Self-reflection and revolution

Monthly Review, May, 2004 by Astra Taylor

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975 (San Francisco: City Lights, 2002) 411 pages, $17.95 paperback.

This summer I moved into an old house in the Catskills full of the random possessions of those who have used it as a retreat since it was built in the 1920s. With most of my books in storage and no television I entertained myself by reading a stack of Time magazines from the late sixties and early seventies that I found in a trunk in the small attic. Flipping through them nearly every evening, I enjoyed countless articles about the hippies, the Yippies, Richard Nixon, the Black Panthers, and the inevitable revolution on America's horizon. I read the ongoing coverage of the Chicago Eight (turned Seven) trial, sensational portraits of California's fringe cultures, and panic-stricken reports of the now too-often forgotten wildcat strikes of the early seventies.

But one article was my favorite, a feature piece on "women liberators," or, as they are more commonly known today, feminists: "Sexism is their target and battle cry--as racism is the blacks'. They regard twentieth century America as a rigid, male-dominated society which, deliberately or more often unconsciously, perpetuates arrant inequalities between men and women--in pay, in kinds of jobs and, more subtly, self-expression." Needless to say, it seems the same still holds for twenty-first century America. But what actually first caught my attention about the article was a photograph: a ferocious looking woman caught in the glare of a flash, bravely karate-chopping at the camera. A closer look at the caption revealed the woman to be Roxanne Dunbar of "Women's Liberation hard-core Cell 16," who is described as "one of the movement's few acknowledged leaders." Roxanne is quoted only once in the three-page article, but it's a doozy: "Sex is just a commodity."

In Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975, Roxanne Dunbar (now Dunbar-Ortiz) tells the story of this photograph, which was, in many ways, a pivotal shot. After forming Cell 16 with a small group of other women (one of whom was Abby Rockefeller, David Rockefeller's daughter) they rapidly began to gain notoriety. The group published the seminal journal No More Fun and Games and emphasized self-defense (thus the Tae Kwan Doe). One night at martial arts practice an unknown individual slipped into the gym holding something silver. Dunbar, convinced it was an assailant with a knife, stared, terrified yet defiant, into what was actually the lens of a camera held by none other than the legendary photographer Diane Arbus.

Arbus's snapshot made the rounds, published in countless periodicals including London Times Magazine, Life, and, of course, Time, radically transforming Dunbar's relationship to the women's movement by forcing her into the spotlight as a spokesperson despite the aim of women's liberation to remain leaderless. Perhaps more significantly, the publicity raised Dunbar's profile in the eyes not only of the her comrades and the broader public, but of the FBI (the book is punctuated by the FBI's extensive and often inaccurate records of where Dunbar was, on what date, with whom, and with what intent).

Almost everyone, it seems, was threatened by women's liberation in general and by Roxanne Dunbar in particular: not just the feds, but also those in the movement. In fact, many of Dunbar's most pointed critiques were geared towards the left, which housed some of her most impassioned antagonists. Dunbar brilliantly reveals and resists the sexist assumptions of revolutionary icons from Che Guevara to Tom Hayden (who in one scene dismisses a young female comrade as a "groupie"). Many of the activists she encounters are hostile to the idea of women's liberation, dismissing it as a distraction from more important issues like the war in Vietnam or racism. Similarly, open-minded Marxists feared the "woman question" would only divide the working class, while those less sympathetic derided Dunbar's cause as "bourgeois" and even "counterrevolutionary." Indefatigable and determined, Dunbar crisscrosses the country speaking in schools and on army bases making connections between classism and sexism, militarism and patriarchy. Having assumed that the "women's liberation movement would automatically trigger connections and create female revolutionaries who would be actively antiracist, anticapitalist, and anti-imperialist," Dunbar is bitterly disappointed when she realizes this is not necessarily the case (a realization that comes after witnessing the women's movement's first round of infighting and noticing that social and political issues such as race, class, and war were happily left off a feminist conference agenda). What is important, however, is that she continues to believe these connections are the ones that ought to be made and, if not triggered automatically, concludes they must be generated through the hard work of theorizing, consciousness raising, and organizing.

All of this takes place at the end of the sixties and early seventies, but when the memoir begins, the year is 1960, and there are few signs that Dunbar's life would cause so much controversy or garner such attention. In the opening scenes, picking up where her early volume, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie, left off, she is 21 and fleeing Oklahoma with her first husband, Jimmy, for California. Though she heads west, Dunbar carries the legacy of her home state with her: she understands the importance of her grandfather's involvement with the Wobblies, has a first hand knowledge of being poor and working class, and wrestles with the pain caused by her alcoholic and abusive mother, a woman who was part-Native American and shunned for it. These factors certainly contribute to Dunbar's keen sensitivity to inequality that, when coupled with her natural intelligence and curiosity, made her one of the most formidable figures of the 1960s.