Florynce Kennedy… The first and only time I ever saw her on camera was in the cameo role of "Zella Wylie" in the Lizzie Borden film, Born in Flames. A kind of women’s liberation “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Zella mentors the young female militants who are engaged in overthrowing the patriarchy and taking over the world in this feminist, science fiction classic.  Here’s "Zella," addressing an age-old feminist concern:
 
“All oppressed people have a right to violence. It’s like the right to pee: you’ve gotta have the right place, you’ve gotta have the right time, you’ve gotta have the appropriate situation. And believe me, this is the appropriate situation.”
 
And Florynce would know. She had organized a "pee-in" at Harvard University to protest the lack of women’s bathrooms.

In the 1960's Florynce was everywhere. Seriously, everywhere. Early in the decade, she became the attorney for the estates of Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker, discovering that their publishers had been collecting royalties without notifying the artists or their estates. Understanding the need to fight media fire with media fire, she contacted Adam Clayton Powell, the highest profile African American member of Congress. It was a shrewd move to politicize the fight, and she won. But it signaled another episode in her progressive disenchantment with the practice of law as a path to social justice. Her life experiences as a Black woman prior to law school had already, in her words, set her up for an “appalling lack of success in accepting, embracing, utilizing or even recognizing such valuable legal techniques as how to walk past a pool of blood and say, ‘what a beautiful shade of red.’”
 
Florynce would step up as legal advisor to Valerie Solanas after her attempted assassination of Andy Warhol in 1968. Solanas was insisting on conducting her own defense, and the first order of business was to prove to the courts that her mentee was not crazy. This required a writ of habeas corpus, because Solanas had been taken to a psychiatric hospital.

Florynce decided that the best defense was a good offense, and to that end, she placed the judge and the court on trial for sexism. When the judge attempted to reprimand her for pants in the courtroom, she didn’t miss a beat: “Well, your honor, you are there in a dress. How can you question me?” 
 
She was also an attorney involved with the landmark Abramowicz vs. Lefkowitz case, arguing for women’s right to safe abortions. This was the first case where women who had been victimized by illegal abortionists were called to testify. Prior to this, it had only been physicians, and this trial established valuable precedent for the later Roe V. Wade case. Florynce went on to publish a collection of some of this testimony, titling it Abortion Rap.
 
Florynce not only called out the National Organization for Women for their failure to stand with Valerie Solanas in her trial, but she would also call out the Black Power movement for its opposition to abortion rights, at a time when the male leadership was framing it as a genocidal conspiracy against women of color.

And here, let me pause to say something about why so little has been written about a woman who was so aggressively and so outrageously present for nearly every social justice movement, every nationally prominent protest, and every media-circus courtroom trial in a decade of unprecedented historical unrest and reform. Why has it taken over a half-century for a comprehensive biography of her life to be written?
 
Author and tireless researcher Sherie M. Randolph gives us the key to solving this conundrum. In a word: intersectionality. Yeah, that thing that was supposed to have been absent from the 1960's. Well, Flo Kennedy was the Empress of Intersectionality, and, for that, she paid a price.
 
In an era where the media was identifying Women’s Liberation as a white women’s movement, and Black Power as an African American men’s movement, Kennedy was busy calling out the former on their racism and the latter on their sexism. She was dragging feminists from the National Organization for Women to Black Power conferences that specifically banned whites. She was arranging with a Black-owned resort in Atlantic City for housing and meals for the predominantly white protestors at the legendary 1968 Miss America Pageant.

Single-issue organizing was difficult enough, but Florynce wanted everyone to see the connections between the many oppressions and to follow her example in showing up for them all. As a result, historians found it easier to focus on less intersectional--and less controversial leaders. This reductive approach to history has led to the erasure of the anti-racist work of early feminists and the anti-misogynist work in the early Black Freedom Movement... and the erasure of Florynce Kennedy.

In 1973, Florynce became one of the attorneys defending Assata Shakur. Prior to this, she had organized fundraisers and boycotts in support of Angela Davis, the Soledad Brothers, and various anti-war protestors. Noting the absence of white feminists in these struggles, she remarked, “As far as black women are concerned, I would certainly be most appalled if they all rushed into the women’s movement. It’s clear that most black people should be involved with the problems of the black liberation struggle.”
 
Interestingly, she also served as a defense attorney for Jerry Ray, the brother of James Earl Ray, convicted for the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King. He was before a Senate sub-committee, and Florynce used the occasion to place the government on trial for conspiracy. Jerry had been accused of robbing a bank with his brother, in order to explain the large sums of money that had funded James’ elaborate escape. In the end, the committee decided that James Earl Ray could not have acted alone, but they rejected any theory of government involvement. (“What a beautiful shade of red...?”)

Kennedy supported Shirley Chisholm’s bid for the Presidency, and she went on the campaign trail with her, visiting colleges and universities. At this time, she founded the Feminist Party, envisioning Chisholm as the perfect candidate to bring about a coalition of  both black and white feminists. Two years later, in 1973, she organized the National Black Feminists organization.

We owe a debt of gratitude to Kennedy's biographer, Sherie M. Randolph. She spent fifteen years researching her subject. Florynce had written her own "autobiography," Color Me Flo: My Hard Times and Good Life, but it is less a biography and more a collection of speeches and interviews, with photographs and copies of leaflets. The papers she had donated to the Schlesinger were filled with gaps and omissions. Sherie found that Florynce's sisters had their own collections, but these were also incomplete. It is important to remember that Kennedy had been under FBI surveillance through many of her years of activism, and that, after her death, friends and colleagues had removed and destroyed  papers that they felt might have jeopardized the safety of other activists. Florynce's biographer has performed a Herculean feat in assembling the details of her subject's life and causes.  And now, finally, the errant papers are all at the Schlesinger, along with an extensive collection of video. And there is, at long last, a biography.
 
Florynce Kennedy’s life is a inspiration for the timid activist. She never hesitated to say the thing that was on her mind, no matter how disruptive or how unpopular it was.  She was never afraid to call out her own movements. She was not intimidated by accusations that she was being "divisive," that kiss-of-death word used so effectively to silence in-house dissent.  To her critics, she would say, “Unity in a movement situation is overrated. If you were the Establishment, which would you rather see coming in the door, five hundred mice or one lion?”

Oh, the lion, by all means. Give us the lion.

CG: So…Cindy Dick, I understand that you have the largest collection of vintage women’s sports cards in the world. That’s amazing. I see that you refer to your collection as “Tiny Treasures, Giant Legends.”  How did you come up with that?
 
CD: I first must clarify that I think it’s the largest.  I currently own close to 1,100 original cards between the 1850’s and 1972. The cards also have to be printed around the time the athlete competed.  I tell myself that there has to be a finite limit but even after 23 years of collecting, I keep finding cards I’ve never seen before! I’ve never run across another collector with a similar collection anywhere near this size so I say it with some confidence, but can’t say it unequivocally. 
 
I have two goals for the collection; a book and a museum show so I needed a name for the collection.  After mulling the options over with friends, “Tiny Treasures, Giant Legends” was born a few years ago.  The name encompasses what they represent in four words.  The cards are tiny.  Most are smaller than a credit card. Finding them is like a treasure hunt, and they are also treasures of history.  These were the best athletes of their day.  Many were giant legends in the world of women’s sports. Some were the grandmothers of women’s sports, establishing rules and leagues.  Because of these women, we are blessed to have the opportunities we have today.

CG: When did you start collecting, and what was it that got you started.

 CD: I had some baseball cards as a kid – even had a Hank Aaron card but sold them all before I was 10.  I didn’t do anything with cards for 20 years.  Finding a women’s card was a complete accident.  I was at a yard sale in Virginia around 1993 and this little boy was selling his sports cards.  I glanced at the cards on the table and was shocked to see a woman’s card!  I’ve always loved visual images of women in sports so this caught my attention.  It took me a while to define the collection’s time frame of pre-Title IX (1972) cards but now that’s pretty much all I collect. 
 
CG: Can you remember your first card?

CD: I joke that you never forget your first one.  Manon Rhéaume was the card at the yard sale.  She was a Canadian minor league ice hockey goalie.  She also had the same appeal as Danica Patrick (read, she was pretty) and between those two factors, there were great hopes that she would break into the professional league and become a hockey phenom.  Card companies made many different cards of her.

CG: So why women’s sports cards?

CD: I love images.  A picture is so powerful, and with trading cards, the magic is that you can hold your hero in your hand.  And they are neat because they have infiltrated the world of men’s sports cards.  I focus on cards and not stamps, posters, postcards, etc. because trading cards were meant to be collected and traded.  Most cards were made to be sturdier than the other forms mentioned because they were created as a collectible.  I like the older ones because they are rare and hard to find (unlike contemporary cards today) and I enjoy the challenge of finding them.  And, financially, it also keeps me focused.  These trading cards are also artistically beautiful.  I started by only buying cards that used photographs because that showed that the athlete actually was competing. But then I grew to love the lithographs, drawings, caricatures, hand painted cards…all the different styles that were used in the vintage cards. 
 
CG: And if I can get a little personal here… what about you?  What’s your sports history…? Should we have a card for you?

CD:   Lol!  No. I had Olympic aspirations but my talent wasn’t at the same level as my dreams.  I ran track in HS and played college volleyball.  Today, I am an avid cyclist and I swim.

CG:What’s the history of the marketing of these? And were the women’s cards marketed the same as the men’s?
 
CD: Trading cards were initially known as “tobacco cards” in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.  When cigarette packs were first made, they were floppy so the manufacturers inserted a blank piece of cardboard to keep them stiff.  Marketers quickly realized that blank space was marketing space so every topic under the sun is pictured on tobacco cards.  Athletes were one of the subjects and became one of the more popular ones to collect.  These are, therefore, the predecessors of the sports cards we know today.  When women were on tobacco cards, they are mostly seen as movie stars or as ‘beauties’.  Seeing women as athletes flies against the ladylike image that society pushed on women back then.    
 
While most of my cards are tobacco cards, some were distributed with chewing gum, chocolate, shoe polish, margarine, and even a piano!  What puzzles me is that it was not fashionable for women to smoke before the 1920’s.  So I have to wonder, who were they marketing to by adding female athletes?  I’ve asked some card aficionados why manufacturers would include female athletes and the answer is always, “Because they were a novelty.” 
 
The neat thing about the cards back then is that the images do not sexualize the women.  They are athletes.  Today, there is a lot of discussion and research about how women are portrayed in the media so it’s refreshing to see that the majority of these images portray the women for what they were – athletes.

CG: And about collecting…  You began to collect several years before the internet. How did you collect in the early days, and how did that change with the internet?
 
CD:  In the 1990’s I started by asking sports card dealers at shows and stores if they had women’s cards.  Dealers sell what sells so once they knew I was interested they started holding them for me.  They would sometimes even give them to me for free because to them, they didn’t have value.  At card shows, upon asking, I’d often get that blank, puzzled look as if I just asked them something that they had never heard before.

Sometimes they would have a card or two, and sometimes I was even told, “I have coaches wives” or “I have cheerleaders.” This was before eBay became a household name, the WNBA was still a dream, and before women’s soccer exploded.  One by one, I learned of sets where women’s cards were inserted into a men’s sets because women were rarely sold as a set of their own.  After a little while, and armed with knowledge, I'd ask the seller if he had women’s cards. If he said “no” I’d ask if he had ‘x, y, and z’ sets.  He’d pull out the boxes of cards and I’d leave with a stack of women’s cards. I started to get a good collection of contemporary cards…and then I came across my first vintage card and that one card changed my focus. 
 
The Internet opened the world of collecting and at the same time, that accessibility also closed many bricks and mortar card stores. The cards in my collection were printed in 25 countries around the world.  The main challenge with buying over the Internet is trusting that it’s an original card and not a reproduction, while praying it doesn’t get lost in the mail!  

CG: The “baseball cards” of my youth, about men, of course, were pretty much all sports statistics.  But I understand that this is not true about your cards. What are some of the most memorable “factoids” that you have gleaned from your cards?
 
CD:  Yes, I love the stories and language used on the backs of these cards.  My uncle translated the German cards, and he kept coming across the phrase “Olympia of Grace” in German.  We looked it up and discovered there was a women’s only Olympics hosted in 1931 in Italy!  I had NEVER heard of this before.  It was not sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee and Americans did not compete in it, but it did have an impact on the Olympics thereafter.  Italy was a fascist country then and the games were allowed because of the belief that “strong women made strong babies,” so it was acceptable for women to be athletes, as long as they didn’t forget their main purpose in life; being a mother. 
 
With the swimming cards I noticed that the images never showed the athletes wearing goggles so I asked former Olympian and world record holder, Misty Hyman, and she said that goggles weren’t used until the 1960’s.  When I look back at records and distances swam, understanding this gave the times context; knowing that the swimmers could only swim as long as their eyes could withstand the chlorine or salt water. 
 
I learned that women boxed in the 1880’s thanks to the card of Hattie Stewart. Her card is significant because the illustration shows her as both bare-fisted and wearing gloves.  The card is from 1888 and that’s the time of transition between when women boxed bare-fisted, and sometimes even bare-breasted, to the rules boxing recognizes today. 
 
I’ve learned about more stories than I can mention here.  These cards are a perfect way for me to do my own history research with each card I find.  They’ve made learning about history fun!

CG: Talk about the women of color cards in your collection… Who was the earliest one?

CD:  This is an important point.  I like to say that it’s important to acknowledge the women portrayed on these cards, and it’s equally important to acknowledge the ones that weren’t.  Sports, as a microcosm of society, were beholden to the racist beliefs of the times; therefore the collection is mostly of white women.  Financially, it was a luxury to be able to compete, travel, and tour, but the biggest barrier was to be allowed to compete – many women of color were not selected, even if they were of equal or better ability than their competition, when trying out for teams.  
 
My oldest card portrays Kinue Hitomi, a Japanese runner from the 1928 Olympics.  She was the first female medalist from Japan, but she medaled in a sport that she didn’t even train for!  She was a sprinter (100m) and a field specialist.  1928 was the first time the 800m run was offered to women (two laps around a track) and the officials asked who would like to join the race.  She did and she came in second place, earning a Silver medal.  Two side stories – the 800m run did not return to the Olympics for women until 1960 and sadly, Hitomi died two years after her Olympic debut. 
 
African American women from the US don’t appear on cards until 1960.  Wilma Rudolph has several cards, and I have one rare card that was printed in Greece of American Earlene Brown, a Bronze medalist who broke the 50-foot barrier in shot put.   Unfortunately, I’ve never seen a card of Alice Coachman; the first African American to win a gold medal in the 1948 Olympics in high jump.  There have been cards made of her jump decades after the fact.   

CD:  Babe was a force to be reckoned with!  As you know, she endured awful comments from the press because her sheer athletic ability, and her boyish appearance challenged what it meant to be female. But she had some admirers too. She pushed the barriers of women in sports and inspired countless young girls to be like her.   Ironically, Babe’s card is one of the first vintage cards I heard of.  She was my inspiration as a young girl, so, as an adult, I had to have that card.  Because it is part of an American set (Goudey Sport Kings, 1933), and because all the other athletes, except for Babe and Helene Madison (swimmer) are men, the card is expensive if it’s in good condition. I finally won it in an auction and it's one of my most treasured cards.  I have many cards of Babe from different countries: U.S., Germany, Italy, and Holland.   I’ve never seen a card of her playing golf that was printed in the time that she played (she was one of the 13 co-founders of the LPGA in 1950 and she died in 1956).

CG: So… getting the word out about these “Tiny Treasures…”  What are your plans? I see that the Phoenix Art Museum is doing a display of men’s cards. Are you trying to get these into museums?  What about touring into schools?  Internet presence?

I would love to see these in a museum show!  In 2012, the MET hosted an exhibit called “A Sport for Every Girl” but their collection showed mostly cards of illustrations of women playing sports, or women that were dressed as baseball players but were actually the gals that rolled the cigarettes.  Using the MET’s credibility as justification for a show, about a year ago I sent the Phoenix Art Museum a proposal.  The significant difference of my collection is that most of my cards are of actual athletes.  PAM declined.  About a month ago, PAM opened the “Ultimate Baseball Collection” which is a premier collection from the Arizona Diamondbacks.  It was disappointing to see that the women weren’t considered but it was their business decision. 
 
I have been approached by the Women’s Museum of California for an upcoming show about women in sports.  I would love to see this collection in the National Women History Museum in Washington, D.C. as well.  I don’t expect a museum to show all 1,100 cards but it would send an impressive visual message to see so many women being athletes and loving sports since the 1850’s!  I’ve also been asked to give some talks locally by the people that watched the Ignite Phoenix presentation. 
 
CG: What can we do to support your work?

As a follow-up to the Ignite Phoenix video, I created a video to help show that there is interest for a collection of this nature.  It’s hard to sell someone something that they don’t know exists…but if there’s interest, well, many voices are always stronger than one.  Also, I’m looking for a publisher that would be interested in this type of history/collectible/women’s sports book if any of your readers can suggest a good fit.  Most sports books are about men and all trading card books are of men so it’s hard to identify a publisher that would understand the importance of these cards.  If you enjoy vintage women’s sports items, please visit the On Her Mark  website. The funds allow us to do what we do and honor women’s sports history, one great story at a time.     

Viola Davis has just become the first woman of color to win an Emmy Award as the "best actress in a drama series." This is a historic moment,  and so is the text of  her courageous speech, confronting the massive discrimination against women of color in TV and in films.

In her speech she delivered these lines, attributing them to Harriet Tubman:

"I see a line. And over that line, I see green fields and lovely flowers and beautiful, white women with their arms stretched out to me over that line, but I can't seem to get there no how. I can't seem to get over that line."

“…truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. The pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet.”—Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor.”

I recently revisited the Matilda Joslyn Gage House in Fayetteville, New York. It was something of a pilgrimage, as I consider her one of my spiritual foremothers. In fact, I took her last name as my own.

The visit brought to mind a quotation by the lesbian poet Adrienne Rich, on the subject of truth. She spoke of it as an “increasing complexity.” Historically, I have preferred my truth monochrome, monothematic—because I find comfort in certitude. It’s a near relation to rectitude, and rectitude purchases indemnity. But I digress.

Matilda Gage was a Suffrage worker. She was part of a triumvirate, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. They were the leaders and the strategists of the movement. They hung out together. They were comrades-in-arms and best friends... until they weren’t. And that moment came in 1890, when Gage discovered that Anthony had gone behind her back  to recruit Stanton in brokering a deal to merge the National Women's Suffrage Association with a rival Suffrage organization made up of conservative, Christian women. Gage woke up to find herself ousted from the organization she had helped lead for twenty years... and well on her way to being written out of history.

This was why I had chosen to be her namesake, actually: Because Gage had refused to compromise her principles in the name of expediency. She would not compromise in her opposition to a “white-women-only” Suffrage campaign, nor would she compromise on her opposition to the Church. In fact, she had written an entire book, Woman, Church and State, unmasking the misogyny of Christian history, supporting her thesis that the exploitation of women was not some oversight or side effect of Christianity, but was it’s entire raison d’être. In other words, Christianity could not be redeemed.

I loved Gage’s radical vision. I loved her refusal to compromise, even when it cost her so dearly.

But, standing in the Gage House nearly three decades after taking her name, I found myself revisiting my own history as well as hers. And her history was that of a married, middle- class woman with four children and a husband who supported her. Gage did not have to earn her living, nor did she have to worry about how she would survive in old age.

My history, since coming out, had been that of a low-income, single lesbian who supported herself largely through touring around the country and giving lectures and performances. Standing in the Gage House, I realized with a jolt that my life experience had more in common with that of Susan B. Anthony—a single, working-class lesbian who supported herself with public speaking—than with Matilda Gage.

And this realization caused me to revisit that historic betrayal of 1890.

Susan B. Anthony had co-founded the first Women's Temperance Movement with Elizabeth Cady Stanton as President. That movement has been mocked as a bunch of tee-totaling Miss Grundies attempting, with hysterical fervor, to police the harmless dissipation of others. In fact, it was a movement of battered women, of activists against domestic violence. It was a movement of survivors of sexual abuse and especially of incest. In the early nineteenth century, a married woman could not own property, could not inherit, could not own her own wages, could not own her own children. Wife-beating and marital rape were legal, and any woman attempting to seek relief through the courts would face an all-male jury. The woman who married an alcoholic was in for a lifetime of terror and abuse, and so were her children. Outlawing liquor appeared to be the quickest way to seek relief legislatively from this nightmare, and the Church was more inclined to support temperance than women’s enfranchisement.

Anthony’s roots were in this movement of survivors. The personal stories of suffering that she encountered would be familiar to any rape crisis or shelter worker. The needs were immediate: shelter, food, protection, medical attention, social services for the children.

Anthony had moved away from the temperance movement to the movement for Suffrage, but those roots and those experiences continued to inform her activism. Standing in the Gage House, which is in a lovely middle-class neighbhood of large houses with landscaped yards, I began to experience the increasing complexity of that so-called betrayal.

Gage’s uncompromising stance, pristine in its radicalism, could have  delayed Suffrage by decades--or even centuries, depending on how deeply the Church was alienated. How would that position read to a woman like Anthony? Might it not look like a function of class privilege? Gage, with her feminist and middle-class husband, might be willing to die before seeing her goals realized, but for women in desperate circumstances, delay could be fatal.  Even limited power, limited Suffrage, would be a foot in the door, a toehold… a something for so many women who had nothing. And these conservative Christian women had resources, lots of them. Was it easier for a woman who was not needing to support herself to turn down that money on principle than for a woman  scraping out a living on the lecture circuit? A woman for whom marriage could never be an option?

I remembered the words of Florynce Kennedy: “'Nothing but the best for the oppressed' translates to ‘nothing for the oppressed.’” And I remembered the words of another legendary activist, Bernice Reagon Johnson: “If you’re in a coalition and you’re comfortable, you know it’s not a broad enough coalition.”

And Anthony was lesbian. Let us never forget that. She did not love men, did not want men. She desired women. She understood that her tribe could never experience security or domesticity in our relationships until women had equal access to education and to jobs. In 1890, she was seventy, in an era before Medicare and Social Security. She was also often desperately lonely in her touring work. One of her lovers had been Anna Dickinson, who  also supported herself as a public speaker. How much could Stanton with her seven children and Gage with her four understand about their lives? And, it is important to remember that the temperance movement leader was Frances Willard, also a lesbian.

Was it Gage who betrayed Anthony in her refusal to compromise, holding their Suffrage organization hostage to a radical vision that was so far ahead of its time? It was easy for Gage to explore spiritualism and other metaphysical systems, when she was not dependent upon the Church as a support system that could provide community, emergency health care, and financial relief, as well as ideological support for the purity and sanctity of womanhood--a lifeline to women struggling with the contempt and violence of their spouses. How relevant would the historical violations of the Church be to these women who had nowhere to turn but the Church?  Was it realistic to expect them to catch up to doctrines of radical feminism in their lifetimes?

I left the Gage House overwhelmed. It was difficult to resist the temptation to think I had been wrong. Right and wrong have no place in “increasing complexity.” The world has need of radical and visionary thinkers, as well as for the pragmatic, on-the-ground, coalition-building, compromise-making activists. There will always be a tension between the two positions, and that tension can provide a healthy check against the excesses to which each is liable. 

The Gage House stood as a bulwark of rectitude for me in my younger days, when I was in the process of reinventing myself. Today my appreciation of it has increased in complexity. Today it is an invitation to go deeper, to challenge everything--even to examine  my beloved foremother through the lens of  working-class, lesbian activism.

Take a tour of the Matilda Gage House website. This essay, narrowly focused on a specific facet from my own experience, does not in any way do justice to this remarkable woman, who did "walk her talk" in so many radical ways. Her home was on the Underground Railroad, and, because of her coalition work with Native women in her area,  she was adopted into the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation. Her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum, would author the beloved Oz books, with their gender-bending heroines. Her crusade for separation of Church and State is especially relevant today. Sally Roesch Wagner is the visionary and pragmatic Executive Director of the Gage Foundation, and, I am privileged to say, a friend and colleague.