Ronnie Gilbert

 Women in Black is an extraordinary group. I came to it because I needed to find something I could do as a Jew, which I’d never done before. I mean, the Weavers started our stardom with an Israeli song, “Tzena, Tzena, Ttzena,” and how I got from that to Women in Black is what I’m writing about now. I needed to find some place where I could put my passion for peace and for saying that we never, ever, ever will do anything but make the world worse, whatever war we’re in. And I was very moved by Women in Black because I remembered in the 1970s, when Argentina was taken over by military dictatorship and people were disappeared, dropped from helicopters to their deaths, and the disappeared women. This actually started in Chile, and they went to Argentina, and how everything was under military rule and under guns, and these women walked out into the plaza, silently, dressed in black, with their the names of their children and the pictures of their children and said, Where are they? Where are they? Where are they? And that silence was heard throughout the world. And I thought, That’s power. That’s women’s power. So that’s how I got into Women in Black.
[from a transcript of a 2004 interview]

There was, of course, the music.

Ruth Alice Gilbert, born New York City 7th September 1926, died Mill Valley, California 6th June 2015.