Everywoman drew in equal parts on women’s history and the earliest forms of cultural activism in the WLM, an agit-prop style of theater/happenings, mostly associated with Robin Morgan and the ad hoc group WITCH. In fact, the central characters of the play are four witches, costumed “with various implements of oppression tied to them (which they later threw into the cauldron), e.g., falsies, coffee can (symbolizing American Imperialism), etc.” referencing the Miss America Protest Freedom Trashcan, organized by among others Robin Morgan. After a section of dialogue in which each of the four witches establishes her ideological position, women’s revolution is important, women’s revolution is trivial etc, the narrator poses a series of questions that begin the play in earnest.
What is the revolution? When did it begin? It began a long time ago. And as with all revolutions, there were women who were there who we don’t know about. We don’t know how they lived or how they died. The history of women has not been written. The history of women’s resistance has been hidden from us. Women have cried out against oppression and THEIR VOICES WILL NOT BE STILLED LISTEN.”[i]
Using the words of revolutionary women themselves, which were distributed to audience members who in reading them became part of the play, Everywoman argued that all prior revolutions failed to free women, so women will have to free themselves through their own revolution. They then proceeded to create a chronological historical narrative that legitimized their argument. The play proceeds through various Enlightenment inspired revolution, the nineteenth-century American woman movement to the early twentieth century labor movements in which women played leading roles and finally to women in the various twentieth-century Communist movements. The Witches then resume discussion of the ways women remain oppressed under these regimes, and the methods of resistance they developed. The play ends with rallying universal sisterhood and a call to action:
I am all women, I am every woman. Wherever women are suffering, I am there. Wherever women are struggling, I am there. Wherever women are fighting for the their liberation, I am there.
I am with all women; I am all women, and our struggle grows.
And where there are women too beaten down to fight, I will be there; and we will take strength together. Everywhere; for we will have a new world, a just world, a world without oppression and degradation!
In Everywoman, women’s role in political struggles of the past provided a revolutionary knowledge and the collective performance of the play by the audience ruptured male-dominated accounts of these struggles. Everywoman contravened the idea prevalent in the New Left that women’s efforts on their own behalf were counter-revolutionary, bourgeois, and narcissistic. Re-produced by the play, in the reading of women’s history by women, instead was a traditional historical narrative that reclaimed agency in the past and implied legitimacy in the future.
The history they constructed simply bypassed the objections posed by socialists, that sexism was secondary to class-based oppression, to instead forge an emancipatory narrative. That the conference organizers determined that a cultural response was the best method for quelling ideological dissent speaks to the centrality of cultural activism in the early women’s liberation movement. The organizers could have, for example, offered a lecture in which a re-reading of Marx focused on the “woman question,” justified women working on their own behalf. Juliet Mitchell had in fact already produced her reading of women in socialist theory, which was not unknown to women at the conference.[ii] Instead they offered a revolutionary past for women to justify the struggle for liberation via a cultural form.
[i] They speak the words of women from history GERMAINE TILLION: ABIGAIL ADAMS 1776: FACTORY GIRLS ASSOCIATION 1835: SENECA FALLS WOMAN’S RIGHTS CONVENTION 1848: LUCY STONE 1855: MARY ELIZABETH LEASE 1890: DOLORES IBARRURI 1936: BERNADETTE DEVLIN 1969: MAC TIM BUOI 1953: Louise Michel sojourner truth ECS V Wodhull Elizabeth gurley Flynn mother jones Dolores Ibarruri, Juana Azurduy do Padilla unnamed Nigerian woman, unnamed Chinese woman revolutionary CHIU CHIN, Djamila Douhirod Djamila, Doupacha Defissa Lalliam Thrieu Thi Trinh, Nguyen Thi Vinh, better known as Ming Khai, Nguyen Thi Ut NGUYEN THI KHIU
Sang historical movement songs Song of the French Partisan, Oh, Mary Don’t You Weep, O Susanna Union Maid Viva la Quince Brigada Guantanamera Nigeria chant Chee Lai Brave Men Hard is the Fortune
[ii]Women the Longest Revolution, 1966, New Left Review. Ellen DuBois recalls the importance of Mitchell’s work for the CWLU. She even wrote to Mitchell to express her admiration.
The Politics of Women's Culture 