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PATTIE
One of the reasons for keeping a
diary is to be able to revisit it years later.
In 1995, from January to July, Carl kept an official diary of
activities he did as an intern, working for the Tampa, Florida chapter
of the US National Organization for Women.
The internship began with the goal of providing a high-level
statistical analysis comparing the status of women in Florida to the
remaining 49 states and the rest of the world.
This turned out to be an ambitious project that was more worthy
of a doctoral dissertation than an internship.
But the volumes of data and the lack of a cohesive source of data
to use for comparisons were not the only reasons that the scope of the
original project narrowed. What
started out to be a research project that Tampa NOW could use but could
never have afforded from a consultant ended up being a journey into the
world of political organisation, protest and burn-out that shaped
Carl’s views of political action, most especially the role that media
plays in determining who gets heard and who does not.
In the year before this
internship, the NOW chapter went through a major upheaval with the
ousting of the previous board of directors in favour of a group that was
determined to connect the chapter to social justice issues that affected
the lives of impoverished women. The
members who achieved this change in leadership were mostly poor
themselves. Carl’s
internship coincided with a period of time during which many of the
members were discovering how difficult it was to put issues of poverty
and social justice on popular agendas.
It was a time when the US Congress’s newly elected Republican
majority was flexing its muscle with the so-called Contract with
America. The political
rhetoric at both the federal level and the state level was backing poor
women and men into corners from which they could not return.
Unlike the recent worldwide protests against the war in Iraq and
against globalisation, protests during this period were small and
largely ignored by mainstream press.
The Internet was young and no quote, alternative media, close
quote, existed beyond a few local newspapers here or there.
Today on First Person,
Plural, we are sharing excerpts from the seven-month diary in
chronological order. The
diary, in many ways, speaks for itself as we follow the course of both
intern and organisation during a difficult period of transition away
from social justice in Florida and in the United States.
Carl shares his experience, his analyses and his insights in an
episode we call Working for Women.
copyright
by Pattie Thomas and Carl Wilkerson 2003
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