THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT
Kipp Dawson
“My first major activity in the women’s movement was sitting in Betty Friedan’s living room. We were a group which included Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett and other people whose names also are well-known alongside people whose names are not so well known.”
Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, April 2023
KD: My name is Kipp Miriam Dawson. I was born on June 10, 1945, in Hollywood, California, because that’s where the army sent people like my mom, who was an army wife. World War II was still going on, and she had been volunteering to drive a jeep for the army. She had been a Rosie the Riveter, but left that job so that she and my dad could create another Jewish child to replace some of the people who were being killed in the Holocaust, which was contemporaneous with her pregnancy. And that’s why I was born in Los Angeles.
JW: Tell us a little more about your childhood and maybe some of the influences that led you to the person that you are now.
KD: I’m happy to do that because my lineage is with strong women who influenced me from the very start of my life. My mother was the daughter of a woman, my grandmother, who was an immigrant from Poland. A Jewish immigrant, at a time when lots of people, like she and her husband, were leaving that part of the world to avoid him being drafted into the Tsarist Army, because Poland was run by Tsarist Russia at that time.
They came into the United States and settled in Erie, and I’m mentioning them because of what happened next. After they had been there for a couple of years, in 1922, my grandmother was made a widow by the xenophobic, racist terrorism, that was going on in Pennsylvania and much of the United States, that took the life of her husband.
Her husband was an active supporter of the then, New Russian Revolution. But he also was a Jew, an immigrant, a campaigner for coal miners, who were on strike across Pennsylvania, in West Virginia and in many other places trying to form a union, and a supporter of the Black struggle that was happening in much of the United States against the lynching that was going on widely.
And in all of those capacities, he raised the ire of the then massive Ku Klux Klan in Pennsylvania and the other forces that were using terrorism against immigrants like my grandmother. And he was murdered. My grandmother was told by the powers that be in Erie, this is 1922, we just celebrated the centennial of this last year; she was told after a visit from the FBI to Erie, that they were not going to investigate who murdered her husband, and she was not safe there, and she needed to take her children and leave. So, this 29-year-old, recent immigrant female, went to Los Angeles, which is where my mother was born, and never gave up the struggle.
She was quiet about her political affiliations at times. She, during the McCarthy period, lost her teaching certification because of her association with Communists, but she kept going, and she raised her three daughters, the youngest of whom was my mom, in a spirit that, you have to stand up for what’s right. Being a woman makes it harder. She was very conscious of that. But it also makes it more incumbent on you to find others like you and work together for a better world. So, my mom grew up like that, and she raised her children like that.
My mom was homeless during the Great Depression, at times living in a car. They went through all the difficult times that people of that generation did. But my mom, if you asked her about growing up, she would not point to the difficulties, completely. She’d mentioned them, but for her, the enthusiasm of the CIOs organizing unions, especially the general strike in 1934 in San Francisco, which my mom got to witness as a ten-year-old, infused her with confidence that the world could be a better place if we worked to make that happen.
And like her mom, she was a before her time feminist, who helped me to learn as a very young child, that yes, we’ll go to meetings together; she took me to her union meetings, she was a factory worker who stayed in the factories after World War II. I loved being at union meetings with my mom. I remember as a six-year-old, watching these people get together and fill the room with smoke, you just accepted that, with plans about what to do to take on difficulties that workers were facing.
But my mom kind of stood out and got in trouble. She was appreciated and loved by her fellow workers, and got elected to be delegates to conventions and things, but she got in trouble because she would not put aside and put in a secondary place, the struggle for women to have equal pay with men doing the same work.
And there are great stories that were told at the celebration of her life when she died in 1992, of men getting up and apologizing for not supporting her back then. My mom was like that. And so, I grew up alongside her. I was her little comrade and participated in many things with her. And so, I tell people I was a Red Diaper Baby’s Red Diaper Baby. I got my enthusiasm and leadership through my mom and my grandmother from the time I was born.
JW: Wow. I’m sorry, I have two questions. One, I just want you to say what the CIO is in case people watching don’t know, and then I wanted to ask if you had siblings.
KD: During the Great Depression, one of the things that happened, was that the union movement split. The American Federation of labor had been a union movement that was quite conservative and based on trades. The Congress of Industrial Organizations, the CIO, was formed under the leadership of the United Mine Workers leader, John L. Lewis, and many others, who thought that all the workers who worked in the same facility needed to be in the same union.
That was a revolutionary kind of idea, but it took hold very quickly. And the CIO was formed and led by the United Mine Workers. No one knew back then that I would become a member of that union, but they were heroes in my house. They went out and organized not only workers, but as my mom loved to talk about, also the unemployed. Seeing the role of unions to organize workers, all workers, in solidarity with one another. And that spirit never left my childhood home.
JW: And eventually AFL and CIO joined, but that was much later.
KD: That was, and it was only after the McCarthy period went after the union movement and tried to keep it divided. And yes, there are lots of stories along the way, but yes, it is now the AFL-CIO, and the power of the CIO organizing in the 1930s is something that can get lost, if historians don’t recognize its importance now.
JW: And so, did you have any siblings?
KD: Yes, I am the oldest of seven.
JW: Oh my gosh.
KD: My mom gave birth to, not long after I was born; it was supposed to happen on my second birthday, but they were premature, to my sisters, who are twins. And then shortly after that, my brother. So, she had four kids in diapers at the same time while she was working in a factory. There were no disposable diapers, and she probably wouldn’t have used them anyway.
I grew up in a housing project. There was a ringer washing machine in the kitchen and there were clotheslines that we shared with our neighbors at the end of the building we were in. People just took for granted that you do these kinds of things.
And then my parents separated. My mom married my stepfather, who was an African American man who brought into our family, his two children from a previous marriage. My sister Cheryl, who was one of the founders of the Black Panther Party, who’s not much younger than I am and still at it, very much so, and our brother Bobby, who was the same age as my brother, who had been born in 1948.
And then together, my parents gave birth to my youngest sister, who is twelve years younger than I, and the apple of my eye, and a very important person, too. Two of my siblings have passed away. The rest of us are still going strong and those two are still very much alive in us.
JW: So, when did you get involved in the women’s movement?
KD: Well, the women’s movement per se, is different from women’s struggles inside of organizations. So, I think in high school, for example, my two best friends who are both females and with whom I’m still very close, we’re talking 1959, ’60. Recognized, as their moms did – my two best friends are African American, and in all our households – we had strong women who were raising us, who were making sure that we felt confident in ourselves as females.
But when we got to school and out in the world, we lived the lives of women who were trying to do things, who weren’t being listened to, and who got together informally and talked about what to do about those kinds of things.
We started the first civil rights club at Berkeley High School in 1960, in solidarity with the students who were sitting-in, who became the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, sitting-in at segregated lunch counters in Tennessee and North Carolina. And in Berkeley High School, we were taking on issues of racism in our own high school and also working to get people to go out in solidarity. Picket lines at our own Woolworths in Berkeley, in solidarity with the students who were getting arrested in the south.
But the women’s movement per sé, I think I could say that I became involved quite soon after women started to organize in the name of women, in what’s called the second wave of feminism. Because at that time, I was living in New York City, and I was an active socialist. In fact, in 1970 I was a Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Senate from New York. I was 24 years old at that time. I was surrounded by things that at first, kind of blew me away, because I had never expected to see things like this.
There was the development of consciousness raising groups, they were called back then, where women got together and sat around and talked about things that they thought that they were the only people feeling. Redstockings was one of the big ones in the early days. I was not a member of Redstockings, but some of my friends were, and I was stunned by these conversations. The big one that I remember happening, was women sitting in meetings of other organizations. A lot of these women were involved in SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society.
Almost all of them were involved, as I was deeply, in the Vietnam anti-war movement, which was a big deal then. Many of us had come through, and our hearts were still with the Black struggle and the civil rights movement, which was taking new forms back in 1969, the period of time that these consciousness raising groups just spread everywhere.
But in meetings of any of those groups, and the socialist groups, and the unions, women could sit in a room full of men, say something, not be heard, and have a couple of people later, a man say the same thing that the woman had said, and people saying, “What a great idea. Why haven’t we thought of that before?” So, that was something that all of us had experienced in common. But talking about it out loud was a new phenomenon. And feeling the power of being with other women who were facing these same things, was a whole other thing.
My first major activity in the women’s movement was sitting in Betty Friedan’s living room, as one of many representatives of a lot of different kinds of groups. Bella Abzug was there, Shirley Chisholm, Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, and other people whose names are more known, and people whose names are not so well known. The rank-and-file people whose history we’re all gathering now.
1970 was the 50th anniversary of women getting the right to vote. So, Betty Friedan, to her credit, and there’s some things to her discredit, which I’ll mention in a minute, but to her credit, she, as a leader of the National Organization for Women, NOW, in that capacity, called for a gathering to organize a march in New York City. To raise the demands that were current in the lives of women, in solidarity and in celebration of that 50th anniversary. And we did that. We got together in her living room, and representing a lot of different organizations, we met, and we came up with a plan.
Now, you’ve got to understand, in 1970, the New York state legislature had legalized abortion in the state of New York, but then they had turned around and vetoed it, or tried to remove that. And if it were not for the Republican governor, and Nelson Rockefeller vetoing that move, abortion would have become illegal in New York. And that was one of the few states where it was legal at that point. We’re talking three years before Roe. It was a big issue. But we were meeting in a context in which, when people had issues back then, because of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam anti-war movement, they took to the streets. Millions of people would go out and demonstrate.
It’s something that two generations have grown up since then, not having the chance to experience. And it’s important to understand that therefore, because of that context, it made sense to us to organize and anticipate a good turnout for a march in solidarity with women who were having these other gatherings also. The first and second Congress to Unite Women had happened, and they were big. Different organizations came together around those. So, we just assumed that we could have a big demonstration.
And one other thing that had happened, which Betty Friedan didn’t want to talk about, was Stonewall. The response to the police raiding the gay bar in the West Village in New York City, and people for the first time standing up against that kind of police raid and saying, “We have the right. We have the right to be.”
And, a massive response to that confrontation, among people who had never come out openly as homosexuals. Nobody used the words we use these days, but it was as gay people. Gay was a new word out then. To say we’re not just homosexuals. Lesbians didn’t have as much of an identity then as a separate group, but that was coming. That was coming.
In New York City at the time of the 1970 demonstration, there was the experience of the gay movement having come out, beginning to be a public movement in the streets in large numbers. And the first anniversary of the Stonewall events in June 1970 preceded the August 26 Women’s Strike for Equality by two months, and set the tone for something big.
I think it’s important to say this. This was all new. This was all new, but it wasn’t new in the sense that you go to the streets, and you can get millions of people to come out in solidarity, because the civil rights movement had done that, and the Vietnam anti-war movement had done that a bunch of times by that time.
So, when we sat in Betty Friedan’s living room, we were surrounded by some conservative women, including Betty Friedan in some big sense of the word. Members of Congress who weren’t, and Bella Abzug, an unusually flamboyant woman, but who accepted capitalism as being the way the human race is going to move forward. And then feminists, who were challenging everything, and then people like me, who was a socialist, who thought that, and still feels that the way forward has to include taking on capitalism.
So, we had sisterly conversations in that room, and we came up with three demands for that march, which will sound really crazy now, but they sounded really right then. And I still believe that there are things we need. The first one, was to pass an Equal Rights Amendment, which still hasn’t happened. Well, maybe it will happen now. That would be great, but it would certainly be in contrast with other things that are being taken away now.
The other two demands seemed very logical for us. Women cannot be full members of society if we can’t control our own reproductive rights. So, we didn’t just demand legalizing abortion. Our demand was for free abortion on demand, so the poor women could get it too. And, no forced sterilization. Because part of the issue is women having control over when they reproduce. And at that time, women were being forcibly sterilized in Puerto Rico, part of the United States. It was an issue, especially among women of color. So that was our demand. Free abortion on demand, and no forced sterilization.
And the other thing that was holding women back from being able to be full members of society besides misogyny, was the fact that working women – and our eyes were on all women, including working class women – working women can’t fully participate in society if they are the only ones taking care of the children. So, our third demand was free, 24-hour childcare. Quality childcare. Free, 24-hour quality childcare, so, no matter what shift a woman was working or what kind of work she was doing, it would be quality care for her children while she was at work. Those were our three demands.
The question of lesbianism came up, because the media started attacking this very audacious bunch of women who thought that women’s rights should also be a mass movement issue, by lesbian-baiting the movement, and saying, “We don’t have to take these women seriously. They’re just a bunch of lesbians. They’re man haters and lesbians,” which they equated as the same thing, and that’s a bunch of nonsense.
And unfortunately, when they went to Betty Friedan about that, her response was, “There are no lesbians in this movement. We don’t have the lesbian menace as part of ourselves.” Well, the response to that shocked her, because, not only lesbians but women and men too who supported us, who were in the midst of this really radical and marvelous coming together, were not going to let that happen without a response.
So, on one day, I don’t remember the date, a lot of us, and at that time I was not out as a lesbian myself, I was one of the people impacted by the movement to recognize something I had been struggling with, and been in and out of the closet for years. But I was certainly not going to be a quiet observer of lesbian-bating happening [to] our movement. So, a lot of us, gay, straight, and everything else in between, and all the other alphabets that we didn’t know then, we put on lavender armbands. And the armbands said, “I am the lesbian menace.”
And these men, women, everybody, all kinds of people, went out to surround Gracie Mansion. I don’t know why we chose that, but that’s where the mayor of New York lives, for demonstration in solidarity with the lesbian menace. And Betty Friedan had to back down somewhat. But we took that on, because we had to. It was part of the spirit of the times.
And I have to tell you that on the morning of August 26, 1970, we went, those of us who were part of the organizing, went out on Fifth Avenue and looked around us, and were blown away as people on every intersection started gathering in huge numbers. It was unanticipated. Betty Friedan’s slogan, and I give her credit, for the day, was, “Don’t Iron While the Strike is Hot.”
JW: Oh, interesting. I never heard that one.
KD: Yes, it was great and the media picked up on that too. There were high school students and gray-haired grandparents. Men, women, all kinds of people. African Americans, Puerto Ricans, lesbians who were beginning to get comfortable with that word, gay men, people who hadn’t marched together necessarily ever before, and veterans of the Vietnam anti-war movement, which included all of those groups, et cetera, just poured into the streets. And it was a jubilant event which still lives. I think there were clips from the news reports on this recently on television. It still infuses us.
But again, 1970, let’s see, how many years ago was that? 53 years, right? And that means that, again, two generations of people have been born, grown up, and now we’re raising children since these times, and have not seen this kind of thing and don’t know that it’s possible in the United States that this kind of thing can happen, except maybe in the olden days. But those of us who are still around, who lived through these things, many of us feel a responsibility to help others, to hand our real history to others. And I thank you so much and the VFA and everyone who is working on keeping this history.
JW: It’s really wonderful. And I do want to say I had chills while you were talking because I was not at that march, but it’s become like the touchstone for many other issues and things that have gone on in the women’s movement. I mean, the pictures from that march are burned in my brain. So significant.
KD: I thank you for saying that. And I know that there are people who are, thanks to groups like what you’re doing, who are taking into their own souls the things that we did, so that they could do that. It’s a very important part of my life. I spend a lot of my time with middle school and high school students now, working as a volunteer educator with Film Pittsburgh’s TeenScreen here, and working with young people. Today, I’m a retired teacher. After I was a coal miner, I went into teaching. I think it’s so incredibly important, and to have the tools like the ones your organization is creating, is incredibly important. So, thank you.
JW: No, really, thank you. This is wonderful. Well, after that time, did you continue this activity or you moved on to other things?
KD: Well, 1970 gave us a lot of impetus to keep the struggle for legalizing abortion alive, and the struggle against the war in Vietnam. And in January of 1973, both of those struggles saw victories with Roe v. Wade from the Supreme Court, which was unanticipated by us.
And I must say, parenthetically, we knew the struggle wasn’t over at that point. And it never stopped because of the takebacks that began immediately with women who are on welfare. Their right to use their medical care as part of welfare, to terminate a pregnancy, was taken away by Congress. And that was anticipated that that kind of thing could happen.
There were struggles from the very beginning after Roe, but nothing like what we’ve just recently been through, of course. And then in the same month, the recently re-elected president, Richard Nixon, found it necessary to say that the United States was pulling out of Vietnam and ending the war in Vietnam, which was something that we had been working on for a very long time, and with the same kind of enthusiasm that the women’s movement was developing. And so, in January 1973, the focuses of our activities were to enforce those two decisions and to move forward in other struggles.
By 1977 I had moved to New York City, keeping involved in all of these things, and by 1979, I had been hired as a coal miner: one of the women who was able to become a coal miner because of Black steel workers going to court years before that, and insisting that Black workers, and women, should have equal access to jobs, and to promotion, to seniority, et cetera, in the steel mills.
And many of the steel companies like the one I was hired by, also own coal mines. And so, that legal victory that was won in the affirmative action suits by Black steel workers, opened the doors to women becoming coal miners.
Meanwhile, women around the country had felt the enthusiasm of the women’s struggle that we had been building in other milieux. And women around the country living in coal mining areas, for almost all of them, you could make a much better living with much safer working conditions if you got hired in a union organized coal mine. And so, women were beating down the doors to get into the coal mines.
Women started to get hired in 1975, so by the time I got hired in 1979, women had been working in a mine I was hired into, and they were the women who bore the brunt of breaking into a male world. But by the time I was hired, my local union – I still sing their praises – was used to us.
And once we passed the informal initiation of proving that we could, and wanted to do the work alongside the men, and most importantly, that we were going to work safely and help save the lives of each other. That’s part of being a coal miner. You watch out for danger and warn each other and protect each other and get out of danger together and use the power of the union to do that. Once we passed those initiation rites, we were very much not only accepted, but looked to, as inspiring, hardworking, union people.
JW: Two questions about that. Was there sexual harassment, and, did you have equal pay?
KD: Okay, so the second one is easier to answer because the United Mine Workers had established from the start, that every worker in a coal mine should have access to every job in the coal mine. Your pay was based on the job that you did, and everyone could bid on any job in the mine. Whether you got it or not was determined solely by seniority. So that was a revolutionary thing. And there are many workplaces which don’t have those things.
That was one of the reasons for the lawsuit. And that was, that Black workers were kept in lower paying and more dangerous jobs and didn’t have the right to try and get other jobs because they weren’t given out the way that they were in the coal mines. But we came into a workforce that was used to seniority determining what kinds of jobs you could get, and pay being based entirely on the number of hours that you work and in what job. So, that was all taken care of.
Sexual harassment, that varied a great deal from one part of the country and one coal mine to another. There were women who suffered pretty serious sexual harassment in different mines. I was only a very tertiary victim of any sexual harassment. It was not looked fondly upon by the leaders of my local union. Because anything that got in the way of solidarity underground got in the way of people’s lives.
If you didn’t look out for each other as if each life down there mattered, then everybody became unsafe. For example, if you saw a rock hanging in some place that somebody you didn’t like was going to go past, you couldn’t just say, “Oh, I hope that falls down on that guy” because if that guy got hurt, everybody else would have to go into an unsafe place to try and rescue him. So, it was against the culture underground to practice any kind of discrimination or harassment in the mine in which I worked.
And to this day, my buddies and I, those who are still alive because many have died, will tell stories about these things. Every coal miner I know has had her or his life saved by coworkers and has saved other people’s lives, because it’s part of what you do in a dangerous job. I think people who work on farms could say similar things, or the railroad, and certainly soldiers. It’s the same kind of thing. You all depend on each other.
JW: How long did you do that?
KD: 13 years. I worked in Washington County, Pennsylvania. I was lucky to be hired into one of the mines that was among the later industries in the Pittsburgh area to shut their doors. Most of my still working friends lost their jobs before, when their mills started on the road to closing down. And my mine, I was able to stay until the end of 1992. I got laid off when they shut our mine down. It changed ownership and eventually reopened.
I could have gone back to work in the mine, but by that time, I was back in school. I started college when I was 16. I dropped out my senior year to be full time worker for the Vietnam anti-war movement in ’66. And so, when I got laid off from the mines in ’92, I had a new daughter, who had been born the previous year, and I was a lot older. I was in my 40’s. I went back to school when I was laid off, so that I could get certified to teach.
The Chatham University, it was Chatham College at that time in Pittsburgh, accepted most of my college credits from 30 some years previously. So, I was able to enter college as a senior and I was able to go to college. Again, because of the United Mine Workers. Because they had worked into our most recent contract with the companies, a provision and a fund, to help fund return to school or beginning school, for people to become educated. To be able to take on new jobs if the mine was shut down because of foreign competition, which is the excuse that they always used.
Most of my coworkers, many of them, took advantage of that fund as I did, to get trained for different kinds of work. Most of my coworkers, I think who did it, became nurses, men and women, because there was a nursing shortage there. But because I had begun this move to being a teacher, it was easier for me to do something that I really always wanted to do since the time I had my first amazing teacher in elementary school. So, I went back and got trained and certified to teach.
JW: And what did you teach?
KD: My first certification was elementary school. That would be Kindergarten at that time. Kindergarten through 6th grade, and I got hired as an elementary school teacher. And then, I was offered a job in the school district I wanted to work in, which was Pittsburgh, if I went back to school again and got certified to be a library teacher. And so, I got a master’s in library science while I was teaching library and science in elementary school.
And then, around the United States, the No Child Left Behind baloney that was going on, started getting rid of library teachers, including in my district. There was no more need to have school libraries with full time teachers, of how to find and use information and how to enjoy reading.
So, in order to stay a teacher, I got my third certification in middle school English, which is what I taught for the last 13 years of my teaching career. Loved it, loved it, loved it. I had always thought that middle school teachers had to be crazy. I learned that that was true, and I learned that I was one of them. I was crazy.
I have so many wonderful relationships that I built with kids and parents during those years, and with others who cared about those kids. It’s still a passion for me. I went from a predominantly male occupation, into working in a predominantly female occupation.
But there, too, women’s voices, it was still an issue. Taking women seriously was still an issue. Taking the mothers of the children seriously was an issue. Helping girls learn that they can be strong and they don’t just have to be, in middle school especially, sexually attractive to boys in order to be important and to feel good about themselves.
The misogyny in our society is deep, widespread, and sometimes invisible. But as a teacher, especially, well, I think of elementary school children too, but also especially of middle school kids who are getting a sense of who they are, having some kind of a feminist consciousness and experience to bring into the classroom; I’ve told my students lots of stories.
JW: Oh, you did?
KD: I did. Oh, gosh, yes. There were always ways to work in stories about strong women, and strong Black people, and strong workers, and strong people who looked like their parents when they went home, and strong people who were immigrants to this country and went through a lot of things in the past and currently. So, yes, until I left teaching, even though I got in trouble now and then for doing things like, having poetry slams in the classroom where the kids could actually express themselves.
I think that one of the most important things I did, was to help the girls and the boys get a sense that you can be very short, which I am. You can be old, which I am, and I was. You can have all kinds of things that make you look less important and less significant than other people. But each of you has strength and beauty that others may not see, especially if you don’t see it yourself. So, let’s find that together.
And in my classroom, one of the mantras was, kids would tell new kids if they came into the classroom, “Ms. Dawson doesn’t let us tease each other or say mean things about each other,” because I told the kids, I am short enough that I had to stand on an orange crate in order to reach the top of the chalkboard or the whiteboard, and I would do that the very first day of school.
And I would say, “I want to stipulate right now that I am short. I’m probably the oldest teacher you’re ever going to have. You can laugh about those things because I laugh about them myself. But nobody in this room, including me, is going to ever make fun of anybody else in this room for any reason, because we are all valuable people, and there’s no one in this room, including me, who can’t learn from every single other person in this room.”
We began the school year like that every year. And I loved it. It was awesome. Of course, it wasn’t smooth sailing all the time. And it wasn’t just because of reactionary things that were coming from state legislatures and administrators who went along with those things. It wasn’t just for those reasons, although they were awful.
It was also because we were real people, working with real children, who were coming from real situations at home, and real environments that were not necessarily conducive to thinking like that about them, or treating them that kind of way when they went out into the world, when they left that classroom even. So, we worked together in a real environment that required flexibility and building a culture of caring and a culture of mutual respect.
JW: Wonderful.
KD: I wasn’t always successful. I will be the first to admit that.
JW: Of course, but did you get pushback from parents, other faculty, the administration?
KD: That varied a lot. Almost always parents were supportive of what I was doing because they knew I cared about their children. And really, once that was established, we could actually have conversations about what was going on. If you start by making a phone call at the beginning of the school year saying, “Johnny is being really bad in class,” then the parent is going to get defensive. I would, if I got a phone call like that.
If you start by recognizing the strength of the child and wanting to help that, nurture that. But there are obstacles, and sometimes the obstacles include a child’s resistance. You call a parent and say, “Can we work together on something that I’m being challenged by?” And usually, parents would respond to that.
In addition to that, I offered the kids things that didn’t happen without my intervention. For example, there was a free Shakespeare contest in Pittsburgh for middle school and high school students sponsored by Pittsburgh Public Theater. That’s a chance for kids to get up on a stage and do a monologue or a scene from any Shakespeare play they want, any monologue or scene that they want to do. And I thought, every kid in this school needs a chance to experience this. And I worked into that program that I did, doing the same thing with August Wilson’s plays.
August Wilson, of course, is from Pittsburgh, but wasn’t recognized, and in my opinion, August Wilson is kind of like the Shakespeare of his time in many ways. Bringing August Wilson in, of course, gave some of the kids a playwright that looked like them as an easier entrée into theater. And so, I brought that program into our school. It got driven out toward the end, but parents got really excited about things like that, and also about the student council which I helped to establish.
In fact, it was my call to do this, in which especially 7th and 8th graders, could develop programs in the school to organize things like fundraising for the families in Fukushima, or having a school dance. Where the kids organized these projects that they came on themselves and could see themselves as leaders helping out people who were in worse situations than they were, or having fun together, like the school dances. Parents liked that too. So, I almost always had, and still have – I’m still in touch with a lot of these parents – a coterie of people whose voices mattered, who would support me if the administration came down against these things.
I was not a teacher who could give into the test mentality that had kids leave activities like these, to sit in front of a computer and learn how to take a standardized test. And that became more and more and more the way that kids and their teachers were being judged by administrators who had to respond to politicians, who were on a drive, counter to the way that a lot of us saw education. So yes, I got in trouble.
There was one time when I had to take down a bulletin board because my students were writing poetry, and they were writing great stuff. I got it into my head that the poet laureate of the United States might be interested in seeing their work and responding to them. And sure enough, she was. This was the poet laureate who was appointed by Obama. When she said she would look at it, some of the kids’ poems, she wrote back, she commented on the poetry.
And so, I put up a bulletin board with all of that. I got in trouble for that bulletin board because it wasn’t helping kids prepare for tests with a rubric that said, “This is what you should have been doing better.” Because that wasn’t the point of the bulletin board. It was recognizing these kids, and them being recognized in a place that mattered. So, yes, I did get in trouble.
And my kids test scores, they were pretty much like everybody else’s test scores. There were some really high ones and a lot that weren’t so high. And to have my kids continue to be judged by how they did on a standardized test was anathema to me. I’ve talked with other teachers about this.
Doctors have this. I think it’s an oath, the Hippocratic Oath, “First Do No Harm.” And when we were doing test prep stuff and taking the other stuff away and kids had to look at their test scores and judge themselves that way, I felt I was violating that oath. And sometimes I had to do it. It was a compromise that got harder and harder to do. And I was getting older. So right around my 73rd birthday, I retired from teaching, but with almost entirely really great years, having made that transition from coal mining as a feminist.
JW: Yes, I hear that. So, what I was going to ask you, I’m not sure how to frame this, but it does sound like your grandmother and your mother really shaped your life going forward into looking at women, and confidence, and helping others. That’s the theme I get from what you’re saying.
KD: Absolutely. In fact, yesterday, I just posted a tribute to my mom on Facebook because it was the birthday that would have been her 99th. And that’s what I wanted to get across. That my mom also was gifted by her mom, who found it in other ways, a way of looking at herself and the rest of the world, and women, and our place in society, and the fact that we can do things collectively, we can find each other.
The whole concept of sisterhood was real. Was strongly real for my grandmother, too, when she was forced to leave Erie, Pennsylvania, with her two daughters and relocate in Los Angeles. There was a camaraderie among other recent immigrants but took on a special form among the women.
And in fact, I am in a writing group at Carlo University here, called Mad Women in the Attic. We just had our last session on Monday, and because of experiences in that group, I have reshaped my own current writing project into a play that is called, “Common Spirits.” It’s a play in which women of my mother’s generation, who didn’t know each other but who I had the chance to meet during my life, gather, and have conversations about themselves and what their lives were like.
And the sisterhood among those spirits who are talking in 2023, none of them is alive now, is something that I’m hoping to be able to recreate in voices as close to their own voices as possible. I’m working with other people, my generation, for whom these are parents, or somebody that they worked with, to try and make the voices genuine.
One of the things I’m learning by listening to these women, is that being with other women who are in similar situations and being able to talk about it and look out for each other, is something that [has been] experienced throughout time, probably, but certainly around the world, by all kinds of women who wouldn’t necessarily call it sisterhood.
A scene that I’ve just written is a conversation between people who didn’t know each other. A Mexicana woman and a woman who was interned in the Japanese internment camps. Both of whom gave birth to children that I knew in real life, born at the same time as I was born, under circumstances in which they needed other women to be around.
Because in the internment camps, the way that women of Japanese descent were looked on, was even worse than; they needed each other’s collective experience as they went through, wondering what was going to happen to their daughters. If they were going to be able to have lives outside of these camps in which they would be seen as Americans.
That was an issue also for the Mexicana women who gave birth at that time. Were they and their children going to be deported to a land that they didn’t know? And that’s still an issue in the United States today. It’s even more of one in some ways than it was then, if they can even get into the country. So, I wanted them to get a sense of the common experiences that they were going through.
And my mom is a witness to this conversation in the play, so that we can pass that on to others. That it has been often the coming together of women, that has helped women get through all kinds of things. Not leaving the men out and not hating the men by any means, but because our experiences as females are different in many ways.
And that becomes more true the more misogyny takes hold of society, the way it’s trying to in this country right now. So, the fact that women have done this and lots of different kinds of experiences, without calling it sisterhood, without calling themselves feminists, is something from which we can take strength and build on.
JW: Absolutely. And they don’t call it consciousness raising, but that’s what it is.
KD: Exactly. And it’s contagious because when women’s consciousness gets raised, men and others get confronted with it too, and sometimes they love it. I found that in the mines, some of my best coal mining buddies loved the camaraderie among the women in the mines. They didn’t feel threatened by it at all because we brought it to them too. We brought it to share.
I think that’s a hope for the human race and the planet. We certainly see it among indigenous women right now who are coming together in many parts of the underdeveloped world or the colonialized world. To plant trees, to do all kinds of things with their hands connected to the earth. And to write about it in books like Braiding Sweetgrass, and to share with us the experience of a female relationship with each other and with our planet.
JW: Well, is there any thing you’d like to add before we close?
KD: I think, if you don’t mind, I just very quickly want to pass on my mother’s philosophy of life. My mom was not a perfect person, nor am I. I don’t want to give any impression that that’s the case. But what kept her going through the McCarthy period, when the FBI came to our door all the time and tried to get her fired from her jobs, and through all kinds of difficult times in her life, I don’t know where she got this from, but I asked her once when I did a taping of her, “Mom, how did you keep going when times got really hard?”
And she would laugh and look at me and she’d say, “We have to understand that the first law of nature is progress. And sometimes it doesn’t feel like that’s what’s happening. If you look at it this way, you’ll understand that life really is a spiral. And it never goes down. It keeps going up, but it also goes backward at times, because that’s what a spiral does. And it can look like we are being defeated and things are being taken away. And sometimes some aspects of what we have done are being taken away.”
And surely, 2023 is the time when we see that happening. But she says, “What they can’t ever take away from us is the bottom of that spiral and how it keeps going. We are moving up and we can’t deprive us of the work that others have done before us and that we ourselves have done and the foundation that that has laid, in being able to make the world a better place. So don’t forget that.” She would say, and I say it now too.
JW: That’s wonderful.
KD: And don’t forget, the music. Because Harry Bellefonte just died, I have to say, music is one of the tools to communicate among us in ways that other things don’t necessarily do that. Music, poetry, art, absolutely essential. And the struggle itself will continue. La lutte continue [the struggle continues].