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WHY GAINESVILLE BECAME A NATIONAL LEADER...
...in the Modern Women’s Liberation Movement. by Denise Matthews
Why was Gainesville, Florida, along with the major cities of Boston, New York, Chicago, and Seattle, one of the first 5 cities in the United States where the Modern Women’s Liberation Movement began? This seems remarkable considering that in the 1960s Gainesville was described as “a small town in rural north Florida with a conservative southern university.” Looking back into Gainesville’s social history, we discover that Gainesville was a place where women recognized that severe discrimination
based on being Black and systemic discrimination based on being a woman overlapped. This overlap led to white women and black women joining to fight for civil rights, for example by creating Gainesville Women for Equal Rights (GWER) in 1963-64, a 200-member, all female, biracial, civil rights organization. But Gainesville/Alachua County women’s resistance to oppression began much earlier with Black women’s resistance to sexism and racism during enslavement on area plantations. When the Civil War ended in 1865, over fifty percent of Gainesville’s residents were Black, most were recently freed from the many plantations in the area. Almost immediately, in 1866, resilient, ambitious Black women and men built a school, Union Academy, funded in part by the federal Freedman’s Bureau. Black students studied at Union Academy for more than 60 years. Union Academy and other Black-run educational institutions in Gainesville as well as Black civic, business, religious, and political institutions were all linked in the creation of this strong, educated Black community. At the same time, this strong community was battling the destructive effects of segregation
(Image courtesy of Redstockings Women’s Liberation Archives for Action.)
