Florynce R. "Flo" Kennedy, the flamboyant feminist who lead a "pee-in" at Harvard to protest the lack of women's bathrooms on campus, died last month at 83.
A lawyer, activist and founder of the Feminist Party, Kennedy was for a time one of most well known--and controversial--black political figures in America.
It was near the height of her fame in 1973 that Kennedy led a mass urination outside Lowell Hall to protest the lack of women's restrooms at
Harvard and throughout the country. On May 24, 1973 Kennedy and a small group of fellow protesters marched though the Yard, around the Design School and Memorial Hall to Lowell Hall, which they identified because it lacked a single woman's bathroom.
"To pee or not to pee, that is the question...pee on Harvard Yard," Kennedy chanted for the benefit of a crowd of onlookers lured by a brief story on the bottom of the front page of that day's Crimson.
Discretely, historians have not noted whether or not the protesters followed through on their threat, though newspaper accounts suggest that may have done so.
The protesters also rallied against pay toilets, reading a poem written for the occasion by Mage Piercy entitled "To the Pay Toilet." ("You strop my anger especially when I find you in a restaurant or bar.")
"If God had meant to have pay toilets, we would have been born with exact change," one of the protester's posters read.
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