The first time I saw the Raging Grannies protesting outside of the Student Union building, I wondered who spiked the tea at the Red Hat Society meeting. Here were these elderly women tricked out in gaudy hats and feather boas, waving signs and belting out protest songs.
It's not at all unusual to see groups protesting or promoting causes on the UMass campus, but this was something different. These weren't students or crazies come up from Amherst's liberal underbelly. They were something new - something that drew crowds out of passing students and made people want to know what they were singing for.
The Raging Grannies are a lot like the Red Hat Society. That is, if the Red Hat Society had a political agenda and a penchant for getting arrested for protesting army recruitment centers. They're an international organization of women old enough to be grandmothers who dedicate themselves to the non-violent protest of social injustice. They dress in clothes intended to mock the stereotype of older women or "grannies" and sing songs to draw attention to their cause.
"We use who we are," says Paki Wieland, a Northampton resident and one of the "grannies" arrested at an army recruitment center in Greenfield last year. "Right now, when older women start singing, it has a disarming quality. People will listen to us because of who we are."
The Raging Grannies depend on radical actions to incite the public to action. If the sight of old ladies singing disarms the public, then the sight of them being dragged away in handcuffs enrages it.
The Raging Grannies represent a dying breed of American activism. These are women who began fighting social injustice promoting the Civil Rights Movement or protesting the Vietnam War. Activists in their time were burning draft cards, hosting illegal sit-ins, and being hauled off Montgomery buses in shackles to fight for social justice. The most radical form of protest seen on campus today is the chalking of University sidewalks.
Student activists today are more likely to table or party for peace than perform radical acts of civil disobedience. Activism has become a part of the mainstream, and today's activists are quieter and more moderate than their predecessors from the 1960s and 1970s. The most aggressive "activist" group on campus today is fighting for the legalization of marijuana. At a glance, it would seem that the roar has gone out of contemporary activism.
The reason for the shift may be more complicated than that. "We live in a more repressed society than we did in the sixties," says Wieland, "Students are hemmed in by more restrictions, like the dependence on government power to take away student loans."
Our society is freer and more repressed than it has ever been. We have more legally recognized rights than ever before, but more restrictions and limitations on those rights. We're more dependent on the government for education, health care and employment. We're less free to act because our actions are more easily tracked and recorded than ever before by the government.
Additionally, the kinds of injustice that activists face today are less concrete than those in the 1960s, and therefore harder to fight. It's harder to protest the war when it's being fought by a volunteer army. It's harder to protest the effects of racism or sexism when there's no law to be overturned, and only a sort of indefinite social mentality that upholds the oppression. While our laws make us look like the freest nation on earth, our rights are slipping away on technicalities.
The new activists work within the system to achieve change. They're quieter, more mainstream, but that does not necessarily make them less passionate; just less visible. Instead of civil disobedience, they petition to overturn unjust laws by legal means.
It's a new form of activism, and just as necessary as the radical demonstrations from groups like the Raging Grannies. "We need to form cross-generational alliances," says Wieland. "Support each other, and we'll help you move on to take the torch."
Rachel Dougherty is a Collegian columnist. She can be reached at rdougher@student.umass.edu.
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