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Loading... Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975 (2001)by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
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In 1968, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz helped found the Women's Liberation Movement, part of what has been called the second wave of feminism in the United States. Along with a small group of dedicated women in Boston, she produced the first women's liberation journal, No More Fun and Games. Dunbar-Ortiz was also an antiwar and anti-racist activist and organizer throughout the 1960s and early 1970s and a fiery, tireless public speaker on issues of patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and racism. She worked in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade and formed associations with other revolutionaries across the spectrum of radical politics, including the Civil Rights Movement, Students for a Democratic Society, the Revolutionary Union, the African National Congress, and the American Indian Movement. Unlike most of those involved in the New Left, Dunbar-Ortiz grew up poor, female, and part-Native American in rural Oklahoma, and she often found herself at odds not only with the ruling class but also with the Left and with the women's movement. Dunbar-Ortiz's odyssey from Oklahoma poverty to the urban New Left gives a working-class, feminist perspective on a time and a movement that forever changed American society. In a new afterword, the author reflects on her fast-paced life fifty years ago, in particular as a movement activist and in relationships with men. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)305.42092Social sciences Social sciences, sociology & anthropology Groups of people Women Social role and status of women Standard subdivisions History, geographic treatment, biography BiographyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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These are the worst male chauvinists I have ever encountered, and they are supposedly leftist radicals. After being called a “bird” for the hundredth time, I told a fellow to fuck off at a party last week – caused an awful scene, really. I have started calling men “bats” – it has caught on rather well.
It took several days for Flo to arrange the meeting with Valerie [Solanas], so T-Grace took me to women’s meetings in New York and introduced me to dozens of women’s liberation activists: some reformists, some radicals, some extremists. One was a young lesbian biologist who avidly supported Valerie, whom she took quite literally. She was researching viruses, hoping to identify a fatal one that would attack males only. She said that once males were eradicated, she planned to introduce chemical reproduction without sperm. Furthermore, women would no longer carry the fetus; rather, the process would take place in the laboratory. She chatted about this idea as if she were discussing the weather. Now I understood what Stokely Carmichael had meant when he said that young black militants in Chicago had called him “Uncle Tom.” When I challenged the young woman, she called me a “daddy’s girl,” Valerie’s term for male-identified women.
Police surveillance and infiltration would only grow worse. More than half the fugitive’s on the FBI’s most wanted list were charged with politically motivated crimes. There were so many agent provocateurs and informers that it was thought that half the membership of some organizations were infiltrators. Even the alternative literary presses and moderate antiwar and peace groups were not exempt. The FBI, using provocateurs, was also partly responsible for the violent direction the movement was taking. Inexplicable suicides and accidental deaths were being reported among former participants of the Venceremos Brigades. In the growing atmosphere of surveillance and danger, the necessity to develop a clandestine structure began to seem like the only way to continue our work.