Showing posts with label women. Show all posts
Showing posts with label women. Show all posts
10.26.2007
Sister Comrade
You don't want to miss this one: Sister Comrade, a celebration of the lives of poet activists Audre Lorde and Pat Parker:
10.23.2007
You Can't Stop Me – an interview with Cathy Cade
If you have an image in your head of a lesbian feminist, Cathy Cade probably helped put in there. For at least my entire adult life, I've been looking at her pictures in the dozen books and magazines where they've been featured, and in her own book, A Lesbian Photo Album: The Lives of Seven Lesbian Feminists.
Cathy became an activist while she was in college: in 1966 she joined the Civil Rights Movement, demonstrating and organizing with SNCC. As an opponent of the Vietnam War, she helped found the Tulane chapter of SDS, and later was an early actor in the Women's Movement. In 1970, Cathy moved to San Francisco where she soon came out as a lesbian and started taking pictures, and her interconnected dedication to social justice and to photography has persisted throughout her life. Along with her documentary photo projects, Cathy runs a business as a professional photographer and personal historian. (Her website has details.) I was so excited when Cathy agreed to do an interview with me, and not only did we have a great time talking, but she managed to recruit me to a whole pile of women's history related projects she's involved with!
Along with the interview, I asked Cathy to chose a few pictures which show how her work has changed over the years. You can find them below, each with a little bit of background from her in the caption.
Gail Grassi and Kate Kaufman repairing a car. "It was a time when we all looked to the Chinese Revolution for progressive ideas of making the world a better place for people."
Bay Radical You talked before we started taping about how when you first started doing photography, you couldn't believe that women could really use that equipment.
Cathy Cade That's right.
BR You started taking pictures in '71 – is that right?
CC Ya. The same spring I came out as a lesbian; they were very connected. It was a time when a lot of lesbians were getting into the trades. And so one of the first things I did was photograph women in the trades, and photograph my friends tuning their cars, and the Women's Press Collective printing books, and carpenters. I still like to do that. Recently I've been photographing men doing skilled work. Uptown Body and Fender is in downtown Oakland and the woman who owns that loves art and she hired me to photograph her workers. [Now] there are these big beautiful black and white prints up on the wall, so when you've had your car smashed up you drive in there and you get out of your car and here are all these skilled mechanics doing their work.
BR That's really cool.
CC It turns out I like to photograph men doing skilled work also.
BR Have you taken pictures of men over the years?
CC Some gay men. But this is all political. Most of the men who work in that shop are immigrants from Latin America, one of whom was just being deported the other day. So it all stays political.
BR Was there some lag between when you started taking pictures and when you started thinking of yourself as a photographer?
CC Not very much, but it's a good question because one of the reasons I started taking pictures was because I was tired of going to meetings and all the processing and yet I still wanted to be in the movement. I figured I could make my contribution and not have to go to so many meetings. When I started photographing there were all these new magazines, and there [were] new exhibit opportunities because the women's movement and the lesbian feminist movement was just bursting out. And so my work got used right away. There wasn't any long period of me wondering if anybody was going to like my work or anything. It was totally grabbed up and used in newspapers, and magazines, and local exhibits, and in the new coffeehouses, so that made it really easy.
I didn't want to use the word "artist" because when I was growing up an artist was one of these rare people who was born with humongous talent and "please don’t embarrass us by thinking that you might be talented". But there were people like Holly Near and others using the word "cultural worker", so I could call myself a cultural worker. Things have changed over the years and I call myself an artist. And I'm glad to identify as an artist, but the fact that I was starting to do my photo work when it was wanted, needed, used and I could call myself a cultural worker – was helpful!
"I became involved with a coalition of union women called Union WAGE - Union Women's Alliance to Gain Equality. Some of the leadership were of an older generation than we were and had been activists in the '30s. This was one of the only places in the '70s where women in the women's movement of different generations were connecting with each other."
BR Right. That makes sense.
CC I didn't get paid.
BR Right. [Laughing] Some things don't change.
CC I think that I worked in photography as opposed to film partly because I could take pictures without having to raise a lot of money. My attitude a lot was, "You can't stop me." With a camera and wanting to take pictures and maybe wanting to get them out a little bit, the "you can't stop me" would work.
Now a days with the new technology you probably can make little films and put them up on YouTube, that's probably shifted.
"I wanted to do a book on lesbian mothering but I never got to, and when I couldn't do a book I said 'I'm going to take some of my favorite images, and I'm going to print them on cloth and embroider the cloth onto diapers'. The great thing about it is, I hang it up on a clothes line with old fashioned clothes pins - I can hang up an exhibit in 20 minutes - which means that I can hang it up for a one day event. I have it in the works to expand it."
BR Right. Well, it's a trade off because, what we don't have now is a movement to go with it and so it's…
CC You don't think we do?
BR Well, I'm curious how you think about it because your work was such a part of a movement. Does it still feel like its connected to a movement in the same way?
CC Well, backup a minute. I had two kids as a lesbian by donor insemination. My first son was born in '78, and my second in '85 – this was the beginning of this new lesbian mothering movement – so I had my kids and raised my kids in a political context. There were those years where lesbian mothering was my movement. After they got to a certain age, I guess high school or something, they weren't around as much and I started looking around and saying, "OK, so where's the Women's Movement? Where's the Lesbian Movement now?" And I couldn't find it. At first it seemed like it was nowhere. Like, when I moved out here in '71, I knew where the Women's Liberation Movement was: it was at Glide Church on Friday nights at 7:30.
BR That makes it easy!
CC Ya! But then we're talking the late '80s, early '90s, it's like nowhere and everywhere. And that's what it feels like now. But I'm now more and more connected with an old lesbian movement, and that's easier to identify - where it is - so I've lucked out again, in another identifiable movement.
Old Lesbians Organizing for Change marching at an early anti-Iraq War demonstration. "I started cutting up my pictures and making collages. This was radical. I had all been black and white, documentary photography, and all the sudden I'm cutting up a print and I'm going, 'Who do you think you are? God?'"
BR [There's a] theme that I see in your pictures that I wondered if you see, or if you have other themes that you want to point out: The subjects in your pictures are without self-consciousness, and especially because it's women doing non-traditional work, or people who are seen by the outside world as ugly in a certain way, that you just present in this really matter-of-fact way.
CC Well, I really appreciate you calling it that because some people think I'm overly positive, disgustingly positive, just this old Pollyanna, so it's nice of you to call it self-acceptance and a lack of self-consciousness. But I really did want to show us as human beings and to show us acting out of our personal power. Those early women in the trades pictures have a lot of sense of personal power you know. And I wanted to show women as smart and loving.
And the lesbian mothering pictures, I called them "mothering" not just "lesbian mothers" because nobody talked about mothering and what a job [it] was, and that it had skills. Part of what I wanted to do in those pictures was to articulate, "What do mothers do?" Not just what do lesbian mothers do but, "What is the job of mothering?"
The other thing is the everydayness - celebrating the everydayness. Everyday activities and everyday people.
"These quilt photos start out being 4X6 color prints that I take to the lab and they make 'em. No more sweating in the dark room. I cut the prints up and I reassemble them like you would a quilt if you had little pieces of cloth. They're about beauty, and I think in this day and age beauty brings hope, and getting to have hope is very political."
Cathy became an activist while she was in college: in 1966 she joined the Civil Rights Movement, demonstrating and organizing with SNCC. As an opponent of the Vietnam War, she helped found the Tulane chapter of SDS, and later was an early actor in the Women's Movement. In 1970, Cathy moved to San Francisco where she soon came out as a lesbian and started taking pictures, and her interconnected dedication to social justice and to photography has persisted throughout her life. Along with her documentary photo projects, Cathy runs a business as a professional photographer and personal historian. (Her website has details.) I was so excited when Cathy agreed to do an interview with me, and not only did we have a great time talking, but she managed to recruit me to a whole pile of women's history related projects she's involved with!
Along with the interview, I asked Cathy to chose a few pictures which show how her work has changed over the years. You can find them below, each with a little bit of background from her in the caption.
Gail Grassi and Kate Kaufman repairing a car. "It was a time when we all looked to the Chinese Revolution for progressive ideas of making the world a better place for people."
Bay Radical You talked before we started taping about how when you first started doing photography, you couldn't believe that women could really use that equipment.
Cathy Cade That's right.
BR You started taking pictures in '71 – is that right?
CC Ya. The same spring I came out as a lesbian; they were very connected. It was a time when a lot of lesbians were getting into the trades. And so one of the first things I did was photograph women in the trades, and photograph my friends tuning their cars, and the Women's Press Collective printing books, and carpenters. I still like to do that. Recently I've been photographing men doing skilled work. Uptown Body and Fender is in downtown Oakland and the woman who owns that loves art and she hired me to photograph her workers. [Now] there are these big beautiful black and white prints up on the wall, so when you've had your car smashed up you drive in there and you get out of your car and here are all these skilled mechanics doing their work.
BR That's really cool.
CC It turns out I like to photograph men doing skilled work also.
BR Have you taken pictures of men over the years?
CC Some gay men. But this is all political. Most of the men who work in that shop are immigrants from Latin America, one of whom was just being deported the other day. So it all stays political.
BR Was there some lag between when you started taking pictures and when you started thinking of yourself as a photographer?
CC Not very much, but it's a good question because one of the reasons I started taking pictures was because I was tired of going to meetings and all the processing and yet I still wanted to be in the movement. I figured I could make my contribution and not have to go to so many meetings. When I started photographing there were all these new magazines, and there [were] new exhibit opportunities because the women's movement and the lesbian feminist movement was just bursting out. And so my work got used right away. There wasn't any long period of me wondering if anybody was going to like my work or anything. It was totally grabbed up and used in newspapers, and magazines, and local exhibits, and in the new coffeehouses, so that made it really easy.
I didn't want to use the word "artist" because when I was growing up an artist was one of these rare people who was born with humongous talent and "please don’t embarrass us by thinking that you might be talented". But there were people like Holly Near and others using the word "cultural worker", so I could call myself a cultural worker. Things have changed over the years and I call myself an artist. And I'm glad to identify as an artist, but the fact that I was starting to do my photo work when it was wanted, needed, used and I could call myself a cultural worker – was helpful!
"I became involved with a coalition of union women called Union WAGE - Union Women's Alliance to Gain Equality. Some of the leadership were of an older generation than we were and had been activists in the '30s. This was one of the only places in the '70s where women in the women's movement of different generations were connecting with each other."
BR Right. That makes sense.
CC I didn't get paid.
BR Right. [Laughing] Some things don't change.
CC I think that I worked in photography as opposed to film partly because I could take pictures without having to raise a lot of money. My attitude a lot was, "You can't stop me." With a camera and wanting to take pictures and maybe wanting to get them out a little bit, the "you can't stop me" would work.
Now a days with the new technology you probably can make little films and put them up on YouTube, that's probably shifted.
"I wanted to do a book on lesbian mothering but I never got to, and when I couldn't do a book I said 'I'm going to take some of my favorite images, and I'm going to print them on cloth and embroider the cloth onto diapers'. The great thing about it is, I hang it up on a clothes line with old fashioned clothes pins - I can hang up an exhibit in 20 minutes - which means that I can hang it up for a one day event. I have it in the works to expand it."
BR Right. Well, it's a trade off because, what we don't have now is a movement to go with it and so it's…
CC You don't think we do?
BR Well, I'm curious how you think about it because your work was such a part of a movement. Does it still feel like its connected to a movement in the same way?
CC Well, backup a minute. I had two kids as a lesbian by donor insemination. My first son was born in '78, and my second in '85 – this was the beginning of this new lesbian mothering movement – so I had my kids and raised my kids in a political context. There were those years where lesbian mothering was my movement. After they got to a certain age, I guess high school or something, they weren't around as much and I started looking around and saying, "OK, so where's the Women's Movement? Where's the Lesbian Movement now?" And I couldn't find it. At first it seemed like it was nowhere. Like, when I moved out here in '71, I knew where the Women's Liberation Movement was: it was at Glide Church on Friday nights at 7:30.
BR That makes it easy!
CC Ya! But then we're talking the late '80s, early '90s, it's like nowhere and everywhere. And that's what it feels like now. But I'm now more and more connected with an old lesbian movement, and that's easier to identify - where it is - so I've lucked out again, in another identifiable movement.
Old Lesbians Organizing for Change marching at an early anti-Iraq War demonstration. "I started cutting up my pictures and making collages. This was radical. I had all been black and white, documentary photography, and all the sudden I'm cutting up a print and I'm going, 'Who do you think you are? God?'"
BR [There's a] theme that I see in your pictures that I wondered if you see, or if you have other themes that you want to point out: The subjects in your pictures are without self-consciousness, and especially because it's women doing non-traditional work, or people who are seen by the outside world as ugly in a certain way, that you just present in this really matter-of-fact way.
CC Well, I really appreciate you calling it that because some people think I'm overly positive, disgustingly positive, just this old Pollyanna, so it's nice of you to call it self-acceptance and a lack of self-consciousness. But I really did want to show us as human beings and to show us acting out of our personal power. Those early women in the trades pictures have a lot of sense of personal power you know. And I wanted to show women as smart and loving.
And the lesbian mothering pictures, I called them "mothering" not just "lesbian mothers" because nobody talked about mothering and what a job [it] was, and that it had skills. Part of what I wanted to do in those pictures was to articulate, "What do mothers do?" Not just what do lesbian mothers do but, "What is the job of mothering?"
The other thing is the everydayness - celebrating the everydayness. Everyday activities and everyday people.
"These quilt photos start out being 4X6 color prints that I take to the lab and they make 'em. No more sweating in the dark room. I cut the prints up and I reassemble them like you would a quilt if you had little pieces of cloth. They're about beauty, and I think in this day and age beauty brings hope, and getting to have hope is very political."
9.26.2007
East Bay Lesbian Bars
Because the gnomes that control google prefer that blogs have straight-ahead titles, I had to give this a straight-ahead title. Were that not the case, I would have called this post Women Unite in Armed Snuggle, a slogan found in the following wonderful link:
A brief history of East Bay lesbian bars.
I don't know much about bars because I spent my 20s clean and sober, and now that I'm not sober, I already feel too old to leave my house after 8 pm. But having read this piece by Barbara Hoke (and heavily illustrated, mainly with photos from the prolific Cathy Cade), I can say that I genuinely wish I spent more time in bars! Most specifically, I wish I could have gone to the Driftwood in Hayward to check out the former Roller Derby queens who ran the place. Seriously, I think bar history is important because bars are where we found each other even when we couldn't find each other anywhere else. Community is important and Stonewall should confirm that what happens in the bars has repercussions that are much bigger.
Related, I haven't watched it in a few years but I remember liking Last Call at Maude's about a long-lived San Francisco dyke bar. And for more on lesbian bar history, this Curve article discusses it, including references to a couple books on the topic.
I'll close with some silliness: popular culture's take on lesbian bars. I would have included Roseanne's lesbian bar kiss, but the only clip I could find on YouTube was too long. Instead I offer you these two:
Susie Bright uploaded her cameo in the bar scene in Bound (which I walked out of after the first 10 minutes when it was in the theater a dozen years ago).
And Pam Grier beats off the lesbians in the Foxy Brown bar fight scene (which I confess, I am too young to have seen in the theater):
Drink on gals!
A brief history of East Bay lesbian bars.
I don't know much about bars because I spent my 20s clean and sober, and now that I'm not sober, I already feel too old to leave my house after 8 pm. But having read this piece by Barbara Hoke (and heavily illustrated, mainly with photos from the prolific Cathy Cade), I can say that I genuinely wish I spent more time in bars! Most specifically, I wish I could have gone to the Driftwood in Hayward to check out the former Roller Derby queens who ran the place. Seriously, I think bar history is important because bars are where we found each other even when we couldn't find each other anywhere else. Community is important and Stonewall should confirm that what happens in the bars has repercussions that are much bigger.
Related, I haven't watched it in a few years but I remember liking Last Call at Maude's about a long-lived San Francisco dyke bar. And for more on lesbian bar history, this Curve article discusses it, including references to a couple books on the topic.
I'll close with some silliness: popular culture's take on lesbian bars. I would have included Roseanne's lesbian bar kiss, but the only clip I could find on YouTube was too long. Instead I offer you these two:
Susie Bright uploaded her cameo in the bar scene in Bound (which I walked out of after the first 10 minutes when it was in the theater a dozen years ago).
And Pam Grier beats off the lesbians in the Foxy Brown bar fight scene (which I confess, I am too young to have seen in the theater):
Drink on gals!
9.10.2007
Rosie the Riveter Memorial Park
I told the kids I was taking them to the Rosie the Riveter Park, which they seemed very excited about it despite the fact they've never heard of Rosie the Riveter. The concept of Rosie the Riveter is confusing because the idea that there was a time when women weren't allowed to work the same jobs as men is foreign to them. I mean, their parents are lesbians – in their world, women do everything including fixing cars, washing dishes, and rolling children up in their blankets like human burritos; why shouldn't women rivet? And what the hell is a rivet anyway? On the way to the park I gave them my now classic lecture (most recently used when discussing Martin Luther King Jr.) about how Sometimes People Have Ideas That Aren't True, and It's Important to Tell Those People That ANYONE Can Be a Riveter (or that anyone should be able to ride in the front of the bus, depending on which lecture I'm giving). (I restrained myself from giving a lecture on war profiteering, which might have been more appropriate for this memorial – more on that in a minute.)
I hadn't been to Richmond in a while, and when I got off the freeway, I was completely confused by the impenetrable wall of condos. This isn't the Richmond I'm familiar with, and if it is part of Richmond now, what is the city doing with all the new property taxes? Please, someone with some real Richmond knowledge fill me in. In any case, I got lost in condo land and finally ended up at an upscale mini-mart where I asked the proprietor for directions to Rosie the Riveter Park. He looked over his glasses at me and chuckled (I'm not exaggerating - he really chuckled!), "Your expectations are too high," and directed me back to a patch of grass next to a parking lot I'd just passed.
The kids and I got out at the Rosie Memorial, a little exhibit about women homefront workers that was commissioned by the City of Richmond, and designed by artist Susan Schwartzenberg (Susan, why don't you have a website?) and landscape architect Cheryl Barton. Given, I'm a nerd, but I really liked it. The memorial runs the length of a Liberty Ship, and as you walk along the path spanning the ships distance, you can read a mini labor history of WWII, with a focus on people of color and women. Also interspersed are quotes from women shipyard workers, and these, along with photos posted at the site, are the most affecting part of the exhibit.
The memorial is planted on the former site of Kaiser Shipyard number 2, where steel magnate Henry J. Kaiser employed many thousands of workers to build ships for WWII.
Richmond's history is inseparably linked with Kaiser's factories and with the war. Richmond became a largely African-American city (36% of the population according to the latest census) as a result of migration related to the war industries. And the poverty that many Richmond residents confront now is directly linked with the city's failure to create adequate housing and infrastructure for its many new residents during the war, and the sudden disappearance of jobs that occurred when the war was over.
In 1940, Richmond had a small town feeling and a population of around 23,000. By 1950, the population was more than 99,000. Workers came in carloads and trainloads, brought by the more than 170 recruiters that Kaiser employed around the state and around the country to power the shipbuilding empire that he had centered in Richmond. So desperate was Kaiser for workers that at one point, LA recruiters instituted a "work for drunks" program where judges issued suspended sentences to 'vagrants' in exchange for an agreement to come work in the Richmond yards. That program didn't last long, but even for the average newly arrived worker, (if you can say that there was an 'average' since folks came from all over the state, from all regions of the country, and represented dozens of ethnic groups) the attrition rate was high. Once workers arrived they found limited housing, working conditions that were both stressful and tedious, and the loneliness of leaving home. The many new African-American workers transplanted from the South found themselves subject to the same Jim Crow racist hiring and housing practices they were familiar with from back home. War industry work crews were racially segregated, Black workers were rarely promoted to supervisory positions, and Black workers were refused membership in the major unions and instead relegated to auxiliary 'negro' unions where members were expected to pay dues but received little or no protection. (White women faced job discrimination as well, receiving significantly lower pay for jobs that white male workers got more for). While many protested these conditions, for example, in the Sausalito shipyards nearly all the Black employees walked out in protest of racist conditions in 1943, government agencies, white labor leaders, and industrialist business-owners were less than sympathetic. Outside of the factory, public housing built during the war was segregated in Richmond, as it was in Oakland and elsewhere in the Bay Area. (According to The Second Gold Rush, details on that book below, Berkeley community leader Byron Rumford started a petition drive protesting public housing segregation which finally lead to federally mandated integration of Berkeley/Albany public housing in 1946.) Basic workplace rights and decent housing were a struggle for Richmond's many new Black residents. For their part, newly arrived white Southern workers tended to complain about 'having to' work side-by-side with African-Americans.
Who was Henry J. Kaiser? He was your basic guy-out-to-make-a-buck, all-American, success story. He got his big start running a road-paving business, and ended his life turning Honolulu into the tourist sink that it is today. He was successful to say the least – his company, along with another Bay Area local, Bechtel and four other companies managed the construction of the Hoover Dam. During the war, Kaiser employees in Richmond (and his three other factories along the West Coast) were building a whole war ship in about a month (the record was set when workers constructed an entire ship in just over four days). His name also lives on in the Kaiser Permanente HMO, which was created because Kaiser needed to provide some basic health services to his thousands of employees, and who can afford that kind of expense (while maintaining a millionaire lifestyle)?
When the war ended, Kaiser moved on to new projects. He even (briefly) got into the auto industry. For the thousands of factory workers who had moved to the Bay Area, many full of patriotism and hope for the future, life wasn't quite as easy as Kaiser's. The jobs disappeared almost immediately. Soldiers came home and were given priority for the few jobs that remained. Women and men of color found themselves fired or demoted to make way for white men who were prioritized by employers. Today Richmond is still full of art, culture, and hard work, but undeniably, Richmond has been scarred by the poverty that is a legacy of the war industry here. The Rosie Memorial is just a little thing, but I loved getting to learn more about why things happened the way they did here. I was glad to come. I confess that the kids liked the nearby boats a lot more than that exhibit, but what can they do, they're a captive audience.
This entry barely scratches the surface of what can be said about the long-term impact of WWII industry on race, gender, and economics here. If you want to learn more, there are a bunch of other sources I'd recommend:
Marilynn S. Johnson's The Second Gold Rush provided a bunch of references for this post. It's factually dense but it maintains a readable narrative. I don't think you have to be as obsessive as I am to enjoy it, which is unusual for this kind of regional history book.
Fight or Be Slaves also has tons of information about this period.
Robert Self discusses issues related to changing racial dynamics in the East Bay after WWII in American Babylon. Unfortunately, I got about 50 pages into this book last summer, and then accidentally left it at Feather River Family Camp, so I can't tell you for sure if it's worth reading, but my friend Jess was just saying good things about it, so on his recommendation, I'll say, go for it.
I thought this Bay Crossings article had some interesting history about water travel related to Richmond.
Finally, I was inspired to check out the Rosie park after reading a nice article about it in the San Francisco Bayview. The article originally appeared on Black Commentator, but I'm including the Bayview link because of some additional notes at the end of their version.
Hey, if you want to learn more, Here's a whole pile of relevant sources.
I'll send you out with this video by historian Betty Soskin on African-Americans in the Richmond war industries. You can read some details about the content of the video here.
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