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One Woman’s Journey

Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975
By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
City Lights, 2002; 410 pages;
$17.95, paperback

By Monte Piliawsky

Outlaw Woman, the second volume of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’ eloquent and riveting political and personal odyssey, is the only full-length memoir of a white, working-class student activist of the 1960s. Her book helps dispel the “Big Chill” myth that all white New Leftists were “red diaper” babies or spoiled, rich suburban kids.

Dunbar-Ortiz was neither, as she made clear in an earlier volume, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie (Verso, 1997). Rather, she was a part-Native American child of dirt-poor Oklahoma sharecroppers; she developed a keen class consciousness from listening to the heroic stories of her grandfather, an activist with the Industrial Workers of the World—the Wobblies.

In Outlaw Woman, Dunbar-Ortiz takes the story through her years of dedicated antiwar activism as a participant in nearly every important revolutionary movement of the tumultuous ’60s and ’70s. She formed associations with leading radical groups including Students for a Democratic Society, the Weather Underground, the Revolutionary Union and the African National Congress; she also worked in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade.

Although, as Dunbar-Ortiz puts it, “I did not share the pacifist philosophy,” she was a fiery, indefatigable public opponent of the Vietnam War. Peace activists today can take heart from the success of that earlier antiwar movement, which included half a million young men who became conscientious objectors—and ultimately forced the United States to withdraw its troops in defeat, as many members of the Johnson and Nixon administrations have since admitted. (In just one example, President Richard Nixon’s chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moore, has said, “The reaction of noisy radical groups was considered all the time. And it served to inhibit and restrain decision makers.”)

Dunbar-Ortiz’s major theoretical contribution to the movement was her unyielding critique of the sexism that characterized contemporary revolutionary struggles and leaders, including such icons as Cuba’s Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. Dunbar-Ortiz identified the structure of patriarchy, with its acceptance of male violence against women, as the root cause of militarism and saw eradicating male aggression as a prerequisite to ending war. In the meantime, she regarded armed self-defense for women—which became a signature identity of Cell 16, her widely influential women’s liberation collective in Boston—as a key ingredient for successful political revolution. According to the author, “I began thinking of Tae Kwan Do as a metaphor for revolution … self-defense to win.”

In an April 1969 speech in Springfield, MA, Dunbar-Ortiz explained that “the Vietnam War … reflects a pattern buttressed by entrenched patriarchy in which every white man can feel he is a participant and a beneficiary. Patriotism is the public expression of patriarchy—the control of women, peasants and nature.” Later that year, in an antiwar address in Cambridge, MA, she shocked her audience by reading a section of the SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto that described “the man getting his big gun off.”

In short, for Dunbar-Ortiz, “women’s liberation was the basis of social revolution,” a vehicle to transform men’s consciousness. She countered the criticism that women’s liberation was diverting attention away from ending the Vietnam War by maintaining that, on the contrary, the liberation of women was integral to the success of the antiwar movement.

Outlaw Woman is rooted in its author’s staunch working-class perspective. Still relevant is her analysis of the unfortunate class cliquishness that pervaded the New Left, prompting Dunbar-Ortiz to reflect, “I often found myself at odds not only with the ruling class but with the Left itself; often, I felt I was regarded as feral in the movement, especially in the women’s liberation movement.”

In one telling example, she describes a 1961 encounter at San Francisco State College, where she was a student. She approached a table where campus radicals were recruiting for the upcoming Mississippi Freedom rides. Hesitantly, in her southern accent, she asked, “Are you-all going to be talking to poor whites down there?” After staring at her for a long time, one of the guys responded, “No, and we ain’t recruitin’ ’em either.”

One of the great virtues of Outlaw Woman is the author’s candid willingness to confess her political mistakes. After supporting the Weather Underground’s approach to revolution, in 1971 Dunbar-Ortiz “decided that armed struggle in the United States was inappropriate and suicidal.” She now admits that carrying weapons and taking rifle practice became—for her and others—a “passion that was inappropriate to our political objectives and … ended up distorting and determining them.”

In the book’s epilogue, Dunbar-Ortiz passionately asserts that the women’s liberation movement of the war years, followed by the gay and lesbian movements, represented a “truly revolutionary moment … not confined to the United States or to one generation. Something new happened then, something deeper and more radical than ever before in history.” To the extent that a feminist perspective can transform America’s militaristic social consciousness, Dunbar-Ortiz’s remarkable political journey contributes significantly to the peace movement.

Monte Piliawsky is a professor of educational sociology at Wayne State University in Detroit.