Turning the World Upside-Down with Barbara Winslow -

The Babblery

Turning the World Upside-Down with Barbara Winslow

00:00 / 57:11

Barbara Winslow has been a political activist since she was a kid campaigning for Stevenson over Eisenhower in the 1950s. By the late 1960s she was a founding member of Seattle Radical Women and then Women’s Liberation Seattle, groups that fought for legal abortion in Washington State years before Roe v. Wade. Her book, Revolutionary Feminists, is a hyperlocal history of that movement: the meetings, the splits, the leafleting, and the door-knocking that changed minds and the law. In this conversation, we focus on that success, and how it mirrors the challenges faced by today’s activists.

Barbara explores the galvanizing events: a doctor who wouldn’t let her sign her own medical consent form, a pro-life billboard that got corrected, and a viral (well, 1968-viral) confrontation with a Playboy Playmate. But our conversation doesn’t shy away from the uncomfortable parts of feminist history. Barbara talks candidly about how her overwhelmingly white organizing group failed to build real coalition with Black women for Seattle’s abortion referendum, and how that failure showed up starkly on election night when the only precincts that voted against the measure were in the city’s Black neighborhoods. We hear about the importance of the fruitful dialogue with antiabortion Black activists like Fannie Lou Hamer.

“We have to find ways to find joy and peace and serenity in small victories. But I also think we have to find it in friendships, in family and in the arts. If you’re in meetings 24 hours a day, you’re not going to find joy. So you have to find a way to balance the political activism and the things that nourish your persona.”

All of this history supports Barbara’s advice to activists today: to understand how the Democratic Party’s retreat from grassroots politics after the early ’70s left an opening the right eagerly filled, how local school boards and library boards matter more right now than national races, and how—even in the middle of exhausting, often losing fights—she still believes, as she puts it, that the struggle is the joy.

Barbara Winslow is Professor emerita Brooklyn College and founder and Director Emerita The Shirley Chisholm Project of Brooklyn Women’s Activism. Barbara has been a political activist for over sixty years – in the Civil rights movement, as an ally in the Black Freedom Struggle, the labor union, public education, anti-war and anti imperialist movements and the women’s liberation movements. She is a retired professor and author of books and articles on these topics, including Revolutionary Feminists: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Seattle.