Community Caretakers

Women did not simply exist as consumers of manufactured goods but as taxpayers and consumers of government services. Having helped to create the modern social welfare state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women understood how important government programs were to the health of local communities and quickly recognized that the Vietnam War was crippling the government’s ability to respond to people in need.

Women of color were acutely aware of the connection between insuffi­cient social services, community suffering, and the war in Vietnam. Disproportionately represented among America’s poor and majority resi­dents in America’s ghettoes, black women came to the conclusion that the government had the wrong budgetary priorities. Responding to a polling inquiry, Ms. Thomas, an African American secretary in Chicago, criticized President Nixon for “spending billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money in Vietnam...

Chicanas were equally alarmed at how budgetary priorities in Washington left their communities without sufficient social services. Tanya Luna Mount, an activist who participated in the emerging Chicano/a movement in California, found it ridiculous that her community’s schools waged a con­tinual battle for funding. “Do you know why they has no money for us?” Mount asked, “Because of a war in Vietnam 10,000 miles away, that is killing Mexican American boys—and for WHAT? We can’t read, but we can die! Why?”⁵⁹

Beyond its impact on social programs, though, many women of color felt that the war was having a detrimental emotional impact on their com­munities. Jacqueline Mack, a black woman running for office in Missouri, testified before the members of the Women’s Hearing on the War in Vietnam, that the war was destroying her people.

There are thousands of women, and women without husbands, and children without fathers... and yet millions of dollars are spent for warfare.... This war has pursued every describable tension and bitterness among the people of my community. And we also feel that many other outbreaks of violence in our country is the direct result of built-up tension and emotions brought on by the Vietnam War...................................

America there are numerous wars going on: war on poverty, war on crime, war on unrest, war on unequality—and many other types of wars that could be fought and won with a quarter of the millions of dollars that are being spent in Vietnam.⁶⁰

Like Mack, a number of other women of color chose to protest the war by speaking out, an act that could still be risky in the racially charged atmosphere of the 1960s. In one of the most notorious protests of the war, the singer and actress Eartha Kitt highlighted the connection between crumbling communities and the war in Vietnam. At the Women Doers’ Luncheon, hosted by Lady Bird Johnson in January 1968, Kitt used her invitation to speak out against the war. After listening to a program of speakers talk about how to ensure safe streets and battle crime in American cities, Kitt boldly informed the gathered women that they had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. While insufficient domestic spending contributed to urban problems, Kitt claimed that the draft was at the heart of juvenile delinquency. A black boy in America faced the prospect of being “snatched away from the mother and sent off to Vietnam,” regardless of good grades or good behavior, Kitt informed the women. As a result, black youth turned to crime. Crime, she argued, was a way to avoid going to Vietnam.⁶¹ Kitt reasoned that black youth rebelled against being drafted into a war that made no sense, and in the midst of this rebellion, black communities suffered.

Polls routinely showed black women to be the portion of the population most critical of the Vietnam War.⁶² While whites might also come to anti­war protest out of frustration with the ways that the war limited social spending, black women’s community worries often went beyond fiscal con­cerns. As one woman wrote in Ebony magazine, “We want—we demand— that all of you [black soldiers] come home alive and ready to fight poverty, hate and racism here in America.”⁶³ Rosalynne Hughes, speaking during the Women’s Hearing on the War in Vietnam, urged Americans to focus on “getting it together here...

The race consciousness that infused the arguments black women made against the Vietnam War frequently fostered a sense of solidarity among black activists with the people of Vietnam, whose situation, they felt, was analogous to their own. Early in 1967, Diane Bevel, wife of the civil rights activist James Bevel, working against the wishes of the State Department, became the first black woman to travel to North Vietnam and interview Ho Chi Minh. The beginning of Bevel’s report on her visit stressed the suffering of women and children, echoing the maternalist concerns held by women in organizations like AMP. Bevel recounted how she had witnessed the “charred remains of an unborn infant blown from the body of [a] Vietnamese mother.” Indeed, Bevel admitted to first becoming interested in going to Vietnam after seeing pictures of a grieving Vietnamese mother holding a wounded or dead child. “I saw myself in this mother's place,” Bevel explained. Bevel's maternalism, though, extended into a critique of what she characterized as the United States' genocidal war, a war she believed had “racial implications for the Vietnamese people and for black youths from America.”⁶⁶ Like Bevel, Eslanda Good Robeson, wife of the longtime activist Paul Robeson and an activist in her own right, character­ized the Vietnam War as “a war against a colored people engaged in a long valiant struggle for freedom and self-determination.”⁶⁷

Chicanas, too, cast the war as a racist imperialist war.

Mediated through their own experiences with racism and injustice, women of color often cast the war as one in which poor nonwhite com­munities struggled for dignity and survival. It is no accident, then, that women of color spoke vehemently against the war in community forums and from a community perspective. While such a local, often neighbor­hood, focus has tended to render women invisible to scholars of the antiwar movement, Kathleen Blee argues that we need to look beyond traditional spaces to hear women's voices and witness their protest. Women's activism, Blee notes, often “involves informal networks of friendship, kinship, or neighborhood rather than elections, positions, and hierarchies of organiza­tions,” and is “situated outside formal organizations: in the social networks of friendship or shared experience, the spatial commonalities of everyday life in homes, stores, neighborhoods, and schools, or the ties of sexual identities and attachments.”⁷⁰ This is not to say that women did not protest using more traditional political forms; they did. But marginalized in tradi­tional political arenas because of their sex and their noncombatant status, many women experienced the war and chose to engage it in terms that were familiar, closer to home, and vitally important to their lives.