About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

2 Yale J.L. & Lib. 1 (1991)
Women and National Liberation Movements

handle is hein.journals/yjll2 and id is 7 raw text is: WOMEN AND NATIONAL LIBERATION MOVEMENTS By Muriel Tillinghast* and Patricia McFadden** Muriel Tillinghast: Thank you for the invitation to Yale University - a most unlikely institution at which to talk about the civil rights movement. But things do change. I was intrigued by the subject of women inside of the civil rights movement because that really does get to the core of interpersonal relations between activists, and get inside the sanctum sanctorum. As I thought about this discussion, I had to wrestle with myself about how honest I was going to be about the struggle of being a female in a liberation movement. But then I decided to lay out as much as my fifteen or twenty minutes would allow; then you can feel free to ask me what you like. Prior to my joining the civil rights movement, I had been engaged in basically a Christian organization. I had been a member of the Lutheran Church. My first organiz- ing effort was trying to get three hundred Luther Leaguers to a national conference. I was nine at the time. By the * Muriel Tillinghast is a human rights and community activist. She was a key organizer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and one of three female organizers who headed county projects in Mississippi in 1964. She and her staff were responsible for Washington, Issaquena and Sharkey counties. She became the second state coordinator for the Council of Federated Organizations, the umbrella civil rights organization which called for the famous Mississippi Summer Project. Ms. Tillinghast resides in Brooklyn, New York, with her daughters, Bayo Callender and Aisha Hinton, her two dogs and two cats. She does social services advocacy in health and child welfare, labor issues and legal referral. She has recently joined the administration of Children in Crisis, which specializes in finding and counseling runaways and kidnap victims. ** Patricia McFadden is a member of the African National Congress who fled South Africa because of her political activi- ties, and hopes to go home soon. She did her D.Phil at Ox- ford, and does work on gender in Southern African society and politics. She is presently doing research in Dakar, Senegal. At the time a version of this paper was given at the Yale Law School in April 1990, she was Visiting Professor at the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University. She has three children, a son and a daughter still in South Africa, and a young son with her. time I had reached my college years, I had experience organizing Luther Leagues on the Eastern Shore of Mary- land. (Those of you who know the political geography of the Eastern Shore will know that that experience gave me a good introduction to Mississippi some years later.) And as a Black female I had learned how to function and not bow down in situations that might not necessarily be at my command. And I learned how to face some very stri- dent opposition very early in the game. So by the time that I had joined the civil rights movement, I was an old hand at how to get people moving and how to get ideas out. My early years in the movement were with NAG (Non-Violent Action Group), which was basically the Washington, D.C. representative of SNCC (Student Nonvi- olent Coordinating Committee). My recollection was that it was an egalitarian organization. In fact, when I think about the question of gender distinctions in the civil rights movement, and see how they affected my role and SNCC's politics, I must conclude that the gender distinc- tion began when the movement itself began to break in- side. Those of us in the movement considered ourselves warriors. We knew that we were in a war. Basically my experience was of being treated as if I had good sense and as if I had something to offer that would be listened to. SNCC was overwhelmingly male, as I remember. There weren't an awful lot of females, but those of us who were female Project Directors held our own. In the state of Mississippi there were three of us. We held down - and that was literal - any number of counties. When the SNCC staff came together to talk about increasing the effectiveness of either the freedom vote or the cotton allotment campaign, or running people for the school board, or dealing with desegregation issues, or running the freedom schools, I can't say truthfully that there was any difference in the reception of what I had to say and the reception of some of the males. In the Movement there was a lot of give and take. And SNCC had a style of operation which I guess was

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most