated with her life. So, when Gloria Steinem interviewed Dorothy at the day-care center in February 1969, Dorothy already had an understanding of feminism grounded in her experience as a Black woman and modeled on the feminism of other Black women.

Dorothy and Gloria connected as feminists at their first meeting during a discussion with their mutual friend Bob Gangi. As Steinem remembers it, Gangi wasn’t sure whether his fiancée should work after they married. In her words, “Dorothy and I didn’t know each other, but we went to work pointing out parallels between equality for women and the rest of his radical politics.”⁴ Although Gangi does not recall this discussion, and says he never discouraged his spouse from working, he remembers Gloria telling him that he was one of her first male friends with whom she discussed women’s equality.⁵

Dorothy, finding in Gloria someone who shared her vision, pushed further, suggesting that if they worked well “one-on-one” that they could work well as a team. In Dorothy’s words, “Then we could each talk about our own different but parallel experiences, and she could take over if I froze or flagged.”⁶ Speaking on For Women Only, a panel talk show hosted by Aline Saarinen on NBC, just three days after Gloria’s article on Dorothy’s center appeared in New York’s The City Politic, Dorothy announced that she was looking for a collaborator in making change.⁷ Gloria would become that collaborator.

At the time, Gloria Steinem was just beginning to be recognized for her work in the women’s movement, including founding a politics column in New York magazine that covered social movements treated as dilettantish in other media venues. Gloria was also getting invitations to speak, though she didn’t like public speaking.⁸ In contrast, Dorothy, as a former nightclub singer, was perfectly at home on the stage. From 1969 into 1973, the two spoke at events together, eventually traveling all over the country to address audiences about the women’s movement. Gloria would typically speak first, followed by Dorothy, and then they would lead the audience in a long discussion, which they believed was the most important part of their speaking engagements. They usually did not have rehearsed speeches but tailored their presentations to the occasion. They always made sure to include the topic of childcare, a leading issue for Dorothy. The two began speaking in school basements and progressed to “community centers, union halls, suburban theaters, welfare rights groups, high school gyms, YWCAs, and even a football stadium or two.”⁹

For Dorothy, these speeches with Gloria were not just a way to raise awareness about the women’s movement, the antiwar movement, and civil rights; they also drew attention and financial support to the West 80th Street Day Care Center. Dorothy was working sixty hours a week as the center’s co-director, mostly doing fundraising and community outreach. This fundraising was essential because the State of New York had begun cutting day-care funding in 1969. The speaking fees also helped provide Dorothy with what she called a “decent income” for her growing family.¹⁰

As Gloria records in My Life on the Road, she and Dorothy worked well together. The relationship between the two came to define, in her words, the potential for the women’s movement. Their speaking engagements exemplified the possibility of interracial sisterhood, of being “sisters under the skin,” as they frequently put it.¹¹

Dorothy’s style was to call out the racism she saw in the white women’s movement. She frequently took to the stage to articulate the way in which white women’s privilege oppressed Black women but also offered her friendship with Gloria as proof this obstacle could be overcome. In more general terms, their relationship speaks to tensions in the early women’s movement regarding race and the ease with which Black women’s experience and activism could be pushed to the margins.

Coming to terms with this tension also presents a challenge to the historian. Consider how cultural critic Kimberly Springer frames the initial struggles over the relationship between the “women’s movement and the Black feminist activism” in terms of which came first and which caused the other. In her narrative, white feminists may have been inspired by the work of Black women in the civil rights movement, but the establishment of Black feminist activist organizations emerged as a “reaction to racism in the women’s movement.”¹² Of course, Black feminists had much to say about the larger women’s movement, but this sequentialist historical treatment elides the contributions of foundational Black feminists, such as Dorothy, Flo Kennedy, Shirley Chisholm, Dorothy Height, and Angela Davis among others

Consider Gloria’s article on the women’s liberation movement and its relationship to the civil rights movement, written shortly after she met Dorothy, for the April 1969 issue of New York magazine titled “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.” One of the most-cited feminist documents of the 1970s, the article contrasts new groups of younger feminists, such as WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), the Redstockings, and New York Radical Women, with the members of the women’s liberation movement who identified with Betty Friedan’s feminine mystique.

Gloria describes New York Radical Women as “rapping” about their position with an understanding that this consciousness-raising would change the world. In her words, “They couldn’t become Black or risk jail by burning their draft cards, but they could change society from the bottom up by radicalizing (engaging with basic truth) the consciousness of women; by going into the streets on such women’s issues as abortion, free childcare centers and a final break with the nineteenth-century definition of females as sex objects whose main function is to service men and their children.”¹³ (Ironically, the New York magazine cover featured a photograph of football quarterback Joe Namath surrounded by six women lounging in lingerie under the title “All Night Long.”) Gloria’s article translated a potentially radical movement for a bourgeois reading public, including the tool for “consciousness-raising.” One of the things that Gloria and Dorothy often did together was attend these rap sessions in New York City.

I remember one evening when Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker, Angela Davis, and about five other women were together. We had dinner together in Harlem. And, we talked, and we left, we left Harlem we went to Gloria’s house and sat up all night long, and when we would have sessions, we would actually, time was not a factor, we didn’t care about time. We would really sit down and discuss until we came up with solutions. So, we sort of really gave a lot to each other. I know I got a lot from being in that group. It also helped to erase the fear, ’cause you know you’re not alone. You know that there are other women who are having problems and maybe it’s not the same problem.¹⁴

Asked about less-integrated sessions Dorothy said, “I remember silently thinking sometimes . . ., ‘How can these women complain about having wall-to-wall carpeting, staying home, caring for the children, being put on what they called a pedestal while the man of the house worked and brought in the money?’ I remember wishing that I could have wall-to-wall carpets, I wished I didn’t have to work every day and sometimes nights, I wished I didn’t have to worry about money. I also would have liked to go shopping for myself and with my children and not worry about spending over fifty dollars.”¹⁵ Yet these realizations did not turn her away from a women’s movement that focused on the gendered experiences of a particular group of white women.

When questioned about her involvement in the women’s movement, Dorothy reflects that she was “a woman without human rights” and that she wanted to be part of a movement to empower women.¹⁶ Other Black women were much more critical of what they saw as a white woman’s movement. In 1972, for instance, Black feminist Jacqui Jackson wrote that “Black women regard white women as willful, pretty children and mean ugly children, but never as capable adults handling their men and the world.”¹⁷ Dorothy was much less dismissive but very willing to be critical of white women unaware of both the extent to which they too were being exploited by capitalism and the extent to which they were contributing to racism that kept women apart.¹⁸

Still, Dorothy was deeply aware of the “double jeopardy” of being a Black woman.¹⁹ Reflecting on her work experience she remembers, “Wherever we women work for social, political, corporate, community organizations or individual domestic jobs, it was always a double whammy. I was always going to be Black and woman.”²⁰ When a reporter from Mademoiselle magazine asked her about Stokely Carmichael’s infamous quip that the proper position for women in the civil rights movement was “prone,”²¹ Dorothy shot back, “Lying down, standing up—if you’re going to be screwed, you’re going to be screwed.”²² Sexism produced some solidarity, it seemed.

In her article on Black Power and women’s liberation, Steinem explicitly linked the agenda of the radical feminists that she interviewed to that of women of color, even as she described the organizing tool of “rap” sessions that would cast feminism in the popular imagination as solely a “white, middle-class women’s movement.” As she noted, “If the WLM [women’s liberation movement] can feel solidarity with the hated middle class, and vice versa,” referring to the concessions regarding the organization of NOW in 1966, “then an alliance with the second mass movement—poor women of all colors—should be no problem.”²³ The call to see the connections between all women was rooted in Gloria’s awareness that “poor women of all colors” were already organizing for change with regard to “welfare problems, free daycare centers, for mothers who must work, and food prices.”

These three issues—welfare, day care, and food prices—came directly from Dorothy’s agenda at the West 80th Street Day Care Center. As Steinem had already noted in her first article, organizing was a central part of Dorothy’s vision, from the cost of day care and the debate over its inclusion in the women’s liberation movement to attacks on the difficulties posed by welfare hotels and the dangerous connection between welfare dependency and education.²⁴ Dorothy also called out local merchants for increasing food prices on the days that welfare checks were mailed. She saw the center as a safe space for women suffering from what would come to be called domestic violence. From the very beginning of their work together, Dorothy’s influence on Gloria was distinctive and reflected Dorothy’s experience as a Black woman.

The labor of organizing, of meeting primarily with groups of women, and walking them through what it would take to make real change inspired both organizers. It took work, and risk. For Dorothy, the risk involved travel. She hated flying on airplanes. Today, more than fifty years after her first “barnstorming” trips, she prefers to travel by train for days rather than fly. During their flights together, Gloria would hold Dorothy’s hand, always during takeoff, sometimes for the entire flight, to stop her from trembling. The singer and organizer would also use her strength to help Gloria. More comfortable writing, Gloria initially hated public speaking. Taking the stage and holding an audience’s attention seemed terrifying. Dorothy, ever the performer, helped her friend, sometimes holding her hand on the stage.

The connection the two of them formed during these early years was significant and lasting. Dan Wynn’s iconic photograph depicts Dorothy and Gloria together, serious and engaged in feminist struggle. The contact sheets for that photo session tell a different story. In the many pages of images taken that day, Dorothy and Gloria are laughing, talking, and looking at each other as much as at the camera. Their fists are raised in the Black Power salute in just a few images. Most of the images depict two friends at ease with each other, even as they were politically committed to changing their communities, their country, and the world.

Dorothy and Gloria began speaking together in 1969. They did so almost every week into 1971.²⁵ Reflecting the rising interest in youth movements, most of the press coverage of their speaking events highlights their appearance on college campuses. When Dorothy could no longer travel as much, Gloria invited Flo Kennedy or Margaret Sloan to take her place.²⁶

Their goal on the road was to start a conversation with their audience.²⁷ Sometimes the conversation came easily. Other times were more fraught, such as when they spoke at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, in May 1972. Dorothy and Gloria were nervous as they stood to speak in front of four thousand raucous midshipmen, who had oranges from dinner with them. As the midshipmen tossed their oranges in the air or to each other, Dorothy commented, “I guess they’re to be thrown,” meaning at them on the stage. As the midshipman groaned, Dorothy let them know she was not afraid of some fruit, having grown up in Georgia where she was terrorized by the KKK. When she realized the oranges were not meant for her and Gloria, she smiled, acknowledged she had nothing to fear from the Navy officers to be, and was rewarded by a loud ovation in response.

Very few women were in the crowd at Annapolis that night, and Dorothy and Gloria probably did not spark a lot of feminist consciousness raising among the midshipmen. There were about seventy African American midshipmen present, however. After Dorothy’s remarks on racism and the divide between life at the Academy and in the poorer neighborhoods in Annapolis, reporters noted that every Black midshipman was “surrounded by his white mates, all of them in earnest conversation, mostly cases of Black talking and white listening.”²⁸ Even the toughest crowd took something away from the appearance of Dorothy and Gloria.

Just as Dorothy and Gloria began speaking in public together, Dorothy’s relationship with her husband, Bill, started to change. Their relationship had always had a degree of openness. Dorothy knew Bill had an interest in someone else in 1969, and she was becoming closer to a mutual friend, Clarence Hughes. Clarence, a tall African American man, was part of their social circle in New York. According to Dorothy’s daughter, Patrice, they were just a good “fit” for each other.²⁹ By 1972, Dorothy decided to buy a place in Harlem and move there with Clarence and her two daughters. She and Bill divorced but remained on very good terms. Bill stayed on the West Side, seeing his daughter Patrice on weekends and taking her to England and Ireland when she was older.³⁰ Dorothy’s new house in Harlem needed work. Bill happily contributed his expertise as a builder, and collectively, they all pitched in to make it a great place for Dorothy’s family, with a bedroom for each daughter. Even after Dorothy married Clarence, there was no animosity between Dorothy and Bill. They remained friends until Bill’s death in 1995.

The new relationship emerged just as Dorothy was most active in the women’s movement. In fact, when Dorothy and Clarence married, Gloria officiated at the ceremony. In 1971, when Dorothy had her third daughter, Angela, she came on the road with them. Gloria held the baby while Dorothy spoke. More scandalous than the content of their speeches was the rumor that Angela was actually Dorothy and Gloria’s daughter.³¹

“WOMEN’S LIB” AND THE MEDIA

Despite an initial synergy that centered race and racial difference in Gloria and Dorothy’s presentations of feminism, media representations of the movement, especially of Gloria’s place in the movement, contributed to the elision of race as a foundational experience informing feminism. For my purpose, the issue of sources illustrates the difficulty of accessing the earlier moment. I can identify the influence that Dorothy’s intersectional feminist organizing had on Gloria’s trajectory. From the moment they begin to work together, the conspicuous discussion of race and of different experiences influences the conversation. Yet the materials that allow us to recover this story privilege one woman over the other. Not only does the media coverage abet this difference, but the differences between Dorothy and Gloria are notable in who had time to communicate in writing and who understood that papers should be preserved and moved from one residence to another.

A discussion of two different shared speaking engagements helps to illustrate this point. In both, the focus on race and feminism centrally occupies the reporting of the presentation. Their narratives are quite different, however. Ironically, the coverage of one event, by New York’s premier Black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, helps illustrate the role that preservation of speeches plays in how we understand the history. In the second example, the irony has a stronger impact on our understanding of Dorothy’s role in shaping this movement. In this second example, the longest textual documentation of a speech given by Dorothy occurs in the very McCall’s article that launched Gloria Steinem as the singular iconic spokesperson for a movement that refused to create a leader. A comparison of these two articles serves to help us understand the process that moved Dorothy’s role to the periphery, at the very moment that the speakers sought to confront the racist tendencies of the women’s movement.

In 1970, the Socialist Party hosted Dorothy Pitman Hughes and Gloria Steinem in the ballroom at Union Square West to address the provocative question of whether the women’s movement was “hopelessly middle class.”³² The Amsterdam News article highlighted questions such as “Can the current Women’s Liberation movement speak to the needs of working women?” and “Are men the real source of women’s exploitation?” Even more provocatively, the article focused on questions of influence that assumed class and economic resources, such as “Are wives and homemakers brainwashed into accepting these roles?”³³ Dorothy and Gloria were joined by Midge Decter and Velma Hill, a paraprofessional representative for the United Federation of Teachers. Velma, the East Coast CORE field secretary who had organized the boycott of the 1964 World’s Fair and led a desegregation charge for schools and beaches, was a friend of Dorothy’s. It was important to Dorothy to not be the only Black woman on the stage. She wanted to highlight that the struggle for gender equality crossed racial and economic boundaries.

The question framed by the Amsterdam News, “Are Liberated Women Hopelessly Middle Class?” focused the reader’s attention away from the kind of interracial cooperation that the participants hoped to create. Given what I see as Dorothy’s role in helping to make sure educators shared the stage for this event, the implicit critique presented by the Black newspaper undermined the potential for biracial organizing. We have only Steinem’s speech from this event, but as she put it then, “The Women’s Movement is the one area I know of in the country where cooperation between Blacks and whites is increasing, rather than decreasing.”³⁴ The comparison, here, for Steinem, is in the way women worked together for change. She contrasts white women working to make revolutionary change with “white liberals, working for someone else’s freedom,” in the civil rights movement. Gloria described the shared discrimination that women faced and directly linked her claims to Dorothy’s vision, when she wrote, “They are working together on equal pay, equal job access, equal promotion, abortion repeal, childcare centers, and all the issues that oppress women of all colors in this country.” Because “white women become radicalized on their own concerns,” they are able to “see their second-class status clearly, and understand that all of us are marked by second-class status in this country by physical difference—women, Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, Indians—that all of us must stand up together.”³⁵ Of course, not everyone made the easy leap from their own oppression to the oppression of all.

For Steinem, the trajectory of thinking about the women’s movement may, indeed, be directly connected to her learning from friends like Dorothy and Flo, but she was frustrated with how the movement was being represented in the media. An undated copy of a Steinem speech that refers to speaking with Dorothy suggests the call to speak about the women’s movement was enough to get the writer away from her typewriter, primarily because “as a writer, I am deeply ashamed at the way this revolution has been trivialized, distorted, and ridiculed by the press.”³⁶ Traveling around the country with her speaking partners, Steinem describes the movement as stronger, “and sometimes much stronger,” outside of the big cities, acknowledging there is no town without a women’s liberation group.³⁷ While the movement’s geographical diversity was important to this speech, the message hinges on its racial diversity, with the comment, “Black women are in the leadership of the Movement.” Steinem goes on to explain the rationale for this, “since they have always had to be stronger and more courageous.”³⁸ The important part of this discussion recognizes how the movement is covered and why this frame might seem new to some of her listeners, who might be surprised if “you’ve been reading only about white upper middle class Vassar girls, or accused SDS bombers.”³⁹

The challenge of recovering this history lies in the coverage itself. One of the most comprehensive texts describing Dorothy’s speaking presentations illustrates this point. In January 1972, McCall’s magazine named Gloria Steinem its “Woman of the Year.” The editors rationalized their choice to some eight million readers, claiming, “because this is the year of the women’s movement, and she has become its most effective spokeswoman and symbol.”⁴⁰ Steinem is described as an activist in bell-bottoms, with tinted glasses and blond-streaked hair, “the reluctant superstar of the woman’s movement.” The rationale for the article was a pluralized “women’s movement,” but the profile of what is called “the most visible of the activists, although her precise role remains undefined,” slips to the singular, “the woman’s movement.”⁴¹ The change of a single letter—women’s to woman’s—“e” for “a,” is telling.

At a moment when the country struggled to understand a movement calling for the upending of economic, structural, and social orders, the press created a singular symbol, a simplified message returned to an older form of address. The nineteenth-century woman’s movement assumed a shared identity and predicament for all women. Yet the story of Steinem in this issue is actually the story of two women. The writer Marilyn Mercer described the “incredible energy barnstorming at the grass-roots level” of the popularizer of the women’s movement. Yet in doing so, she erases a speaker who shared the stage with Gloria Steinem, indeed, who initially talked the shy reluctant speaker onto that stage in the first place. As the piece notes, “she usually appears with a Black partner—most frequently day care expert Dorothy Pitman Hughes.”⁴²

The coverage of the speaking duo privileges the white woman and her vision, and in doing so, struggles against its own narrative. Dorothy’s presence becomes part of Gloria’s vision, not Dorothy’s. Yet Dorothy’s determination to be at meetings speaking on the women’s movement around the country demanded much more from her than from Gloria. Dorothy had to make arrangements for her two daughters to be picked up from school, dressed, fed, and cared for. She had to coordinate and troubleshoot as the director of a community and day-care center, and she had to pack not only for herself but for her eight-month-old infant, Angela. Named after Angela Davis, Dorothy’s baby daughter also shared the lecture platform with Gloria and Dorothy, came to the after-lecture rap sessions and parties, and traveled from event to event on planes, buses, cars, and trains. Packing for an infant, even in the relatively new age of disposable diapers, meant food, bottles, skin cream, and changing cloths, often bundled into a basket.

The struggle to have a place for herself and her daughter at the podium is invisible in the McCall’s article. Instead, McCall’s used Dorothy’s presence “to underscore” Gloria’s point that “whatever the color, women are sisters under the skin” and that “Black and white women have more in common than they have dividing them.”⁴³ Gloria certainly believed this, and Gloria and Dorothy had a remarkable relationship in this way. These sentiments, however, could not be easily generalized. For instance, in 1971, Toni Morrison posed the question: “What do Black women feel about Women’s Lib?” Her answer, “Distrust.” For Morrison, “liberating movements in the Black world have been catalysts for white feminism,” yet women’s lib didn’t pay “much attention to the problems of most Black women.”⁴⁴ Toni Cade Bambara put the issue even more starkly in 1970 writing that Black women “look at White women and see the enemy, for they know that racism is not confined to white men and that there are more white women than men in this country.”⁴⁵ Dorothy shared similar sentiments despite her relationship with Gloria. When they spoke together, Gloria made a point of greeting the audience as “friends and sisters.” Dorothy, who always spoke second, would usually say, “I find when I speak to groups like this, I have very few ‘sisters’ in the audience, and after I leave I find I had very few friends.”⁴⁶ In other words, Dorothy recognized that her relationship with Gloria was not representative or easily reproduced.

In 1973, the Paramus, New Jersey, chapter of NOW invited Dorothy to speak to them about why Black women were joining the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), an organization that Dorothy helped found, instead of NOW. Dorothy told the women of Paramus, “White women are still benefiting from racism and classism: under those circumstances, it’s ridiculous to pretend at sisterhood with Black women.”⁴⁷ For Dorothy, feminist action was not complete unless it simultaneously addressed sexism, classism, and racism. The NBFO was a means to this kind of intersectional feminism. Dorothy thought that if the NBFO was successful, eventually Black and white feminists would meet, communicate, be honest with each other, and “then we’ll really have that thing everybody’s talking about—sisterhood.”⁴⁸

Dorothy and Gloria were trying to overcome the racial divide in feminism, but their media coverage did little to help. Consider how the same McCall’s article describes Dorothy and Gloria’s meeting at a domestic workers’ cooperative in Auburn, Alabama. Thirty Black co-op members and the white women supporting their efforts to organize for higher wages were told by Gloria that the effort represented change: “The white housewife who exploits her Black sister is really saying that women’s work isn’t worth anything.” Exploitation, based on race and class privilege, represented a “lack of respect for her own work.” Instead, the speaker urged the women in the audience, Black and white, to recognize the power of working together. “Black women,” said Gloria, “have the courage, and white women have the skills, and we both have the common problem of boring, repetitive, underpaid, work, whether it’s in our own kitchen or someone else’s.”⁴⁹

This message, connecting employers and employees by the commonality of the labor, seemed to miss the point. However well intentioned, the message could not overcome the basic difference in the perspective of the two groups of women, who “sat shy and silent, absorbing this message.”

That is until Dorothy took the stage. Recounting her experience as a domestic worker, she focused on the difference in power. The result was tangible to the reporter, who explained, “Shyness melted away and, one after another, the Black women stood up and testified, with a cadence and eloquence born of a lifetime of Sundays in rural Black churches, to the indignities that they had suffered.” Echoing the perspective that Dorothy captured, they cried out “Yes, sister!” and “Tell it, sister.” One woman took it even further and brought the message home to the white women who saw themselves as “helping” to organize the domestic workers. Addressing the group of white women directly, a Black woman warned, “You give us hate, but we give you love. We was brought up that way; we was taught that way. Love one another.”⁵⁰

The challenge of understanding the crucial role that Dorothy plays here is key. I do not have the text of her speech—she did not save it or perhaps even write it down. What she brought to the encounter was her experience as well as her willingness and ability to turn that experience into a point of organizing. Just as the posters on the walls of her day-care center offered tangible examples to children of how to perceive themselves, the representation of her experience, and her willingness to share it with a white speaking partner, helped to frame the intersectional discussion of privilege, employment, and vulnerability.

The difficulty of the exchange between the Black domestic workers and the patronizing white women was not easily resolved. But that was the point. Traveling together, the Black and white duo modeled the complexity and importance of open conversations about race and privilege. From its inception, what was erroneously called the second wave women’s movement included complicated relationships around race.⁵¹ The misrepresentation of this narrative, one that erased the central role of understanding the relative positions of what would later be called “intersectional analysis,” emerged from the call to name and to capture for popular consumption the hard work of revolutionary change.

In the meeting described above, the erasure happens narratively. An impending airline flight ended the meeting, which could have continued “all afternoon.” White women with tears in their eyes approached Gloria, asking for help: “How do we organize? Where do we start?”⁵² The biographical essay on the Woman of the Year ignores that woman’s partner, and the Black women who called her “sister.” In doing so, the magazine reflected the kind of racism that granted only white women in the women’s movement the agency and power to create political change. Gloria and Dorothy frequently and consciously modeled the difficulty and importance of interracial conversations, but the writer, writing for a magazine intended for white middle class housewives, honed the story to misrepresent.

In response to this kind of media bias, Gloria, Dorothy, and other feminists decided to take control over their own stories by creating their own media. In response to the Esquire issue that first published the image of Dorothy and Gloria with fists raised, they proposed creating their own magazine. They decided to call it Ms. Gloria’s impact on Ms. is easier to trace than Dorothy’s. Gloria, a writer by profession, assumed the role of editor when the preview issue came out in 1971. Dorothy did not write for the magazine, but articles related to children, gender roles, and childcare appeared regularly, often written by Letty Pogrebin, another founder of the magazine attuned to issues of motherhood.⁵³

The same year Ms. was launched, Dorothy and Gloria helped found a feminist organization called the Women’s Action Alliance (WAA). Led by Gloria and NOW vice president Brenda Feigen, the WAA sought to rework the top-down legislative focus of NOW “by encouraging women to confront sexist issues in their own communities.”⁵⁴ The WAA sought to provide coordination and advocacy for the many feminist groups springing up around the country. Grassroots feminist action was envisioned as being facilitated by an organization that would “allow groups of mothers (and fathers) to look for sexist references in the textbooks their children were studying” and support working women by advocating for “twenty-four-hour child-care centers.” In this original vision, women would organize around their own communities and eventually connect to groups around the country struggling with the same problems. The idea was that “women not yet committed to feminism” would articulate issues that touched them personally. The personal would be made political by fashioning those personal concerns into broader agendas and pushing for change in state legislatures and in Washington, DC. ⁵⁵

The WAA, like Ms. magazine from its first issue, was focused on gender socialization as a crux for organizing and producing change. In response to a national call to identify feminist issues, the newly founded Women’s Action Alliance received more than five thousand letters in 1972 from parents across the United States asking for advice: “How do we keep young children from developing the rigidities of sex-role stereotyping? How do we help little boys realize that love, affection, and nurturing are indeed part of the proper role of a man? How do we help little girls realize that the world is theirs to have and to hold? How do we help them in their earliest years make choices that will not one day limit their choices?”⁵⁶ The outpouring led the WAA to support the Non-Sexist Child Development Project, which help put children and gender socialization on the national agenda. This focus fit naturally with Dorothy’s own interests stemming from the West 80th Street Day Care Center.

Dorothy’s focus on children’s issues was also shared in another iconic piece of feminist media: the record album and TV special Free to Be . . . You and Me.⁵⁷ Dorothy attended the same consciousness-raising sessions as the actress and producer Marlo Thomas. Dorothy remembers, “When Marlo explained her children’s album to me, I personally understood the need for it. From all my experiences caring for and working with children, I know that social change has to start with them.”⁵⁸ That said, Dorothy also appreciated that Free to Be was not solely for children, just as the center was meant to be transformative for an entire community. Free to Be was as much for adults as children.

Free to Be . . . You and Me was developed in parallel with Letty Pogrebin’s work at Ms. magazine.⁵⁹ From their first issue in 1972, Ms. included a “Story for Free Children.”⁶⁰ Some of these stories were included in the Free to Be . . . You and Me book. All of the stories, nonsexist alternatives, were often accompanied by beautiful color illustrations. They could be cut out of the magazine, folded, and stapled into a separate children’s book. The Free to Be . . . You and Me project drew from these Free Children story sections in 1973. As the TV show, record album, and book were being developed, Marlo Thomas and the Free to Be projects were featured on the cover of the March 1974 issue of Ms., which was devoted to “free children.”

When Marlo began filming her television special, she selected Dorothy’s day-care center as one of the locations and included some of the center children in a segment in which Marlo talks about their relationships with siblings. Dorothy’s middle daughter, Patrice, was among those children but wasn’t included the final version of the television show. Patrice, who was just eight at the time, remembers being disappointed, which is natural.⁶¹ Dorothy saw the experience as empowering for the children and an opportunity to gain confidence. On a more personal level, Dorothy felt her focus on classism, racism, and sexism made it into the show as it took on multiple forms of discrimination.⁶² It is fitting that the kind of intersectional feminism that grew from Dorothy’s community activism was reflected in one of the most popular pieces of feminist media ever produced. Dorothy recognized the transformational power of actions rooted in children’s lives. She knew the impact would reach well beyond the children themselves to affect women and their community as a rich and complex form of activism that cut across race, sex, and class.