by Robin Carton

Grace Paley, writer, social justice activist and longtime RESIST board member, passed away after a long struggle with breast cancer. She was 84 years old.

Grace often described herself as a “combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist” who grew up with a “normal socialist childhood.” In the early 1960s, she joined the War Resisters League and helped found the Greenwich Village Peace Center. As young men began to be drafted to serve in Vietnam, Grace amplified her resistance to the war.

In a 1997 interview for the Resist Newsletter, Grace remembered:

A couple of us started a group called Support In Action in the mid 1960s. We wrote our little statement, which was five lines. But our whole purpose was to share with draft resisters the possible punishment … . We were writing this statement in New York about the same time the "Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority" was being put together in Boston. When the original “Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority” went out, there were people sitting with their ears and mouths open waiting for it.

Grace soon joined RESIST as well, serving on the board for nearly 30 years.

Somehow in the midst of her relentless activism, Grace found time to write. A captivating author, she published her first collection of short stories, The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Men and Women at Love, in 1959 and received excellent reviews. In 1974 she published Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. In 1985, after publication of her third volume, Later That Same Day, Grace was described by Time magazine as “the friendly neighborhood radical” who could be seen on street corners passing out leaflets for the Women's Pentagon Action.

An ardent feminist, Grace noted, “When I began to write my first book in the mid-1950s, I didn't know I was a feminist. I didn't have any idea. By the time I finished the book, I sort of guessed I was, but that was 1959.” Grace later engaged in campaigns to support reproductive choice and women's anti-militarism actions, including the Women's Pentagon Action, the Seneca Women's Peace Encampment and work with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

She was often invited to speak about her writing and used her lectures to introduce students to political activism. For example, in response to some of the political stories in her book Just As I Thought, a group of young college students asked if she could explain civil disobedience to them. Grace responded in her classic style:

It's a very simple thing. It's just a way of talking very loud. If nobody is listening to you when you are talking in a nice way, civil disobedience is a way of calling attention to yourself in some way or other. It has to be very important to you and you have to be willing to get into trouble. But if you really want people to hear what you are going to say, sometimes you have to be willing to get into a lot of trouble, maybe go to jail or maybe just get some people mad at you. You just have to decide to do that.

Grace got herself into a lot of trouble – and she encouraged the rest of us to do the same. As Grace might have said herself, “Doll, we'll miss you.”

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Robin Carton directs the grant-making program at RESIST and with Eileen Bolinksy interviewed Grace Paley for the Resist Newsletter in 1997.