241 P - Battling for Space: Community Organizing in Post World War II Cities

Saturday, June 3, 2017: 1:45 PM-3:15 PM
BRESL 217 (Hofstra University)
Chair:
Francoise Hamlin, Brown University
Taking Back 'Take Back the Night': Feminist and Community Organizing in the 1970s/80s
Georgina Hickey, University of Michigan, Dearborn
The "Militant Mothers of Raymur": Low-Income Women Building Safe and Healthy Communities through Direct Action and Community Organizing in 1970s Vancouver
Meghan Elizabeth Longstaffe, University of British Columbia
The Boston Busing Crisis: Black Mothers in the Civil Rights Movement
Julie de Chantal, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Narrating and Navigating Urban Divisions: Alice Browning, The Champions, and Women's Neighborhood Organizing in South Side Chicago, 1945-1960
Kathryn J. Oberdeck, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Session Abstract

This panel focuses on the ways individuals and communities organize to push for reform, effect change, and unify as a collective entity in the face of injustice within the spaces they inhabit. One study analyzes the mid-1970s organized attempts to “reclaim the night” that grew out of a multi-faceted feminist anti-violence movement and considers this mode of organizing in relation to Take Back the Night events of the present day. The second study explores the grassroots organizing of low-income women who lived at a social housing complex in an inner-city neighbourhood in Vancouver, Canada during the 1970s and highlights how an urban environment that segregated marginalized women became a focal point for their activism. The third study argues that by using their positions as mothers, Boston’s Black working-class women pursued a more radical agenda not only in the 1960s, but throughout the entire twentieth century, as they, just to name a few, pushed for the desegregation of Boston’s public schools, proposed welfare reforms, and created job training to help other mothers gain better work opportunities in a way that was more successful in effecting change than their male counterparts. The fourth study draws on Alice Browning’s papers and fiction as well as archives of South Side block club organizing to document and analyze the gendered politics within everyday struggles for social justice involving urban space and decent housing sought by participants in different waves of black migration to Chicago.

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