The Young Lords by Fernández Johanna;

Author:Fernández, Johanna;
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2019-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Given the defining role that gender played in her childhood, it is no surprise that Morales refused to pander to the notion that national liberation should be privileged over women’s liberation. As deputy minister of education, she exerted considerable political power, reeducating members on a range of issues, helping develop the organization’s internal curriculum, developing classes for the community, and leading discussions. Ironically, the early political education sessions of the organization didn’t address issues of gender, even though a woman was helping to create and lead them. But the Young Lords’ philosophy of education—that the process of political education alongside struggle would engender enlightened individuals prepared for the task of building a new just society—opened up a world of critical analysis on women’s oppression that eventually drowned out those who were against the organization’s focus on women’s issues. In fact, it inspired in its female members a desire to understand social relationships, the specific condition of women’s oppression among women of color, and the influence of class, culture, and history in the gendered system of oppression.

Beginning in the spring of 1970, the Young Lords began to use in-depth articles written for Palante in the political education of new recruits. In the area of women’s oppression and leadership, Palante articles discussed the state-led campaign in Puerto Rico that used women’s sterilization as a form of contraception; deconstructed the institution of the concubine in Puerto Rico and its oppressive gendered logic; featured the biographies of political leaders such as Puerto Rican political prisoner Lolita Lebron and the black American freedom fighter Sojourner Truth; and in a sophisticated article on the politics of and motivation for the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in 1970, featured a photograph of armed female Cambodian guerrillas.106 And in response to being called “Young Ladies” in Robin Morgan’s classic essay “Goodbye to All That” in RAT, a New York–based underground newspaper whose editorial board was taken over by second-wave feminists,107 the female members of the YLO mounted a fervent campaign in defense of themselves and their organization. The challenge deepened the already existing internal struggle within the organization over the place women would occupy in it.

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