This year we have been following current events with increasing dismay—lately it seems like women are embattled on every front. At the heart of every struggle are women telling their stories, testifying en masse to uncover and combat abuse, inequality, and the erosion of our civil rights. What is shocking is just how many women coming forward it takes for our testimonies to be taken seriously. Women have learned time and time again that we must band together, seeking justice in numbers. So for our newest Dead Feminists broadside, we turned to Simone de Beauvoir, who shepherded hundreds of women together to speak up for the rights of all:
Ne pariez pas sur l’avenir, agissez maintenant, sans plus attendre. (Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.)
Simone de Beauvoir was a complex, controversial, even problematic figure all her life. Hesitant to call herself a philosopher, she nevertheless was an influential member of the French existentialist movement. Her many essays and books examined the very idea of self, particularly that of women in light of society’s expectations and constraints. She contended that women are as capable of choice as men, and that when women take responsibility for themselves and the world, they can choose their own freedom. Her tumultuous personal life, which made her as infamous as her writings, embodied this staunch belief in freedom of choice. Unwilling ever to marry or even set up a joint household with anyone, de Beauvoir maintained a 51-year partnership with Jean-Paul Sartre as well as numerous affairs with both men and women. Her insistence on intrapersonal, educational and economic independence flew in the face of what she called society’s “othering” of women through stereotypes and the myth of the feminine mystique.
In the 1970s, de Beauvoir finally “came out” publicly as a feminist, and used her platform to advocate for reproductive rights for French women. In 1971 she wrote a manifesto calling for the legalization of abortion, and published it in a prominent magazine. She knew that simply calling for change wouldn’t be enough to tip the scales—nor would simply sharing her own story in the process. So she gathered together hundreds of other women who were willing to come forward and testify that they, too, had undergone illegal abortions. These women signed the Manifeste des 343, in full knowledge that they might risk persecution (or even prosecution) for speaking up. American women soon followed, when 53 others — including Billie Jean King, Gloria Steinem and Judy Collins—told their own abortion stories in Ms. magazine. Today there are projects like Lindy West’s Shout Your Abortion, where contemporary women of all ages speak the hard truths that society is often unwilling to hear. Beyond their personal choices, what these women have in common is the knowledge that it takes reaching critical mass before societal change will come.
This has all happened before in other public spheres, and unfortunately, it will all happen again. And that’s because almost all of us know on an instinctual level that as far as society is concerned, one woman’s testimony is garbage. When we come forward to report assault or abuse, we are at best patronized or disbelieved—at worst vilified, doxxed, threatened, sued, attacked, even murdered. When we remain silent, we are criticized for not reporting, for not protecting future victims. There is no winning this terrible game, so we seek safety—and credibility—in numbers. In 1991 a group of 1600 Black women took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, lending their names and support for Anita Hill as she testified against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. This year 1600 men did the same for Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, as she gave sworn testimony against Brett Kavanaugh. Both Thomas and Kavanaugh were confirmed to lifetime Court appointments—Dr. Blasey Ford is still living in hiding to protect her family from the constant threats she receives. As of November 2018, 499 gymnasts have come forward to accuse sports doctor Larry Nassar of sexual abuse—it took more than 20 years of reporting to the authorities by at least 100 of these victims (several of them pictured above) before the case finally went to trial. Sixty accusers and one male comedian speaking out were required to bring Bill Cosby to justice. At least as many women have come forward to accuse Harvey Weinstein; it is yet to be determined whether he’ll stand trial for the allegations against him. (Even Simone de Beauvoir found herself on the other side of the witness stand, when several of her former female students came forward and accused her of seducing them while they were still minors.) And when it comes to legislation for women’s rights, it takes much more than a village—it takes all of us speaking with one voice.
In light of these and countless other stories, our 28th broadside, Liberté, Egalité, Sororité, is layered with meaning. To symbolize the sheer number of women it takes to speak out before our testimonies are taken seriously, every name from the Manifeste des 343 shines through Simone de Beauvoir’s translucent quote. These names are cut off by the edges of the paper, signifying the disbelief and contempt women face when they come forward. In the center of the design is a trio of red tulips, as a nod to Margaret Atwood’s book The Handmaid’s Tale, which teems with floral metaphors of femininity, fertility, death and control.
To help fight the erosion of reproductive rights and protect Roe, we are donating a portion of our proceeds to Center for Reproductive Rights, via an Action Grant from the Dead Feminists Fund. The Center for Reproductive Rights uses the power of law to advance reproductive rights as fundamental human rights around the world.
Liberté, Egalité, Sororité: No. 28 in the Dead Feminists series Edition size: 173 Poster size: 10 x 18 inches
Printed from hand-drawn lettering and illustrations on an antique Vandercook Universal One press, on archival, 100% rag (cotton) paper. Each piece is numbered and signed by both artists.
Colophon reads: Simone de Beauvoir (1908 – 1986) was born to a bourgeois Parisian family who lost their fortune just after World War I. With upward mobility via marriage no longer an option, de Beauvoir focused on her education in order to earn an independent living. In 1928 she became the ninth woman to earn a degree from the Sorbonne, completing a thesis in philosophy. After an early teaching career (which ended once her relationships with underage female students came to light), de Beauvoir devoted her time to writing. Her numerous affairs with other writers also influenced her (and their) work, most notably her 51-year partnership with fellow existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. In her landmark 1949 book Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), she declared, “One is not born but becomes a woman,” defining arbitrary societal gender constructs as the source of women’s oppression.
In 1971 de Beauvoir wrote and signed the Manifeste des 343, published in the French weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. This petition of prominent women who underwent illegal abortions called for free access to contraception and the legalization of abortion. Despite attacks by the media—who dubbed the signers 343 salopes (sluts)—the document inspired 331 American doctors to publish a similar manifesto ahead of the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. In 1975 France followed suit with the passage of the “Veil Law” which legalized abortion.
Illustrated by Chandler O’Leary and printed by Jessica Spring, honoring the brave women who come forward despite personal threats, testifying to secure and protect the rights of all. 173 copies were printed by hand at Springtide Press in Tacoma.
Special thanks to our friends Rebecca Wilkin and Gilles Brocard for their French translation assistance!
Midterm elections are looming, and we have a lot of work ahead of us. We knew right away that with this being an election year, we wanted to feature voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer for our next Dead Feminists broadside. But before long we realized that Hamer could carry us down the rabbit hole, with seemingly endless social issues to investigate through the lens of her life and work. Which should be the focus for our broadside? Where would we even start? We could have chosen any number of things, just based on Hamer’s story. Her Congressional bid evoked the contemporary groundswell of women newly running for office. Her forced sterilization in 1961 brought up reproductive rights and the Pro-Choice movement’s shadow history of racist eugenics. Her survival of a beating in a county jail underscored this country’s persistent police brutality against Black citizens. Her work with community agriculture reminded us of America’s continued lack of food security and equal access to nutrition for the working poor. And taken together, all of these myriad issues and problems are distilled and rarefied by Hamer’s simple truism:
Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.
It was that simplicity that swayed us in the end: Hamer started with focusing on the vote, and so did we. As the midterms approach, it is increasingly obvious to us that turning out the vote is the only way to turn the rising tide of state-sanctioned inequality and violence. It is more important than ever to help continue Hamer’s work, to combat racism and make sure that all Americans have the same access to their constitutionally-protected rights of suffrage. That task is as difficult as it’s been in decades, thanks to the Supreme Court overturning key portions of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. And Black voters—those voters who most reliably stand for progressive causes and candidates, and who are already disproportionally targeted for disenfranchisement—are feeling the effects of that ruling. If progressives want their help in November, we need to help them first.
Fannie Lou Townsend was one of 20 children born to a family of sharecroppers in Mississippi; by the time she was a teenager, she was picking up to 300 pounds of Mississippi Delta cotton per day, despite a permanent leg injury from having polio as a child. Though she was only able to attend school through age 12, she loved learning and was an avid reader—years of Bible study forged for her a personal connection between scriptural stories of liberation and the modern Civil Rights movement. In 1945 she married Perry “Pap” Hamer, a fellow sharecropper, and the couple later adopted two daughters. In 1962 she attended her first mass meeting—it was there that she learned for the first time, at the age of 44, that Black people had the right to vote. A few days later she and sixteen others boarded a bus to Indianola, MS to register as voters (her attempt was unsuccessful, thanks to literacy tests and poll taxes)—and the following day, she was fired from her plantation job. Pap was fired shortly afterward.
Hamer continued to try to register to vote, and started helping others attempt to overcome the racist literacy tests, poll taxes and transportation challenges that stood in the way. As her interest in direct action for civil rights increased, so did the attempts to silence her. Days after she lost her plantation job, she survived a drive-by shooting attempt by white supremacists. In 1963, while on a bus trip with fellow activisits from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Hamer and several others were arrested after being refused service at a cafe in Winona, MS. After being taken to the county jail, a state trooper took Hamer into a cell and ordered two inmates to beat her with blackjacks while the police held her down and groped her. The state trooper then joined in on the near-fatal beating, leaving Hamer with permanent damage to her legs, eyes and kidneys. She kept up her activism anyway: “I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared — but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.”
After the police beating, Hamer traveled widely on a public speaking tour—sharing her story, singing gospel hymns, gaining followers and raising money for civil rights groups. In 1964, after co-founding the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (which helped expand Black voter registration and challenged the state’s all-white hold on the party), she ran for Congress. Her bid against a white incumbent was unsuccessful, but in an interview with The Nation she said, “I’m showing the people that a Negro can run for office.”
The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party continued to grow, agitating for change to the system of seating only white Mississippi Democrats at the Democratic National Convention. Hamer and her fellow MFDP members traveled to the 1964 Convention to stand as the state’s official delegates, with Hamer was chosen as the party’s speaker—prompting the white delegates to walk out in protest. President Lyndon Johnson—who generally supported the Civil Rights movement and signed the Voting Rights Act into law in 1965—feared he’d lose his bid for reelection without the support of white Southern Democrats. To appease them and bolster his own campaign, he preempted the broadcast of Hamer’s convention speech by holding a nationally-televised press conference at the same time. Finally, in 1968 the national Democratic Party changed its rules to require equal representation from its states’ delegates, and the MFDP was seated at that year’s National Convention alongside the white Southern Democrats. In 1972, the same year that Shirley Chisholm ran for President, Hamer was elected as a national party delegate.
Hamer’s voice continued to inspire her national following, even as she narrowed her focus back to her native Sunflower County, Mississippi. In the late 1960s she lent her time, money and energy to a number of grassroots efforts there, including a communal farm and livestock share program to increase food security and nutrition equality among the sharecroppers and rural Black residents. She argued that self-sufficiency was the best path to full citizenship for Black Mississippians, and promoted land ownership and crop control as essential civil rights. She enlisted the help of a Wisconsin nonprofit called Measure for Measure, and secured a large celebrity donation from Harry Belafonte, to found the Freedom Farm Corporation and begin buying up Mississippi Delta farmland. By 1971, despite threats by white supremacists, Hamer had acquired over 600 acres for use in communal agriculture: “If we have that land, can’t anybody starve us out.”
Our 27th broadside, Seeding the Vote, honors Sunflower County, where Hamer planted so many seeds for freedom, suffrage and full citizenship for all. The first half of the quote sits “behind bars,” obscured by the stalks of wilted sunflowers, while the second half is festooned with vibrant yellow blossoms. Hamer’s portrait hovers above a trio of her iconic yellow voter registration buses—which are also designed to be reminiscent of other Civil Rights Movement buses in the American South, including Rosa Parks’ famous bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
To help combat the same racist disenfranchisement that Fannie devoted her life to fighting, we are donating, via a grant from the Dead Feminists Fund, a portion of our proceeds to Spread the Vote, a nonprofit that obtains government-issued photo IDs to help eligible voters meet the requirements of voter ID laws. Currently 34 states have some form of voter ID law as a requirement for enfranchisement; many of the strictest laws exist in states with a large percentage of Black or other minority voters. With their IDs obtained with the help of Spread the Vote, these same people can also secure housing, jobs and other essentials more easily—helping them participate more fully in society and exercise their rights as Americans.
Seeding the Vote: No. 27 in the Dead Feminists series Edition size: 165 Poster size: 10 x 18 inches
Printed on an antique Vandercook Universal One press, on archival, 100% rag (cotton) paper. Each piece is numbered and signed by both artists.
Colophon reads:
Fannie Lou Hamer (1917 – 1977) was the youngest of 20 children born to Mississippi sharecroppers, and was picking cotton by age six. At 13, since she was literate, she became the plantation’s record keeper. Married in 1944, she continued plantation work with her husband. In 1961, Hamer was subjected by a white doctor to a hysterectomy without her consent, while undergoing surgery for a uterine tumor. Forced sterilization of Black women was so widespread it was dubbed a “Mississippi appendectomy.”
Starting in 1962, Hamer organized buses to register thousands of Black voters in Sunflower County, Mississippi. They faced continued voter suppression, a $100 fine for a bus that was too yellow, extortion, threats and assaults — and Hamer was fired from the plantation. In 1963, after she ran a literacy workshop to help Black voters overcome racist poll tests, police arrested her and beat her nearly to death. Nevertheless, she ran for Congress in 1964 and helped organize the Freedom Summer voter registration drive in Sunflower County. At the Democratic National Convention later that year, she co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an integrated group of activists who openly challenged the legality of Mississippi’s all-white, segregated delegation. Through it all, Hamer kept campaigning, while signing hyms and traditional spirituals to keep up morale among her followers. Today she is heralded as a civil rights icon, yet the refrain of her famous words is still familiar to the choir: “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Illustrated by Chandler O’Leary and printed by Jessica Spring, in honor of the tireless work of women who plant the seeds and tend the crop of budding voters.
One exhibit might be ending this week, but another is just getting started. On Tuesday night I went to the opening for Ink This!, a new exhibit of contemporary Northwest print arts at the Tacoma Art Museum.
The place was completely packed—both in the lecture space and in the common areas.
I spent so much time catching up with friends and colleagues from all over the region (which is the best part about this show!) that I barely made it upstairs to see the artwork itself.
And then when I got there, I had a pleasant surprise: my piece in the show is prominently displayed, right by the entrance.
It’s such an honor to have my book in a room with so many incredible prints, sculptures, artist books and other work by the people I admire the most.
Most of all, I can’t tell you how gratifying it was to see so many people come up and spend time with my book. That’s the highest compliment anyone could ever pay me.
Many, many thanks to the Tacoma Art Museum for putting this show together; to Margaret Bullock for her amazing work curating the exhibit; to Ann and Peter Darling who lent the book from their private collection for the exhibit; to everyone who has seen the show so far; to the artists themselves; and to the lovely man monitoring the gallery that night, who so kindly gave me permission to take some hip shots with my phone camera. (I couldn’t hide how excited I was to have my work in a museum for the first time—thanks for not laughing at my dorkiness!)
Ink This! will be on display through November 9October 19 (update: show is closing early to accommodate the opening of a new museum wing), at the Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Avenue in downtown Tacoma.
Here we are: year ten. Since the time Jessica Spring founded the Tacoma Wayzgoose all those years ago, it’s become one heckuva beast—and a veritable Tacoma institution.
So here are a few sneak peeks of the giant linoleum block Jessica and I are carving—and we’ll reveal all on Sunday:
10th Annual Tacoma Wayzgoose
Sunday, April 27, 2014
11 am to 4 pm, Free!
King’s Books
218 St. Helens Avenue, Tacoma, WA
If you’re new here and don’t know what a Wayzgoose is, or you just want to relive the glory days of old, here are links to all the Wayzgeese (gooses?) I’ve been a part of:
In case you might be wondering, I’m still working on my Mt. Rainier book. I don’t post about it often, but this is a near-constant backdrop to everything I do. Every day, I hand-color a few more prints. Every day, I cut a few more pieces. Every day, I cross a thing or two off the massive list. And every day, I get closer to “done.”
I’m working on something huge (and secret!) that I’ll be launching very soon. In the meantime, I’m going through the studio and doing some housekeeping (both literally and online). As happens with any big shift, it’s time to take a good hard look at anything that doesn’t quite fit the puzzle going forward.
So at noon PST on July 1, I’m going to be making some changes to the shopin preparation for the big thing to come. And while they’ve had a good run, I’ll be removing a few things permanently—including the last remaining hand-painted linocuts from the Flock series.
(Don’t worry, the bird cards aren’t going anywhere!)
Most of the rest of my hand-printed artwork (like the Mt. Rainier and Horse prints) will still be available, but the prices will go up on July 1—some by quite a bit. So if there’s anything you’ve had your eye on for awhile, now might just be the time for you to snag it.
It’s that time of year again: the trees are blooming outside, and inside we’re playing with knives. The ninth (!) annual Tacoma Wayzgoose is one week from today—and if we’re really lucky, Jessica and I might just finish carving our design by then. As usual, we’ll reveal the whole design that day, but until then, this little peek might look familiar…
If you’re new to my tiny u-bend of the Intertubes, you might ask: what the heck is a Wayzgoose? It’s a festival celebrating the art of printing, a tradition that goes back hundreds of years. Here in T-town, our party mobile is a steamroller—yes, ma’am—and we churn out giant-sized linocuts in the street to mark the occasion. If you’re local, come on by and get ink on your jeans:
9th Annual Tacoma Wayzgoose
Sunday, April 28, 2013
11 am to 4 pm, Free!
King’s Books
218 St. Helens Avenue, Tacoma, WA
In the meantime, you can whet your appetite with a stroll down Amnesia Lane—take a look at the ghosts of Wayzgeese past:
Right now my little cottage-industry factory is churning out Christmas—starting with this year’s letterpress ornament collection. This is the second year I’ve made letterpress ornaments, and I have been dying to show you this year’s crop.
Thankfully, I can finally let the…ahem…cat out of the bag.
Look at Laurie’s amazing tree! She is the queen of holiday decorating.
There are two sets of ornaments this year, and for one of them I collaborated with my friend Laurie Cinotto, the fabulous fine-craft genius and kitty wrangler behind the insanely wonderful Itty Bitty Kitty Committee. A year ago I asked her if she’d be interested in doing a set of kitty ornaments, and for months now we’ve been positively chortling over these things. (Curious fact: we make nearly identical chortle sounds.)
The really hard part was picking which kittens from Laurie’s nearly endless alumni and gorgeous photographs to illustrate. In the end, I settled on a few of my all-time favorites: Clovis Ashby, who is a bit of a Tacoma celebrity. Extra-pretty Victoria Anne McGillicuddy in all her calico glory. Aloysius Petrie for his “Who, me?” look. My particular friend Baxter Lamm, who now makes mischief full-time at Jessica’s house. And Pearla Dearborn, to whom my secret heart belongs forever (even though she doesn’t live with me). And watching over the flock is Laurie’s own Empress Mama cat, Charlene Butterbean.
These kitties (and Laurie’s photographs) are T-town legends, as I found out this weekend. We did a little ornament test-drive at a local craft fair, and people kept saying things like, “Hey, that’s Clovis on that tree!” and “Wait a minute—what is Charlene Butterbean doing at your table?” But whether these guys are old hat for you, or you’re a dog person who’s never heard of such a thing as kitten blogs on the Internet—well, I just dare you to tear your eyes away from Laurie’s world.
There are just 200 sets of these ornaments to go around, and each one is ridiculously handmade. To give you an idea of just how ridiculous, I thought I’d walk you through part of the process.
Yes, there’s sushi on that press sheet. That’s the other ornament set this year…
Y’all know my printing process pretty well by now, so I’m going to skip ahead a bit. Just FYI, these are linocuts; check out my bird prints if you’re curious about that process. But as you can see, I printed both ornament sets all at once, on one press sheet.
Then I went ahead with my usual hand-coloring assembly line.
No, wait a minute. I said 200 prints, right? Well, that’s a small edition for retail goods, but when you’re hand-painting each one, 200 feels more like eleventy billion.
There, that’s more of an accurate picture.
Still, if the work stretching endlessly ahead of you to the horizon is a bunch of drawings of kittens, it’s impossible not to be happy about it, despite yourself. I know—I tested the hypothesis, and I’m still grinning like a fool.
This year I added a new step to the process: rather than hand-cutting all 1200 kitties in the set by hand (ahem, Local Conditions, I’m looking at you!), I made the design simple enough that I could semi-automate part of the assembly line. I bought a hand-crank die-cutting machine, created a digital dieline (basically an industrial pattern) of my design, and sent it off to a friendly steel rule manufacturer in Kent.
I know that plank with all those pink foam bits doesn’t look anything like an ornament set, so let me zoom in. A die consists of steel blades embedded in a piece of wood. The blades are bent and arranged in precisely the configuration specified by the dieline. Those pink foam bits cushion the blades, hold the paper in place and help with cutting accuracy. When the die is run through the cutting machine (which works much like a Vandercook press), those pink bits squish down under pressure, exposing the blades and gripping the paper to be cut. Those metal pins sticking up are for lining up the press sheet—they’re spring-mounted, so they retract when the blade goes through the cutting machine.
Here’s the underside of the die—now you can see how the blades fit the press sheet.
Still, while the die is a total lifesaver in terms of cutting time, the lightweight paper I was cutting made for some wiggle room—even with the extra line tolerance I built into the design. After all that hand-coloring I didn’t want to lose a third of my prints by cutting them in the wrong place. So I still had to do some puzzling and figure out how to outsmart the limitations here.
Since the lightweight prints are mounted to a heavier board to complete the ornaments (the ribbon loops are sandwiched in between), I was basically using the die twice. I realized that the leftover blanks of board would make a good template, and wouldn’t wiggle under pressure.
A little masking tape,
some quick eyeballing,
and slow-and-steady cranking in the press—
—and Bob, as they say, is your uncle.
Individually taping down all eleventy billion 200 press sheets was a little mind-numbing, but still, the “finished” pile added up fast.
And it was awfully satisfying to see the whole edition completed in days rather than weeks or months.
Laurie stepped in and saved my sanity by doing a lot of the grunt work—rough-cutting boards, snipping lengths of ribbon, and cutting insets into the board-kitties so that the ribbon loops lie flush and disappear.
A quick coat of black around the edges,
and just a wee bit of cursive script on the back,
—and we have a litter of Christmas kittens. Laurie contributed one of my favorite photos for the packaging, and I basically have been unable to stop squealing ever since. Now the Tailor and I just need to hurry up and chop down our Christmas tree, so I can display these guys in the living room!
If you’d like a set, they’re up in the shop. To answer the foreseeable question, we’re just offering these in full sets—they were printed in sets, so we don’t really have any oddball solo pieces this time. And last year almost everyone wanted the full set of bird ornaments, rather than just one, so I let those votes carry the motion. Actually, there are still some bird sets left, so feel free to snag ’em if you missed out last year. As usual, these are limited-edition—I won’t be reprinting them, so once they’re gone, they’re gone for good.
One last thing: to make sure that Tacoma pets also have a happy holiday season this year, Laurie and I will be donating a portion of our proceeds to help stock the Tacoma Humane Society’s emergency pet food bank. We want to make sure that while we’re all having a kitty-themed Christmas, the kittens who inspire us get to enjoy Christmas dinner, too.
If you have any sort of link to the outside world (television, radio, internet access, newspaper, mailbox), chances are you’ve been unable to escape this year’s deluge of advertising, chatter and glossy-printed recycling fodder—all centered around this coming Tuesday. It’s enough to have even four-year-olds throwing up their hands in frustration. Jessica and I, however, have spent many hours sifting through election material—1972 election material, I mean. To remind us of what’s really important this year (and every year), we turned to the woman who help paved the way for our current President.
The one thing you’ve got going: your one vote. —Shirley Chisholm
Shirley Chisholm was one of fifteen Presidential candidates in 1972. It was a volatile time: the Vietnam War was the center of public discord; movements for civil rights and gender equality were major issues around the western world; and the race came on the heels of the 1968 race—one of the bloodiest election years in American history.
Shirley knew she was a long shot; she even referred to herself as “literally and figuratively the dark horse.” Yet she also knew that to run for President, all that was required was to be a natural-born U.S. citizen of at least 35 years of age. There was nothing in there about being male or Caucasian—and as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, she was at least as qualified as her fellow candidates. So she ran, because it was her right, and because she knew that if she played it smart and started winning delegates, she’d have some power to leverage.
Shirley sought to create a truly representative government. Rather than a cookie-cutter set of interchangeable politicians running the country, she envisioned an America where each region, economic sector and ethnic group elected one of its own to office. She wanted to see a woman heading the Department of Education & Welfare; a Native American in charge of the Department of the Interior. And as a freshman Congresswoman she was assigned to the House Forestry Committee but refused to serve—how would forest stewardship or agricultural bills represent New York’s inner-city 12th Congressional District?
She also saw her office as an opportunity to encourage women—especially women of color—to get involved in politics. Every member of her staff was a woman, half of them African-American. To say the least, her very presence made her fellow legislators nervous—and on top of everything else, she was probably the only woman of color in the whole country who made the exact same salary as her white male colleagues. (Heck, for people like Yvette Clarke or Barbara Lee, that’s probably still true for the most part. How depressing is that?)
On the national political stage, however, her race and gender were two strikes against her. She gathered support from the National Organization for Women, but when the time came for NOW to officially endorse a candidate, their squeamishness over the possibility of a black nominee overcame their lip service. And the Black Congressional Caucus, of which Shirley was a founding member, threw her under a bus because they couldn’t bring themselves to support a female candidate. To me, that’s the most interesting thing—Shirley Chisholm always said she faced far more discrimination over her gender than the color of her skin.
Still, though she had to battle opposition and prejudice from all sides, she worked to bring people of all stripes together. When her opponent George Wallace (yes, that George Wallace—Mr. “Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever”) was wounded in an assassination attempt, Shirley visited him in the hospital. They were the ultimate Odd Couple: years later Wallace used his clout among Southern congressmen to help Shirley pass a bill giving domestic workers the right to a minimum wage.
In the end, though she gathered 152 delegates, she knew she’d never snag the Democratic nomination. So she conceded to George McGovern—who went on to win just one state (Massachusetts) in the 1972 Presidential election. Take a look at the electoral college map for that year:
That’s a whole lotta red.
And since this election season marks the fourth anniversary of our series, that map was the starting point for Keep the Change, our new Dead Feminist broadside. I redrew the map in blue, and from there we crafted a period homage to Shirley’s impeccable style and substance.
The 12th Congressional District was one of the areas hardest hit last week by Hurricane Sandy. While the immediate recovery efforts in the city are crucial, we also recognize the importance of serving a community long after the disaster relief efforts have ended. So to help continue Shirley’s long-term service to her home city, we’ll be donating a portion of our proceeds to Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration, the nation’s first non-profit community development corporation. Restoration partners with residents and businesses to improve the quality of life of Central Brooklyn by fostering economic self sufficiency, enhancing family stability, promoting the arts and culture and transforming the neighborhood into a safe, vibrant place to live and work.
In the meantime, let’s do what Shirley did best—cast our vote, and keep fighting the good fight.
Keep the Change: No. 16 in the Dead Feminists series
Edition size: 152
Poster size: 10 x 18 inches
Printed on an antique Vandercook Universal One press, on archival, 100% rag (cotton) paper. Each piece is numbered and signed by both artists.
Colophon reads:
Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm (1924–2005) was born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York — though she spent her early years growing up in Barbados with her grandmother and younger sisters. She earned a master’s degree from Columbia University and moved on to teach, becoming an authority on early education. After working as a consultant to the Bureau of Child Welfare, Chisholm won a seat in the New York State Assembly in 1964. She ran for the House of Representatives in 1968 under the slogan “Unbought and Unbossed,” and was the first African-American woman elected to Congress. As a junior member, she was assigned to the House Forestry Committee but demanded reassignment on the grounds that she couldn’t effectively represent her inner-city constituency. A founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, she served seven terms in Congress.
In 1972 Chisholm ran for U.S. President, the first woman and African American on a major party ticket. She fiercely supported the rights of women and people of color, and opposed the Vietnam War. She was “literally and figuratively the dark horse”— women voters limited their support based on race, and the Congressional Black Caucus backed off because of her gender. Though she didn’t win a single primary, she proved “a catalyst for change,” gathering 152 delegates and demonstrating that women could compete nationally. Chisholm ended her campaign at the Convention, releasing her delegates to George McGovern — who lost in a landslide to Richard Nixon.
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