Dorothy Pittman Hughes, Advocate for Women and Children

01/30/2023

Dorothy Pittman Hughes, Advocate for Women and Children

Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.
Albert Schweitzer, physician and philosopher, 1875-1965

Most people remember Dorothy Pittman Hughes, who passed away in December, from the iconic photograph with Gloria Steinem, fists raised in the air. As an activist, Pittman Hughes broke ground in ways both pragmatic and practical.

According to the Washington Post, “Ms. Hughes organized one of the first shelters for battered women in New York City and co-founded the New York City Agency for Child Development to broaden child-care services in the city. But she was perhaps best known for her work helping countless families through the community center she established on Manhattan’s West Side, offering day care, job training, advocacy training and more.”

The Post story elaborates: “By the mid-1960s, after having trouble finding anyone to look after her own children, she had started the West 80th Street Day Care and Community Center and charged $5 per week for a child.”

Her biographer Laura L. Lovett noted, “She realized that child-care challenges were deeply entangled with issues of racial discrimination, poverty, drug use, substandard housing, welfare hotels, job training and even the Vietnam War.”

Pittman Hughes told her own story in Wake Up and Smell the Dollars! Whose Inner-City Is This Anyway!: One Woman’s Struggle Against Sexism, Classism, Racism, Gentrification, and the Empowerment Zone. (2000)

PS—Today is the last day to register for tomorrow’s Engaging Exchange with Rukia Rogers, hosted by Sara Gilliam and Cecilia Scott-Croff. Don’t miss this live online conversation on “Our Beloved Community: Supporting Children's Compassion, Kinship and Activism”

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