Celebrating the Village as a Hotbed of Women’s History

By Phyllis Eckhaus

To “feel seen” is to experience a kind of real-life magic, jolting our best, most authentic selves with an electric surge of affirmation.

To my shocked joy, I was told that a favorite artist in the Acts of Art Hunter College exhibit—which I wrote about in last month’s Village View—“felt seen” by my review. And then she wrote to thank me for my “amazing” article. I felt beyond seen; I felt flooded with possibility. As someone so visually oblivious I can’t recognize people when they change their winter coats, who was terrified to write about an art exhibit for fear I would miss something obvious, I had to consider that perhaps I underestimate myself.

Women underestimate themselves all the time. And in this hierarchical and hostile world, increasingly antagonistic to those of us who are not straight white native-born Christian men, it is so important to share stories of women—women who remind us of what we can be. And indeed, that’s a huge part of why I love the Village. In reputation and real life, it’s been a hotbed of women’s freedom.

Here, in honor of Women’s History Month, I offer a small sampling of places and people that move me.

Jefferson Market Library
Our magnificent Victorian edifice—the Jefferson Market Library on Sixth Avenue and Tenth Street—was formerly a courthouse. In 1927, when bawdy ex-vaudevillian Mae West (1893-1980) was tried there on obscenity charges for her play Sex, she wittily transformed her trial and 10 day sentence into tabloid gold. This so reinvigorated her career that Hollywood came calling. Her first flick in a starring role rescued Paramount Studios from bankruptcy.

The courthouse would have been reduced to rubble but for preservationist Margot Gayle (1908-2008). Her 1961 campaign to fix the clocks in the clock tower seduced folks into saving the entire abandoned structure.

Women’s House of Detention
As longtime Villagers know, the garden adjacent to library was once the site of the Women’s House of Detention. In 1965, Bennington freshman and future feminist author Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005) was arrested during a “sit-in” on the UN steps, protesting the burgeoning Vietnam War. The mauling internal exam she—and other inmates—endured upon entry to the “House of D” made her stoic family physician cry. Aided by author and peace activist Grace Paley (who lived nearby on West 11th), Dworkin made the prison’s brutal conditions a national scandal, helping set in motion its eventual demolition and spurring her scholarship on violence against women.

Afeni Shakur (1947-2016) spent months at the House of D as one of the “Panther 21”—members of the Black Panther party infamously arrested in a 1969 police raid. All were eventually acquitted after Shakur, acting as her own attorney (and pregnant with future rapper Tupac), exposed the FBI infiltrators responsible for the bombing conspiracy of which the “21” were accused. From her cell window, Shakur witnessed the Stonewall riots and Gay Liberation Front support for the Panther 21; herself queer, she became a force linking Black and gay liberation movements.

Silver Building
Moving back in time, what’s now NYU’s Silver Building (32 Waverly Place) was once its main building—and a magnet for late 19th and early 20th century women determined to violate public mores by studying law and breaking into public life. Emily Roebling (1843-1903)—who finished the Brooklyn Bridge when her husband was stricken with the bends—took NYU’s pioneering Women’s Law Class. The essay she read at her 1899 graduation—reported by one newspaper under the heading Tea Table Gossip—was titled A Wife’s Disabilities, and trashed “the sacred rite of marriage” as conferring on married women the legal status of “idiots and slaves.”

Ambitious feminist activists flocked to the law school’s degree program, and became part of Village Bohemia. Daring and beautiful Inez Milholland (1886-1916), the inspiration for Wonder Woman, led the 1911 New York City suffrage march while a law student. A year after graduation, she headed the famous 1913 suffrage march in Washington, DC, where, mounted on a white horse, she beat off violent male rioters with her riding crop. Her death at 30, during a grueling national suffrage speaking tour, made her a martyr and spurred the White House pickets, arrests, and inmate hunger strikes that galvanized the last phase of the suffrage fight.

Eloquent Crystal Eastman (1881-1928), NYU Law 1902, proclaimed, “What women deserve is…the human right to develop and give their best to the world.” She was part of the troika—with suffragists Alice Paul and Lucy Burns—to redirect the suffrage movement from state battles to a national campaign for the 19th Amendment. She also wrote the first workers compensation law and co-founded the ACLU, then a radical group defending WWI conscientious objectors.

Brown Building
Steps from the Silver Building is the Brown Building (23-29 Washington Place), site of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire where 146 garment workers—overwhelmingly immigrant women—perished in a conflagration that immolated the upper floors. Frances Perkins (1880-1965) rushed across Washington Square to the scene, witnessing women jump to their deaths. She credited that horror with the birth of the New Deal. After winning ground-breaking, pro-worker safety laws in New York, Perkins became the U.S. Secretary of Labor under Franklin Roosevelt. She was the first female cabinet secretary. Perkins helped secure minimum wage laws, the Social Security Act, and the National Labor Relations Act.

Washington Square
Washington Square—familiar home to local protests—became the frontline in the war against urban renewal in the late 1950s, when regional planning czar Robert Moses proposed a four-lane highway through the park. Author and urban activist Jane Jacobs (1916-2006), joined by a protesting “stroller brigade” of mothers with baby carriages, took Moses on, and won—the first to halt him.

So Many Women
And here we hit a wall—so many women…and so little space! I’ve yet to touch on birth control advocates and poets. I’ve no room even to ruminate on Heterodoxy—the fabulous founded-in-1912 MacDougal Street club for “women who did things, and did them openly.”

So let me recommend a resource for further exploration — Village Preservation’s website at villagepreservation.org. Dig in, and you’ll find it offers much, including a compendium of “impactful women.” It’s a heartening start.