Berkeley Talks: The making of a pioneering Black feminist

(Music: “No One Is Perfect” by HoliznaCC0)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from Strategic Communications at Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. We’re also on YouTube @BerkeleyNews. New episodes come out every other Friday. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)

Marion Fourcade: Welcome everybody. My name is Marion Fourcade. I’m the director of Social Science Matrix. Thank you all for joining us. If you’ve ever dreamt of going back to school, and as you can see, the room was set up by Sarah here as a classroom. The teach-ins are the opportunity to do that. We wanted a space where we could invite fabulous teachers from Berkeley to deliver a lecture of their choice. And if you’re wondering how we selected Professor Taylor, we have no access to teaching evaluations, and we had heard some rumors, but basically the way that Sarah did this is she went on social media. She went on Reddit, and she found all of these fabulous comments.

Ula Taylor: Wow. Thank you.

Marion Fourcade: So this is how we decided that Professor Taylor would be a wonderful person for the teach-in. So we are delighted to welcome her to teach a lecture on “the Making of Frances M. Beal’s Black Feminist House.”

In this lecture, Professor Taylor offers snapshots from her larger project, next book project, exploring the intellectual and political evolution of Frances M. Beal reflecting on activism and sisterhood and bringing into view the exhaustion and exhilaration of political struggle. Please note that today’s event is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Departments of Gender and Women Studies and African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies. I would also like to thank very, very, very warmly, Ula, for providing lunch for us today.

Ula Taylor: You’re welcome.

Marion Fourcade: You know that we always mention the upcoming events. We have a lot this semester. I’ll just point out two in March, the first two in March, we’ll have a New Directions panel. New Directions panels are panels with graduate students only where they present their work. And we thought that post-colonial perspectives have become really important, especially for graduate students. And so we wanted to highlight that. And so we have a panel on colonial legacies and post-colonial perspectives. And then of course we hope to see you all at the Matrix BESI Open House on March 11.

Now, let me go back to my job as the person who is introducing our speaker. Ula Taylor earned her doctorate in American history from UC Santa Barbara. She’s the author of The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey, the co-author of Panther: A Pictorial History of the Black Panther Party, and the story behind the film and co-editor of Black California Dreamin’: The Crisis of California African American Communities.

Her articles on African American women’s history and feminist theory have appeared in plenty of journals. In 2013, she received a Distinguished Professor Teaching Award for the University of California, Berkeley. That was another reason. Only 5% of the Academic Senate faculty received this honor, and she’s the second African American woman in the history of the university to receive this award. So without further ado, let me turn it over to Ula.

(Applause)

Ula Taylor: Thank you so much for being here. Can you all hear me OK? OK, lovely. I’m so thankful. I’m coming down with a little cold, so this is why I have my sweater and my beanie on. So please excuse my attire at this point.

But I want to thank you guys for being in attendance, taking time out of your lives to come here and sit with me in a room to talk about my work in progress. I also want to thank Sarah. I had no clue that you had done all of that digging in order to contact me and I appreciate all of your efforts. And Barbara Montano, who is our staff person in African American studies, who at the last minute coordinated the food that you all are eating.

I’m excited to be here on the 19th day of Black History Month. My former student, Professor Jarvis Givens’ most recent book, To Make Me a World, is about Black History Month. And I want to read a paragraph that captures why this month is so important in 2026.

Reads a passage from To Make Me a World: “The year 2026 marks the 100th anniversary of Negro History Week, which was established in February 1926 by famed educator and historian Carter G. Woodson, then expanded to Black History Month in 1976. This milestone presents an opportunity to reflect on the black historical tradition, a critically important task given the current political moment pertaining to what can and cannot be taught about race and history in American schools or in colleges or engaged in public spaces.

Such critical reflection is the purpose of I’ll Make Me a World, which commemorates the 100th year journey of Black History Month by deeply engaging in the tradition that informed its creation. To thoughtfully engage this legacy, I will employ the language of Black memory work and Black memory workers as capacious terms borrowed from Black women archivists to describe the enterprise of recovering, preserving, and bearing witness to Black history.”

I don’t need to tell anyone in this room about the worldly violence and chaos that is tugging at my heart as I stand here before you. Almost daily I talk with Fran Beal about it. She is my sounding board and the memory worker who is most dear to me. She is also my youngest friend at the age of 86. It was at her 75th birthday party that she asked me to write this book. So here I am a decade and a year later still grinding to put on the page a life filled with so many political lessons, and just as many quotidian moments that reflect the history and culture of Black life.

Fran and I have collaborated to narrate how race, class, gender, motherhood and geography can shape possibilities in a capitalist-saturated white supremacist world. Our storytelling aims to bring to the fore life history sutured to transformative historical moments, McCarthyism, civil rights, the Vietnam War, Black power, the women’s movement and the New Left.

Today I’m going to share with you snapshots into the making of Frances Beal’s Black feminist house. A house that she describes as being built by hindsight bricks. Moments when she questioned, critiqued, or became angry about racism and gender oppression. The scenes are from a larger book-length project that explores how Beal became both a feminist and a radical, and why understanding her intellectual and political evolution is important for 21st century activists.

Interpreting the life of a living subject can be filled with what I call “formal intimacies,” intellectual and emotional entanglements that require an innovative approach. My course of action is grounded in interdisciplinary methods, and overall can be defined as an oral memoir. In the tradition of autobiography and griot storytelling, yet stretching beyond these narrative forms with interpretive analysis, I offer a seamless combination of a first- and third-person voices.

Fran’s vision drives the storytelling. My third voice carefully leans into what she experienced and observed, both expanding and chronicling the most nuanced versions of her life. Fran’s eye is boldly analytical, and my use of her name and the she pronoun layers her retelling. Ultimately, we present a brick by brick history that centers on the making of a radical Black feminist, her fantastic life, which continues to be lived in San Leandro, California.

Born in 1940 to a non-religious Jewish mother and an African American father, Beal always felt alienated from everyone outside of her nuclear family. In fact, Black girlhood existed in Upstate Johnson City, New York because she lived there. It was in this small town that her radical parents were isolated as a political menace at the beginning of the Cold War. Beal felt the sting of every newspaper article that detailed their connection to the Communist Party and every racial epithet that marked her as other. As their only daughter, her coming of age experiences at times were different from her three brothers because of normative ideas about femininity.

We begin in 1948, Johnson City, New York.

Reads from her book project: “Like most kids, I felt free during outdoor play, but one of the first lessons about what girls shouldn’t do took place in the front yard of my grandmother’s house. During the 1940s and ’50s, girls only wore dresses, and I was climbing a big maple tree when I heard my Aunt Gert say, ‘Get out of that tree. I can see your panties.’ Showing my panties, even during innocent play, at least in Aunt Gert’s thinking was an unladylike act as she was determined to make me into a respectable Black girl. I objected to these fences that were placed around me. I felt the contradictions and occasionally occurred them, but my Aunt Gert had her own strong will.” Brick number one.

Historian Lindsay Jones reminds us that a pedagogy of play raises persistent questions about who has the power to determine what counts as girlish pleasures. In the case of Fran, it was her Aunt Gert who was watchful and used her commanding voice to redirect Fran. But why should a Black girl have to worry about possible eyes upon her covered bottom? What could the image be mistaken for and how might it hinder the possibilities of Black girlhood?

Aunt Gert’s critical gaze and words aimed to protect Fran in a racist patriarchal culture and to counter the potential harm directly linked to stereotypes that haunt Black female bodies no matter the age. Yet Fran recognized the inconsistencies. Her three brothers were able to climb trees freely. Limited by notions of vulnerability, it was disturbing to Fran that her childhood play required regulation and discipline.

Johnson City, 1950, New York.

Reads from her book project: “It was on a makeshift baseball diamond that I had my worst fight. It was after supper, and it was on a lot near our house. My brother Raymond left the house before I did and arrived. And when I saw him, there were all these kids around him. He was 13 years old and there was a white girl his age berating him and calling him all kind of racial epithets, calling him a (n-word), a monkey at eight, that should go back to the jungle. And she was poking him in his chest.

“Immediately I recognized her as Mary Ann, a girl in Raymond’s class. And he was just standing there because in my father’s words, boys never hit girls. My brothers were not allowed to hit me and I never saw my parents get into any kind of physical altercation. Without hesitation, I weighed in and started to poke and hit her. It didn’t take long before she turned on me. She was 13 years old and getting the best of me, badly beating my ass. My 10 year old arms were flailing around, and fortunately for me, my hand caught a hold of her shirt and it started to rip.

“She stopped hitting me and crossed her arms to cover up her itty bitty titty she was just beginning to grow. I quickly saw a strategy before me. I stopped trying to hit her and went for the shirt, tearing it off while she tried to cover herself up. And then she started to run home. I picked up stones and threw them at her. I ran home with Raymond and burst into tears telling my mother what had happened.

“Shortly thereafter, the phone rings and it’s Mary Ann’s mother. She complained like hell and called me a little savage because of what I had done. I recall my mother saying, quote, ‘If your child will learn to behave and not use those kinds of words, these things wouldn’t happen. So you need to teach your child to behave.’ My mother accepted no blame. When we were in this kind of situation, she didn’t say, ‘Well, you’re right. My kids shouldn’t fight.’ Although against violence, she believed in self-defense, and it was their fault for starting it. This fight was another example to me that my mother would back us up in these incidents.

“Also, this fight exposed me to the dangers of a crowd. Kids were hooting and hollering and egging Mary Ann on when she was winning against my brother. And as soon as I started to win against her, they turned like a chameleon, and were saying, ‘Go, go, go, go, go, go,’ like I was a leader of this mob. I felt uncomfortable about this because I was aware of lynchings and mob rule by the Nazis.” Brick number two.

Fran recalled that boys shouldn’t hit girls, but she was clear that a girl could hit another girl when that said girl was a racist bully. At the beginning of the fight, Fran was losing in the face of a superior force. It took exploiting an unscripted opening, the exposure of a developing female body, to survive the beat down. Fran witnessed Mary Ann recoil and run away out of bodily shame, visible 13-year-old breasts. And later on, Fran’s so-called chubby body were deemed unseemly and examples of out-of-control flesh.

Fran also recounted how the mob instigated the violence and quickly shifted loyalty. It frightened her, as it should have. She came to play baseball, not to physically fight. The actions of Mary Ann ignited the battleground.

Yet in the view of Mary Ann’s mother, she was the victim of a little savage. Fran’s mother, however, placed the onus back on Mary Ann and critiqued another mother for her lack of mothering. Self-defense reversed the violence, but culminated in Fran’s flowing tears. Fighting back against hegemonic culture can be traumatic and painful. Fran learned early on that bumping and bruising were sometimes unavoidable and emotionally wrenching.

Queens, New York, 1955.

Reads from her book project: “Another family friend that I spent time with outside of babysitting was Bertha Hartman, who had three boys.” It’s supposed to be that way. Okay. “She was shocked that I didn’t know anything about Jewish culture. I was around 15 and went out to shoot some baskets with her 14 year old. I was much better than him. He told his mother that I had won. Bertha said something along these lines, that I should have let him win because he was a boy. I recall being pissed off about it and I told my mother. And my mother said, ‘Don’t listen to her because she’s stupid.’

“This was supposed to be a communist family, but stereotypical gender roles were everywhere and they weren’t supposed to exist in those communities. Even though my mother didn’t talk much in terms of women’s liberation, she behaved it. My brothers were supposed to take care of their own bedrooms and we shared other chores like running the vacuum and clearing the kitchen.” Brick number three.

Fran refused to play into gender games of letting the boy win for their ego. “Stupid” was the word her mother used to deflate Bertha. Stupid, as in she doesn’t understand. Stupid, as in seamless. Stupid, as in empty-headed. Stupid, as in dumb. The power and imagery of one word can go a long way in capturing a moment in time. Her mother’s home spun feminism was largely rooted in practice, but occasionally she would speak an empowering word to her only daughter, which forged a feminist brick.

Queens, New York, 1957.

Reads from her book project: “By my senior year in high school, Jimmy and I were going steady. I knew I needed more protection. We used a lot of condoms because I left it up to Jimmy against becoming pregnant. We were screwing like rabbits. Before Jimmy, I only knew about the missionary position. He taught me a whole lot more about sex.

“One weekend we never left my attic bedroom. Sex and water are all I remember. I went to the Margaret Sanger Clinic because I had heard it was semi-private and you could get birth control there with no questions asked. I got a diaphragm, but we didn’t use it 100% of the time. I was caught off guard when I missed my period and realized I was pregnant. Jimmy was very supportive. We agreed that I was too young to have a baby. I was preparing for college and we were not ready to be parents.

“Jimmy took over and found someone to give me a backstreet abortion. It was 1957. I was 17 years old. And it was stereotypical, in Harlem, on top of a kitchen table. The Black woman stuck a tube in me and gave me the medical instruction: If I started bleeding heavily, go to the hospital. Afterwards, Jimmy took me back to his apartment in the Bronx. Later we went dancing, and I started to feel really bad. We went back to the apartment, and I was bleeding all over the place.

“When it didn’t stop, Jimmy took me to a hospital in the Bronx. The nurses kept asking me, ‘What did you do? What did you do?’ I replied, ‘I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything.’ I was afraid and told Jimmy, ‘You got to give me a ring so they think we’re married.’ The staff continued to batter me with the same question. ‘What did you do? What did you do?’ I was crying on the table. A nurse said to me, ‘Easier going up than coming down, isn’t it?’ I don’t recall the details after that because I almost died.

“I was taken to a hospital ward with older women. The conversation in the room was filled with raw sexual talk. I heard one woman flirting with a doctor say, ‘Hey baby. Oh, that feels good.’ I have to say this was not my class background and I was terrified. But all of these women had had abortions, some saying it was their second and third time. I felt ashamed that this had happened to me.

“At the same time, these women gave me a bit of comfort. I remember thinking this stuff happens to women. I’m not the only one. Soon thereafter, a classmate, Cordelia, died after a botched backstreet abortion. I was struck by this sad news and immediately thought this could have been my fate. Her death had a profound effect on me. And I later learned when I studied the subject of reproductive rights that tens of thousands of women died each year from backstreet abortions.” Brick number four.

When Fran and Jimmy agreed to move forward with an abortion, they entered into a realm of illegal activity. She recalls dancing after the procedure. As she moved her feet, swayed her hips, and lifted her hands above her head, she might have felt a kind of physical release from an unwanted pregnancy. Yet when her body began to show signs that everything was not all right, Fran found herself in a hospital ward with other desperate women. She believed that her class differences were announced to her by the language that she heard, but her own privilege had not shielded her from being in that same ward.

Class nonetheless could shape how a woman experienced an abortion. For example, one woman, Rea Duncan, recalled her abortion experiences in the 1950s in New York State by proclaiming, “Almost everything I know about abortions I learned from not being able to get one.” As a married woman with a history of miscarriages, Rea had had three faulty fetuses removed in the hospital by a procedure commonly known as a D&C abortion.

She thought the question of legality didn’t apply to her. But after she became sick and her gynecologist had no reason to remove the fetus, she had few choices. With heavy black poison seeping through her body, Rea asked her father, who was a physician, why she couldn’t get an abortion. He told her, quote, “Unless rape could be proved or near certain death predicted for the mother, doctors who performed abortions in 1957 could lose their license, even go to jail.

Rea’s father used his professional contacts and sent her to two other doctors, but their fear overcame friendship and both refused to perform the procedure. In desperation, Rea considered an illegal abortion, but her father suggested that she get a psychiatrist to diagnose that she was emotionally incapable of raising a child. This won the approval from a gynecologist for the abortion.

Fran didn’t have Rea’s resources. Rea was an elite married woman, and her story helps to contextualize why so many women and girls were reduced to backstreet abortions. Usually performed by an unlicensed person, the procedure could be fatal if improperly done in unsanitary conditions. Fran shared that she almost died, and her high school classmate Cordelia did. In addition to the health risk, along with the person who performed the procedure, all could be indicted for breaking the law.

The surveillance of working class urban communities like Harlem resulted in the press reporting on clusters of abortion prosecutions during the 1950s. To proceed with an abortion, given that death and jail were ever-present, speaks to Fran and other women’s unflinching resolve against having a child for whatever reason.

Madison, Wisconsin, 1958.

Reads from her book project: “The Black population at the University of Madison was only a sprinkling here and there. It was shameful because at least there’s Milwaukee and some other big cities. Most of the Black students were male athletes and scholarship recipients. There was one other Black woman in the dorm who was the daughter of a doctor. We were not particularly close. She was a Jack and Jill Club type.

“I got invited to a meeting as a Negro student to help found the Delta sororities on campus. I met for the first time four or five other Black women who I didn’t even know were at the school. First of all, just getting ready for the meeting was a joke because I didn’t have the appropriate attire. I knew I was expected to wear a black dress, a girdle, black heels, stockings and pearls, and I didn’t have most of those things.

“I remembered Harriet Tasman going into her closet and pulling out this dress that I ended up wearing. Harriet was also in the integrated liberal studies, and later I met her again in SNCC.

“We get to this meeting, and I’m ultra left up the gazoo. I should have kept my mouth shut. I was already anti-Jill and cotillions, and now I’m also anti-sororities. These were not the things I was interested in. They ended up not forming a chapter because they felt they had lacked a critical mass.

“At that time, I really didn’t understand the role of Black institutions and how important they were. I just saw this gathering as a mean group of people. Had I done enough investigation, I would have learned that the Deltas were the intellectuals. Later when I was working for the National Council of Negro Women, the national president of the Delta showed up at one of the board meetings wearing an Afro, and shared that she was confronted at her sorority meeting. The Deltas had asked her when she was going to stop wearing that Afro. And she said, ‘When it starts growing straight, I’ll wear it straight.’” Brick number five.

Hair texture, attire and constricting undergarments were shackles for many Black women. The time, effort, and money it took to look unlike oneself was factored into why many Black women decided to embrace aspects of women’s liberation. Although Fran does not recall the details of why she felt the Deltas were a mean group of people, she clearly didn’t feel comfortable in their presence, and attributed her leftist thinking to being at odds with middle-class organizations. Exploitive capitalism and racial discrimination were intertwined and the enemies to be fought against. Fran had little patience for any other kind of political conversation.

Queens, New York, 1960.

Reads from her book project: “We had a lovely wedding reception in my mother’s backyard. Mildred’s father, who was a sergeant in the army and part-time caterer, provided a tasty feast. Many years had passed and he’d never forgotten that my mother refused to press charges against his daughter. My mother brought the food, but he wouldn’t let her pay for the preparation or the service of it. He also let us cut down the bushes that separated our backyard lawns to enlarge the space. I remember his generosity.

“The table and chairs were set up on Mildred’s lawn. The garage was the dancing area and our backyard was for co-mingling. Aunt Ida took a lot of photos at the reception. Jimmy’s family came all away from New Jersey and attended as guests. The one thing that really bothered me at the reception was that my family handed Jimmy all of the wedding cash because he was the man. Even my left family was stuck in gendered norms that were discriminating against me.” Brick number six.

Fran’s work life began at the young age of 10. Her father had created a newspaper route for her and her brothers. He pounded home the importance of honorable work and saving one’s money. As a teenager, Fran was a babysitter for progressive families, and in college, employed as an academic counselor and tutor. She took pride in living within her means and putting away cash for a rainy day.

This money situation at the wedding reception, and later on in their marriage, was exceptionally hard for Fran because of their contrasting views toward money. He was a spender and she had been taught to be a penny pincher. Scholars have analyzed how money can be manipulated and used as a vice grip to uphold patriarchal power. This money exchange made Fran mindful of financial dependency and how left families could also be committed to masculine notions of heads of households.

Paris, France, August 1960.

Reads from her book project: “The six to seven day voyage to Paris from New York was our honeymoon. We played shuffleboard and enjoyed each other. Jimmy knew a whole lot more about sex and we used his Kama Sutra book, which was a popular underground bestseller, to guide us. We had sex everywhere, in the bathroom, in the bedroom and at all times of the day. As he pulled me into his body, I became more and more uninhibited. We were young and I really enjoyed making love with him.” Brick number seven.

Fran consistently describes how she enjoyed sex. Although she had moments of guilt when she was sexually active and unmarried, she didn’t deny herself the pleasure. It was, however, a secret that she shared only with her lovers and her diary. A sisterly conversation about sex was stifled because her generation was saddled with the binary tag of virgin or whore. And marriage was no guarantee that a woman would eventually embrace her sexuality.

For example, W.E.B. Du Bois explained that his first wife, Nina, was uncomfortable in the bedroom, and it impacted their relationship. Quote, “My wife’s long life training as a virgin made it almost impossible for her to ever regard sexual intercourse as not fundamentally indecent. I took careful restraint on my part not to make her unhappy at this most beautiful of human experiences,” end of quote.

Fran was not Nina. In tune with her body and the erotic feeling stoked with sexual intimacy, she bystepped the divide and said yes to sexual pleasure.

Paris, France, 1960.

Reads from her book project: “It was late 1960. I was pregnant again. In France, even contraception was illegal, let alone abortions. As a Catholic country, there was no separation of church and state. This reality lingered over me during the early weeks of my pregnancy. I was fearful, but we agreed that I should have another abortion.

“Jimmy once again led the way by securing information through a coworker who was a communist. A communist medical student came to our home and gave me a tubal abortion. He told me if there was excessive bleeding to go to the hospital only after I had passed a heavy clot. After he left, I was bleeding heavily, but I waited. A day or so later, I passed something big in the toilet and began to feel really weak. I thought I was going to die.

“Jimmy took me to the American hospital because he wanted to be able to converse in English. The hospital was far away in the western suburbs. Like my experience in the United States, the hospital attendance badgered me, saying, ‘You better tell us what you did. Otherwise, we won’t know how to treat you.’ I had been coached not to admit anything.” Brick number eight.

Pregnancy risk fluttered around Fran and Jimmy’s pleasurable sex life. She was a wife, but not ready to be a mother. The life-threatening fear that Fran had experienced in Harlem was now compounded by life-threatening fear in Paris. Fran knew what was at stake. It didn’t matter if you were in France or in New York. A woman’s body was not her own in either place because abortions were illegal. All of the possible medical risks of illegal abortions were not kept at bay by swapping a Harlem table with a bed in a Paris home. Her body hemorrhaged for several days. She was forced to go to the hospital to save her life. Death hovered, but she admitted nothing to avoid criminalization.

Paris, France, 1961.

Reads from her book project: “It was impossible not to see evidence of multiple wars in Paris. Remnants of World War II were not just the selling of cats as rabbits. Former World War II soldiers, many of whom were amputees, sold lottery tickets on the street. The political past mingled with the present. President Charles de Gaulle initiated peace talks with the view of ending direct colonial control of Algeria. In response, a flood of former French colonists fled Algeria, to the outrage of the French. Looked down upon as tainted by Africa, the French pejoratively called them “Black Feet.”

“I even felt this personally. In class and on Paris streets, I was often misidentified as Algerian. Algerian students would come up to me speaking in Arabic because they assumed I was Algerian. This happened repeatedly. First, I would start stuttering in French, but eventually I would say in English, ‘I am a Negro American.’ Algerians got angry and didn’t believe me. I would continue in English saying, ‘I don’t understand. I am an American.’

“My Americanness became a kind of buffer to scary situations. Paris was not my home. I was an expatriate, and needed to interact on that basis. I told my friend Julia Wright, daughter of Richard, about these incidents, and she explained to me that they thought I was trying to pass. Julia’s political colleague Herve was Algerian, or at least that’s what he said back then. I learned years later when they were no longer a couple that he was a swarthy French Jewish guy. He was an Afrophile who could pass for Algerian.” Brick number nine.

Context can uniquely mark embodiment. Black subjecthood is a complicated construction that Herve was drawn to. Laced with creativity and clawback, it’s seductive for those who seek to replicate powerful self-possession.

At the same time, loathed and violently desired by their oppressors, Black bodies must fight for their humanity. In the case of Fran, her body was read as both Black and white in the United States and in Paris as Arab. Jim Crow racialization in the United States placed Fran in and out of danger, but in Paris, a misstep could make her a target for deadly violence, given that the Algerian political terrain included the FLN opposition, the Algerian National Movement. Moreover, the protection afforded darker-hued Black Americans in Paris was elusive to Fran. No matter where she lived, Fran could never fully shake loose from racial categorization and all of its violent baggage.

Paris, France, 1964.

Reads from her book project: “My days were met by breastfeeding schedules and increased domestic work. One time I spent the entire day scrubbing the hardwood floors and Jimmy came into the house and ran upstairs to change his clothes.

When he returned downstairs, I was sitting in the living room expecting praise for my hard work. Instead, he aggressively said, ‘How come the bed is not made?’ When he asked that question, I was furious because I had spent three to four hours scrubbing with steel wool on my hands and knees to pick up the embedded dirt. I then swept away that dirt with a heavy corn broom. I sealed the floor and stairs with wax. I became a human buffer sliding across the floor with a dry towel under my feet, not stopping until it shined like new money, only for Jimmy to notice the unmade bed.

I learned that day that Jimmy and most people only saw housework by what was not done as opposed to what was finished.” Brick number 10.

Housework is one of the most underappreciated forms of labor. Why women do this under capitalism is connected to patriarchal culture. Housework can also be linked to the political economy of establishing non-egalitarian households. No wonder housework, littered with inescapable subordination, was a major site for women’s liberation. Once Fran had clarity on how undervalued housework was in her home, she pulled back from investing in it and attaching her worth to it.

Paris, France, 1964.

Reads from her book project: “In Paris, I continued to consume news about the United States freedom movement and anti-colonial efforts in Africa and the Caribbean Islands. So much was going on which magnified my understanding that revolution was in the air, but it wasn’t enough for me to take comfort in my knowledge. I felt that I had to participate in making the world that I so desperately wanted for myself and my girls. Each day already presented some form of a challenge. My children, Jimmy, my classes. So why not add something to my life that aimed at what I perceived to be the global root of violence and injustice, racism and its intersection with the United States empire?

“There would be no magical way to make this come about. I couldn’t add more hours to the day, and I certainly couldn’t anticipate every family need. Over time, however, I found it more difficult to be on the periphery of the movement. I was also becoming less attractive to Paris and more drawn to the epicenter of the struggle in the United States.

“So when I heard that the political collective, Presence Africaine, vowed to bring Malcolm X to Paris on November 23rd, 1964, I saw this as a perfect opportunity to fully engage with like-minded folks. Ellen Wright hosted the planning meetings at her home. She was the widow of Richard Wright, and worked as the executive of his estate. Attending these gatherings where people discussed the dynamics of Black liberation were invigorating for me.

“It was at Ellen’s that I met Carlos Moore, a Cuban expatriate who later became the darling of the right wing by speaking against and calling Cuba racist. Sandy Bethune, who was a West Indian poet, was also there. Ellen was raising money to pay for the venue, and I had 50 francs, $10, in my purse, and I quickly gave it up. That was a lot of money and Jimmy gave me a dirty look and did not give a dime. Yet imagine helping to ensure that the logistics were in place. And on the day of the event, I almost missed Malcolm X’s talk because I couldn’t find a babysitter.” Brick number 11.

Teenage babysitters kept the nuclear family afloat, which is why scrambling to find one was the hallmark of modern motherhood. Earning between 35 and 55 cents per hour, Life magazine reported in 1957 that 48% of America’s 7.9 million teenage girls were babysitters. In this informal economy, teenagers could be exploited. Sexual advances, employers adding unexpected expectations of house cleaning, not paying upon the agreed amount.

Fran had been one of those teen babysitters in America. As a mother, she knew that the babysitting challenges were directly linked to how the term disguised the hard work. When she cared for the children of Gerda Lerner, who would help to usher in the academic field of women’s history. Elayne Jones, who broke the color bar as the first Black member of the New York Philharmonic, and Ewart Guinier, the first department chair of African American studies at Harvard University, and the father of famed civil rights attorney Lani Guinier, all of whom were her mother’s left-wing contacts, Fran clearly knew that babysitting required doing so much more than just sitting.

New York, 1966.

Reads from her book project: “Jimmy and I split up for good when he stopped coming home to our house in Great Neck. He had disappeared into the ether, and I’m scared out of my mind. I’ve never lived on my own, let alone with two small children. I can’t handle the rent by myself, and I began to look for a better job in the city. My brother told me to take the civil service exam, which I did. When I heard I was in the top 1% of the applicants, I believed a good job was around the corner.

“In the meantime, I found a regular job in Manhattan as a legal secretary in a real estate firm. The job is horrible, but I have to work to maintain my family. I find an apartment near my mother on Francis Lewis Boulevard in Queens. The neighborhood is all Black and poor. The apartment is on the second tier and is roach-infested. One day Anne is putting on her sneaker and a huge roach is inside. She went to put on the other shoe and felt a big water bug. For years, Anne would never put on a pair of shoes without shaking them upside down first.

“Working at the real estate office gives me insight into the laws. I take the landlord to court over the roaches. I also have to push the same landlord down the stairs when he propositioned me. I need heat in my unit, not a creepy man who feels he can take advantage of me. Poverty is tough. No mother wants her child to be cold and afraid at home.” Brick number 12.

Working hard and still poor. This could be a mantra for the working class. Single Black mothers like Fran felt the snowball effect of low wages, high rent, few benefits and the constant pressure to live on a tight schedule and a restrictive budget. Capitalism and racism framed how Fran and her children lived a life of struggle. Poor working Black women were the demographic that Fran was most concerned about as an activist because she had to solve her own problems. The heartfelt cry of her daughter’s fear made Fran even more committed to radical change.

In conclusion. Overall, Fran Beal’s experiences highlight how a woman of a certain era could become a Black feminist. As Fran became committed to building a more just world with her comrades, she reflected on her experiences in consciousness raising groups where she and other activists were forced to recall and rethink their lives.

Fran was often caught off guard by the insightful knowledge, and marveled at why it had previously escaped her. Her life encounters invited an unpredictable understanding of herself and others. Black feminism for Fran was not a politic that came from one experience or one moment in her life. It was a culmination of the brick of girlhood frustrations, the brick of early adolescent battles, the brick of teenage gendered expectation, the brick of abortions, the brick of sexual pleasure, the brick of housework, and the brick of single motherhood. All and so many other theoretical and practical life bricks informed the construction of her Black feminist house grounded in social justice feminism. Thank you for your attention.

(Applause)

(Music: “No One Is Perfect” by HoliznaCC0)

Anne Brice (outro): You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from Strategic Communications at Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)