INTRODUCTION

I begin with “The Image.” The one that immortalized Dorothy Pitman Hughes as an icon of the women’s movement, reproduced on posters, T-shirts, and postcards. In fact, a copy of it is now part of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Used by people like my students to celebrate the defiant, cross-racial, in-your-face assertiveness of a movement that sought to change everything, this image has taken on a life of its own, without giving us information about the life of its subjects.

When Dan Wynn made this photograph, Dorothy and Gloria Steinem were speaking about feminism together in venues large and small around the country. They needed a publicity shot for these speaking engagements, and Wynn agreed to provide one for free. In Wynn’s photograph, Dorothy stands beside Gloria, both women in tight turtlenecks, with fists raised in a Black Power salute, eyes directed at the viewer in defiance of the male gaze that would “consume” them as sexualized objects.¹ Gloria stares directly at the viewer, her hair, blond-streaked since the early 1960s in tribute to Holly Golightly’s challenge to ladylike conformity, framing her face with a straight mouth and calm eyes.² Dorothy’s hair makes a statement as well, one that defied the association of certain hairstyles with polite feminine demeanor. Dorothy followed in the footsteps of Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizer who began wearing her hair natural because frequent jail stays after arrests for civil rights activism did not allow time for “fixing her hair.”³ Dorothy’s Afro was not just a political gesture invoking the Black Power and civil rights movements; it had been called “the largest Afro in New York City.”⁴ Beneath her hair, in this image, Dorothy, an accomplished nightclub singer, tilts her head away from the camera. The flow of her body, head, and arm draws the viewer to her eyes, their determination, their defiance, seeming to say this was someone you need to know.

But the fists are different. Dorothy’s fist came easily to her, a gesture practiced on the street, in marches with political comrades. Gloria’s fist is not that of a fighter. Instead of the thumb folded over her fingers, it lies at the side of her fingers, with a precisely filed fingernail profiled for the camera. If she had hit someone with that fist, her thumb would have been jammed or even broken. This small difference speaks volumes. Looking back at the photo when they reshot it in 2014 for her seventy-fifth birthday, Dorothy remarked, “I always had to show Gloria how to do the Black Power fist.”⁵

I begin with the image because it is the way that most people know, or think they know, Dorothy. Dan Wynn’s photo was published in Esquire magazine in 1971 with the caption: “Body and Soul: Gloria Steinem and her partner, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, demonstrate the style that has thrilled audiences on the Women’s Liberation lecture circuit.”⁶ The image suggests a moment that we understand and that we seem to know, but one member of the duo has been the subject of at least a half dozen biographies, a play, a feature film, and three autobiographies, while the other has appeared only in occasional biographical sketches, a fictionalized biography, and short polemical self-published memoirs.⁷ Here, I recover, beyond this iconic image, Dorothy’s life as an activist and explain why she has been the focus of neither media attention nor historical scholarship, especially in contrast to her friend and speaking partner Gloria Steinem. In doing so I am not attempting to justify or vindicate her status as a feminist icon. Instead, I offer a narrative of Dorothy’s life that provides a vantage point to describe the broader social, cultural, and political events that necessitated and shaped her activism.

In her notable essay “Feminist Biography: A Contradiction in Terms?,” historian Judith P. Zinsser observes that biographies have traditionally been devoted to so-called extraordinary individuals. She counters that a woman is considered exceptional “because of her place within a male-defined framework [that] . . . closes off awareness of all other women’s lives.”⁸ Put another way, biography should not serve to glorify individuals in terms of achievements relative to a male standard but should describe experiences that, for instance, connect women to their communities.⁹ In this way, an individual life provides a perspective into the sociocultural and political processes of their time.¹⁰

Five major Black feminist organizations emerged during the late 1960s and early 1970s. All of them ended by 1980, with the beginning of the Reagan administration.¹¹ With the creation of the National Black Feminist Organization, Black Women Organized for Action, the Third World Women’s Alliance, and the Combahee River Collective, among others, Black feminists carefully considered problems that impacted Black women directly, such as poverty and high unemployment rates.¹² Subsequent historians seeking to understand the place of Black feminism in the women’s movement have focused on the Combahee River Collective and the National Black Feminist Organization, as well as other Black feminist organizations that existed during that time.¹³ Black women are, however, not a monolithic group. They have varied political opinions and beliefs, and each woman ultimately chooses to support the cause or causes that best reflect her needs and those of her community.

My approach to Dorothy’s life places her within several communities and different cultural, social, and political moments. As a child born in Lumpkin, Georgia, in 1938, she was, and remains today, immersed in a rural African American farming community and Primitive Baptist Church. When I first interviewed Dorothy, she insisted I join her in Lumpkin for Sunday services in order to understand where she came from. She had left Georgia for New York City, where she established herself as a nightclub singer, in 1957. Her brother and sisters were all performers with a number of records to their credit. In New York, Dorothy became a lifelong social justice activist and children’s welfare advocate. Later, she became an entrepreneur, opening a business supply store in Harlem, where she was one of only a few African American women business owners. Each of these quickly sketched facets of her life locates her in different communities and illuminates different historical issues.

Dorothy Pitman Hughes’s life has been one of continual activism. When she moved to New York from rural Georgia in the late 1950s, she remembers becoming involved in everything she could that “represented Civil Rights, Human Rights and Equality.”¹⁴ From her first efforts raising funds for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the early 1960s, Dorothy turned her attention to the conditions in her West Side neighborhood in New York City. Because she worked nights as a singer and was at home during the day, Dorothy witnessed the children in her neighborhood forced to take on caregiving roles for younger siblings while their parents worked.¹⁵ When Dorothy started a community day care for these children, she had the revelation that it was not simply a childcare issue. Dorothy realized the children of the West Side faced a tangle of issues, including racial discrimination, poverty, drug use, substandard housing, welfare hotels, lack of job training, and even the Vietnam War. This is why the childcare center that Dorothy imagined and created was essential. It became a center for the community to define its needs, fashion its own solutions, and take to the streets in protest when it was called for.

Dorothy’s activism was astonishingly multifaceted. Through the childcare center, she created community-controlled resources that focused on day care and on job training, adult education classes, a youth action corps, housing assistance, protection from domestic violence, and food resources on the West Side of Manhattan before gentrification.¹⁶ When Gloria first met Dorothy, she described her as a “beautiful black female Saul Alinsky [because of] her natural gift for organizing.”¹⁷ Alinsky was a community organizer and political theorist. His book Rules for Radicals was required reading for left-leaning activists.¹⁸ At the time, Gloria was a journalist, and Dorothy was the better-known activist. As Gloria began reporting on Dorothy’s community and childcare center on the West Side, they both became more involved in the emerging women’s movement. Indeed, the 1971 Esquire photo and article are cited as a major reason for the creation of Ms. magazine. As a singer and activist comfortable in front of a crowd and willing to lead occupation protests in city offices, Dorothy was able to persuade Gloria to speak publicly. They traveled together, speaking about the women’s movement, childcare, and welfare in the early 1970s. Yet Hughes has not appeared in histories of the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, or even New York City community politics. Part of this exclusion is the result of historians and members of the public privileging gender over race in ways that did not address Black women’s experiences. Contemporaneous journalists have focused on white feminists, such as Steinem. Some of the early historians of the women’s movement, who turned first to journalists’ accounts of the movement, concentrated on gender to the exclusion of race, producing an image of feminism rooted in white, middle-class concerns.¹⁹ With Her Fist Raised examines the erasure of Black women leaders, such as Dorothy.

As a community activist, Hughes was deeply involved in a series of political efforts that began with CORE in the 1960s and extended to community organizing in New York City, fundraising and campaigning for the Democratic Party, and lobbying to include women in the decision process behind the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone. By the 1980s Dorothy had left the West Side for Harlem and was transitioning away from community organizing to owning a business and being an entrepreneur. Along the way, she bought a franchise for the Miss Greater New York City pageant. This short-lived endeavor marked a transition as Dorothy moved from childcare to running her own office supply business. Dorothy’s store, Harlem Office Supply, was a community center of a different sort, organized around economic empowerment, especially for women, in Harlem. Used to dealing with government programs, Dorothy saw the creation of President Bill Clinton’s Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone in 1994 as a tremendous opportunity for businesspeople in Harlem, only to be disappointed when those opportunities benefited national chains instead of local owners. Dorothy’s own Harlem Office Supply was displaced by a Staples.

Finding Hughes’s place in these stories produces a history of the women’s movement with children, race, and welfare rights at its core, a history of women’s politics grounded in community organizing and African American economic development. It is a story that must be told.