‘Working together accomplishes much more’: a conversation with Dr Patricia Romney,author of We Were There: the Third World Women's Alliance & the Second Wave

Abstract

In this conversation with Paulina Jones-Torregrosa, Patricia Romney reflects upon the theories, methods and legacies of the Third World Women's Alliance. Active from 1970 to 1980, the Alliance was a multiracial feminist organisation based in Manhattan, New York, Berkeley, California and Seattle, Washington. The Alliance used the term ‘Third World‘ to articulate solidarities between US women and Third World women, arguing that both groups were subjected to similar kinds of state oppression, like unjust incarceration, reproductive violence, poor living conditions and police brutality. Through their organising, writing and artmaking, the Alliance agitated for women's liberation in the United States and around the world. After she left the Alliance to pursue a doctorate, Dr Romney noticed throughout her teaching career that the Alliance was not mentioned in US histories of mid-20th-century activism or second-wave feminisms. Her recent book, We Were There: the Third World Women's Alliance & the Second Wave, blends personal memoir, oral histories and archival research to describe the Alliance's distinct anti-racist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist contributions to US feminisms. This conversation with Dr Romney about her years in the Alliance and the process of compiling We Were There reveals the gaps between scholarly narratives of feminist history and the diverse experiences of writers, thinkers and activists whose struggles for women's liberation strain narrative boundaries. Even though the Alliance eschewed the label ‘feminist‘ in the 1970s, some contemporary scholars and Alliance members now describe the group as part of the racially diverse and ideologically expansive US feminist second wave. However, other Alliance organisers point towards the racial and class divisions that still exclude them from feminist projects. Our conversation gestures at the varied ways that multigenerational activists and scholars describe US feminism's past while identifying the community-building methods from the 1970s that are essential to its future.