Abortion Speakout: 2009 and 1969

An Abortion "Speakout" in New York in 1969 began to shake up the dynamics about the need for safe, legal abortions. Sponsored by the radical feminist group, Redstockings, women spoke publicly for the first time about the dangers that they encountered with illegal abortions, and the need for change.

On Thursday, March 5, 2009, at 7 pm in New York, the Women's Liberation Birth Control Project will sponsor a 40th Anniversary Commemoration of the 1969 event at Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square Park (entrance 239 Thompson) near New York University.

Panelists will include two people who originally participated. Rosalyn Baxendall, professor and co-author of "Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women's Liberation Movement," who spoke about her own experiences, and Susan Brownmiller, author, who wrote an article about the event, "Abortions: The Oppressor is Man," for The Village Voice newspaper.

The current organizers in the Birth Control Project are guided by a group of energetic and dynamic young activists. They write about their interest in the 1969 event:

"Women testified about their dangerous experiences with back-alley abortions, or having to bring a pregnancy to term and give the baby up for adoption. The historic event took place here in the West Village to a crowd of 300 people. Speakouts then spread around the country like wildfire, sparking the Women's Liberation Movement that has won us Roe and so much more."

Organizers say that panelists will discuss this historic event and how to use this history in activism today. But for those unable to attend, a rich collection of archives has been created by Redstockings and can be ordered by mail.

Among the available materials is a two CD set with a recording of the original abortion speakout in 1969. Redstockings quotes one woman recorded at the time: "We are the ones that have had the abortions...This is why we're here tonight, to make things come home...We are the only experts."

Also available is a CD of a 20th anniversary tribute to the first women who spoke out, held in 1989. An "Archives for Action Packet" contains documents from the original speakout and the 20th anniversary.

The materials can be purchased through an online order form.

Quoted on the Redstockings archive website is renowned lawyer and activist Flo Kennedy, who at the 20th anniversary speakout in 1989, said: "What we must remember is, every struggle pays off ... and I think the next 20 years will find progression depended on the amount of struggle." Now that the 20 years Kennedy (since deceased) mentions are here, a look back at "progression," slide-back, struggle -- and future -- is well worthwhile.

Posted by Cindy Cooper

pictured above: button from Redstockings Archive site.

Joy of Music: Feminist Revue

Feminist music expresses the pulse and range of our fascinating movement. Nothing demonstrates this better than the Feminist Music Extravaganza aired by Joy of Resistance Multicultural Feminist Radio on WBAI in New York on January 1, 2009. The show broadcast a splendid collection of music from the 1960s on.

Fortunately for those who couldn't or didn't tune in at the time, the show is archived online and can be downloaded (see links below).

Joy of Resistance, hosted by Fran Luck and Maretta Short, airs on the first Thursday of every month. Its hot new year's show offered a wide ranging musical chronicle of "feminist" or "proto-feminist" songs with many unexpected and surprising selections in rock to rhythm and blues, punk, pop, folk, rap and more.

"Starting in the sixties and seventies in the U.S., a torrent of songs poured forth from women, expressing their lives and their aspirations as the political momentum of the women's liberation movement opened up space for these expressions," says co-host Luck at the outset.

She later wrote in an email:

Fifty-five minutes is hardly enough time to do more than present a small sampling of feminist and feminist-inspired music, so we had to make some tough decisions. We chose songs that illustrated a) the broad range of styles in which women have written songs of our struggles against male supremacy (folk, rock, R & B, punk, calypso, show tunes and much more), b) the range of issues in women’s lives that have been subjects of such music, and c) the history of the movement itself. Some songs beat out others just because they were our favorites and we wanted to share them–and have them lift us and carry us into the new year with renewed energy.... We could have created at least three more shows of feminist music....

The exceptional chronology begins with an homage to the Civil Rights Movement and then it rolls on. The playlist goes like this:

Rutha Harris & the SNCC Freedom Singers - We Shall Not Be Moved

Leslie Gore - "You Don't Own Me"
Aretha Franklin - "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man"
The New Haven Women's Liberation Rock Band - “Abortion Song"
Sandy Rapp w/voice of Bella Abzug - "Remember Rose"
Dore Previn - "Did Jesus have a Baby Sister?"
Queen Latifah - "U.N.I.T.Y"
Rebel Voices - "Daycare"
Jolie Richman - "Suffer to be Beautiful"
Le Tigre - "FYR" (Fifty Years of Ridicule)
Nina Simone - "Pirate Jenny"
Sweet Honey in the Rock - "Soundbite from Beijing" (The Women are Rising).

Near the end of the show, co-host Short makes an especially appropriate comment: "All the movement in our country has always been met with music to go along with it ... So folks, start building a movement through your music."

To listen to or download the show, go HERE or HERE.

Posted by Cindy Cooper

pictured above: Cover of Nina Simone album with "Pirate Jenny"

Costa Rican Feminist Performance on YouTube

A feminist theatre in Costa Rica has posted a wonderous video of its recent production, The Labyrinth of the Butterflies -- El Laberinto de las Mariposas.

Not only is this video beautiful, but so is the thinking behind it -- and something well worth emulating. The video itself -- Labryinth of the Butterflies is here on YouTube -- shows performers in flowing costumes creating intriguing moments, accompanied by the soothing beat of a drum. There is no verbal text, but English and Spanish titles that present memorable nuggets of poetry and thinking. Overall, it portrays multinational stories of women who weave history. "Cross the line" of patriarchy, it says, "with the joy of dance."

The group behind the video and theater project is called Wings of the Butterfly or Alas de Mariposa. It combines "music + poetry + theatre + thought." The performance piece is based on a book by Maria Suárez Toro, who is also co-founder and producer for FIRE or Feminist International Radio Endeavour, and co-founder and co-coordinator of the theatre. The script was created with director Ailyn Morera. Maria's book, Women: Metamorphosis of the Butterfly Effect builds on The Butterfly Effect from Chaos Theory, which, says the website: "states that everything is so interconnected and so fragile to the influences of those connections, that the smallest action in any one place can have an immense effect somewhere else. "

The performance piece -- which was presented in Costa Rica and South Africa in November 2008 -- is described as featuring "a panorama of women in world history whose contributions and experiences based on an alternative paradigm have rarely been recognized." While live performance engrosses the mind in a way that can't be replicated, this video, produced by Margaret Thompson in Denver, stands on its own as a moving piece of art.

In addition, the theatre group has identified described in eloquent terms why art and creativity are so important for feminist movements. The group notes that "the process of rendering visibility and legitimizing women's experiences" lead to the ultimate global slogan that "the personal is political":

But somewhere along the line in the 90s and the beginning of the new century this feminist approach to learning and knowledge seems to have been lost, leaving women at the mercy of institutionalized knowledge exclusively. Furthermore, institutionalized knowledge has been co-opted by conservative scientific, political and fundamentalist forces that acclaim their perspective as universal.

In this context, women's contributions are in danger of erosion, not only by neo-liberal policies, but politically and ideologically though the discourse that denies, de-values and de-legitimizes sources of experience and knowledge that do not come from mainstream, experts and science made by men ....

...By connecting, through art, the stories of the women in history (“Butterfliers”) who remain unheard with the testimonies ... we will be legitimizing women's ways of knowing and linking the knowledge that they are contributing today, with that of women everywhere and at anytime in history.

This process can contribute to break the walls of fundamentalisms in the sciences, politics, epistemology and culture ....

These wise words, combined with the intelligence and impressiveness of the video, offer much hope and inspiration to feminist creative artists. As one line in the video says: If women are going to change our place in history, we need to fly.

Posted by Cindy Cooper

Pictured above: Performers in Wings of the Butterfly at a workshop, from Wings of the Butterfly website