Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years 1960-1975

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

In 1968, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz became a founding member of the early women's liberation movement. Along with a small group of dedicated women, she produced the seminal journal series, No More Fun and Games. Her group, Cell 16 occupied the radical fringe of the growing movement, considered too outspoken and too outrageous by mainstream advocates for women's rights.

Dunbar-Ortiz was also a dedicated anti-war activist and organizer throughout the 1960s and 1970s. During the war years she was a fiery, indefatigable public speaker on issues of patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and racism. She worked in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade, and formed associations with other revolutionaries across the spectrum of radical and underground politics, including the SDS, the Weather Underground, the Revolutionary Union, and the African National Congress. But unlike the majority of those in the New Left—young white men from solidly middle-class suburban families—Dunbar-Ortiz grew up poor, female, and part-Indian in rural Oklahoma, and she often found herself at odds not only with the ruling class but also with the Left and with the women's movement.

Dunbar-Ortiz's odyssey from dust-bowl poverty to the urban radical fringes of the New Left gives a working-class, feminist perspective on a time and a movement which forever changed American society.

"Roxanne Dunbar gives the lie to the myth that all New Left activists of the 60s and 70s were spoiled children of the suburban middle classes. Read this book to find out what are the roots of radicalism—anti-racist, pro-worker, feminist—for a child of working-class Okie background."—Mark Rudd, SDS, Columbia University strike leader

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a historian and professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at California State University, Hayward. She is the author of Red Dirt: Growing up Okie, The Great Sioux Nation, and Roots of Resistance, among other books.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Memoir, History, Politics, Biography Memoir, Biography

411 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2002

About the author

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma in a tenant farming family. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than 4 decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. Dunbar-Ortiz is the winner of the 2017 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize, and is the author or editor of many books, including An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, a recipient of the 2015 American Book Award. She lives in San Francisco. Connect with her at reddirtsite.com or on Twitter @rdunbaro.

Reviews

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

A follow-up to Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie, Outlaw Woman covers Dunbar-Ortiz's life as a radical. I loved reading this so much - I often feel lonely in Oklahoma, without a lot of political shared reality. This memoir is hauntingly honest, and makes me want to return to read more of her work. When I first moved to Norman in 2007 she was speaking on campus, and she said something very smart about the question of "legality" when it comes to immigrants. That is to say, let's talk about the legality of United States rule of stolen lands, and the ignored treaties of the 1880s. Perhaps ironically, I stumbled onto this book in the biography section of the OU library, where I was looking up "Composing a Life" by Mary Catherine Bateson, a decidedly different kind of "women's" memoir that I had been assigned to me at a professional conference. Reading Bateson's text is like sitting in an uncomfortable chair at a seminar table of driven, ambitious academic feminists. Reading Dunbar-Ortiz is like sitting on a milk crate in a circle of driven, ambitious materialist feminists. I am neither driven nor ambitious, and I prefer cozy couches to the struggle. But I do like to read.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

Watts burned for five days...When it was over, it became clear that destruction had been precisely selective, leaving churches, libraries, black businesses, and private homes untouched. The police and the white businesses, mostly liquor stores, were the only targets.

I'm lucky enough that, every few years, some diabolical streak of luck renders me fated to pick up a work that does the equivalent of giving my brain a much needed spring cleaning. In the case of this, the author's more popular An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States led me one way or another to this, which looking back may have been incentivized by my having far too much of the earlier years of various revolutionary women's lives and not enough of the meat of their 20s and 30s. I ended up not liking this as much as I have its earlier encountered kindred, but that didn't stop me from breaking the spine and riddling the head of my copy with folded bits of receipt when a particular sentence/factoid/argument struck home. I wouldn't recommend this as an introduction to anything if the reader's truly committed to combatting the kyriarchy (a term that I wouldn't be surprised if Dunbar were present at the inception of), but for those who know the pictures of Malcolm X, Kent State, the Occupation of Alcatraz, and wonder where they all went, here's a portrait of the fits that raised and the pigs that bulldozed written by someone too radical for the germinating "feminist" movement and too honest to portray themselves as an ideal revolutionary. Indeed, the fact that I know enough to have my quibbles shows how far I've come, and when it comes to reading like this, that's always a bonus.

"Bev's talk about innate biological differences between women and men bothers me; I mean she thinks biology is unchangeable and determines behavior."
"It's certainly an easy way out for me to believe that; then they don't have to change,"

I worried about the direction of women's liberation with the mainstream media selecting leaders, especially when, in the midst of news of the My Lai massacre, Time magazine published a photograph of Gloria Steinem with Henry Kissinger, captioned: ["]Occasionally, he turns up with Gloria Steinem, the smashing looking Gucci liberal who writes for New York Magazine. [']He's terribly intelligent and funny,['] says Gloria. "He really understood Bobby Kennedy, and that made me know he was not Dr. Strangelove.[']

As eternally says Lorde, the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. As eternally posits Spivak, can the subaltern speak? As eternally will the line be drawn in the sand between those who carry the keys and those who serve as livestock, how does one bring the abject to the realm of public consciousness without being sacrificed by any one of the spokes grinding one's flesh to the thinnest string of flesh and the barest trace of memory? From one side of the family, Dunbar inherited Turtle Island indigeneity; from the other, militant comradery amongst those who have none that makes the one with all tremble in their gold encrusted boots. In other words, a double death sentence regardless of one's status in society, and the fact that Dunbar traverses the spectrum from prized academic to abused housewife, from incendiary feminist to silent peon, within the span of 400 pages is a powerful testament for anyone who fears that, because they did not reach this consciousness here or fell back to lick their wounds there, they are no longer 'valid' in the realm of committed social justice. Outside of there, there is a plethora of famous names that one need not have previous knowledge of (I probably got one in three, if that) to greatly benefit from a oration that doesn't wonder where a movement came from or where it went, but mourns for those who have gone ahead and buckles itself in for the long game. What prevented that fifth star of mine was the fact that, at one of the lowest, if not the lowest, points of the narrative, Dunbar conflated a violent Black trans woman sex worker (In the cell was a black woman I assumed to be a prostitute...It crossed my mind that the person was a man disguised as a woman...) with an inviolable reason for her to give up direct revolutionary action and retreat to academia. Don't get me wrong, by the time she had reached 35, Dunbar had done ten times more good than I'll probably ever achieve. I just know narrative framing when I see it, and that particular authorial choice, especially in a purportedly feminist and anti-racist record (queer liberation was something Dunbar got to after 1975) left a bad taste in my mouth.

Last week we discovered that one of the members of our women’s study group, a graduate student at the Heller School of Social Work at Brandeis University, which is intimately connected with the Lamberg Center for the Study of Violence (also at Brandeis), was sending detailed reports of our meetings in order to continue receiving her stipend [...]
The research that some of us and others in left movements have done reveals that this information is used at the highest level to break movements, both in this country and everywhere else in the world. Universities and research institutes are increasingly being used by the ruling class as information sources for psychological warfare (sometimes called “software” techniques) against peoples’ movements as well as for developing the physically destructive “hardware” machinery for their counter-insurgency work.

[John Thorne] extracted one sheet—an FBI memorandum dated 5/27/68 and headed "Counterintelligence Program, Internal Security: Disruption of the New Left." [: "]Certain key leaders must be chosen to become the object of a counterintelligence plot to identify them as government informants. It appears that this is the only thing that could cause these individuals concern, if some of their leaders turned out to be paid informers. Attacking their morals, disrespect for the law, or patriotic disdain will not impress their followers, as it would normally to other groups, so it must be by attacking them through their own principles and beliefs.["]

I'm a handful of books away from logging 2000 read on this site (although I'm sure I've forgotten plenty and including manga would push me towards 3000, easy). You get to this point, you look at the world, you look at yourself, and you wonder when what you've learned in the process will carry over to what you see. Dunbar, these days Dunbar-Ortiz, is still kicking, and I doubt she's all that pleased with the fact that the US, in its current state, is as well. Roe vs. Wade has been struck down, social justice is still mired in the electoral politics she despised, and the wave of unionism has likely mostly sacrificed militant comradery for "DEI" equivocating. Then again, maybe she has changed along with it, and if I ever ran into her on Twitter (however long that keeps from self-imploding), maybe she'd have a puerile flag or two in her username, sacrificing the complexity of history for a quick jolt of self-righteous nationalism. Still, so many of her generation were lost to the war years from 1960 to 1975 that I'd hope she still refuses to feed the beast, however 'progressive' it's cloaked itself as in its loaves of bread and tightropes of circuses. Long story short, once upon a time, there was a woman who escaped one household full of violence and found herself in a country soaked in blood and a timeline steeped in genocide, and ended up asking herself whether there was any space for thought in the time of the military industrial complex. You may think you have nothing to learn from such a tale. But you'd be wrong.

For once, in the history of the United States, a significant number of us told ourselves the truth.

[Jacob Wren]

A few short passages from this amazing book:



These are the worst male chauvinists I have ever encountered, and they are supposedly leftist radicals. After being called a “bird” for the hundredth time, I told a fellow to fuck off at a party last week – caused an awful scene, really. I have started calling men “bats” – it has caught on rather well.



It took several days for Flo to arrange the meeting with Valerie [Solanas], so T-Grace took me to women’s meetings in New York and introduced me to dozens of women’s liberation activists: some reformists, some radicals, some extremists. One was a young lesbian biologist who avidly supported Valerie, whom she took quite literally. She was researching viruses, hoping to identify a fatal one that would attack males only. She said that once males were eradicated, she planned to introduce chemical reproduction without sperm. Furthermore, women would no longer carry the fetus; rather, the process would take place in the laboratory. She chatted about this idea as if she were discussing the weather. Now I understood what Stokely Carmichael had meant when he said that young black militants in Chicago had called him “Uncle Tom.” When I challenged the young woman, she called me a “daddy’s girl,” Valerie’s term for male-identified women.



Police surveillance and infiltration would only grow worse. More than half the fugitive’s on the FBI’s most wanted list were charged with politically motivated crimes. There were so many agent provocateurs and informers that it was thought that half the membership of some organizations were infiltrators. Even the alternative literary presses and moderate antiwar and peace groups were not exempt. The FBI, using provocateurs, was also partly responsible for the violent direction the movement was taking. Inexplicable suicides and accidental deaths were being reported among former participants of the Venceremos Brigades. In the growing atmosphere of surveillance and danger, the necessity to develop a clandestine structure began to seem like the only way to continue our work.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fierce and uncompromising, Dunbar-Ortiz tracks her personal and political journeys through the "long sixties." It's a story of awakening, breaking free, exploring options, making mistakes, self-criticism and, above all, unwavering commitment to the liberation of women, working class people, and the vast number of communities--domestic and international--struggling to live with dignity under the capitalist system. There are times--quite a few of them--when I was irritated with Dunbar-Ortiz's self-righteous tone, but I usually backed away from the initial response, putting it in the context of her own struggle--she *had* to be fierce to survive, and of the politics of a time when ideological correctness was seen not just as a necessity but as a virtue. It's not particularly well written--too many abstractions and jump cuts (which to some degree mirror her life). But it's useful, which I'm sure was her primary intent; she cites Marge Piercy's great poem "To Be of Use" as one of her inspirations. For those who didn't live through the time, Outlaw Woman gets the *feel* of radical politics right; in retrospect, mistakes were made, but they stemmed from impulses that remain legitimate. If you don't know the difference between the Revolutionary Union, the Socialist Labor Party, the Weathermen, or "political" and "cultural" feminists, this is an excellent place to start.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz makes history come alive while telling her story of left activism embued with a strong working class orientation, feminism, and commitment to internationalism.

I found this book in the bibliography at the end of Dan Berger's book "Outlaws of America."

Dunbar-Ortiz writes on page 251:
I clearly stated what I thought then, and still think:
I am a Marxist and a revolutionary and I don't believe that has to be contradictory to women's liberation. It is a given that women will not be liberated under capitalism. No one will.

[Sezin Koehler · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sort of sequel to "Red Dirt," that then delves into Roxanne's history as a women's liberation activist and revolutionary. I never knew that Roxanne and I share a love for Valerie Solanas, founder of the Society for Cutting Up Men and author of the brilliantly irreverant "SCUM Manifesto."

Yet, once again, I was so reminded of my own mother's history as an activist and I really hope that one day she'll write out her experience of these war years and beyond.

[Daniel Burton-Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite memoirs of the '70s. I particularly appreciate the perspective of a militant who considered the guerrilla option but pulled back just in time.

[Ciara · Rating 4 out of 5]

of dunbar-ortiz's three sequential memoirs, i liked this one the best. probably because it felt the most like she was just writing about everything that happened & not trying quite so hard to prove a point. there is a bit of point-proving in here (like the way she builds up her opposition to the vietnam war--why can't she just give it a rest & let her books speak for themselves?), but it's fairly minimal. the book opens with her youthful marriage disintegrating in california & roxanne deciding she wants to be free of it & pursue a college degree. she starts attending university of california in berkeley & gets divorced right around the same time that the free speech movement stuff was happening on the berkeley campus, which leads her into anti-war activism, which leads her into feminism (due to the anti-war movement & the new left in general being pretty macho & uncool on the lady front). a good chunk of this book is about her realizing the huge impact that sexism has played in her life, how a burgeoning feminist consciousness helped her leave her marriage & finish school, etc etc. she kind of wastes a lot of time chastising other political movements for their lack of a feminist consciousness. dude, we know. that's why the second wave got going. i mean, it's not that she's not making a valid point. it just has this beating-a-dead-horse air to it, you know? & then when she gets into the petty (& occasionally not-so-petty) in-fighting among various feminists & radical women...for pete's sake. no wonder the ERA didn't pass. okay, maybe that's not fair. it's just that i get sick of every dunbar-ortiz memoir having an axe to gring against some other prominent political peer. it really just comes across as a bunch of petty jealousy that you'd thing she would have gotten over in the last thirty years. in this one, she lays into cathy wilkerson & accuses her of threatening members of roxanne's feminist collective. cathy wilkerson addresses this in her own memoir & says that she did no such thing & thinks it was an FBI trick. which, it probably was. roxanne was just so quick to point fingers. it bugged me. nonetheless, i'm glad i read it. very interesting stuff.

[Sharmeen · Rating 4 out of 5]

4I read this book while I was traveling in Cuba this year, so it was the perfect companion of an autobiography of a feminist and revolutionary who went on the 3rd Venceremos brigade in Cuba and went through various struggles to make revolutionary work forefront in her life.

My main problem with the book is that while she writes quite objectively about her failures, the mistakes she has made, there is very little writing on real critical analysis of these mistakes. One disturbing trend is her involvement in radical feminist work and yet, her constant return to abusive controlling men. She writes of the irony, but little detail as to what was going on for her politically. I sometimes felt that perhaps she was jumping from issue to issue based on the romantic image of the movements rather than an articulation of what they meant to her. She glossed over some important contradictions such as how the women's movement did not include women of colour and how she dealth with these contradictions.

But with these contradictions and her honesty with her various journeys, this book was incredibly moving and inspiring for the reason that she does situate herself as a martyr or a hero. Although I was left more with questions.

This is an accessible and engaging political autobiography with a lot of history and perspective. What I really appreciated was her writing on mass movement mobilizations with an internationalist perspective and how she dealt with the contradictions with various organizations, including some good pokes at the Weather Underground. Plus, it was an alternative read of the radical socialist organizing during the 60s and 70s that does not romanticize the tactics nor gloss over the failures. Probably most helpful were her excerpts of various revolutionary documents to contextualize her organizing.

I look forward to reading her other books.

[Benjamin Fasching-Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Instead of clear-eyed hindsight, Dunbar-Ortiz drops right in it: Exciting, frustrating, and at times terrifying. Even as she gets involved in some pretty foolish situations, her intellect comes blazing through.

One strange thing that I enjoy reflecting on: If Diane Arbus hadn't photographed Dunbar-Ortiz, would she have faced as much COINTELPRO hell? The whole thing about "stars" in the Women's Liberation movement takes on a decidedly more threatening character in this memoir.

Have you ever had a frustrating conversation with an RCP member, like, you are trying to have a conversation, but they are just trying to recite the correct bit of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist analysis from memory to fit whatever issue you've raised? Dunbar-Ortiz reveals some of the weirdness in that group's origins... Avakian and other radicals and reformers as well as Dunbar-Ortiz herself do not sail through this book coming out like saints. When people are jerks or are downright dangerous, she doesn't flinch.

This book would benefit from an index. It would be nice to be able to easily flip back to pages where certain other activists or activist groups are mentioned, or certain locations as she road trips around the country and the "underground."

Because Dunbar-Ortiz doesn't pretend to have all the answers, I think this would make an excellent book club choice.

[Chad Montabon · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is over-long, at 400+ pages, for what you get. It reminded me of another 'over-long' book, 'A Taste of Power' be Elaine Brown who briefly headed the Black Panther party, but found a way to put herself as the hero of the whole movement.

Dunbar-Ortiz story starts off with her leaving a family that she started too young. She mentions her daughter only a few times. Her first husband, 'Jimmy' gets the treatment, but to this reader he comes off as a saint.

There is a lot of name dropping, but ultimately Mrs. Dunbar-Ortiz was not all that committed. She did earn multiple degrees and was temporarily 'under-ground', but other than likely making a threat against Spiro Agnew this 'militant' didn't actually do much.

It would be good if potential students at San Francisco State College could read this before taking her class, but ultimately that would be a lot to ask. It does read well in the final third of the book, but mostly it is dull (not reflective of the MFA she earned.

[NOLaBookish aka blue-collared mind · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have passed this name in more than a few 60s history, but not much detail except passages like " this seemed to be the outlook of radical feminists like Roxane Dunbar" etc etc.
So, when I saw this on the shelf in Iron Rail in our excellent biography section, I was delighted to find it.
Read it in a day, thought she got the high points-her evolution to Cell 16, her move to a more serious anti-establishment outlook and life lived among those historical events.
I had no idea that she stationed herself in New Orleans for the most radical period (and I am sure it seemed where better to amass caches of guns than in a third world city forgotten by America, even then?) The New Orleans stuff rings very true, so I am willing to buy the rest as a practical retelling of a activist's time in history, and one that I hope more newer versions of her take the time to read.

[ryan bears · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was my first read during my first month/winter in pdx. i enjoyed reading this book. and it reads really fast. but a memoir offers the ability to reflect and i don't see alot of that in this book.

two examples:

first, when rita mae brown challenges dunbar as non inclusive of lesbians, dunbar doesnt really know what to say. which, when it happened, could be understandable. she was on the spot. but this is after the fact, why not acknowledge or engage rita mae brown's critiques. dunbar never does.

second, if it was so important for dunbar to 'go underground.' why not take some time to explain what you saw in the underground and how that change significantly.

lots of good cali history from the 60's to 70's

[Megan Straughan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an absolutely eye-opening book. I especially appreciated how straightforward the author was about her memories, she rarely provided analysis or explained how her thoughts had changed past the years the memoir covered. This allowed me to feel more immersed in the history and place this story in my own context. I'm embarrassed to say I was surprised over and over reading this book. I think my privileged millennial mind glossed over this era with a "activists in this time were heroes, leaders, etc." and never understood the complexities or specifics of organizing these movement. This was a thought-provoking read and will certainly cause me to consider history more thoroughly when crafting my own beliefs and actions as they relate to justice and activism.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very candid and honest. This autobiography is "part 2" of a three book series by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. This installment follows her awakening to feminism, involvement with militant organizations in the 60's and 70's and work up until the end of the U.S. occupation in Vietnam in 1975. An excellent and well documented work highlighting the activities of revolutionary organizations by a participant. The author has a very descriptive and honest retelling and recounts her own mistakes without shame or self judgement. Excellent!

[Allee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this, devoured it in a couple days. Memoir traces Dunbar-Ortiz getting 'woke', as the kids would call it these days, and increasingly radicalized throughout the 60s and 70s. It felt very pertinent to where I'm at right now. Kind of depressing in the way that a lot of the shit they were figuring out then is still being figured out now (how to make mainstream feminism actually inclusive of all womens concerns rather than a province of white women, for example), and I felt like I recognized a lot of the issues she was struggling through. Recommend to my fellow awakening women.

[Sarah Shourd]

Roxanne is a powerful example of the 60s-70s radical feminist movement in this country. This autobiography reads like a novel and makes me hungry for more of this obscured history. Interesting to examine how the women's movement has changed, then it was brave and sensational act to cut one's hair on television, it was almost too easy to be revolutionary. Now, the face of femininity has changed but women choose to sell-out to get political power.

[World Literature Today]

"Dunbar-Ortiz’s Outlaw Woman is an essential read for anyone on the periphery of society who yearns to resist the status quo. It is an even more crucial read for the privileged who may wonder what a commitment to a pluralist feminist politics entails." - Danielle Harden, University of Oklahoma

This book was reviewed in the March 2015 issue of World Literature Today. Read the full review by visiting our website: http://bit.ly/1F5rzx2

[Bart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though a memoir, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz' Outlaw Woman roots autobiography in political context, widening the frame and scope of the book. Not only does Dunbar-Ortiz engage in some pretty cool actions (and other ones in which she later is not happy she participated), she exposes inner workings of radical activist movements with great insights that are relevant to dynamics in current activist scenes.

[Tayib · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Greek the word for truth, "alethia", is not the opposite of "lie" as one would expect, but of "lethe", which means forgetting. So truth is unforgetting.

"It is essential that we 'un-forget' these things as we engage in present in future struggles. We must tell ourselves and our children and our children's children our stories of the war years...."

[HeavyReader · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book takes up where Red Dirt left off. This story is more radical and political, all about Roxanne's work in the women's liberation movement and the time she spent underground. Also an excellent, engaging read.

[James Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Start with Personal Politics and then read this book.

[wheels · Rating 5 out of 5]

i am grateful to learn from our elders about resisitance, repression, and long haul struggle.

[Mel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This gave me a whole new insight into the history of women's liberation and radical politics.

[Andrea Janov · Rating 3 out of 5]

This memoir was maybe the most informative overview of interconnected movements of the 60s and 70s. While I was familiar with many of the causes that were mentioned, I realized just how surface level my information was. This first hand account is really invaluable to really understanding the history of our political unrest, which is still plaguing us today.

[Rachel Kucan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-read it after having to read it for a college class years ago and it made so much more sense to me now. It’s a fascinating journey. And an inspiring one at that. Her perspective helps me look at the world from a different angle, in an important way.

[Marek Eby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand US radicalism in the 1960s or (indirectly) its reflections and aftermaths today

[Mirza Sultan-Galiev · Rating 4 out of 5]

The scene with "Chairman Bob" is priceless and that's just the beginning..

[Olivia Sonell]

Roxanne's' recollections of her work in the 60s & 70s is important. In order for Revolution to be successful we need to understand why we've failed to make them in the past.

Roxanne's' important conclusion is that most USbased Revolutionaries have failed to make a historical analysis of the entire US situation, often only questioning the legitimacy of the Govt because of Slavery & Imperialism and because it isn't living up to the ideal of "liberty and justice for all", yet they ignore or consider as secondary that the US is a settler colony, on occupied land, carved out of the bodies of hundreds of millions indigenous peoples. That is what is at the root of US illegitimacy.