Tamar Carroll, GRASSROOTS FEMINISM: DIRECT ACTION ORGANIZING AND COALITION BUILDING IN NEW YORK CITY, 1955-1995

As a historian of politics and gender in the U.S., my research lies at the exciting crossroads of emerging scholarship on urban history and women's activism. Recent studies have emphasized the importance of space as a site of battles over power and rights. My dissertation on women's activism, identity politics, and social change in New York City from 1955-1995 is grounded on the neighborhood level, chronicling activists' local battles to obtain resources and recognition for their communities. At the same time, I am interested in the dialectical relationship between social policy and grassroots movements. As new work on labor feminism and women of color in the reproductive rights movement has shown, post-war women's activism flourished beyond the academy and the professions, offering vital insights into possibilities for broad-based coalitions for social change. Highlighting the mobilizations of working-class white ethnic women, women of color, and gay rights activists, my study explores the ways in which identity shapes political participation, and how the American state responds to social movements. Using archival sources, organizational records, newspapers, films, and oral history interviews, I set my case studies of women's activism against a background of changes in the economy, the state, and culture that have both created and limited opportunities for social movements. Ultimately, this study reveals the transformational potential of coalitional, identity-based politics for creating interracial and cross-class activist communities and enhancing social justice.

Composed of three case studies that move chronologically, my dissertation opens with an examination of Mobilization for Youth (MFY), a demonstration project for the War on Poverty located on the Lower East Side and active from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Founded on the Kennedy administration's faith in technocratic expertise to solve social problems, MFY initially consisted of a top-down program focused on male juvenile delinquency and job training programs for unemployed men. Over time, however, through social workers' interactions with clients, MFY developed important concepts of advocacy and resident participation. Because MFY social workers interacted primarily with low-income families in the Lower East Side, African-American and Latina mothers played a crucial role in reorienting the agency's bureaucratic approach. The growth of the civil rights movement in the North led MFY to take more activist approaches to the empowerment of low-income residents, including rent strikes and legal suits against the welfare and police departments, leading to the formation of the welfare rights movement. Ultimately, these activities resulted in a backlash against the agency, which was accused of harboring communists and sponsoring anti-American activities. In analyzing the attack on the organization, I highlight the resistance of local centers of power – city hall, the political parties, the police and welfare departments – to MFY's campaigns for empowerment of the poor. These bureaucracies resisted and ultimately succeeded in curtailing MFY's efforts to change New York City's distribution of resources, in the forms of jobs, education, social services, health care, and housing, along racial, class and gender lines.

My second case study, on the National Congress of Neighborhood Women (NCNW), shifts from mobilizations shaped by the Great Society's technocratic liberal faith in progress and state intervention into a political context dominated by economic recession and backlash to the War on Poverty. This study charts the political coalition forged by working-class white ethnic women and African American women public housing residents in the mid-1970s in Williamsburg/Greenpoint, Brooklyn and East Harlem. I show how NCNW members, drawn into political organizing by urban renewal and de-investment policies that threatened to destroy their neighborhoods, at a time when racial tensions in the urban North were at their height, formed an organic, cross-racial, needs-based women's movement. The NCNW designed its own innovative community-based college program, which brought women from different racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds together for guided study of the social institutions and practices that shaped their lives and contributed to the differences among them. Through group education and consciousness-raising, NCNW members developed an understanding of intersectionality, the ways in which social relations of class, gender and race, among others, shape each other, and are therefore best understood when analyzed together. This understanding of intersectionality allowed NCNW members to identify and work on areas of mutual needs, while at the same time acknowledging and respecting their differences. Building trust across barriers of race and class took time; it was an ongoing and lengthy process. In some cases, the strains encountered by the coalition in trying to survive under the Reagan administration's restrictive social welfare policies and the violence directed at poor minority communities in the War on Drugs proved to be too great, leading to fractures in the coalition along race and class lines. Restrictive state regimes foster defensive politics and are more likely to encourage the growth of single-issue advocacy groups than broad-based coalitions like the NCNW.

My final case study chronicles the history of Women's Health Action Mobilization (WHAM!), a direct action feminist group founded in 1989 in response to the Supreme Court's Webster decision restricting abortion rights. In this section, I chronicle the alliance between young, white, mostly middle-class feminists in WHAM! and gay men in the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) that emerged in NYC in the 1990s over sexual privacy and access to health care. Mobilizing in response to moral interventions by the state, in a climate of violent right-wing Christian attacks on gay people and abortion clinics, ACT UP and WHAM! members recognized common enemies as well as common goals. These activists formed a different kind of community, one based on shared cultural values more than residence, and they employed attention-grabbing direct action techniques in their protests. WHAM! and ACT UP hoped to put pressure on the state by changing public opinion through their use of the media. With an activist repertoire that included bold satire and political theater, as well as "wheat-pasting," literally covering the public spaces of lower Manhattan with graphic art political slogans, they succeeded in garnering public attention, and made significant policy strides under the Clinton administration. The Bush administration has already rolled back many of those policy gains, however, suggesting that direct action alone is inadequate as a primary mode of organizing for social change.

For all three of these organizations, outsider identity provided an entry point into mainstream politics, and a starting point to articulate what each group needed from the state in order to enjoy full citizenship. Rather than viewing identity-based politics as inherently fragmenting, I argue, it is precisely the recognition of difference among groups that allows for broad-based coalitions for social change. I conclude that identity-based politics can result in more civic engagement and greater democratic participation, and that policies which encourage cross-race and cross-class partnerships, such as the War on Poverty's maximum feasible participation standard, offer the best hope for empowerment of low-income Americans today.