The Struggles of Barbara Deming
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Although Barbara had been largely apolitical throughout the ’50s, by 1962 she was one of a small group of signatories to a call for national demonstrations against President Kennedy’s eight-week resumption of nuclear bomb testing in the Pacific. Along with championing unilateral nuclear disarmament, she soon added the struggle for racial equality to her agenda and then, by the end of the decade, radical feminism and lesbian rights (both of which she equated with what she called “the struggle to claim my life as my own”). Regardless of which issue took momentary prominence on her activist agenda, she never simply dropped her other concerns; nor did she waver from her consistent commitment to the strategy of direct-action, nonviolent protest. She came to believe strongly that nonviolence was an inherent feature of androgyny—that it encouraged in every individual both self-assertion (traditionally associated with “masculinity”) and empathy (traditionally assigned to “femininity”). As Barbara put it: “One asserts one’s rights as a human being, but asserts them with consideration for the other.”

            Before participating in direct actions, she signed on to a sixteen-day training program sponsored by the radical Peacemakers and was enthralled with the diverse group of fellow trainees: “The candor and innocence of their actions give to these people,” Barbara later wrote, “an extraordinary spontaneity—the sense that an individual can act and has weight. If no-one else will do it, then do it yourself.”

            Following the training, Barbara joined a CNVA-sponsored series of peace walks and vigils against the submarines being built in Connecticut shipyards and equipped with Polaris missiles (each with the capacity to carry a hydrogen-bomb warhead). The following year, she spent a week on the road with the San Francisco-to-Moscow Walk for Peace out of the conviction that the power of arms had to be supplanted by the power of persuasion. When she asked her fellow walkers if they felt there was really any hope for such a shift, she got variations of the same answer: “I don’t operate on the basis of hope. I simply ask myself what is right and what is wrong.” Barbara was impressed; Mary Meigs was not. She didn’t believe that everyone had a conscience, buried or otherwise. She equated conscience with guilt—as originating from within the family. By 1962-63, as Barbara’s political involvement escalated, the two women, after ten years of living together, began to draw apart.

            Barbara became convinced that the issues of disarmament and black civil rights were two parts of one struggle; both were committed to nonviolence, both were insisting that the country live up to the Declaration of Independence’s promise of inalienable rights, and both shared a strategy of “firmness with friendliness.” She believed that the peace movement was also a “freedom” movement—freedom from alignment with repressive regimes and from the pessimistic certainty of a nuclear war. Many radicals disagreed. Some argued that Southern whites who might otherwise be sympathetic to the peace movement would shy away if blacks were involved. Others insisted that an alliance would be a disservice to blacks themselves by handing their opponents the ammunition of questioning their patriotism.

      Barbara had become a full-time activist by 1963, increasingly known and admired in radical circles. In that year she accompanied A. J. Muste, the leading figure in the War Resisters League, to a five-day international conference—just 55 people from thirteen countries—in the hill town of Boummana, Lebanon, to plan for a World Peace Brigade for Nonviolent Action. (It was Gandhi who first called for such a meeting shortly before his assassination). The Brigade’s first project was a march into Northern Rhodesia (which in 1964 became Zambia) to protest the racist white government). The British halted the marchers at the border. Lacking resources, the Brigade thereafter became inactive, though it would be reincarnated as Peace Brigades International in 1981.

            By 1963, the urgency of the black struggle had come to occupy most of Barbara’s energy. She was arrested and jailed while demonstrating in Birmingham with a sign around her neck reading “All Men Are Brothers” (the condition of women had not yet reached the political break-through point). Released six days later, she promptly returned to a raft of meetings and demonstrations. She felt a special thrill upon hearing Martin Luther King Jr. tell one gathering, as she wrote in The Nation on May 25, 1963: “We have a weapon that they can’t handle. They don’t know what to do with us when we are nonviolent. … You don’t need to strike them in return, or curse them in return. Just keep going. Just keep presenting your body as a witness.”

            And Barbara did. She was arrested again on a march through Albany, Georgia, and was jailed for a month this time, crowded into a small cell, forced to sleep on the floor—though the constant noise made sleep fleeting at best. With her vitality ebbing away, A. J. Muste was allowed a brief visit and thought she looked as if “made of paper.” Her stomach rebelled against the repetitive diet of grits, bitter turnips, and black-eyed peas. Combined with the lack of exercise, her bowels seized up for several weeks and she finally required a series of enemas. Yet through it all, and “unutterably tired of being in here,” she held firm. Her determination was fueled by a particular view of human nature, one generally shared by those who seriously commit themselves to movements for social change: that human beings are naturally drawn to affiliation and cooperation rather than aggression and enmity. It was a view widely shared in the ’60s, as exemplified by the movement for non-coercive “free” schools and the popularity of such theorists of radical education as A. S. Neill (Summerhill), John Holt (How Children Fail and How Children Learn), Jonathan Kozol (Death at an Early Age), and Paolo Freire (The Pedagogy of the Oppressed).

            Finally released, Barbara, along with other marchers, rested up at Koinonia Farm, a haven for racial equality, then headed back to Wellfleet, where she sat for weeks and weeks “able to do little more than stare at the birds and the bushes.”

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But turmoil was again around the corner, this time domestic in nature. Mary Meigs had fallen in love with Marie-Claire Blais, a 23-year-old French-Canadian writer whom Edmund Wilson had taken under his wing. Mary offered “M-C” (as she was often called) the use of a small house on her Wellfleet property. Before long Marie-Claire was taking her meals with Mary and Barbara. For a time Barbara thought that she herself might be falling in love with M-C, and their relationship became briefly sexual. M-C “imposed” on herself—as she put it in a letter to a close friend—a pretense of admiration for Barbara’s political activities, but that gave way after the first few years of co-habitation to open annoyance. She told Mary that Barbara was “terrorizing” her. Edmund Wilson had become openly negative about M-C (“that little bitch”) and predicted to Barbara that she would be the one who ended up being “left out in the cold.” Fortunately for Barbara, she’d run into a woman, Jane Verlaine, whom she’d distantly known at Bennington, and they became increasingly involved. By the time Mary dissolved the Wellfleet household several years later to go off to live with M-C in Brittany, Barbara and Jane had formed a “permanent and unshakeable” bond and found their own place in Monticello, New York.

            Throughout this period of domestic turmoil, Barbara maintained her political activism, especially in the face of the escalating war in Vietnam. In April 1966 she’d joined a six-person trip to Saigon that included A. J. Muste, and to do so had to overcome her own terror of getting injured or killed. The trip convinced her that she could handle fear—and convinced her as well that more people had to move from “words of dissent to acts of disobedience.” In December–January 1966-67, she was part of a peace delegation to North Vietnam that lasted for eleven days. She was horrified at what she saw. Everywhere she went, she saw clear evidence of the destruction of U.S. bombing on non-military targets like schools, churches, hospitals, and homes—to the point where she became convinced her country was waging a deliberate “war of terror against the civilian population.”

            Returning to the States, she spent the winter of 1967 on a cross-country speaking tour to describe her experiences in Vietnam and to share her fear “that we Americans are on our way to becoming the world’s bullies, all while the majority of us are confident in our hearts that we are a well-intentioned people and therefore incapable of atrocities.” After describing the widespread devastation she’d seen, she urged her audiences to take some form of action—to stop paying taxes, to refuse purchase of government bonds, to boycott and/or refuse to work in companies like Dow Chemical that manufactured weapons of destruction like napalm.

            She herself joined the planners for a massive demonstration on October 21, 1967, in front of the Pentagon. Some 100,000 people turned out—the largest antiwar protest to date. Further emboldened, she took part in the Poor People’s Campaign six months later, which Martin Luther King Jr. had initiated shortly before his death. She joined the campaign at its starting point at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where King had been murdered a few months before, and walked from there to the encampment in Resurrection City in D.C., where she stayed for a full three weeks. It was a grim encampment: it rained so often that the plywood shelters leaked, mud was omnipresent, no garbage was collected, water was available only from a few fountains, and food consisted primarily of bologna sandwiches. The police randomly attacked the encampment with Mace, sometimes blinding and choking people for long periods. The public address system loudly amplified garbled instructions, and civility took a rapid nose dive. The federal government finally ordered the encampment cleared out, and the residents were too demoralized to put up a fight.

            Reflecting on the “lessons” of Resurrection City in a powerful and influential essay, “On Revolution and Equilibrium,” Barbara placed them in a larger context. If nonviolent campaigns had produced only slight gains for blacks to date, she asked, did that mean nonviolent tactics were the wrong tactics to employ? Was an appeal to conscience an impotent illusion? “Would resort to violence have brought greater gains?” Barbara refused to judge those who currently argued that counter-violence was the only effective way to combat the violence employed against blacks or the Vietnamese people. She even agreed that the nonviolence peace movement in the past had too often confined itself to petition and had relied too glibly upon appealing to brutal opponents “to love one’s fellow human beings.”

            Nonviolence in her view need not be either humble or meek in its appeal to conscience. What was needed was a firm refusal to do another’s will, to exert nonviolent force: “one doesn’t just say ‘I don’t believe in this war’ but refuses to put on a uniform. One doesn’t just say ‘the use of napalm is atrocious’ but refuses to pay for it by refusing to pay one’s taxes, and so on.” What differentiated this kind of force from traditional violence was the refusal “to injure the antagonist … it is quite possible to frustrate another’s action without doing him injury. … We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern. … It is precisely solicitude for his person in combination with a stubborn interference with his actions”—the combination of love and truthfulness—that produces uniquely effective pressure. Barbara was aware that her formulation was subject to challenge. In asserting, for example, that “the antagonist cannot take the interference with his actions personally because his person is not threatened,” the concept of personhood is porous. Wouldn’t a confirmed segregationist, convinced that God had created blacks as inferior beings, feel that in assaulting the very basis of his belief system, his person was being violated? The issue, as Barbara herself put it, was “infinitely complex.”

The late ’60s in the U.S. was comparable to an automatic rifle going off at a firing range. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April 1968 sparked rioting throughout the country. Two months later, Robert Kennedy was shot dead at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, to be followed by the Chicago police bloodily assaulting protesters at the 1968 Democratic Party convention (and a “conspiracy” trial of the so-called Chicago Eight that was itself a parody of justice). Then in December 1969 came the police murder of Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and the killing of four students at Kent State University during an antiwar protest in May 1970. A nonviolent solution to the country’s ills seemed mere wishful thinking. Barbara held to her views and took part in a variety of actions, though the many adjustments involved in shifting partners and homes inescapably absorbed some of her energy.

            No sooner had her personal life settled down than she was in a car accident that very nearly took her life. Hospitalized for four months with multiple injuries and in agonizing discomfort, she was subsequently laid up at home for nearly a year (including months in a body cast). Inactivity being contrary to her nature, the long days of convalescence were “dark and painful,” though she complained little.

            It wasn’t until mid-August 1972 that she was able to resume political activity to a limited extent. At the time, debate was raging on the Left about whether or not the antiwar movement’s confrontational tactics should be put on hold in the name of working for the election of the Democratic candidate George McGovern to the presidency. Barbara took the position that resistance activities had to continue in case McGovern reneged on or diluted his promise to end the Vietnam War. But others—including the prominent activist Dave Dellinger—refused to endorse McGovern, calling for the Left to stop playing “the electoral game.” To which Barbara, who’d never been an ideologue, forcefully replied, “I say damn all those labels! I say damn what we may have decided about all elections before this. If there is at least a significant opportunity here to end the war … let us try to seize it.”

            When Nixon won a landslide victory over McGovern, Barbara feared he would take it as a mandate to reject peace negotiations and to escalate the bombing raids still further. She thought he might even prove capable of using atomic weapons. Though an incurable optimist, Barbara was the kind “who is never surprised when things go wrong.” Nixon’s victory frightened but did not stop her. Nor did she turn away from mainstream channels of protest that might yield results: along with many others, she went to the Capitol to try and persuade individual congressmen to vote for cutting off funding for the war. She also resurrected her earlier idea of recruiting hundreds of American women to live and work in scattered Vietnam villages in the hope that their presence might stay the U.S. government’s hand. Neither effort bore fruit.

            As the war dragged on, Barbara’s mounting interest in the burgeoning feminist movement began to absorb some of her frustrated energy. During her year as a shut-in she’d read much of the emerging new literature—ranking highest Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex and theologian Mary Daly’s The Church and the Second Sex—and she gradually became friendly with some of the movement’s leading figures, including Adrienne Rich, Robin Morgan, Ti-Grace Atkinson, and Andrea Dworkin. She herself also began writing more about feminist issues, and several of her articles became widely known: “Two Perspectives on Women’s Struggles” and “On Anger.” Adrienne Rich was particularly affected by the essays and wrote Barbara to say that “your work has meant a great deal to me.”

            “On Anger” became particularly influential. In it, Barbara argued that one kind of anger was healthy: “It is the concentration of one’s whole being in the determination: this must change.” One also needed to recognize, in Barbara’s view, that “we are members one of another, that nobody, nothing is strictly other.” Men can learn connectedness: ”we have to insist they can.” To destroy “maleness” and “femaleness” as we currently knew them, it was necessary to insist that the qualities traditionally defining them as polar opposites were in fact potentially present in all humans. “Won’t we always be men’s prey,” she asked, “until they come to acknowledge that in each one of them is what Adrienne beautifully calls a ‘ghostly woman’?” Adrienne herself was less convinced. She was aware that some of the greatest apostles of nonviolence—Gandhi for one—”perpetuated psychic violence on women.” She believed that women were wholly entitled to defend themselves violently from male assault and rape (on that point Barbara agreed).

            The resistance of male leftists to feminist insights greatly disturbed her. She became convinced that “until the left becomes feminist, it is flawed, can’t make real revolution.” Yet most of the men she approached responded defensively. Still, she felt that “so many of us [are]changing so fast these days that I think it a mistake to count any of us who are changing hopeless.” And on a personal level, enough men—for example the prominent civil rights lawyer Arthur Kinoy—did respond positively to the feminist message to give her hope.

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Barbara had never fully recovered from her car accident, and by 1976 she fell ill again and again. Though only sixty, she tired quickly, had to restrict travel, and felt that she could no longer take the bitter northern winters. While she acknowledged the move as a “drastic step,” she and Jane decided to relocate permanently to Florida. They bought a small house on Sugarloaf Key, about twenty miles north of Key West, and moved there in the spring of 1977. It was “a great tearing away” from friends, family, and movement work, yet necessary for survival. They began their slow adjustment.

            Over time, a few women began to join Barbara and Jane at Sugarloaf, and it became a small lesbian community. At its height, about a dozen women were in residence, though most stayed for only a few years. Nonetheless, Sugarloaf came to mean a great deal to Barbara, even if she sometimes felt “starved” for solitude, especially when “too much communal living” stood in the way of getting some writing done. Yet she never withdrew from politics, whether local or global. She joined the unsuccessful fight to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed in Florida, which to this day remains one of thirteen states to vote against ratification—and to keep the amendment from becoming part of the Constitution.

            On the national level, too, she continued to raise her voice. A longtime advocate of nuclear disarmament, she wrote and distributed a statement that included these telling two lines: “Our politicians tell us that we have to be strong,” but “we had better ask ourselves what the word means. Are we strong if we show that we are capable of destroying all life on this earth?” In regard to the simmering national debate about women serving in the military, Barbara raised a cogent, unorthodox question about the dubious merits of being part of the armed forces: they “train you not to ask why the war is being waged, why these particular people should be killed—just do as you’re told, kill when you’re told to. Mindlessly.” As for the then common consensus that women would not be sent into combat, Barbara dug deeply into the rationale: “the powers-that-be feel women shouldn’t be subjected to violence. If they felt this, they would give battered women and rape victims help they don’t give. No, they want to assure the men they’re ordering around that dealing-out violence is reserved for them—and somehow proves that they are more than women are.”

            She continued to believe that most men on the Left were not true comrades—and certainly not feminists. If they were perhaps more gentle than other men, Barbara felt that they too “need to hold on to power over others, to treat others as owned.” And she let them know it. When her old antiwar “comrade” Father Daniel Berrigan publicly compared abortion clinics to the Pentagon (“war is also an abortion, and abortion is also a war”), Barbara indignantly wrote him to say that he was simply playing with words—“and playing with the deepest feelings of women. Women do not have abortions in the spirit of war!!… to insist that women bear children that they don’t want to bear—Dan, isn’t this making war on women?” Berrigan was unpersuaded and sent Barbara a muddled response that reflected the teachings of his Catholic faith more than logic.

            Barbara found men on the Left equally untrustworthy allies on the question of gay rights. The War Resisters League, non-Marxist and secular, was somewhat of an exception among organizations on the Left, though its founder, A. J. Muste, had been profoundly homophobic. After Bayard Rustin was arrested on a “morals charge,” Muste opposed hiring him as a staff member. But he was overruled, and the organization as a whole was uncommonly welcoming of gay people to its ranks. As early as 1969, almost immediately after the Stonewall riots, WRL’s magazine Win put out a gay liberation issue. The League even had two gay men (David McReynolds and Igal Roodenko) and one bisexual man (Karl Bissinger) on its small staff. Yet none of the three considered the issue of gay rights of primary concern when compared with the injustices of class oppression.

            If Barbara was unhappy about the disconnect between the leftist men and feminists, she was no less concerned about the feminists’ apparent lack of interest in the principle of nonviolence. At the start of Second Wave Feminism, she’d taken it for granted that feminists “would see nonviolence as an obviously natural approach for them.” She explained this indifference as a function of the need most women felt to sufficiently express their anger, to refuse to continue being “the ones to suffer.” They were unable, as Barbara saw it, to feel any “bond with the oppressor”—though that principle was to her at the heart of a true understanding of nonviolence. Women, she decided, still felt “too vulnerable to be able to deal with the fact of kinship with, and likeness to, men.”

            In the early years of living at Sugarloaf, Barbara would occasionally undertake trips north—in 1982, for example, to the National Women’s Studies Association meetings, and in ’83 to the Seneca Women’s Encampment at Romulus, New York. At the latter, she joined a demonstration against the planned deployment of NATO first-strike Cruise and Pershing II missiles at the nearby Seneca Army Depot. The local citizenry responded angrily to the demonstration, denouncing “these outsiders disgracing our community” and shouting out “Nuke the Dykes!” and “Lesbian-Communists go home!”

            A significant number of women remained at Seneca for several months, but Barbara, feeling frail and exhausted, had to take herself back to Sugarloaf after three weeks. Soon after returning, she came down with flu-like symptoms that refused to abate. She and Jane finally decided to fly to New York City to consult with Barbara’s brother, a physician. He hospitalized her for tests, and in March 1984, the verdict came down: Barbara had ovarian cancer. She underwent chemotherapy for several months, but the doctors told her that the cancer was too far advanced to hope for a cure. She and Jane returned to Sugarloaf.

            Barbara was determined “to give to her dying the same passion” with which she’d lived and loved, but by the end of July she’d wasted away to skin and bones. Jane wrote in her diary that “I’ve always seen her snap back. … Now I am scared that she won’t … this time is it & I am in great distress … disabling distress, not helpful tears relieving emotional tension.”

            Within days, Barbara’s pain rose to excruciating levels, and she started taking a higher level of morphine, which made her sleep a great deal. She slipped into a coma soon after and died two days later, at age 67. A bereft Jane, trying to sum up in her journal Barbara’s unique qualities, wrote of her “innate shyness” and “self-deprecation,” her “physical/spiritual beauty,” her “passionate, attentive quality. She paid attention. She listened. She answered.”