Aug. 26, 1970: Don't Iron While the Strike is Hot

 Fifty years ago today, I was standing in the (then-named) Civic Center Plaza in downtown Chicago, listening to a plethora of speakers talk about women and equality and the need to end the war in Vietnam. As is so often the case with my early adult life, I have no photos--only a button from the event and a memory of the slogan, "Don't iron while the strike is hot." I've had the button in my collection for the past 50 years.

I was working at my first real job after college--as a staff reporter for the Lerner Newspapers, a  chain of community papers in Chicago. I have no clip from the event, as not working was a key idea of the strike. My boss, Terry Gorman, a young man who considered himself progressive, did not object. So off I went--on my own, as I recall, to an event that did not...leave a strong impression. I don't remember any particular speech or speaker that day. The documentary She's Beautiful When She's Angry has a brief scene of the Chicago event showing hundreds filling the plaza.  I could blame my faulty memory for this limited recollection, but it's more a case of my feminism being in its nascent stage then. I had yet to join any group, and in 1970, my mind was more focused on Chicago politics and the continuing, tragic war in Vietnam. The shooting of student demonstrators at Kent State University by National Guard troops had occurred just a few months earlier, and with my colleagues I tried to find stories about the war protests with a "local angle". Meanwhile, another important strike was happening that August in California: Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers were striking for better wages and working conditions in the fields. My roommates and I were honoring that strike. An incredibly eventful year it was.

Although I had graduated from a women's college just two years earlier, I had not yet internalized just what discrimination and systemic sexism meant and would mean for me as a woman. But I had read Betty Friedan's 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, credited today with being one of the sparks of second wave feminism. I also knew about the stirrings of the Women's Liberation Movement all around me; I just had no personal entry point yet. The abortion I needed and almost didn't get in the pre-Roe v. Wade era--was still two years away. That experience later brought me to my first feminist collective, the Emma Goldman Women's Health Center, a free well-woman clinic on Chicago's North Side.

Thanks to digital archives, I can revisit the Women's Strike for Equality on Aug. 26, fifty years ago. An article in TIME, a couple of weeks later, called it the largest demonstration since suffrage was won in 1920.  The main event was in New York, where 20,000 women and men marched along Fifth Avenue, chanting and waving banners. TIME wrote: "In nearly half a dozen cities, women swept past headwaiters to 'liberate' all-male bars and restaurants. At the Detroit Free Press, women staffers, angered because male reporters had two washrooms while they had only one, stormed one of the men's rooms, ousted its inhabitants and occupied it for the rest of the day.

"In Manhattan leafleteers collared brokers at financial-district subway stops early in the morning; teams of women activists made the rounds of corporations whose advertising "degrades women" to present them with "Barefoot and Pregnant Awards....In the nation's capital, 1,000 women marched down Connecticut Avenue behind a "We Demand Equality" banner....Los Angeles liberationists were confined to the sidewalk during their march, which drew only 500. Seven women dressed in suffragette costumes stood a "silent vigil" for women's rights during the day at the Federal Building. Easygoing street theater and speeches marked demonstrations in other cities. More than a thousand women and men sympathizers attended a noon-hour rally in Indianapolis, where they watched guerrilla theater."

For some visual imagery of the event within the context of suffrage and other women's struggles, a 3-minute student presentation is worth a watch. And for a broader understanding of the feminist movement of the 60s and early 70s, I highly recommend the documentary, She's Beautiful When She's Angry. It's available free online. 

From these archives and my limited memory, it's clear that voting was not a demand in 1970; voting rights has been a centerpiece of the Civil Rights Movement, and I remember how satisfied I felt, just months after I went to Selma, that Pres. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

On Aug. 26, 1970, observance of the suffrage anniversary was an entry to a new, second-wave women's movement. In the following 20 years the concept of equality was taken to every field: business, health, politics, literature, the arts, many more. And since then, we've seen third and fourth wave feminism come into being. The latter, according to a Wiki, began around 2012, focusing on empowerment of women and intersectionality, the interconnections of categories such as race, class and gender.

And now on Women's Equality Day 2020, a century after the 19th Amendment was ratified, voting is once again center stage in the struggle for justice and equality. Voter suppression is evident as the current occupant of the White House tries to manipulate his way to a second term. Perhaps we could argue we're in a fifth wave of feminism, which will challenge us to help make all of the gains of the past century a living reality for all and protect the gains we once thought we had won for good--reproductive rights being at the top of the list.

A little more than two months away from the Nov. 3 election, in the middle of a pandemic, I have no plans to protest in person. But I'll be phone banking and writing letters for the Democratic ticket, making sure my ballot is in on time.  To quote suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, "To the wrongs that need resistance, To the right that needs assistance, To the future in the distance, Give yourselves."