Dorothy Pitman Hughes, whose street-level activism in New York in the early 1970s, during the first years of the women’s movement, helped to inject issues of race, class and motherhood into roiling debates about feminism and equality, died on Dec 1st in Tampa, Florida. She was 84.
Her daughter Delethia Ridley-Malmsten confirmed the death, at Ridley-Malmsten’s home.
Pitman Hughes is perhaps best known for a 1971 photograph in which she stands alongside her close friend Gloria Steinem, their right fists raised in solidarity.
The two women were in the middle of a nationwide speaking tour, and Steinem had asked her neighbour Dan Wynn to take the photo for publicity. It later appeared in Esquire magazine and became one of the best-known images of the women’s liberation movement.
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Steinem and Pitman Hughes met in 1969 when Steinem was writing an article for New York magazine about the West 80th Street Day Care Center in Manhattan, which Pitman Hughes founded in 1966.
Daycare for working parents was a revolutionary idea in itself, but the centre was much more than that; it soon expanded to offer job training, legal assistance and community organising.
I don’t see very many friends or sisters, because white women have not yet learned or come to the conclusion to change for themselves how much they have been part of my oppression, as a black woman
— Dorothy Pitman Hughes
Among the first community centres in the city, it grew from Pitman Hughes’ belief in a feminism rooted in the everyday struggle of working-class mothers and caregivers and in the often-overlooked experiences of women of colour. And it emphasised radical community involvement: parents ran the board of directors, and the needs of the community determined the centre’s priorities.
“She realised that childcare challenges were deeply entangled with issues of racial discrimination, poverty, drug use, substandard housing, welfare hotels, job training and even the Vietnam War,” Laura L Lovett, the author of With Her Fist Raised: Dorothy Pitman Hughes and the Transformative Power of Black Community Activism (2021), wrote in The Washington Post in 2021.
‘Street activist’
In her article, Steinem called Pitman Hughes a “beautiful black female Saul Alinsky”, in reference to the noted Chicago organiser.
“She wasn’t about following, or leading. She did what needed to be done,” Steinem said in a phone interview. “She was a great street activist, literally demonstrating in the streets.”
The two could not have been more different: Steinem was white, single and college-educated; Pitman Hughes was a black woman with a nine-year-old daughter and a high-school education. But they clicked immediately over their shared interests in the emerging movement for women’s rights.
They soon decided to hit the road for a campus speaking tour.
They made a powerful combination. Steinem would go first and articulate the principles of the women’s movement. Then Pitman Hughes would bring a black perspective, often taking issue with her friend’s points.
“It’s very hard for me to say that ‘Good evening, sisters and friends’ as Gloria usually says, because usually I can’t,” Pitman Hughes said in a 1972 speech at the U.S. Naval Academy.
“In most of the audiences that we speak to,” she added, “I don’t see very many friends or sisters, because white women have not yet learned or come to the conclusion to change for themselves how much they have been part of my oppression, as a black woman, and only until that is changed can we have sisterhood.”
Pitman Hughes stopped touring soon after she had another child. But her activism continued. When the state of New York attempted to impose income restrictions on childcare benefits in 1970, she led 150 daycare workers in a sit-in at the city’s Department of Social Services.
Front lines
She was on the front lines of the struggle between grassroots, community-organised services, such as her centre, and the attempt, across all levels of government throughout the 1970s, to impose regulations on those services and make them a part of the welfare system.
She won many of her battles but eventually lost her war. New rules in the 1980s required daycare operators to have college degrees and government licences, neither of which she possessed. She closed her centre in 1985.
On Saturday nights, drunken white men from the other side of town would drive through her neighborhood, shooting into houses while children like her huddled under their beds
Pitman Hughes was not, as is often reported, a founder of Ms magazine, which Steinem and others founded in 1971. But the two remained close, even after Pitman Hughes moved to Florida in 2002. A decade later, they recreated their famous photo, their fists still raised.
Dorothy Jean Ridley was born Oct. 2, 1938, in Lumpkin, Georgia, a timber town about 140 miles southwest of Atlanta. She was one of nine children born to Melton Lee Ridley, who owned a pig farm and a small trucking business, and Lessie (White) Ridley, a maid.
Dorothy experienced the violent face of white racism early on. On Saturday nights, drunken white men from the other side of town would drive through her neighbourhood, shooting into houses while children like her huddled under their beds. When she was 10, white men nearly beat her father to death in retribution for his involvement in local civil rights work.
Her family was a musical one, and as a teenager, she and some of her sisters sang in a group, Roger and the Ridley Sisters, which toured the military bases and small towns along Georgia’s western border.
She graduated from high school in 1957 and then moved to New York to pursue a singing career. She found work in nightclubs but also took side jobs as a saleswoman and house cleaner.
Her first marriage, to Bill Pitman, ended in divorce. Her second husband, Clarence Hughes, died in 2015. In addition to her daughter Delethia, she is survived by two other daughters, Angela Hughes and Patrice Quinn; her sisters, Julia Van Meter, Mildred Dent and Alice Ridley; her brothers, Tommy Lee Cherry and James Ridley; and two grandsons.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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