1968 The Third World Women’s Association (TWWA) is formed out of the Black Women’s Liberation Committe of SNCC to address male chauvinism within the anti-racist movement. The feminist organizers of TWWA were determined to “dispel the myth of the Black matriarch within the community, to prioritize work that responded to the ongoing oppression of Black women, and to legitimize Black women’s role in the revolutionary struggle for civil rights”(Richie, 144). As one of the earliest groups advocating for an intersectional approach to understanding women’s oppression, their organizing principles (in direct opposition to essentialist theories in the mainstream feminist movement) paved the wayfor Womanism and Black feminism as critical feminist theories. TWWA’snewsletter, Triple Jeopardy, helped to advance understandings of the simultaneity of oppression.
October 13th, 1970 Angela Davis is arrested in New York for alleged involvement in a shoot-out outside a California courthouse following activist Jonathan Jackson's attempt to free three prisoners. Though Davis had not been present, she was accused of purchasing the guns used in the incident; she was charged with murder, kidnapping, and criminal conspiracy. Her arrest spurred on the Free Angela Davis campaign, a national movement that would continue until her acquittal in 1972. The campaign drew public attention to the lengths the state would go to suppress and quell the revolutionary potential of Black feminist voices.
1972 Women incarcerated at MCI-Framingham hold a protest against the deplorable conditions inside. Their protests were part of a nationwide wave of protests inside American prisons, fueled by the Attica rebellion. This political unrest would later be used as justification in prison officials’ attempts to build a behavior modification for women in the MCI system; pathologizing criminalized women as “dangerous” would become another method of state control.
August, 1972 Yvonne Wanrow, a Native American woman of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation is arrested in Washington state for shooting and killing William Wesler, a white man who threatened to sexually abuse her young son.
Spring, 1972 The D.C. Rape Crisis Center (RCC) is established, one of the first of its kind in the United States. While the organization’s original involvement included young, white, working-class women involved in the women’s liberation movement, the RCC would later transform its initial single-axis analysis of the criminal justice system -- thanks to its emerging Black feminist leadership -- to link the city’s Black liberation and women’s movement.
1973 Yvonne Wanrow is convicted of second degree murder, and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
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