Dorothy Pitman Hughes Dies at 84; Brought Black Issues to Feminism

Dorothy Pitman Hughes, whose street-level activism in New York in the early 1970s, during the first years of the women’s movement, helped to inject issues of race, class and motherhood into roiling debates about feminism and equality, died on Dec. 1 in Tampa, Fla. She was 84.

Her daughter Delethia Ridley-Malmsten confirmed the death, at Ms. Ridley-Malmsten’s home.

Ms. Pitman Hughes is perhaps best known for a 1971 photograph in which she stands alongside her close friend Gloria Steinem, their right fists raised in solidarity.

The two women were in the middle of a nationwide speaking tour, and Ms. Steinem had asked her neighbor Dan Wynn to take the photo for publicity. It later appeared in Esquire magazine and became one of the best-known images of the women’s liberation movement.

Ms. Steinem and Ms. Pitman Hughes met in 1969 when Ms. Steinem was writing an article for New York magazine about the West 80th Street Day Care Center in Manhattan, which Ms. Pitman Hughes founded in 1966.

Day care for working parents was a revolutionary idea in itself, but the center was much more than that — it soon expanded to offer job training, legal assistance and community organizing.

Among the first community centers in the city, it grew from Ms. Pitman Hughes’s belief in a feminism rooted in the everyday struggle of working-class mothers and caregivers, and in the often overlooked experiences of women of color. And it emphasized radical community involvement: Parents ran the board of directors, and the needs of the community determined the center’s priorities.

“She realized that child-care challenges were deeply entangled with issues of racial discrimination, poverty, drug use, substandard housing, welfare hotels, job training and even the Vietnam War,” Laura L. Lovett, the author of “With Her Fist Raised: Dorothy Pitman Hughes and the Transformative Power of Black Community Activism” (2021), wrote in The Washington Post in 2021.

In her article, Ms. Steinem called Ms. Pitman Hughes a “beautiful Black female Saul Alinsky,” in reference to the noted Chicago organizer.

“She wasn’t about following, or leading. She did what needed to be done,” Ms. Steinem said in a phone interview. “She was a great street activist, literally demonstrating in the streets.”

The two could not have been more different: Ms. Steinem was white, single and college educated; Ms. Pitman Hughes was a Black woman with a 9-year-old daughter and a high school education. But they clicked immediately over their shared interests in the emerging movement for women’s rights.

They soon decided to hit the road for a campus speaking tour.

They made a powerful combination. Ms. Steinem would go first and articulate the principles of the women’s movement. Then Ms. Pitman Hughes would bring a Black perspective, often taking issue with her friend’s points.

“It’s very hard for me to say that ‘Good evening sisters and friends’ as Gloria usually says, because usually I can’t,” Ms. Pitman Hughes said in a 1972 speech at the U.S. Naval Academy.

“In most of the audiences that we speak to,” she added, “I don’t see very many friends or sisters because white women have not yet learned or come to the conclusion to change for themselves how much they have been part of my oppression, as a Black woman, and only until that is changed can we have sisterhood.”

Ms. Pitman Hughes stopped touring soon after she had another child. But her activism continued. When the state of New York attempted to impose income restrictions on child-care benefits in 1970, she led 150 day-care workers in a sit-in at the city’s Department of Social Services.

She was on the front lines of the struggle between grass-roots, community-organized services, like her center, and the attempt, across all levels of government throughout the 1970s, to impose regulations on those services and make them a part of the welfare system.

She won many of her battles but eventually lost her war. New rules in the 1980s required day-care operators to have college degrees and government licenses, neither of which she possessed. She closed her center in 1985.

Ms. Pitman Hughes was not, as is often reported, a founder of Ms. magazine, which Ms. Steinem and others founded in 1971. But the two remained close, even after Ms. Pitman Hughes moved to Florida in 2002. A decade later, they recreated their famous photo, their fists still raised.

Dorothy Jean Ridley was born on Oct. 2, 1938, in Lumpkin, Ga., a timber town about 140 miles southwest of Atlanta. She was one of nine children born to Melton Lee Ridley, who owned a pig farm and a small trucking business, and Lessie (White) Ridley, a maid.

Dorothy experienced the violent face of white racism early on. On Saturday nights, drunken white men from the other side of town would drive through her neighborhood, shooting into houses while children like her huddled under their beds. When she was 10, white men nearly beat her father to death in retribution for his involvement in local civil rights work.

Her family was a musical one, and as a teenager she and some of her sisters sang in a group, Roger and the Ridley Sisters, which toured the military bases and small towns along Georgia’s western border.

She graduated from high school in 1957 and then moved to New York to pursue a singing career. She found work in nightclubs but also took side jobs as a salesperson and house cleaner.

Her first marriage, to Bill Pitman, ended in divorce. Her second husband, Clarence Hughes, died in 2015. In addition to her daughter Delethia, she is survived by two other daughters, Angela Hughes and Patrice Quinn; her sisters, Julia Van Meter, Mildred Dent and Alice Ridley; her brothers, Tommy Lee Cherry and James Ridley; and two grandsons.

After closing her day-care center, Ms. Pitman Hughes, then living in Harlem, recognized the need for a place where Black activists could print out fliers and pamphlets. She opened a copy shop, which she later expanded to sell office supplies to the city agencies and Black-owned businesses in the area.

At one point, unable to find additional bank financing, she sold shares in her business, at $1 each, to the local community as a way to build Harlem’s wealth.

But that enterprise also came under pressure in the late 1990s, after the federal government created an “opportunity zone” for Harlem that incentivized businesses, often quite large, to hire local workers. Her store closed soon after a Staples office supply store opened almost directly across the street.

Still, she remained convinced that local wealth was the only way forward for impoverished Black communities.

“Without economic empowerment, you’re not free, and Black folks have not gained that freedom we fought for,” she told The Florida Times-Union of Jacksonville in 2013. “There’s a new fight going on. This kind is where we make ourselves responsible for what is going on, or not going on, in the community.”

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