In Their Own Voice: An Oral History of the 1985 Cambridge Anit-Pornography Referendum
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Authors
Jaquish, Sarah
Issue Date
1995
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
Alternative Title
Abstract
In November 1985, in the city of Cambridge, feminists
nearly succeeded in passing civil rights anti-pornography
legislation by voter-initiated referendum. As Andrea Dworkin
writes: "We got 42 percent of the vote, a higher percentage than
feminists got on the first women's suffrage referendum." During
the petition process, activists spoke with the Cambridge
community and were able to mobilize people on the issue of
pornography at a grass roots level. As the report on the campaign
by Women Against Pornography states: "Pornography became the
central issue in Cambridge in the Summer of 1985." This work is
a history of the Cambridge campaign. It discusses central Issues
surrounding the campaign: the organizing, the events, and the
opposition.
Why study Cambridge? Details of the campaign
demonstrate that it was very local and used the types of grass-roots and community-based strategies consistent with feminist
political ideology. Besides garnering a significant populist vote,
the campaign was the first to use a referendum strategy.
Although opponents and critics of the campaign maintained that
the organizers were not from Cambridge, a significant number of
the core group working on the campaign had recently been
residents of Cambridge, and others either lived in Cambridge or
were students there. This particular attempt at passage of the
ordinance was the first to be initiated and organized primarily by
feminist community members. Third, such grass-roots organizing,
integrally linked to community education, merges legal and more
traditional education-based strategies of feminist anti-pornography
work.
In addition to the utilitarian aspects of studying the work
done In Cambridge, recording feminist history constitutes a
political act. The historical information available to women about
the feminist movement, on theory, feminist writing, and especially
activism, is limited. I continue to be inspired by Sheila Jeffrey's
observation that even feminist literature of the 1960s and 1970s
is being lost: "Well worn feminists insights are seen to be new and
exciting.· And indeed it may well be. that they are seeming
exciting to a whole new generation of young women who don't
have any access to feminist literature of the sixties and seventies
because that literature does not appear on their courses and is
nowhere referenced. " Though the details of this research project
are discussed at greater length below, an oral history approach
provides an opportunity to not only study feminist insights, but
feminist analysis of past events as well. It creates the possibility
for discussion not only of the events of a campaign, but also the
possibility of analyzing those events in an interview setting.
Description
v, 75 p.