Howard Zinn passes

Feminist and historian Howard Zinn died yesterday at the age of 87 of a heart attack. Zinn was best known for his 1980 work A People's History of the United States. An alternative to school texts that focused on the history of white, privileged men in America, A People's History detailed the stories of women, immigrants, and laborers. In Zinn's chapter on women, entitled "The Intimately Oppressed," he writes that the mainstream recorded history of the feminist movement reflects the activities and goals of wealthy white women, such as Abigail Adams, who implored her husband John to "remember the ladies" as he crafted a national code of laws. Women of color and working class women, many of whom labored in the trenches of the feminist movement, were completely overlooked.

"Working-class women had little means of communicating, and no means of recording whatever sentiments of rebelliousness they may have felt at their subordination," he writes. "Not only were they bearing children in great numbers, under great hardships, but they were working in the home. Around the time of the Declaration of Independence, four thousand women and children in Philadelphia were spinning at home for local plants under the 'putting out' system. Women also were shopkeepers and innkeepers and engaged in many trades. They were bakers, tinworkers, brewers, tanners, ropemakers, lumberjacks, printers, morticians, woodworkers, stay-makers, and more."

You can read the chapter in its entirety here. -Naomi