Women's Pentagon Action: Women Weaving

By Sarah Pirtle

The Women's Pentagon Action was organized by a coalition of women in recognition of the connection between our struggles. The demonstration was designed to be feminist in form as well as in message, and was shaped as a ritual in four parts. Puppets made by Bread and Puppet Theater signaled the transition to each stage.

During mourning, placards like gravestones were emplanted on the Pentagon mall lawn in memory of Karen Silkwood, Anne Frank, Rosa Luxembourg, Yolanda Ward (a young black woman and local activist in Washington, D.C. whose murder we protested in a vigil the night before), the Salem witches, Love Canal victims, and missing women in Brazil. Women wailed and many wept. In the second stage, rage, women shook fists at the Pentagon and shouted "We won't take it." This was followed by the circle of empowerment and then defiance as described below.

164 women were arrested while non-violently blocking the entrances in civil disobedience. Those who pled guilty were taken to Aldersen Federal Penitentiary in Virginia on unheated buses, shackled at the waist, legs and wrists without food or medical attention. This contradicted the federal law prohibiting imprisonment in federal facilities when the sentence is less than a year. Some served sentences of between ten and thirty days, some were acquitted, and some cases were dismissed because of lack of evidence.

Grace Paley said on Sunday, November 16, when we gathered for a day of workshops before the demonstration, that "We are in continuous process to keep this planet moving along and life moving on it." She read telegrams of support from women around the world-Sweden, England, Australia.

Another group focusing on disarmament, the Women's Party for Survival, inspired by Helen Caldicott, is planning a demonstration at the Pentagon on Mother's Day.

It is mid-morning, chilly and cold. November 17. My mother in a raincoat and I in a parka are gripping each other's mittened hands and smiling fiercely. Ahead of us is a stone building. We see windows, a small segment. By agreement we are silent. The silence shifts. A four-year-old girl next to us begins crying. My mother opens her purse and brings out a cracker for her. Strangers bound by hands.

We hold hands which hold hands which hold

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hands-over 2000 times. We can't see the others. All we see are the walls and the windows. Two secretaries wave. A man comes to the glass, makes a gesture of violence-a solitary finger-and disappears. Then a runner comes past us shouting, "We made it! We're all the way around!" We stand, points in the circle, sensing the whole. The web is woven. A gesture of empowerment.

I think of all the women who are here but cannot

be seen. The women who stayed behind in

Massachusetts who could not leave their jobs on a Monday-they are with us today. And the Unitarian

women who gathered in Michigan during the weekend for a national conference on women and religion; they read aloud our Unity Statement:

We want an end to the arms race. No more bombs. No more amazing inventions for death.

We understand all is connectedness. The earth nourishes us as we with our bodies will eventually feed it. Through us, our mothers connected the human past to the human future. With that sense, that ecological right, we oppose the financial connections between the Pentagon and the multinational corporations and banks that the Pentagon serves.

Those connections are made of gold and oil. We are made of blood and bone, we are made of the sweet resource, water.

We will not allow these violent games to con-

Military Clarifies Anti-Gay Policy

On January 16, 1981, the Department of Defense issued a revision of its exclusionary policy toward lesbians and gay men. The new policy makes discharge for homosexuals mandatory, thereby targeting the small number of precedential successes established in the cases of Matlovich, Berg, and Ben-Shalom.

National Gay Task Force Co-Director Lucia Valeska commented, "The new directive signals a reactionary move on the part of the Department of Defense to counteract recent progress made through the courts in challenging discrimination against gay men and lesbians in the military. Fortunately, the new policy has some positive aspects: 1) all exclusions and discharges solely on the basis of sexual orientation will now be classified as Honorable, and 2) 'homosexual identity' will no longer be determined by so-called homosexual mannerisms or through guilt by association.”

"On the other hand," Valeska continued, "the directive draws a new battle line in its overall hardline

stance. The military has bent over backwards, to the point of downright silliness in places, in order to tighten restrictions. NGTF intends to expose and fight the new directive on the basis of its irrational nature, unenforceable provisions and fundamental attack on the constitutional rights of all U.S. citizens."

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Don Knutson, Legal Director of Gay Rights Advocates, said, "The new regulations are, on the one hand, ludicrous, and on the other, ominous. They were carefully drawn to make judicial protection for the civil liberties of gay service personnel as difficult as possible. They are, however, vulnerable to constitutional attack in several important respects. We intend vigorously to pursue whatever remedies are available to us to challenge in the courts this repressive and ridiculous policy."

-NGTF Newsletter January 29, 1981

tinue. If we are here in our stubborn hundreds today, we will certainly return in the thousands and hundreds of thousands in the months and years to come. We know that there is a healthy sensible loving way to live and we intend to live that way in our neighborhoods and on our farms in these United States and among our sisters and brothers in all the countries of the world.

There are women all over the country stirring. There are invisible fibers that link us.

There is a riddle here-What is momentary but lasting? What can be torn but never broken? Chanting begins: "A circle of birds in migration, a nation of women with wings". The riddle's answer comes: these webs of women.

As the song ends, a light-hearted voice calls out to the faceless walls, "Surrender! We've got you surrounded." Three helicopters appear in the sky. The ominous chopping of the blades is right above us. They land a few hundred yards away. Metal birds. And still we call out in delight, "Surrender!"'

Word passes through the circle. It is time for the fourth stage of the ritual: defiance. Each of us goes to one of the three entrances of the Pentagon. We transform our pattern, articulate our gesture.

As my mother and I follow the lines of women walking, our arms are around each other. This in itself is our own act of defiance. We defy the spooking that keeps mothers and daughters apart. We defy the inner violence, the stench of self-hatred that comes to divide us. We defy the lie that it is our mothers who have bound our feet. These steps are new ones for us.

At the loading dock entrance, four affinity groups gather on the cement steps. Four women who are weavers in Vermont take out many colored yarns. They begin to weave from one hand railing on the side of the steps to the other hand railing, closing off access to the doors. Back and forth, back and forth they travel. They work wordlessly and unceasingly, as they have agreed to do, with their eyes fixed only on the threads. Guards come and cut the yarn to make a passageway for the officials traveling in and out of the building. Without looking up, the weavers simply tie new pieces of yarn on the broken ends and continue their work. The guards cut. The women reknot.

An older man is the first to appear in the doors and try to leave the Pentagon. He faces the barrier, looks at the crowd, and then uses his body to break the yarn, walking determinedly through the colors. They cling to him for twenty yards as he heads down the steps to a parked car. It has the look of a parade. He reaches his car and smiles as if a victory has been won, a stance not surrendered. The weavers gather the torn pieces and keep working.

A guard approaches the yarn with large wire cutters. These will not cut the pliable material. Scissors from another guard do. The women re-tie silently. This continues for an hour. Then the arrests begin. Others who are doing civil disobedience take up their post and continue the weaving.

"Women weaving the web of life," a chant is sung in witness and support. There are so many holes to close, so many torn ends to mend. I think of my mother and I re-tying carefully and sturdily our broken thread. Then I think of the guards-mostly Afro-American. In our chants we try, often clumsily, 'to acknowledge them and include them in our weaving. And the men and women who work at the Pentagon and pass our barriers of yarn and of bodies--we look into their faces, speak to them. Some women follow them into the parking lot trying

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Page 6/What She Wants/February-March, 1981