Iconic Black feminist Dorothy Pitman Hughes dies aged 84

Hughes formed a powerful partnership with Gloria Steinem, helping to change the face of the feminist movement

The widely respected Black feminist activist Dorothy Pitman Hughes died at her daughter’s home in Tampa, Florida earlier this month. She was 84 years old.

Ms Hughes rose to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, campaigning around the country with fellow activist Gloria Steinem and helping to change the face of a feminist movement that had, up to that point, been dominated by white, middle class women.

Ms Hughes met Ms Steinem in 1968 in New York at the West 80th St Community Childcare Center, the multiracial cooperative childcare center she had organised to help women like herself who were unable to afford the cost of traditional care.

Throughout the her career, Ms Hughes remain laser-focused on the intersections between gender, class, and race and how they affected women in New York City and beyond.

In addition to her role in organising the cooperative childcare center, Ms Hughes also organised the city’s first shelter for battered women and co-founded the New York City Agency for Child Development. She would later serve as a guest lecturer at Columbia University and City College, Manhattan, own an office supply store in Harlem that was eventually run out of business by a Clinton administration economic development programme, and published a memior.

Ms Hughes is perhaps best known, however, for her partnership with Ms Steinem — who credited Ms Hughes with improving her capacity for public speaking. The pair toured around the country in the ‘70s, speaking to a wide array of audiences. Ms Hughes also helped Ms Steinham found Ms. Magazine, the country’s first national feminist magazine, which still publishes today.

In October of 1971, photographer Dan Wynn captured both Ms Hughes and Ms Steinem with their fists raised in the Black power salute. The photograph was published in Esquire and is today a part of the National Portrait Gallery.

That photograph was one of a number of memorable points on a remarkable journey through the American twentieth century. Ms Hughes was born in Lampkin, Georgia in 1938, where she said her family believes it was the victim of Ku Klux Klan when she was a child.

She moved to New York as a 19 year old and worked a variety of jobs before launching her career in activism and movement politics. Her cause of death was reported as old age.

“My friend Dorothy Pitman Hughes ran a pioneering neighborhood childcare center on the west side of Manhattan...” Ms Steinem wrote in an email to Politico. “We met in the seventies when I wrote about that childcare center, and we became speaking partners and lifetime friends. She will be missed, but if we keep telling her story, she will keep inspiring us all.”