Bread and Roses

Annie Popkin and Judith E. Smith

BREAD AND ROSES. Bread and Roses, emerging in September 1969 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was an early influential effort to create a New Left women’s formation that could explore and support new ideas and practice about women’s liberation while remaining engaged with ongoing movements protesting racial and social inequality, US foreign policy, especially support for the Vietnam War, and corporate power. The group’s name was inspired by the demand for “Bread and Roses” on banners carried by early twentieth-century immigrant women textile workers on strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Defining itself as an autonomous socialist women’s organization, Bread and Roses tried to work out a new organizational form while also launching political initiatives expressing visions of socialism and women’s liberation (later termed socialist feminism). Bread and Roses looked for independent models of socialism outside the Communist bloc, and developed new analyses of how capitalist, racist, and sexist sources of injustice shaped each other. A commitment to women’s liberation was an alternative to individual women’s success; it required changing conditions for all women. As an organization, Bread and Roses lasted only eighteen months, but women affected by its insights, energy, and creativity generated public political understandings, powerful intellectual and literary work, and significant alternative institutions, many of which continued through the last three decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

Women brought diverse organizing and movement experience into Bread and Roses. Cambridge, Massachusetts, was an older industrial city dominated by two major universities, Harvard and MIT, that were then the sites of intensifying debates over racial inequities and Black Power, university involvement in Vietnam War research, and the draft. Although often not visible in the public record or widely recognized by male colleagues, women had joined and made contributions to these protests, as well as to alternative forms of knowledge and the counterculture flourishing beyond the campuses. Various founding members of Bread and Roses had been arrested at desegregation sit-ins in Maryland and did voter registration and taught in Freedom schools in Mississippi; some had worked in interracial community organizing projects initiated by Students for a Democratic Society’s Economic Research and Action Projects in Boston area working-class neighborhoods, joining with Mothers for Adequate Welfare and those beginning to challenge Boston’s segregated public schools. Many women were active in anti-war organizing and draft resistance. Others researched and publicized the university expansion displacing Black and working-class neighborhoods. Still others worked in underground media, as radical filmmakers in the Newsreel collective or writing for the radical underground newspaper, Old Mole. Collectives were an increasingly popular organizational experiment in “participatory democracy,” and some women began meeting in small women’s collectives even before these became an organizing structure of Bread and Roses.

Beginning in 1967, women radicals across the country had begun to imagine “the liberation of women” as central to the broader transformative social and economic changes they sought. As part of the New Left, their political aspirations were anti-reformist and their orientation was toward defiance and direct action tactics. Discussions of women’s issues and explicit critique of “male chauvinism” (a term popularized in Communist Party debates on the “woman question” especially after 1945) took place among some women active in SDS and the college-faculty level New University Conference; in the Black Women’s Liberation Committee in SNCC, soon to become Black Women’s Alliance; and in New York’s Radical Women. The language of “liberation” was especially popularized by its usage in Black Liberation in the early 1960s and in Gay Liberation in 1969. Chicago women began to publish a newsletter, Voices of the Women’s Liberation Movement. A 1968 ad in a Boston underground newspaper calling for a “Female Liberation Front” resulted in early Female Liberation meetings and publications.

Some women who worked in draft resistance and anti-war groups began to caucus separately to talk about issues that they faced as women organizers. Boston women who traveled to Chicago to attend the first national Women’s Liberation conference in November 1968 began to hold open Women’s Liberation meetings in Cambridge in 1969. Here women began to discuss and analyze various aspects of “women’s oppression,” meeting in women’s apartments, at MIT, and later, at a Draft Resistance Coffee House. Phone numbers to contact “Women’s Liberation” began to be listed in the Old Mole.

In May 1969, women meeting in these groups convened a “Female Liberation Conference” held at Emmanuel College in Boston over a weekend in May 1969, with films, discussions, and workshops ranging from “Women and the Control of Their Bodies” to “Capitalism and the Politics of the Female” to “Black Women in a Caste Society” to “The Family and Children.” Publicized in the Old Mole and via posted leaflets, the conference was attended by more than 500 women, and many reported being exhilarated and inspired by the rich and stimulating discussions as well as the overall experience of thinking out loud with other women. More than 200 women came to the next Women’s Liberation open meeting; others formed themselves into smaller groups. Over the summer, some of the conference conveners and attendees began to discuss forming a new autonomous city-wide women’s liberation organization, which could make demands on existing institutions and join coalitions. Bread and Roses, formally constituted September 15, 1969, was one among many new organizing projects emerging from the Emmanuel College conference.

Bread and Roses had high aspirations: to operate autonomously to develop analyses and collective strength while still contributing to New Left critiques of imperialism, racism, and class inequalities; to explore a new basis for politics deriving insights from women’s lived experience and everyday life attentive to the interplay of sex, class, and race; to enliven participatory democracy within a totally new kind of organization. The founders set up a dual structure of small, intimate, personally engaging groups that would meet weekly, and bi-weekly mass meetings for announcements, decision-making, and political education on topics ranging from women and socialism to women and racism to women in the family to structures of women’s work inside and outside the home. In its first year, Bread and Roses joined in coalition with a number of other anti-war groups and Boston Black Panthers in a disruptive action to protest MIT’s military research; women marched and rallied in support of women Black Panthers currently on trial in New Haven; other women helped formulate demands and sent participants to the Black Panther Party’s Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia; and many demonstrated against the US invasion of Cambodia. Bread and Roses members developed a practice of publicizing their ideas and analysis via quick creative guerilla theater interventions: distributing baby chicks at Boston’s underground FM radio station to challenge an on-air request for “chicks” to type for a local drug program and to demand airtime for a one hour women’s show for international Women’s Day; commandeering the witness stand at a Massachusetts legislative hearing in order to dramatize their critique of the state’s abortion laws; arriving at the Boston Globe newspaper offices with non-negotiable demands to cease publishing sex-segregated help-wanted ads and “sexist-racist” advertising; and gathering in an “ogle-in” to subject men to women’s experience of catcalling.

Bread and Roses also reintroduced a powerful socialist women’s tradition in Boston when they took to the streets in early March 1970 for International Women’s Day, celebrated by Socialist women in the United States and around the world since 1909. Several hundred women carrying banners marched through the city, expressing Bread and Roses’s expansive critique by calling out consumerist pressures on women in expensive stores on shopping thoroughfares, the political repression enacted at the city jail, and the unmet need for free medical care, including safe abortions, as they passed a major hospital. The final speech of the march was delivered by eighty-three year old white suffrage activist Florence Luscomb, whose radical political activism persisted through the decades of the twentieth century. After women’s suffrage, Luscomb worked on peace and prison reform and CIO clerical workers’ organizing, sought office on the Progressive Party ticket, opposed anti-Communism, and protested the Vietnam War. Now Luscomb threw out her arms and warmly welcomed the listening crowd as a long-awaited and much-needed new generation of women radicals.

Many of the women drawn to Bread and Roses were invigorated and emboldened by political insights and forms of activism made possible by the organization’s combination of small groups and mass meetings. Its members were overwhelmingly the children of professionals, many the daughters of working mothers. College-educated white women were most likely to be drawn to its approach. Black women’s conversations were taking place largely within Black institutions with shared understanding of racial oppression and focus on the urgency of Black resistance. Even with new members coming through regular orientations, and one or two paid staff, its complicated structure and multiple commitments could not be sustained for long. Members continued to approach clerical workers, hospital workers, and union members; they offered picketing support to women at General Electric and to striking waitresses, to agitate for child care, and to offer classes in dance and theater, auto-mechanics and self-defense. But by January, 1971, it was clear that Bread and Roses as an organization was not sustainable. Informal meetings labeled “Crumbs and Petals” tried to imagine some kind of reorganization that might be able continue, but to no avail.

After the demise of Bread and Roses, the energies and visions it unleashed and circulated continued to have significant ongoing impact. In one dramatic example, a Bread and Roses group trying to locate space and raise money to establish a community women’s center joined forces with other local women radicals whose goal was to “do something dramatic” for International Women’s Day in 1971. Within three weeks, plans were in place for the march to culminate in a Harvard University building takeover. This time the march began at the State House, with a speech by Caroline Hunter, a recently-fired African American chemist at Polaroid who had inadvertently discovered that Polaroid technology was central to the pass card system required to enforce apartheid in South Africa. Hunter, co-founder of Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement, and fresh from addressing the UN, invited the crowds of women to support their campaign to boycott Polaroid and join the local and international fight against apartheid. Then the crowd again marched, chanting and singing, through Boston’s shopping districts, past the hospitals, jeering the objectification represented by the Playboy Club, and pausing to call in solidarity, and hear back from women in the Charles St Jail. Then the march continued across the river, culminating with taking over a barely-used Harvard building in a neighborhood where residents were already demanding that Harvard build low-income housing.

The International Women’s Day occupiers demanded the repurposing of the building as a community women’s center, and prodded by the neighborhood activist group, added low-income housing to their demands for 24-hour community-controlled child care, reproductive rights, and equal pay for equal work. Other women heard about the take-over; some offered support, some came to stay. After ten days, and facing threats of police and legal action from Harvard, the occupiers left with a promise of a woman’s anonymous donation to enable the purchase of a building, now the oldest continually operating women’s center in the country. The Cambridge Women’s Center opened its doors in 1972, providing space for a Women’s School, Rape Crisis Hotline, services for battered women, lesbian resources, child care, self-defense classes, and meeting space utilized by many different groups, including the Black socialist feminist Combahee River Collective who met there from 1974-1977.

New energy directed toward women’s friendships and women’s community, new kinds of organizing projects, and new iterations of socialist feminism continued to reverberate beyond Bread and Roses. Various projects begun in Bread and Roses outlasted it. The “women and their doctors group” created its “Women and Their Bodies course,” began to teach it, and published a newsprint version of what they found out. They would continue to meet as the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, to organize around women’s health issues, and to publish many editions and many translations of their trade press book, Our bodies, Ourselves. Long-time Somerville women residents associated with the Somerville Women’s Health Project, a free clinic started by some Bread and Roses members to enable working-class women to gain access to reproductive health, operating from 1971 to 1978, went on to found RESPOND in 1975, one of the first shelters for women victims of domestic violence. Capacious thinking about working women supported the founding of Boston 9 to 5, later a national clerical workers’ organization, and a nationwide union for office workers, SEIU District 925. In 1973, former Bread and Roses activists helped to found the Boston Women’s Union a city-wide socialist feminist organization that supported reproductive rights, protested sterilization abuse, and joined in city-wide marches to Take Back the Night and to oppose the Hyde Amendment cutting off access to reproductive rights to women on welfare. Beginning in 1978, a group of working class women in Dorchester organized International Women’s Day celebrations every March for the next twenty-eight years. These and many other efforts sustained socialist feminist imagination of women changing themselves and changing society into the 21st century.

Other resources

http://catherinerussodocumentaries.com/index.html.

https://leftonpearl.org

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