Taking Back 'Take Back the Night': Feminist and Community Organizing in the 1970s/80s

Take Back the Night is a staple event at many colleges and recent attention to campus sexual assaults has brought renewed energy to these rallies and marches, furthering their association with the college environment.  One activist, who went public with her own campus assault in the 1990s, recently trademarked the name for a “charitable 501(c)3 foundation” in order to “unite the hundreds of events being held under the TBTN banner around the world.” These trends suggest a narrow, homogenous agenda for Take Back the Night, obscuring the urban, radical, and coalitional origins of feminist and community organizing in the 1970s and 1980s.

In the mid-1970s, organized attempts to “reclaim the night” grew out of a multi-faceted feminist anti-violence movement and served as mass-based expressions of women’s frustration with American culture and the urban environment. Beyond this, the first decade of Take Back the Night reflected the particulars of the individual cities and local organizations that spawned them. They can help to illuminate aspects of 1970s/80s feminism generally overlooked in historiography and popular memory. In particular, the history of these events reveals concrete efforts to connect women’s issues to broader community priorities, particularly those espoused by residents of neighborhoods vulnerable to poverty, violence, and urban decay. While white feminists created marches for safe streets and to protest the rise in public pornograpy, they did so ways that intentionally engaged with communities of color, working-class neighbors, survivors of institutional and personal violence, and activists from a range of backgrounds.