Clothesline Project (CLP) is a program started on Cape Cod, MA, in 1990 to address the issue of violence against women. It is a vehicle for women affected by violence to express their emotions by decorating a shirt. They then hang the shirt on a clothesline to be viewed by others as testimony to the problem of violence against women.
According to the Men’s Rape Prevention Project in Washington DC, 58,000 soldiers died in the Vietnam war. During that same period of time, 51,000 women were killed mostly by men who supposedly loved them. In the summer of 1990, that statistic became the catalyst for a coalition of women’s groups on Cape Cod, Massachusetts to consciously develop a program that would educate, break the silence and bear witness to one issue – violence against women.
This small, core group of women, many of whom had experienced some form of personal violence, wanted to find a unique way to take staggering, mind-numbing statistics and turn them into a provocative, “in-your-face” educational and healing tool.
One of the women, visual artist Rachel Carey-Harper, moved by the power of the AIDS quilt, presented the concept of using shirts – hanging on a clothesline – as the vehicle for raising awareness about this issue. The idea of using a clothesline was a natural. Doing the laundry was always considered women’s work and in the days of close-knit neighborhoods, women often exchanged information over backyard fences while hanging their clothes out to dry.
The concept was simple – let each woman tell her story in her own unique way, using words and/or artwork to decorate her shirt. Once finished, she would then hang her shirt on the clothesline. This very action serves many purposes. It acts as an educational tool for those who come to view the Clothesline; it becomes a healing tool for anyone who makes a shirt – by hanging the shirt on the line, survivors, friends, and family can literally turn their back on some of that pain of their experience and walk away; finally it allows those who are still suffering in silence to understand that they are not alone.
October of 1990 saw the original Clothesline Project with 31 shirts displayed on a village green in Hyannis, Massachusetts as part of an annual “Take Back the Night” March and Rally. Throughout the day, women came forward to create shirts and the line kept growing.
A small blurb appearing in Off Our Backs magazine was picked up by Ms magazine and everything changed for the Clothesline Project. In the following years, the Ryka Rose Foundation and Carol Cone’s advertising agency took an interest in our work and helped create a national push with small pieces appearing in USA Weekend magazine, Shape magazine, and others. This outreach created an overwhelming national response and brought the Clothesline Project from a single, local, grassroots effort into an intense national campaign.
At the moment we estimate there are 500 projects nationally and internationally with an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 shirts. We know of projects in 41 states and 5 countries. This ever-expanding grassroots network is as far-flung as Tanzania and as close as Orleans, Massachusetts.
The Clothesline Project honors women survivors as well as victims of intimate violence. Any woman who has experienced such violence, at any time in her life, is encouraged to come forward and design a shirt. Victim’s families and friends are also invited to participate.
It is the very process of designing a shirt that gives each woman a new voice with which to expose an often horrific and unspeakable experience that has dramatically altered the course of her life. Participating in this project provides a powerful step towards helping a survivor break through the shroud of silence that has surrounded her experience.
The shirts are color coded to show the form of abuse and whether the victim survived the abuse they experienced. (I did not know there was a color code interesting)
White represents women who died because of violence;
Yellow or beige represents battered or assaulted women;
Red, pink, and orange are for survivors of rape and sexual assault;
Blue and green t-shirts represent survivors of incest and sexual abuse;
Purple or lavender represents women attacked because of their sexual orientation;
Black is for women attacked for political reasons.
Event organized by Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, featuring a large number of shirts decorated by female victims of abuse and rape. Exhibited on August 26th, the 90th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote, this local showing was the 19th annual exhibition of this project in Portland Oregon.
The shirts portray grief, outrage, shattered spirits and incredible resilience in the face of often ongoing abuse and rape; some of the victims were as young as 4 years old.
The most powerful one I saw was a small toddler shirt that said “Why Daddy Why” That hit me to the core.
