PREFACE

I first met Dorothy Pitman Hughes in 2010 during my research of the history of Free to Be . . . You and Me, the record album, book, and television special from the early 1970s that offered a feminist response to gender and racial stereotypes dominating children’s toys, books, and music. Part of the television special had been filmed at Dorothy’s childcare center on New York City’s West Side. The show’s producer, actress Marlo Thomas, had met Dorothy at a feminist consciousness-raising group and asked if she could use the center to film a conversation with local children. At the time, Dorothy was a well-known community organizer in New York City. By 2010, though, I did not recognize Dorothy’s name. When I searched for her on the internet, I immediately recognized her face.

People today most often remember Dorothy Pitman Hughes as an icon of the women’s movement because of a photograph of her and Gloria Steinem standing side by side with their fists raised. I had shared this image many times with the students in my women’s history courses when discussing the complexities of the women’s movement of the 1970s, but I realized I knew embarrassingly little about Dorothy herself. I decided to interview Dorothy about her history and invite her and her daughter Patrice to contribute to a book I was editing with Lori Rotskoff, When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children’s Classic and the Difference It Made.¹

Dorothy’s stories about her activism in New York City were amazing. I felt incredibly fortunate to be able to include some of them in our book. In 2013, when the National Archives invited my coeditor and me to speak as part of their effort to highlight the historical importance of the 1970s, I asked Dorothy to travel to Washington, DC, to share her history of activism. The audience at the National Archives loved Dorothy’s recounting of her struggle to create a community-run childcare center that not only defied stereotypes of race, class, and gender but became a community-organizing space that recognized the important role children play in our future. After the event, as we shared a meal and talked about her life, I asked Dorothy if anyone was writing her biography. She acknowledged there had been some interest but not by anyone trained in history. She looked at me and said, “You could do it.” I thought about this for a moment, excited and nervous. Producing a historical biography is a big project; taking on a living subject is even more daunting. Writing as a white historian about a Black feminist would take care and self-reflection on my part. If Dorothy was going to place her trust in me, I had to get the history right.

Historians must have materials to document their narratives. For a biographer, a collection of personal papers that includes letters, diaries, clippings, and photographs is invaluable. Some pioneering feminists, such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, understood this and saved almost all their personal papers. Steinem’s papers fill 237 boxes at the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History at Smith College. Indeed, the collection began to augment the Smith College Archives, founded in 1942 as the first dedicated women’s history collection, helping to create an expectation that women’s lives are worthy of historical study and their papers are important to collect and preserve.²

The challenges of documenting women’s lives and experiences lie not only in the scarcity of archival materials. The fact that women sometimes change their names with marriage can make it difficult to trace them and determine how to refer to them. For example, how should I refer to the subject of the biography? Dorothy, born Dorothy Ridley, married Bill Pitman and became Dorothy Pitman, then married Clarence Hughes to become Dorothy Pitman Hughes. Dorothy prefers to be called by her first name, and so that is what I have done.

When I started discussing her life with her, Dorothy told me she had one hundred boxes of personal papers. As a historian, I was thrilled. I thought I would be able to use them to help chronicle the complexity of her life. Drawing on a rich collection of papers, letters, and ephemera helps reconstruct the essential details of the past and document where memories are accurate and where they might be vague. What Dorothy saved, however, though not helpful to me as a historian, spoke volumes about her personal generosity: the boxes were filled with records from every individual to whom Dorothy had sold shares in a private stock offering for her combination copy center, office supply, and Black history bookstore business. She had opened one of Harlem’s first copy shops at a time when passing out flyers was at the heart of most community actions, making it a center for Black businesses in the African American community. She offered shares of her company for $1 a piece in an effort to share ownership of the business with her community. To her, it was a form of community development and direct investment at a moment when Harlem was gentrifying. When Dorothy left Harlem, she packed the share certificates in one hundred boxes, which she moved to her daughter’s home in Florida. She kept all of the shares because it was her hope that one day, she would be able to repay every single shareholder.

To a historian hoping to narrate a life that touches so many important topics, from feminism and civil rights to childhood and Black cultural and economic empowerment, these boxes were not the resource I had first imagined. Nevertheless, I found more than a few historical gems in those boxes. While Dorothy’s papers weren’t as extensive as I had hoped (they now fill only eight boxes), I knew they were important. I asked the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History to acquire them, and those papers are now next to Gloria Steinem’s in the Sophia Smith collection, where they belong.

Dorothy had a profound impact on her community and on the women’s movement, even if it is not yet widely recognized. For many years now, women’s historians have understood that it is wrong to grant only white women in the women’s movement agency and power to create political change. Dorothy’s route from New York City community activism through the women’s movement and beyond has been a challenge to document, but a genuine commitment to understanding the wider history of Black activism makes it vital to piece together, lift up, and publish stories such as Dorothy’s.