Political Education "in the Belly of the Monster": The Third World Women's Alliance's "Tuesday Schedule"

Abstract

Political Education "in the Belly of the Monster":The Third World Women's Alliance's "Tuesday Schedule" Vani Kannan (bio) The back cover of the Third World Women's Alliance's first issue of Triple Jeopardy introduces readers to the group's "Tuesday Schedule" of political education events, held weekly at 346 West Twentieth Street, New York, and starting at "7:30 sharp." Topics covered in political education sessions included a broad range of domestic and international issues: hospital working conditions and management-labor relations; "bourgeois and revolutionary attitudes" toward love and sex; a critical introduction to nutrition focusing on the food industry, additives, and food lobbies; a film screening and discussion on the anti-war movement; guerrilla theater skits on Third World women and the war; and a discussion of Third World people in anti-war demonstrations. Every other week, the sessions were open to men. This first "Tuesday Schedule" demonstrates how the Alliance's political objectives and anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-capitalist framing deconstruct the local/global binary and refuse to draw stark divides between different scales of struggle. A critique of capitalist labor relations in the U.S. flows seamlessly into a larger discussion of the war in Vietnam; a discussion of intimate partner relations moves into a critique of the corporatization of food. The articles in the first issue of the paper demonstrate the group's adeptness at fleshing out the material interconnections among these scales: articles transport the reader from the perspectives of incarcerated revolutionaries in the U.S., to surveillance on public transportation, to a demonstration for universal day care, to the Vietnam War, to reproductive justice, to book reviews, poetry, and first-person interviews with women workers. Protest report-backs highlight the vibrant cross-section of New York City organizing that comprised the Alliance's political community. This first issue of the paper also offers a public report-back on the group's internal work, [End Page 185] principles, and philosophy of organizing, demonstrating a commitment to transparency with its base. The paper was understood as the Alliance's official news organ. As Linda Burnham puts it, the intention of the paper was as follows: to really speak to the ways in which women of color experience the world, and speak to the issues that were not at that time being addressed by the white women's movement, or the mainstream women's movement. And it was the early side of the recognition that women of color faced issues and discrimination and marginalization, not only as women, but as people of color, as people with particular class background, et cetera. (2005, 20) Triple Jeopardy was directed toward an audience of Third World working-class women and men, and an internal criticism of the early papers addresses the need to refine this audience further to "the unpolitical sister," rather than those who were already connected to political struggles ("Dear Cheryl" 1972). The paper's editorial staff were entirely volunteer, and in early issues of the paper like this one, bylines were typically not attributed to individual authors; collective authorship served as a method of protecting members from state surveillance (Romney 2021, 109). The Alliance maintained a principled stance of not including advertisements in the paper. For example, the Alliance received a letter from someone conducting a study on survivors of sexual assault who asked whether they could advertise in TJ, and the Alliance said no, redirecting them to the group Bay Area Women Against Rape ("Dear Friend" 1973, 1). Because Triple Jeopardy was understood to be deeply connected with the Alliance's political organizing and organization-building goals, anyone who expressed interest in joining the paper was asked to join the organization itself. Frances Beal saw writing and organizing as inextricable, and "thought knowing the Alliance and being part of its activity were necessary prerequisites to writing for the paper" (Romney 2021, 108). For the Alliance, writing was embedded in organizational work, rather than existing alone or adjacent to grassroots organizing. For those of us who are writers, teach writing, or are otherwise engaged in the study and practice of composition as political work, this insight is essential; when engaging with Triple Jeopardy...