On March 6, 1971 – International Women’s Day – 150 women veered from a march in support of women’s liberation, choosing instead to turn left on Pearl Street in Cambridge’s Central Square. The other protestors continued on their march from downtown Boston but for the breakaway, theirs was a different endpoint: 888 Memorial Drive, a Harvard-owned building occasionally used by the design school. In what they expressed to be a denunciation of the gentrification of the Riverside community and of the sexism of the left, the women stormed the building and took it over, declaring it a women’s center. The occupation would last for ten days.
On November 11, 2013, I took a train from Cambridge into downtown Boston to view a screening of Left on Pearl, a new documentary by Susan Rivo concerning the events of 1971. To view this era today – the 60s, the 70s, the second wave – always feels disconcerting, an exercise in both wild nostalgia and naivety. Nowadays, Super 8 footage more immediately brings to my mind trendy wedding videos than revolution.
“We all decided that the place to be was Boston,” remembered one of the dozens of women interviewed for the film, “because the women’s movement was happening there.” There was a cerebral bent to the area’s feminist presence: Bread and Roses held political tableaus in the center of Harvard Square, and campus occupations had already been held by the (male) students of Brandeis and Harvard. The previous year, the activist and eventual city councilwoman Saundra Graham had led a group of protesters from working-class Riverside onto the stage during Harvard’s commencement, where they disrupted the proceedings by protesting the university’s expansion into Riverside and the accompanying raise in rents. Campus police, most of them Cambridge locals, initially refused to remove Graham and the others from the stage.
888 Memorial Drive, a former knitting factory, was chosen partially for its proximity to Riverside. While the organizers of the takeover were not formally affiliated with Graham, they were inspired by her actions; their first demand, in fact, was for the construction of affordable housing for the greater Cambridge community. Implicit, too, was a rallying against all institutions that were hitherto this focused on the business of men: “There we were,” another activist remembered, “surrounded by MIT [and] Harvard, and they all had war research going on.”
To create and sustain a women’s space requires a simultaneous sense of idealism and distaste for the world outside of you. “As a woman I have no country,” Virginia Woolf had declared decades earlier in Three Guineas: “As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.” For the ten days that followed March 6, 888 Memorial Drive appeared to be the best sleepover-cum-consciousness raising group that I never knew I wanted. NO BOYS were allowed inside, as their graffiti on the building’s outside proclaimed. THE GIRLS RUN IT.
At least 100 women got their hair cut, claimed one interviewee (perhaps a slight exaggeration.) Dance parties were held, as were karate and self-defense courses. When Harvard turned the heat and electricity off, the women broke into the basement and turned the electricity back on themselves (the heat, unfortunately, could not be figured out). “The sleeping faces of women are beautiful,” declared the idealistic journal entry of another.
But of course it could not last, and this is where that naivety comes into play. Anyone that is politically engaged and active has to lose their innocence: it is a rite of passage in activism, the moment in which we realize that to accomplish anything we have to first accept that infighting and disagreements will always occur. It happened, for those of us young now, when we Occupied our city or college campus; it happened for 888 Memorial Drive when the complexities of intersectionality that modern feminism is still working to achieve first surfaced. Straight women could not understand the nascent lesbianism that some of the other women were discovering; there was the discomforting reality, too, that many of these women occupying in the name of Riverside were at times speaking over the voices of Riverside. SISTERHOOD IS POWERFUL read more of their graffiti – except when sisterhood refuses to conceptualize difference.
Harvard was fast growing impatient, arguing with Kathy Allen, the attorney for 888. Like many peaceful leftist movements that advocate for total revolution, the use of force was quickly becoming a point of contention. “It’s one thing to seize and hold a building. It’s another to fight with the cops,” said one. Another, Laura Whitehorn, a Radcliffe graduate, was “a secret member of the Weather Underground.” (She would later serve 14 years in prison for an unrelated bombing.)
So it dissolved. Scared that they would be hurt and arrested, the women left on the morning of March 16, when Harvard police threatened to intrude. Susan Lyman, the chair of Radcliffe’s board of trustees, donated $5,000 (in today’s money, $28,000) to the women, who used it to create the Cambridge Women’s Center, the longest continuously operating women’s center in the country. The participants of the takeover went on to organize against violence against women, advance women’s therapy, and advocate for global women’s and human rights, amongst others. The film, a scant hour, ends on a triumphant note: our mothers and grandmothers fought for us, and won.
But this, of course, isn’t entirely true, and today’s attitudes towards women haven’t changed too dramatically from that era’s. While some of the offenses listed by the documentary’s participants – in 1965, for example, Boston University women were not allowed to wear pants, even in the winter, as one woman notes with a particularly grim shake of her head – no longer exist, others, like the continued gentrification of Cambridge, particularly pernicious in today’s increased focus on tech start-ups and the empty buzzword of “innovation,” have perhaps grown even worse. Every two minutes in the U.S., someone is sexually assaulted. 41% of U.S. women currently live in poverty. The film screening was held by the Boston chapter of Hollaback!, a non-profit dedicated to ending street harassment.
“There is, in fact, no other place in this society where women can get together to meet our own needs,” an 888 Memorial representative read during their televised listing of demands. Upon leaving the screening and re-entering today, their final triumph instead seemed like a disappointment. I turned to the friend who had attended alongside of me and proposed a consciousness-raising group of our own.
