Mona Rocha - The Weatherwomen: Militant Feminists of the Weather Underground

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

This book has undergone peer review.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-3880-5

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS Control Number 2020002125

2020 Mona Rocha. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover: Mugshots of female members of the Weather Underground from 1972 (Federal Bureau of Investigation).

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

For James

A great number of people assisted in the research and development of this project. I am grateful for all of the assistance they provided along the way and would like to acknowledge some of them here. A very early version of this project was presented at the Western Association of Women Historians conference and at the Popular Culture Association/ American Culture Association national meeting, where I received insightful questions and useful comments. I am also grateful to my students in my Womens History class at LSU and to those in my Radical Women in History class at Fresno State, whose shrewd discussions and cogent remarks spurred me in new and interesting directions.

Some of my greatest assistance came from my graduate school advisors when I was originally writing on the Weatherwomen for my dissertation. I am grateful to Charles Shindo for all his enthusiasm and his invaluable suggestions. Alecia Longs astute comments were always beneficial, as were Kate Brattons. Significantly, I am immensely grateful to Carolyn Lewis for her many discerning observations and continued support.

I also give thanks to the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their valuable suggestions and incisive remarks.

Librarians on both coasts of the country helped me track down documents and archival materials. I am particularly grateful to Michele Wesling of the Southern California Library, as well as to David Olson, Brianne LaCamera, and Kristen La Follette of the Columbia University Center for Oral History. Additionally, I thank Bolerium Books.

I also give thanks to David Gilbert, whose letters provided guidance and insight.

Importantly, I am also grateful to the folks at McFarland. Thank you for your advice and guidance throughout this process, Charlie Perdue and Gary Mitchem.

My wonderful mother, Carmen Constantinescu, is owed a great debt of gratitude. She supported me every step of the way, and without her influence I would not be where I am today. She constantly inspired me to work hard and follow my dreams. My extended family also deserves many thanks: I really appreciate all the love and support I have received from Bridget Brown, Greg Brown, Kimi Rocha, Derrick Rocha, Stephanie Fish, Rex Fish, Savannah Brown, Katherine Rocha, and Kyle Rocha. I especially appreciate Deanna Rocha and Jim Rocha for their invaluable support and belief in me.

Finally, there is one person who weathered every step of this project and read every draft of every chapter. He was there while I paged through FBI files, made charts, wrote and rewrote sections; he spent countless hours discussing the Weatherwomen, their politics, and the turbulent sixties. I am incredibly grateful to James Rocha for all that he has done to make this possible.

On March 6, 1970, Diana Oughtons life came to a sudden and violent end as a bomb assembled by members of the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) blew up in a Greenwich townhouse. Newspaper accounts after the explosion characterized Dianas involvement in the WUO as inauthentic and misled, stemming from the greater-than-life personality of her lover, Bill Ayers. Defining Ayers as charming, manipulative, and a bit cruel, contemporary accounts concluded that he probably exercised the single most powerful influence over Diana until her death. This treatment reflects the dominant historical narrative of women involved in the WUO and other militant leftist organizations of the late 1960s and 1970s. While there is no doubt that the ideology, goals, and methods advocated by this group were inherently problematic, it is a mistake to dismiss the participation of women such as Oughton as being motivated by simple, misguided infatuation. Dedicated revolutionaries in their own right, the women of the Weather Underground deserve serious consideration.

Arguing that violence can be justified in the pursuit of feminist aims, and that justified violence can be used by women just as easily as by men, the women of the WUO articulated and embodied militant feminist principles. This book excavates their long-buried history and reclaims the voices of the Weatherwomen, a name they gave themselves.

To argue that the Weatherwomen are militant feminists, it is necessary to establish both their militancy and their feminism. Their militancy is easier to establish since the WUO engaged in the bombings of symbolic targets, such as buildings or statues. Lets say that an organization can be militant through direct acts of personal violence, such as by intentionally harming people, who may be combatants or civilians, symbolic acts of violence, such as destroying property (as the WUO did), threats to commit acts of violence, or through associating with symbols of violence, such as by openly carrying guns or using a bomb as a organizational symbol. Thus, an organization can be militant without being actively violent, such as an organization arming itself with weapons in open displays of self-defense (such as the Black Panther Party), but without ever using those weapons or even having any intention to use those weapons. Further, an organization can be militant while being committed to never using violence against persons, such as an organization that sends in bomb threats without actually planting any bombs or even an organization that works very diligently to ensure that their bombs never harm people (as the WUO did). These latter organizations are aggressive and disruptive in ways that conjure up thoughts of violence without actually being physically violent against persons. Hence, there can be militant organizations that attempt to limit their militancy so that they do not harm any persons. The WUO attempted to be militant in this sense: they did not wish to actively harm anybody, but they did use violence symbolically and against buildings and statues.

Feminism, in itself, is an open-ended term that includes anyone who accepts, in some form, three propositions: (a) men and women are equal (in any morally significant sense of equal), (b) we live in a society that does not treat men and women as equal, and (c) something should be done to improve our society to obtain gender equality. Someone could not be a feminist and deny the first claim since any claim of gender superiority, such as the belief that men are superior to women, is the essential meaning of being sexist. A feminist argues for the second claim merely by pointing to sexist practices that exist within society. Furthermore, if someone believes the first two, they are likely to accept the third as a practical consequence: if men and women are equal and society fails to recognize this equality, then something should be done to rectify the situation.