2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

When many historians talk about radical activism in the United States, certain times and places immediately come to mind, from communist organizing and union strikes in the 1930s to Panther Party rallies and feminist/ gay liberation marches in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In contrast, the late 1970s and 1980s are typically presented as an era of widespread conservatism, a lull in radical activism challenging state control, repression, and violence.  Collectively, these papers disrupt the standard narrative of when, -where, and in what forms --radical challenges to the state occurred within and across U.S. national borders. Jacqueline Castledine’s paper directs our attention to black-owned restaurants as an unexamined site for vital civil rights organizing, a space protected from state surveillance and intervention precisely because of popular associations of restaurants as gendered public places. Karen Tice analyzes a hidden side of the 1980s, in which thousands of U.S. radical activists, educators, and cultural workers transgressed travel bans and FBI harassment to work and study in Cuba, forge solidarity alliances, and challenge U.S. militarization. The diversity of these political travelers, however, led to contestation over women’s roles,  homophobia, racism, internationalism, and strategies for alliance-building across borders.  Finally, Melissa Stein traces the diverse political genealogies, from “back-to-nature” environmentalism to Pan-Africanism, that informed the MOVE organization’s ideology in the late 1970s and 80s, and the difficult conversations--about race and marginalization, class conflicts within the African American community, and U.S. suppression of radical dissent--provoked by the infamous police bombing of the group’s communal home.