A Woman’s Place Is in the Home

Women of Weeksville circa 1900; Percy F. Moore Photograph Collection, 5th of July Resource Center for Self-Determination & Freedom

“A woman’s place is in the home.” I am a homebody. “Home is where the heart is.” Brooklyn is my heart.

On April 18 I will host a salon at Weeksville Heritage Center, inviting women artists, intellectuals, and activists to gather in the living room of the historic 1930s house. Our topic of conversation: “living room.” In her essay on Weeksville, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts describes the historic 19th-century African American community as “a room without an exit” where “we could huddle…and protect each other and comfort each other and tell stories.” This salon will ask guests to do the same while reflecting upon “the value of rootedness in a time when its lived reality is eroding.” As gentrification continues to transform Brooklyn, police brutality rages unchecked, and transwomen of color continue to die with little or no media attention, where do we find room to breathe—to live—to thrive?

In her 1987 poem “Moving Towards Home,” Jordan empathizes with the Palestinian people as she envisions a community safe from the forces of extermination:

I need to speak about living room
where the talk will take place in my language
I need to speak about living room
where my children will grow without horror
I need to speak about living room where the men
of my family between the ages of six and sixty-five
are not
marched into a roundup that leads to the grave
I need to talk about living room
where I can sit without grief without wailing aloud
for my loved ones
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I need to talk about living room
because I need to talk about home

WE need to talk about home. This event is for invited guests only but we plan to take portraits of everyone in attendance. I have no doubt this group of women will be as brilliant and beautiful as the sisters pictured below!