Women took on the male leadership of the radical 1960s Puerto Rican movement and (mostly) won
Machismo was unrevolutionary
Denise Oliver fled the headquarters of Amiri Baraka’s Black Nationalist organization, Committee for Unified Newark, shortly after arriving— without her male companions. A founding member of the Young Lords Party, a militant group of Puerto Rican revolutionaries that first organized in East Harlem in 1969, Oliver was the only woman invited to the meeting about a possible collaboration on political action. A few minutes in, she needed to get out of there.
Oliver was horrified. When the group of Lords arrived, “Women crawled into the room on their hands and knees wearing elaborate headdresses made with fruit,” while men walked in and greeted the male Lords with a power handshake, ignoring Oliver. She in turn fired off questions at Baraka, demanding an explanation for the role of women in his organization. When he pretended not to hear her, she walked out.
The Young Lords had an all-male leadership, and actually advocated for “revolutionary machismo” as part of their 13-point party platform. Young Lord Iris Morales, in her recent book The Eyes of Rebel Women, recalls women puzzling over the meaning of that term in the caucus meetings they’d started. “It’s like saying revolutionary racism,” one woman remarked. “It just doesn’t make sense.” What was clear, Morales says, was that “women were not treated as equals in the Young Lords Organization.”
The consequences of that inequality were suddenly clear to Oliver, who immediately called a meeting of the women’s caucus. “I told them that if we didn’t do something we would end up on our hands and knees with fruit on our heads.” A few weeks later, under intense pressure, women were appointed to the leadership committee and elevated to positions of power.
That change made the Young Lords exceptional among the New Left groups of the 1960s and 1970s agitating for social and political revolution. Elevating women to the leadership meant that analysis of gender roles was taken very seriously by the Young Lords. “Men were told they had to go to classes on sexism, to deal with it,” remembers former Lord David Jacobs. “There were guys who didn’t like the idea.” A men’s caucus was established, too, to deal with the problem of machismo. The men’s caucus, Morales says, “was part study group and part consciousness raising session.”
Slowly, structures and attitudes about women changed, beginning with a proclamation on women’s rights that defined machismo as distinctly unrevolutionary. “Machismo has always been a very basic part of Latin American and Puerto Rican culture,” it read. “Machismo is male chauvinism and more. He can do whatever he wants because his woman is an object with certain already defined roles — wife, mother and good woman.” The platform point about revolutionary machismo was replaced with this: “We want equality for women. Down with machismo and male chauvinism.”
Yet much remained the same within the Lords. Only a handful of women, for instance, were elevated to leadership positions. Then there were the issues that Puerto Rican women faced in particular, like rates of sterilization wildly out of proportion to the rest of the population. Their health care options were terrible. One of the first legal abortions in the United States killed a Puerto Rican woman because doctors failed to account for her heart defect when they performed the procedure. The sexism of the broader culture continued regardless of the changes women were able to make inside the organization. Moreover, women in leadership positions weren’t taken seriously outside of the Young Lords. A fluffy New York Times piece on the women of the Lords cooed over Oliver’s looks (“full Afro hairdo, the figure of a model”) and dismissed their politics: “The five women seemed to have memorized the prevailing revolutionary rhetoric, and it rolled off their tongues like raindrops off a playground slide.”
And advancements within the Lords were also short lived. By 1971, the leadership announced a new direction for the organization, the establishment of the Young Lords Party in Puerto Rico. That goal meant that all other issues were suddenly secondary, and women’s equality was singled out as a particular issue that was getting more than its fair share of attention. They clarified their point of view in a communique: “The biggest contradictions of our nation are the division of the nation and the division between classes. Then comes the divisions of sex and class.” Efforts to recruit women to the Young Lords cause, the most successful aspect of their ongoing membership drive, ended. These choices were fatal to the Young Lords, who never regained the momentum of their early years.
Today, Lord members openly acknowledge the critical role women played and the energy that women brought to the organization. “Iris Morales, particularly, and Denise, they led a movement to really challenge our thinking,” Luis Garden Acosta, the Lord’s onetime minister of health, admitted sheepishly on Democracy Now, in a 2009 show devoted to the group’s history. “I went into the Young Lords thinking that I was a very liberated male, you know, open to everything, you know?” It turns out, maybe not quite as open as he thought.
