5th March 2021
On March 8, 2021, we celebrate International Women’s Day. One hundred and ten years ago — in 1911 — one million women and men gathered at IWD rallies around the world, demanding equal rights for women to work, to vote, to hold office, and to be free of gender-based discrimination.
This is a moment to consider how far we’ve come… and where we are today. And also to ask: what’s next?
Visit my YouTube Channel for an audio-visual blaze of forward momentum, set to my song, “We Shall Go Forth!”
In celebration of this year’s International Women’s Day, I share a memory from forty-four years ago…
It was the closing session of the National Women’s Conference in Houston TX, November 18–21, 1977. The ten thousand women at this Congressionally mandated conference — representing 50 states and 6 U.S. territories — were uneasy. The final speakers on the dais were aware that something was taking shape in the room. Something was about to happen.
The night before, at a gala concert event produced for the elected delegates by Barbara Price and her team, Women in Production, I shared the stage with Sweet Honey in the Rock and Malvina Reynolds. After the show, I was asked by conference organizers to “close” the 4-day gathering with my song, “We Shall Go Forth!” Now, the next morning, I was hurriedly brought out from a quiet back stage dressing room into the 10-thousand seat hall filled with a level of volatile energy I had never experienced. I was directed to sit in the front row next to the stage steps. For the next several minutes, I sat in a kind of energetic limbo, completely still. Waiting.
Suddenly an organizer came rushing toward me, shouting over the hum: “They’re going to start a demonstration. Get to the piano — and get the audience singing!”
In this moment, I had no idea what was going on. Later, I learned that Phyllis Schlafly and her supporters had organized an action to disrupt the closing session of the conference with anti-ERA, anti-choice, anti-lesbian sentiments.
I ran up the steps and moved quickly behind the line-up of conference leaders, including Gloria Steinem, three First Ladies, and the conference chair, Rep. Bella Abzug, who was in the middle of introducing me as I slipped onto the piano bench at a 9 ft. Steinway grand perched on the edge of the stage. I began to play the first of four slow and solemn chords.
As I spoke to the audience, I continued to repeat the chord progression in a languid, steady tempo. With simple gestures, I divided the audience into three sections and encouraged each section to sing along with me as the piano rang out with its mesmerizing rhythm.
The first three thousand conferees sitting in the left of center floor area sang along with me: “We shall go forth!” While they continued to sing, I gestured to those seated on the other side of the room to sing a second melody with me. The sound of thousands of women’s voices in 2-part harmony immediately filled the hall. Finally, I swept my raised arm toward the balcony–filled with lesbian feminists who had earlier demonstrated joyfully, releasing hundreds of lavender balloons onto the conference floor after the delegates voted to include Lesbian rights in the National Women’s Conference Plan of Action to be presented in person to President Jimmy Carter. We were now singing “We shall go forth!” in glorious three-part harmony, to the accompaniment of those four chords.
After singing the verses and chorus solo, I continued to play but stopped singing and invited the audience to join with each other one last time. I played as they sang the lyrics over and over in a truly transcendent moment: “We shall go forth…!” Ten thousand women were on their feet, cheering and applauding, and singing three-part harmony together.
And somewhere in the midst of all this, the steam had left the angry demonstrators’ disruptive efforts in the hall and the conference was adjourned.
It was an honor to be invited to Washington, D.C. a few months later when the song was inducted into the Political History Division of the Smithsonian Institution along with other documents and artifacts of the historic 1977 IWY National Women’s Conference.
Check out our current audio-video version of “We Shall Go Forth!” on my YouTube Channel. The three-part harmonies you will hear in the audio portion — from Best of Margie Adam — were blended by the women’s community and friends at Jordan Hall in Boston, MA.
Enjoy!
