Clothesline Project
History of the Clothesline Project
In the spring of 1990, the Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Women's Agenda was searching for a way to communicate the horrific extent of violence perpetrated against women. The group was outraged by a statistic compiled by the Marlyand Men's Anti-rape Resource Center, which estimated 51,000 women were murdered in the United States by their husbands or lovers during the 16 years of the Vietnam War, where 58,000 Americans had died. During a visit of the moving Vietnam Memorial, the group asked itself, "Where is our wall? Our war has never ended--in fact, it is worse than it ever was."
One member of the group, an artist named Rachel Carey-Harper, answered that question with a powerfully simply concept: a clothesline on which women could air out the "dirty laundry" in the form of a shirt describing the violence they had experienced. On October 8, 1990, the Cape Cod Women's Agenda hung a clothesline on the town green in Hyannis. Thirty-one shirts blowing in the sea breeze proclaimed that violence against women could be found everywhere, even in a vacation Mecca and in every stratum of society.
Word of the potent display spread rapidly. The Cape Cod Clothesline traveled the northeast coast, arriving in Washington, D.C. in March 1991 for a display in a Congressional committee room, the first time members of the House of Representatives and the Senate were exposed to the project. A display at the 1991 National Congress of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, spread the Clothesline to California, Washington, Texas, Virginia, and Illinois. A brief article in Ms magazine prompted calls from all over the country. By the end of 1991, more than 40 local Clothesline Projects were being displayed around the United States.
The project continued to grow at an incredible rate. A Northeast conference was held in Worcester, Massachusettes in 1991, the largest gathering of local projects, displaying more than 750 shirts. Pictures and words about the Clothesline were carried to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, to the 1992 International Congress of WILPF; and delegates from 110 countries took the idea home with them initiating projects in Tanzania, Costa Rica, England, Canada, Israel, the Phillipines and Cuba. The Monterey Peninsula California project traveled to Geneva, Switzerland as testimony at the United Nations Human Rights Conference in 1993. After the National Display at Washington, D.C., the Clothesline Project will travel to Beijing as part of the U.N.'s International Conference on Women.
The true power of the Clothesline lies in its grassroots approach, with individuals and organizations breaking the silence about violence happening in their own communities. More than 250 Clothesline Projects have been organized at the local level with upwards of 35,000 shirts created by survivors. The problem of violence against women has a national and even global aspect; nevertheless, it is a war that must be waged on local fronts as well. Just as the shirts hang shoulder-to-shoulder, so must the public, the legislators, and the law-enforcement agencies combine forces to affect real change.
The Clothesline Project has allowed thousands of women to put a face on the numbers--their own face. The hope is that, with strength and courage, survivors everywhere wil hand up their shirts and say, "No More", helping to end the violence that affects us all.