Cape Cod Branch Creates Clothesline Displays at Home

Mary Zepernick examines the Sexual Assault Awareness Month display in South Yarmouth, MA. The Clothesline Project originated in her living room in 1990.

By Elenita Muniz
Cape Cod WILPF

June 2020

The Cape Cod Branch of WILPF has finally reached the stage we’ve witnessed in other branches but never thought we’d be facing: older members, less energy, less time for actions, and now COVID-19.

So we have stumbled on a new approach to activism. Rather than trying to do some big event for Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, or Hiroshima Day, we are now doing micro-actions at home.

For instance, April was Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and Chris Morin (former US Section president and now Prevention Education Director for Independence House, our Cape sexual assault resource) hung a section of the Clothesline Project in the trees in front of her house in South Yarmouth, MA. She included a sign about the Clothesline Project and about Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

I am a caregiver for Mary Zepernick (also former US Section president), who lives next door to Chris. So when I saw Chris’s Clothesline Project display, I took home a couple of bins of shirts from Mary’s basement and hung my own display in front of my house in Brewster. I live in an 800-acre conservation area which has attracted many more walkers than usual since the Covid-19 lockdown began, so plenty of people had a chance to see the display and read the shirts.

Then another member of the branch, who lives in Wellfleet, decided to do the same thing. She picked up a bin of shirts from Mary’s, too. Instead of trying to do one big Clothesline display, we had three ongoing displays in the Mid- and Lower Cape!

For Mother’s Day, I posted on a tree out front a big copy of Julia Ward Howes’s original Mother’s Day proclamation, along with a line strung with peace cranes. People were invited to take a crane.

The cranes came from our Seeds of Change box, a one-stop container with everything needed for an action: Information about WILPF, sign-up sheets, a branch banner, markers, chalk, pens, etc. It even includes a complete Penny Poll for Tax Day and other appropriate events.

This is a new effort for us, one we hope will prove fruitful and manageable in our current situation, so we wanted to share it.

Here is a slideshow of five photos from the Cape Cod Branch displays.