Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Northampton, MA MINNIE BRUCE PRATT Interviewed by KELLY ANDERSON March 16–17, 2005 Jersey City, New Jersey This interview was made possible with generous support from the Ford Foundation. © Minnie Bruce Pratt 2005 Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Narrator Born in Selma, Alabama in 1946, Minnie Bruce Pratt is an award-winning poet, essayist, teacher and activist. She graduated from the University of Alabama in 1968 and received a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1979. Pratt found the women’s movement in 1974, while living in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and began a new life as an out lesbian, a feminist, a writer, and an activist. Pratt was a member of the editorial collective Feminary, worked with the National Organization for Women, the local rape crisis line and women’s center, sat on the Cumberland County Council on the Status of Women, and co-founded WomanWrites: A Southeastern Lesbian Writers Conference and LIPS, a lesbian direct-action group. Pratt’s engagement with feminism and antiracism is best known through her cultural activism. Her publications are extensive and include Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism, with Elly Bulkin and Barbara Smith (1984); Crime Against Nature (1990); Rebellion (1991); and S/He (1995). For the past ten years, Pratt’s activism has been in connection with the International Action Center, the Workers World Party, and the transgender movement. She lives with her partner Leslie Feinberg in Jersey City, New Jersey. Interviewer Kelly Anderson (b.1969) is an educator, historian, and community activist. She has an M.A. in women’s history from Sarah Lawrence College and is a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. history at the CUNY Graduate Center. Abstract In this oral history, Pratt describes her Southern heritage and family background. She reflects on her marriage, its dissolution, and the loss of custody of her children. Pratt describes a distinctly Southern women’s movement in the 1970s, offering important insights into the dynamics of race and racism and the politics of sexuality, and discusses in depth the Feminary collective. The interview focuses on Pratt’s activism as a writer, the development of her antiracist and anti-imperialist consciousness, and her identity as a femme. Restrictions Minnie Bruce Pratt retains coyright to this interview. Format Interview recorded on miniDV using Sony Digital Camcorder DSR-PDX10. Ten 40-minute tapes. Transcript Transcribed by Luann Jette. Audited for accuracy and edited for clarity by Revan Schendler. Transcript has been reviewed and approved by Minnie Bruce Pratt. Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Bibliography and Footnote Citation Forms Video Recording Bibliography: Pratt, Minnie Bruce. Interview by Kelly Anderson. Video recording, March 16–17, 2005. Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection. Footnote: Minnie Bruce Pratt interview by Kelly Anderson, video recording, March 16, 2005, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, tape 2. Transcript Bibliography: Pratt, Minnie Bruce. Interview by Kelly Anderson. Transcript of video recording, March 16–17, 2005. Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection. Footnote: Minnie Bruce Pratt, interview by Kelly Anderson, transcript of video recording, March 16, 2005, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, pp. 23–24. Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Minnie Bruce Pratt, interviewed by Kelly Anderson DVD 1 of 10 Page 1 of 101 Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Sophia Smith Collection Smith College Northampton, MA Transcript of interview conducted MARCH 16–17, 2005, with: MINNIE BRUCE PRATT at: Jersey City, New Jersey by: KELLY ANDERSON ANDERSON: For the record, this is Kelly Anderson with Minnie Bruce Pratt on March 16th, in Minnie Bruce’s [apartment at 127 Chestnut Street] in Jersey City, and we’re doing a taping of an oral history for the Voices of Feminism Project at the Sophia Smith Collection. So, let me start with just sort of a general outline of what I hope we can cover over the next couple of hours, just so we can sort of agree on what we might be able to get to. PRATT: This [sound] is going to come in periodically. This is part of the country in my city apartment. ANDERSON: What is it? Oh, it’s your bird clock. PRATT: It’s a clock and it chirps with a different bird song at the different hours. So, depending on how long we go – ANDERSON: So I’d like to start talking about family background and your childhood, and then I’m hoping that we’ll at least get through the ’70s, that we’ll be able to talk about going to college and getting married and getting involved with the women’s movement in Fayetteville, [about] Feminary. Hopefully we can get through that stuff. And then I think that tomorrow will be enough time to do the 1980s and 1990s, which I know is, in some ways, the most rich, because that’s when you started to publish, and there’s a lot to tell. PRATT: Yes, although once it’s all written down, there’s less to tell, in a way. So that sounds doable. ANDERSON: OK, so we’ll try. PRATT: I think so. ANDERSON: So we’ll try to get up into that point. I think these tapes are going to go until about 40 minutes, so you might see a flashing light there, but I will Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Minnie Bruce Pratt, interviewed by Kelly Anderson DVD 1 of 10 Page 2 of 101 certainly give you a couple of minutes’ warning when we’re about to run out of tape. But, instead of an hour, I think they’re about 40 minutes. So, let’s start with your family background. Why don’t you just first tell me what you know about the two branches of your family, your grandparents, as far as you know back. PRATT: All right. I will tell you something about them and I’ll couch it in a certain kind of way. As you know from my work, I tend to take my 2:04 personal history and turn it in a kind of kaleidoscopic way, and keep looking at it differently and then differently again and then differently again, and gleaning some new insights from that. So, one of the things I’ve been doing for a while is doing that kind of kaleidoscopic turning with my family history. And it originally started because I was trying to understand the relation of my white family in the South to racism. But it has developed into also looking at class issues, as I’ve learned more about my family by doing some research. Typically for the South, both sides of my family are incredibly well researched genealogically. No one ever talks about this but I’m sure it has its roots in the white South with wanting to know that you do not have African American ancestors. It’s sort of an obsession with genealogy. So, I have, on both sides, my mother’s side — which is the Browns and the Carrs, the Christophers and the Gilders — and on my father’s side, which are the Pratts and the Williamses — I have genealogies that go back to the 1700s. What’s significant about all that to me is this: I don’t know so much about my father’s side, but I think they came from mid-England. I do know on my mother’s side that they were Scot, originally. My grandmother’s maiden name was Carr, C-A-R-R, and they were relocated to Ireland as part of the planting of Ireland by England. So, they were poor Scot Presbyterians, who were dissenters in the context of Catholic Scotland, right, and impoverished, and when the common lands of Scotland were being enclosed, of course, all those people lost their land and lost their way of making a living and became renters. And then the rents were driven up, driven up. The rents were driven up and they were vulnerable to being sent by the English to a place that they hoped would be better, Ireland. So they ended up in the northern part of Ireland and identified from then on as Scot-Irish. And at some point, in the 1700s, they migrated to North Carolina by way of the Netherlands. They came on a Dutch ship, and I think that’s that Presbyterian Calvinist connection. Some of the Scot-Irish who passed through the Netherlands ended up in South Africa, and became racist there, having learned all too well from the English how to do that, first in relation to the Irish. And my branch ended up in North Carolina, a little inland from Wilmington. And then at some point they came farther west into Alabama, and settled near the Mississippi border, in a place called Pushmataha — it was Choctaw Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Minnie Bruce Pratt, interviewed by Kelly Anderson DVD 1 of 10 Page 3 of 101 land — had a farm there, had a plantation there, owned slaves there, a small farm. I almost hesitate to call it a plantation, because that evokes Scarlett 6:25 O’Hara stuff. People who don’t know much about the South and the history of the South don’t understand that certain areas by their geography and their topography lend themselves to large-scale plantation and certain areas for small farms.