This episode investigates the connections between off our backs and government agencies like the CIA and FBI. We also discuss radical groups like the Weather Underground and off our backs' commitment to informing their readers. We ask the question: What does it mean to be "radical?"
On this episode we’ll be talking about the “threat” of activism and how different government authority’s interaction with activist groups has shaped our understanding of the term “radical”.
Throughout history the U.S. government authorities such as the CIA and FBI have used intimidation, surveillance and influence to label activist groups as a threat or as radical.
Counterterrorism agents in the FBI and CIA have conducted surveillance on activist groups throughout history with a range of issues including, environmental protection, animal cruelty, poverty relief, racial injustice, police brutality, feminism and more.
The Black Panthers, the Catholic Workers Group, PETA, Greenpeace, and more recently, the Black Lives Matter Movement have all been surveyed by government agencies, being labeled as “threats” or “armed and dangerous”.
In this episode, we’ll dive into the work that landed off our backs labeled as “ARMED AND DANGEROUS - EXTREMIST” with, as well as the information and stories of their interactions with other activist groups also targeted by these government authorities.
First, let’s set the scene. It’s important to consider what the U.S. was like at the beginning of off our backs.
The seventies were a time of flourishing revolutionary organizations, as progressive ideas took root in networks throughout the country. As different groups engaged in different organizing activities, some with protests, some with violence, the government continued to push back on the influence of these groups, even as surveillance like the FBI’s CounterIntelligence Program, commonly known as CO-INTELPRO, was drawing to an end. The official end of COINTELPRO did not stop the FBI from investigating radical groups, like the WeatherUnderground and their ties to news outlets, like off our backs.
Even before we had entered the archives here at the University of Maryland, we were aware of FOIAed documents revealing the existence of the FBI’s file about off our backs thanks to the Internet Archive. They weren’t just labeled “radical” – their file bore the stamp “ARMED AND DANGEROUS - EXTREMIST.” We were intrigued… and needed to know more.
Feminists continued to organize during the 1970s, focused on the main goals of equal pay for women, gaining access to job opportunities that were typically reserved for men, abortion reform, increased government funding/support for childcare resources, and the renewed fight for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendments. ‘
“Collectives” were formed by political activists, which included like-minded people protesting for a shared cause. These collectives ranged from feminist newspapers to underground extremist groups living as fugitives of the law. Sometimes these groups were targets of CIA and FBI surveillance, whether or not they were breaking the law or not. There is a LONG list of organizations and individuals that ended up with FBI files.
These tactics often pushed groups further underground, created an environment of distrust, but it also changes how we look back at these groups now. So in this episode, we want to explore how the presence of these FBI/CIA interests affect our understanding of groups like Off Our Backs.
Off Our Backs was a feminist collective that grew from a consciousness-raising group in Washington, D.C. In their first issue, published in February 1970, they launched their news journal with an editorial that began: “Dear Sisters… we call on all women to join us in celebration of International Women’s Day” on March 8. They go on to explain that they were dissatisfied with the underground press outlets which only covered specific “women’s” issues to sell more papers, arguing that there’s no place for women in the “male-dominated media” – even in the alternative papers of the New Left and those supporting other progressive and radical causes.
In this opening editorial, the writers at off our backs explain their paper is for all women, “fighting for the liberation of their lives.” Most importantly, however, they assert that “Our bias should be clear. We intend to be just, but we do not pretend to be impartial. Our paper is part of a movement; we ourselves committed to a struggle that we will take stands to further the cause of that struggle.”
We want to continue to share their founding mission, in their own words because allowing these women to define themselves, 50 years later is also important to us.
They write: ”Our paper is part of a movement; we ourselves are committed to a struggle and we will take stands to further the cause of that struggle. We understand our politics to be radical, not because of any dependence on the rhetoric of a revolutionary ideology, but because of the force of truths revealed in woman’s struggle from oppression to liberation.”
It is this dedication to the feminist movement, the support of radical politics, and their assumed communication with radical activists which earned the organization their FBI file. And with that file, off our backs joined an esteemed list of feminist organizations that were surveilled around this era: The League of Women Voters, NOW (the National Organization of Women), and the Women’s Liberation Movement.
Because off our backs served as a bridge between different groups and individuals interested in women’s liberation, their role was publishing important communications and informing the public of what they needed to know. Both in the pages that were published, interviews with the collective members, and in the archival collection, there is evidence that these were agonizing decisions – and that they could feel the tension in the feminist movement as the decade wore on.
Determined to keep communicating with their readers, the women that produced off our backs continued to engage in the debates and discussions about what feminism was and who counted as a feminist, while trying to balance the input from readers letters, their own commentaries and staff disagreements, and their need to keep publishing news about the movement itself.
One thing was clear from our work with the Off Our Backs archives: for the most part, people trusted them. There were hundreds of letters and communications between activists and groups asking Off Our Backs to publish their work, publish their information or help them with something.
One letter that caught our attention was one from Marcia Holly and Gail Eierweiss, who worked with “People Against Grand Juries”. This letter was addressed to Off Our Backs on Feb. 28, 1975.
The letter acted as a warning to the rest of the movement and to other women against the FBI.
In their letter, they wrote: “The renewed dangers of the FBI-grand juries system are primarily to women- it is we who are being questioned and jailed right now.” Holly and Eierweiss requested that off our backs publish the letter as a warning, but to leave their names off it due to the impending danger they would face from the FBI.
As far as we were able to determine, this particular letter never made it into the pages of the paper. But that doesn’t mean that off our backs was silent on the issue of cooperating with the FBI or the all-consuming power of grand juries and subpoenas.
In May 1973, off our backs printed a letter from a woman named Jane Alpert, a fugitive living underground following her involvement in a series of bombings in Manhattan in 1969. The letter was sent to many different feminist news outlets, including Gloria Steinem’s Ms. Magazine. The essay portion was later published by independent feminist presses as a pamphlet.
off our backs ran her work in the “struggle” section of the paper and titled it: “letter from the underground.” In a commentary ahead of the letter, off our backs explained to their readers that they had received the communique in a manilla envelope from Alpert, asking them to run her words unedited.
In the letter and her subsequent (new) feminist theory, “Mother Right,” Alpert attempts to explain her conversion from radical leftist to feminist, arguing that any connection she had with the folks in the Weather Underground and her participation in radical, violent actions were deeply influenced by her experience of misogyny and sexism. That she writes to publicize the arguments about feminism and why women should be working for themselves, not the Leftist men in their lives. She offers her story of coming to terms with feminism and acknowledging her own oppression.
Alpert also mentions that it is her connection to feminist media in her time as a fugitive that has been so instrumental in her process of becoming a feminist. She asks the papers in the feminist media to print responses to her open letter, so that she might see the conversation that unfolds from her position in hiding.
Responses to her letter vary - but the conversation about Alpert spills over the pages of off our backs for several years beyond the publication of “Mother Right.” Some write in support. Others write in opposition. Some write to question the authenticity. Still others write to challenge the arguments that Alpert offers.
While off our backs reprinted Alpert’s missives the following month, along with dozens of letters joining the conversation, based on the letters we poured through in the archives, it is safe to say that there are dozens of letters that remained in the folders in the off our backs offices – never making it into the pages of the paper… each with their own thoughts and perspectives on what Alpert (and those like her) meant to the feminist movement.
These letters represent something critically important to remember, as we continue to unpack the “ARMED & DANGEROUS - EXTREMIST” label.
These letters, and in particular the letter we mentioned before, warning readers about potential cooperations with grand juries and authorities, demonstrate that off our backs was a trusted source of news and information, and a trusted partner in disseminating it.
They were instrumental in cultivating the sisterhood of activism that spread throughout the movement. Women with different identities and different backgrounds came together in the pages of off our backs as a way of communicating with the larger movement and their fellow sisters.
So remember that letter from “People Against Grand Juries?” Fast forward to November 1974, and Jane Alpert has surrendered to federal authorities. She winds up serving 20 months in prison for her part in the conspiracy of bombings in 1969.
The debate over Alpert hits a fever-pitch. How much did she tell authorities when she turned herself in? Who in the women’s movement could be in danger? Is she really even a feminist?
A few months later, in the February 1975 issue, the off our backs published a statement from Ellen Brusse and Terri Turgeon, women who were both subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury in Connecticut about Katherine Ann Power and Susan Edith Saxe. They both refused.
Their statement explains that they were subpoenaed after they refused to speak to the FBI. It lays out the reasons why they refused to talk, citing the invasion of privacy, the patriarchal oppression of the system, and the subversion of their constitutional rights.
Like Jane Alpert, Power and Saxe were fugitives. Previously students at Brandeis University, Power and Saxe became active with the Student Democratic Society (the SDS), and eventually, in more violent anti-war operations. They were involved in a violent crime in January 1970 alongside other anti-war radical activists when they robbed an armory and then a bank with the stated goal to arm and fund the Black Panther Party to support a revolution. Boston police officer Walter Schroeder was killed in the incident.
While their co-conspirators were arrested immediately, the two women evaded immediate arrest. They were both added to the FBI’s most wanted fugitive list in the 1970s. In it’s 72-year history, more than 500 people have been on the FBI’s most wanted list. Only 11 of them have been women. Saxe was arrested in 1975, while Power successfully lived underground under an alias until she turned herself over to authorities in 1993.
But in those early months of 1975, off our backs found themselves deeper in a controversy, where the federal authorities seemed to be infiltrating feminist organizations and closing in on underground activists. The paper adopted a “refusal perspective,” printing information regarding this case under the title: “f.b.i. & grand juries.” They even went so far as to print a “Save this page… Dealing with the FBI and grand juries” in December 1981, as federal authorities investigated Puerto Rican independence protests, chicana feminism, and the continued push for equality by progressive groups.
off our backs also published letters from folks like Mary Moylan, one of the Catonsville Nine: nine Catholic activists who were convicted for burning draft cards in Catonsville, MD in an anti-Vietnam protest. Their actions inspired more groups to commit the same act of civil disobedience across the country. Moylan was one of four who skipped bail and became a fugitive.
In those FOIA documents that we initially found, the FBI states that they’re looking into off our backs because of the Moylan letter, published in the summer of 1973. The memos state that agents attempted to talk to off our backs staff, but they were informed of the paper’s strict non-cooperation policy with federal authorities.
Although still partially redacted, these documents reveal that the FBI was interested in chasing down people like Alpert (whom they would soon have in custody) and Moylan – women who were considered dangerous because of their activist actions.
The paper that served as a bridge in the feminist movement was in a position to be a source of information for the FBI. Later in interviews about the first decade, off our backs collective members reflected on the dangers in publishing the Alpert letters or statements from non-cooperating witnesses because they might’ve revealed too many details.
Those interviews also reveal that the collective members weren’t concerned at the time that what they published might help federal authorities. But in an environment where they were working long, unpaid hours to get the next issue successfully to print… were watching the pressure in the feminist movement as cracks appeared ideologically… and where some weren’t sure who in the movement they could trust… providing information to their readers was job one.
It wasn’t just the pressure from the FBI that weighed heavily on organizations like off our backs. As the feminist movement shifted and changed, the shifts revealed cracks in the ability of groups of women, still advocating for equality in public, to come to consensus on many of the issues they faced.
Publicly, they struggled to maintain a single, united front. But just under-the-surface, there were deep, divisive cracks about who should speak for the women’s movement, whose methods would win the day, and how the movement would organize and progress. Like other groups at the time, off our backs was negotiating the choices they made: what to print, what conferences to cover, and how best to support the advancement of women’s rights.
By 1975 the feminist movement was being shaken by a scandal of sorts. Paranoia was brewing as Gloria Steinem was being accused in an exposeé of working alongside the CIA, granting them access to the inner workings of the growing movement.
If you recognize the name Gloria Steinem, it is because she is a writer, lecturer, and political activist who became nationally recognized in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s as a leader in the feminist movement. In 1968, she aided in founding New York magazine, working as a political columnist.
By 1972, Steinem co-founded Ms. Magazine, remaining as one of its editors until 1987. Ms. was shiny. It was commercial. And as American Studies Professor Amy Erdman Farrell writes in her book, Yours In Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism, “For some women's movement activists, the birth of this new magazine heralded the movement's coming of age"; for others, it signaled the capitulation of the movement to crass commercialism. Whatever its critical reception, however, Ms. quickly gained national success, selling out in only eight days.”
off our backs greeted Ms. magazine with pride, writing that the power of female-driven media was going to slip into middle class homes on “those glossy pages… concealed in bags of groceries like tarantulas on banana boats.” Calling them the strongest feminist propaganda of the day and marveling at their budget, production quality, and strong successful start, off our backs adopted a welcoming position for its contribution to a “strong woman’s media” being critical to the feminist revolution as a whole.
But now it was 1975… and the cracks were visible… and growing. Prior to the published exposeé about Steinem’s affiliations and career paths, one of the editors of the Feminist Revolution (another feminist paper) was discussing the politics of Ms. Magazine and it’s effects on the greater feminist movement with a colleague. A few years prior, someone had stumbled upon a pamphlet entitled, “Report on the Vienna Youth Festival,” published by the Independent Research Service in 1960.
There was no author listed on this publication, instead three names were listed as officers of the Independent Research Service: Gloria M. Steinem (Director), Leonard N. Bebchick (Executive Director), and Dr. Paul E. Sigmund Jr. (Executive Director).
We now know that the Independent Research Service was a front, a creation of the CIA to recruit American college students into disrupting Soviet-run youth festivals. This is later confirmed by Steinem in her memoir and in statements made in interviews.
Much like the ever-present specter of the FBI during this time, there were increasing suspicions of CIA domestic intelligence operations, and the possibility that they were involved in the women’s movement seemed plausible to activists who feared disruption of their goals. Redstockings, founded in 1969 as one of the first radical, feminist groups of the time, publicized questions they had regarding Steinem’s true motives after she joined the women’s movement with no previous involvement, and so soon after her involvement with the CIA funded Independent Research Service.
Redstockings, a Women’s Liberation group established in 1969, organized the claims about Steinem and made their questions and concerns public through a press statement at the MediaWomen’s Conference. This release caused backlash from both ends of the issue, with many beginning to question Steinem’s credentials in the feminist movement, while others stood behind her and condemned Redstockings for creating such paranoia.
In both the May and July 1975 issues, off our backs covered the controversy. Like other things they printed over the years, the staff at off our backs relayed what happened at the conference for their readers. They offer commentary about the accusations, attempt to balance both sides of the controversy, and recap the reactions from others in the movement.
off our backs wrote: “We feel it is important for women to be aware of this background, to analyze their own experiences with Ms. and to draw their own conclusions.” Arguing that Ms. placed Steinem in a “strategic position,” off our backs acknowledged that their decision to wade into the debate could also be controversial.
”It is possible,” they wrote, “that this story will be dismissed as just ‘dredging up the past.’ But 1969, the year that Steinem entered the women’s liberation movement, is very recent past.” They then reproduced the Redstockings accusations - clippings, categories, and quotes from Steinem’s work with the CIA.
In September, off our backs published a statement from Gloria Steinem addressing the accusations, denying any CIA involvement in Ms. and further explaining her involvement with Vienna Youth Festival, the Independent Research Service, and her entry into the feminist movement. She mailed the letter to multiple feminist papers. The information presented by the Redstockings press release was not new information, she argued, and was disheartened that it was presented in a way that misrepresented the facts of the situation.
In the archival collection, we found a copy of the original letter. Again, it is letters as a primary form of communication between groups and individuals in the 1970s that are left as traces to help shape our understanding of the work that off our backs was engaged in.
This was not the end of the criticisms of Ms. or coverage of Steinem from off our backs, but it is an example of the ways in which the movement was navigating the tensions of different approaches to feminism and progress. The criticisms of Ms. were sharp – in the pages just past Steinem’s statement, off our backs ran a commentary from a former Ms. employee, taking them to task over their focus on electoral politics, “pervasive class bias,” and their creation of a “liberated woman” archetype for other women to live up to.
We have one more idea that we wanted to explore in this episode: as we read more and more about off our backs, questioned why they were worthy of an intelligence file, and the political environment of radical activism - we kept coming back to the question: “What does it mean to be radical?” And, if a group is defined as “radical,” do they give up their rights to communicate through the press?
Off Our Backs interacted with groups far and wide, feminist and not, and radical and not. One of these groups that contacted Off Our Backs for print was a group called the Weather Underground.
This group called for social change, but did so through different bombings on different people or buildings.
In a communication sheet sent to Off Our Backs, the Weather Underground explained the process behind an attack they did on California Attorney General Evelle J. Younger.
The document laid out simply and efficiently why the attack was justified and what led to its occurrence.
We include this communique from the Weather Underground for its illustrative value: off our backs was a place where political activists knew that they could be heard. Readers wrote with letters to have their voices heard. Organizations (as we have seen earlier in this episode) wrote letters to have their voices heard.
off our backs was a trusted publication - even in its early years.
For those listening who are unfamiliar with the Weathermen (later the Weather Underground) and the Weather Women... don’t worry. We hadn’t heard of them yet either.
The Weather Underground was a radical, militant group that grew from the Student Democratic Society. Both organizations we also mentioned earlier in relationship to fugitives Jane Alpert, Susan Edith Saxe, and Katherine Ann Power. According to the book Outlaws of America, written by historian and professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies Dan Berger, the organization took its name from a popular Bob Dylan song and fashioned itself after revolutionaries in Cuba and Vietnam. Violence and secrecy were the way to wage that war against the state.
There are whole other stories we could get off track with about the Weather Underground and its members, operations, and conclusion – but we’re focused on off our backs, so we want to bring you back to that letter: the one explaining their action bombing the office of California Attorney General Younger’s office on May 31, 1974.
For us, the discovery of this archival document opens up an entirely different conversation about activism and radicalism. Yes, the Weather Underground committed a ruthless act of violence against Younger and his staff, giving them just 10 minutes to evacuate by calling in the bomb threat… but, does that mean off our backs should not publish their side of the story?
As laid out in the communique from the Weather Underground, Younger used his power to enforce and enact many harmful and racist policies which resulted in the deaths of many minorities and activists. While he didn’t firsthand participate in any violence, the Weather Underground argued the blood was on his hands.
Groups that were labeled as “radical” or “extremist,” meant that it wasn’t just the FBI or CIA that saw them that way. The US government has a wide influence on the opinions of the country, even at times of political uprising or activism. In fact, in 1975 a Congressional Report about the organization and its origins and actions spends 116 pages defining and summarizing their brand of quote “terrorism” and detailing the identities and actions of those involved with the organization.
off our backs often mentioned the Weather Women, the militant feminist faction of the Weather Underground – sometimes with admiration, sometimes with skepticism. As Weather Underground members turned themselves over to authorities in the 1980s and 1990s, off our backs continued to reflect on and write about the organization and its influence in the realms of activism and feminism.
In a 25th anniversary retrospective in 1995, off our backs alleges that their offices were even broken into in the 1970s because of the communiques that they published.
Across those 25 years, though, the paper remained critical of the influence and tactics of the FBI, kept their readers alert to the unprecedented power that grand juries could wield, and attempted to offer readers solidarity if they too felt the burden of being suspicious to their government.
At the end of this research - weighing the role of journalists and alternative papers and the revolutionary ideas of the 1970s - we ask: How far away from social norms can you stray before you lose numbers and power behind your movement? We know, for example, in the 1970s many feminist groups split because some people weren’t radical enough, while others were too radical.
There were lesbian separatists.
There were divorces.
There were whole women’s conferences that splintered over where the grant money was coming from…
This is a part of social movements to be sure. Similarly, during the civil rights movement many groups split away from each other, with some people wanting to use whatever means necessary and others wanting to stay peaceful.
But we want to close this episode on the “threat of activism” by asking: What is the role of an alternative media outlet like off our backs in covering the struggle? Did they actually owe allegiance to anyone but that first stated goal of keeping people informed?
We hope you enjoyed this episode of With Love and Struggle, and that we’ve sparked your curiosity – as ours was sparked doing this work. We considered how FBI and CIA involvement with activist groups such as off our backs and how these organizations influenced society’s public opinion and the memory of activism work.
It was written and produced by VSJ’s Summer Research Interns Janete, Hannah, Maliyah, Katherine, Ashley, Vivi, Fibee. Our executive producer is Dr. Jaclyn Bruner. Our theme music is “Concrete Flamingo” by Aldous Ichrite.
Special thanks to Laura Cleary and her team at the Special Collection archivists at Hornbake Library at the University of Maryland, and also to McKeldin Library where this episode was recorded.