Gandhi, King, Chavez and WHO? The Active Nonviolence of Barbara Deming

One in a series of discussions about the major nonviolent theorists and activists of our age. Too often students and practitioners of nonviolence overlook the major contribution of women. Deming was an author, playwright, director, theorist and journalist who devoted herself to nonviolent struggles for civil rights, especially women's rights, and was also jailed frequently for protesting the Viet Nam war, including making trips to Hanoi. She came out as a lesbian in the 1930's - to her, the personal truly was political and vice versa. Perhaps because of her gender orientation and advocacy of women's rights, she came to believe that often it is those who love us who oppress us most. Activist scholars Alice and Staughton Lynd consider Barbara Deming “the most significant theorist of nonviolence in the American New Left... Her image of the “two hands” -- one firmly resisting the antagonist, the other extended in hoped for reconciliation -- remains for us a fundamental metaphor of what we are about....”
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