Overview of the Project

(The Clothesline Project - National Network - Presentation by Coordinator in 1994

National Network, Box 727, East Dennis, MA 02641 508-385-7004)

According to the Men's Anti-Rape Center in Washington, D.C., 58,000 soldiers died in the Vietnam War. During the same period of time, 51,000 women were killed by men who supposedly loved them. That statistic became the catalyst for the Cape Cod Women's Agenda to consciously develop a program that would educate, break the silence and bear witness to one issue, violence against women.

This small core group of lesbian and straight women, many of whom had experienced some form of personal violence, wanted to find a unique way to take staggering, mind-numbing statistics and turn them into a provocative, "in-your-face" educational and healing tool.

After a few months of discussion, one of the women, a visual artists who had been moved by the power of the AIDS quilt, came up with the concept of using shirts - hanging on a clothesline - as the vehicle for raising awareness around the issue of violence against women. The idea of using a clothesline was natural. Doing the laundry has always been considered women's work, and in the days of close-knit neighborhoods, women often exchanged information over backyard fences while hanging their clothes out to dry. The concept was simple - let each women tell her own story, in her own unique way, and hang it out for all to see. It was and is a way of airing society's dirty laundry.

The original Clothesline Project with 31 shirts, was displayed on the village green in Hyannis, Massachusetts, in October of 1990, as part of the annual Take Back the Night March and Rally. Throughout the day, women came forward to create shirts and the line just kept growing.

After that first successful event, project organizers thought that maybe, some day, some other group of women somewhere just might be interested in having such a display in their area.

A small blurb appearing in a magazine called "Off Our Backs" was picked up by Ms Magazine and everything changed for the Clothesline Project. All of a sudden organizers were traveling up and down the East Coast, displaying in colleges, statehouses, churches, museums, and shopping malls.

Since then, we've grown to over 250 projects nationally and internationally with an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 shirts. There are projects in 41 states and 5 countries - that we know of. This ever-expanding grassroots network is as far-flung as Tanzania and Israel, and as close as East Dennis, Massachusetts.

The Clothesline Project honors women survivors as well as victims of intimate violence. For the purpose of this presentation, a survivor is any woman who has experienced personal violence and lived to tell about it. The term victim is reserved for those women who did not survive.

Participating in this project often provides another key to helping a survivor break through the shroud of silence that has surrounded her experience. Any woman who has experienced such violence, at any time in her life, is encouraged to come forward and design a shirt. Victim's families and friends are also invited to participate.

It is the very process of designing a shirt that gives each woman a new voice with which to expose an often horrific and unspeakable experience that has dramatically altered the course of her life.

The hanging of her shirt gives her the opportunity to leave behind some of the pain of her experience and move on to the next phase of her life. Over and over women tell us that before they saw the Clothesline Project, they felt like prisoners trapped by the bars of isolation and shame that came from their experience. For families and friends of women who have died, making a shirt is a unique way to express their deep loss and demonstrate how their lives have been unalterably changed by this senseless act of violence. They are comforted, knowing that the memory of their loved one will live on through her shirt, and will teach others about the devastating impact of violence against women.

Seeing stories, similar to theirs, hanging on the line, break through those feelings and give the survivor a sense of community. "Here is a woman who really knows what I'm feeling. She's been there - she understands."

At a recent UMass Boston Display, a student between classes, came runnning in to see what all the excitement was about in the Harbor Gallery. She went up and touched one of the shirts and started crying. "I don't have time to make a shirt, I'm already late for my next class," she said. "But, thank you for being here, I thought I was the only one," she said as she fingered the shirt. "I'm so glad to know I'm not alone!" Then she ran out still crying. Although we didn't see her again, I know that seeing the Clothesline Project gave her a connection with women she'll probably never meet.

An interesting side note comes from women who have made shirts who reconnect with us in some way to share how the Clothesline Project enabled their journey through the healing process. Often too afraid to speak out, creating a shirt empowered them to put their story into words and give it physical form. From there, many women moved forward and regained control of their lives.

The shirts that hang on the Clothesline Project represent a wide spectrum of abuse- rape, battering, incest, and murder to name a few. When this project began, we adopted a color code to help us keep a visual statistic about this particular violence. Red, pink, and orange for women who have been raped or sexually assaulted; yellow or beige for women who were battered or otherwise assaulted; blue or green for incest or childhood sexual asault; white for women who died as a result of violence; and purple or lavender for women who are attacked specifically because they were or were perceived to be lesbian.

During each presentation or display of the Clothesline Project a tape created by the project is played. Entitled the Sounds of Sexism, the repititious sounds are audible reminders of the level of violence to which women are exposed in this country. The bell, whistle, and gong indicate the frequency and types of violence perpetrated against women. The gong is struck to indicate a woman has been battered. Current statistics show this occurs every 12-15 seconds. The whistle is blown to indicate a reported rape. Every minute of every day in this country more than one woman is reported raped. The last sound, the bell, tells us that another women has died at the hands of a batterer. In the United States, 3 to 4 women are killed by batterers every day. These statistics come from the National Victim Center, a clearing house for information dealing with personal violence.

It's important to acknowledge that everything about the Clothesline - the sounds, the shirts with their graphic, very personal stories, and this material in general, can be gut wrenching and often produce feelings that are difficult to deal with. Think carefully about taking the time you need to really honor those feelings.

One of the newest aspects of our work is our high school outreach project. Statistics from the US Justice Department state that about half of all violent crimes against teenagers aged 12 through 19 take place at school, in school buildings, on school property, or in the streets surrounding the school. According to the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault, dating violence affects one out of ten teen couples.

This devastating reality filters down at different levels in each of our communities. With teen dating violence becoming one of the fastest rising statistics in the United States, we felt a need to reach a younger audience and thereby interrupt this violence at an earlier age. To accomplish this goal, we've enlisted middle and high school administrators, adjustment and guidance counselors, psychologists, school nurses, and teachers in this effort. The obvious goal is to interrupt, through education, the assumption that violence against women and girls is acceptable behavior and will be tolerated. What may not be so obvious is that we're challenging students to take a hard look at their behavior by exposing them to the outcomes of such abuse.

It is out hope that young men and women, who may already either be engaged in or exposed to this type of behavior, will realize that they have other options.

Seeing the display in a school setting has had profound impact on students, faculty, and project organizers alike. Between April and June of this year, we displayed the original line in five schools in the Cape Cod area. After viewing the Clothesline, over 100 students came forward to tell their stories by creating shirts. Again and again we heard that this was the first time they had told anyone about what had happened to them and that seeing the shirts - with experiences similar to theirs - gave them the courage and incentive to speak out. The first student in each school who has the courage to come forward and create a shirt helps birth a new community of survivors and their allies in that school.

Teachers in every one of those schools have told us that spending 45 minutes with the Clothesline Project, reading the shirts and hearing the audio tape, reached students in ways that other curriculum presentations could not.

Written evaluations from students tell us that until they viewed the Clothesline Project, young men and women thought hitting, hair pulling, and throwing their girlfriends up against a wall meant that he liked her... and after all, "everybody's doing it so what's the problem?" We also heard that when presenters came into their classroom to relate line by line statistics about violence against women, it goes right over their heads...until they see the shirts hanging on the line. Witnessing this powerful, physical testimony reaches behind their denial and opens the gate into that place where we we all attempt, at times, to hide our feelings. I have yet to see anyone walk away from a display untouched or unmoved and after 12 years of activist related work, I continue to be amazed at the impact information presented in this fashion can make on young men and women.

Along with giving students an opportunity to bring voice to their own experiences, additional goals include working in tandem local rape/crisis/battered women's/sexual assault centers and schools in a communal effort to provide safe, supportive environments for students to discuss and learn from one another's experiences.We are very fortunate to have the staff of Independence House working with us during our inservice programs and displays. Their well-trained counselors provide outreach information and support to students and staff throughout our time in the schools.

As a direct result of having brought the Clothesline Project in high schools, students in several schools now have started student survivor support groups and groups for young men who may be afraid of or questioning their own aggressive behaviors.

Before every display, we meet with the faculty and expose them to the shirts and sounds, so they will have an understanding of the impact the project will have on their students.

At every display, we offer a variety of handouts relevant to the audience we're addressing, as well as providing opportunities for viewers to get involved - organizing a project in their area, creating a shirt, writing letters or making phonecalls to their legislators - to name a few.

The Clothesline Project is committed to ending violence against women through education. It is our belief that such violence is a direct manifestation of sexism, and that this violence is perpetuated and rooted in the mentality of domination and "power over" the other.

We believe that encouraging women to take action in their own communities, at the grassroots level, is the most empowering way to bring about change. To that end, at least 80% of our organizers are brand new activists who have chosen the Clothesline Project as their first step into the political arena. They are people who live and work in their communities. While we provide leadership training, educational materials and ongoing support, it is the local activist who fashions the project based on the needs of the constituents in her community.

We have Clothesline Projects that are church, agency, shelter, and organizationally-based as well as those that have sprung from the interest of a few committes souls not connected with any particular organized effort.

The magnitude of the issue of violence against women and its interconnectedness to all the oppressions is not lost on the Clothesline Project. We continue to make the connections between sexism, racism, homophobia, ageism, ableism, and religious opression by working in coalition with state-wide and national organizations doing similar work.

Some of those organizations include: the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the National Organization for Women, the Women's Statewide Legislative Network, and Unitarian Universalist's Acting to Stop Violence Against Women.

I've often been asked if I really think this violent behavior that has been around for centuries will ever change? Do I really have hope? Yes, quite frankly I do. Violence is a learned behavior, it's not genetically inherited. I firmly believe that if we can learn a particular behavior, we can unlearn it as well.

And the atmosphere is ripe for us to look at violence against women and children with a new sense of creativity and a renewed sense of purpose and energy.

I've heard of some very exciting programs dealing with conflict resolution where schools are teaching peacemaking and conflict resolution skills to children at the elementary school level while middle and high schools are enrolling students in the peer leadership training programs. In both cases, target students are trained in conflict resolution and peer mediation. They have agree to take on the responsibility of being role models, and mediating conflicts that come up in their classroom or on the playground. In every case, the emphasis is on a peaceful, nonviolent, resolution of the dispute using a respectful process.

Surely part of the solution has to include teaching these skills to all of our children... and ourselves for that matter. Having access to new tools for dealing with the anger, frustration, and psychic injury that so often explodes into violent behavior will provide us with other options for dealing with those feelings. We individually and collectively, need to make a conscious choice to go back to the beginning to fine a new avenue of approach that gets at the root cause of our inability to deal with conflict as a non-violent, creative oppotunity for growth.

In closing, I'd like to add that as one more person comes forward to join the growing corps of people committed to ending domestic violence, and as another woman has the courage to tell her story, create her shirt, and hang it on the Clothesline, the personal violence to which we, as women, are all too often exposed, becomes a little more visible, and a lot less tolerable - and society's dirty little secret becomes more exposed. I have no doubt that working together we'll make dramatic changes.

One day at a time - one shirt at a time - one woman at a time - one organization at a time - we can, and we will bring an end to violence against women.