Ms. Interview, Gail Garrot: Big City Cop

"This poster is a satirical critique of the enthusiasm for women joining male-dominated professions, like policing, expressed in 1970s feminist maga-zines. It features a fictional Ms. Magazine with “Gail Garrot,” the first woman hired by the Detroit Police Department. Garrot’s name is a reference to the execution method used by Spanish Fascists. In answer to a question about how being a woman helped her on the job, she answers, “I’ve found that by using some of the techniques I saw used in consciousness raising sessions combined with our standard police interrogation methods, I can come up with the confession without having to worry about some liberal judge throwing it out on a ‘technicality.’” The interview, a biting critique of the liberal wing of the women’s liberation move-ment, ends with Garrot declaring, “‘Sisterhood is powerful’ and if we sisters stick together, we can become all that men are in this society.”14The piece also includes photographs of Lorraine Perlman and Judy Campbell, among others, posing as Wayne County Circuit Court bailiffs carrying out a home eviction and “Sally Sheis, the first woman shit-shoveler for the Freidan-Steinem Manure Company,” a dig at feminist icons Betty Freidan and Gloria Steinem, co-founder of Ms. Magazine. A caption below a photograph of a blindfolded prisoner, “self-proclaimed revolutionary” quotes a leaflet that she holds, which declares that while women are “especially oppressed” their goals are ultimately the same as any other sector of the population: “the abolition of the wage system, destruction of the political state and the end of all authoritarian relationships and institutions.”15The poster first appeared as a centerfold in Fifth Estate." The Detroit Printing Co-op by Danielle Aubert